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My McKenzie family came
from Easter Ross and in tracing the family I find they generally lived in
the parishes of Fearn, Tarbat and Nigg. My grandfather, Archibald
McKenzie, was born in Bayfield, Nigg in 1867 and he married a ladies maid,
my grandmother Elizabeth Martin, in Dingwall in Easter Ross. Archibald
enlisted in the Seaforth Highlanders (the Mackenzie Clan regiment) in the
late 19th century but later transferred to the Military Corps of Staff
Clerks. As a consequence he was transferred by the army to the Woolwich
Arsenal in London. He was with the Military Corps of Staff Clerks at the
time of the Boer War where he served during that war. The military career
based in London turned my McKenzie family into an English-based family and
although my grandparents had were several brothers and sisters I have only
been able to trace very few of these and many may have left Scotland also.
One, the eldest McKenzie brother, emigrated to Australia, the youngest
brother other than my grandfather who was the youngest of the 9 boys
emigrated to New York as a gentleman's gentleman, we are told, and that
would be around 1909 we think. The youngest child Janet, otherwise called
Jessie Mackenzie, married the Antarctic explorer Dr. William Speirs Bruce
who led the only Scottish National Antarctic Expedition in 1902-4 when he
discovered and named Coats Land after his sponsor Captain Coats of thread
fame. She later emigrated to Australia.
So we find a new McKenzie
family in the 20th century living in London. From the many descendants,
my father, like his father joined the army. As a regular soldier we
travelled the world and the family lived in Hongkong, Egypt (Cairo) and
Nairobi in Kenya at different times. My father retired as a major in the
Royal Army Service Corps having gone through the ranks from enlisting as a
boy soldier aged 14 in 1911. By the time he retired from the army in 1953
our part of the family was living in the West Country - Devon and it was
there that I started my career as a bank clerk with Barclays Bank in 1953
at the Devonport Branch. I married in 1958 (aged almost 22) to Jill Leach
aged 20, also from an army family. We had four children and my bank career
was doing well. In 1974 the U.K. was in a mess and the Hudson Committee (a
think tank) came out with a report that Britain would be the poorest
country in Europe by the year 2000 except for Portugal and Greece. Miners'
strikes caused the bank to run bank course in hotels in London as the
bank's college in Wimbledon could not get the power to run the place. I
was instructing at Wimbledon in 1974 and at that time Canadian banks were
hiring large numbers of British bankers for their rapidly growing business
in Canada, where they were desperately short of trained staff. So after
consultation with my wife we decided that the future in Britain looked
grim for our four children and after 21 years with the bank I resigned
from Barclays Bank to accept an offer to join the Bank of Montreal in
Montreal. And that is how our family once in Scotland and then in England,
found itself transplanted once again but this time to Canada. The old
story - job opportunities seemed better across the Atlantic.
As we now know Britain did
not become the poorest country in Europe and despite the general hatred
she seems still to attract, the policies of Margaret Thatcher turned
things around in Britain and she was able to tame the trade unions, some
of which had political connections with the communist party - a task which
at one time seemed impossible. One of my uncles, who had been a shop
steward for the huge Transport and General Workers Union, which was
constantly bringing the railways out on strike, seriously suggested to me
that I could do a lot worse than read the Daily Worker - the communist
party newspaper. A cousin of mine in London, who was a hardworking
bricklayer, was so disgusted at the work ethic of his companions and the
control exercised by the unions that he came round to see all the family
to say goodbye as he and his wife decided to seek a better life in
Australia.
We now have the First
Minister of Scotland coming to Canada to try and persuade young Canadians
of Scottish origins to go back to Scotland for the job opportunities
there. So perhaps things are looking up!
Attached is a photo of my McKenzie grandparents taken in Belfast (where he
was stationed) in 1905. His five children include my own father on the far
right.
Alan McKenzie
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