In Search of My Highland Aunt
Christina Campbell or Ross,
born Inverness 1924, died Invergordon 2009
It is Wednesday and today is the day of my aunt Cissie's funeral. What a sweet gentle lady she was and what great fortune I had in meeting her again last year after the passing of fifty-three years!
Cissie, or Christina as she preferred to be called in later years, was born in Inverness in 1924 and she grew up with her family in the Highlands in the peaceful and remote valley of Strathcarron. The Strath has not always been peaceful due to the turmoil of the Highland Clearances during the 1800s, but when Christina Ross was born the community had settled down in a beautiful and largely forgotten country area, a remote part of Ross and Cromarty with its sprinkling of crofts and five or so hunting lodges.
These magnificent country houses were built by the Estates of the Scottish landowners, mostly in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when they realised the value of hunting to supplement their vast sheep runs, and to control the deer population which brought in the wealthy tourist during the season. The lodges provided work for the indigenous population; gillies, gardeners and gamekeepers, and many other peripheral jobs, building, repairing, fencing, catering and transport, which were all required to fuel the hunting and fishing season.
The Gaelic word gillie has the meaning lad or servant, and of course during the rise in popularity of fly fishing for the salmon, there were many young lads learning their trade from the day they could walk. Good gillies were in great demand and are nowadays revered by most in the same way as the golf professional and the ski teacher in the Cairngorms or Alps, for teaching those skills and pursuits that the city dwellers all love for their two weeks holiday each year in the mountains. This way of life in the Highlands flourished particularly in the first half of the last century, and even today it continues in much the same way, but now with the rich and famous visiting from all over the world.
When Cissie was brought up on the family croft in Strathcarron, it was a quiet community where mostly the folk made their living from keeping some sheep and cattle and working the land, taking their produce to market.
The crofters were tenants of the Braelangwell and Balnagown estates owned by Sir Charles and Lady Dorothy Ross who were much admired and respected by the local people. Before World War II Cissie went to a teacher training college, probably in Inverness and taught at local schools up in the area of Lairg before going South in her mid-twenties to teach in the City of Birmingham.
In 1956 she took a year out in America; she sailed on the Queen Elizabeth en route to the Terra Haute in Indiana on a teacher exchange and spent some time in Washington and New York, where she met our Aunt Martha Ross, her second cousin once removed, who by then had retired in Massachusetts USA. But that is another story.
Cissie was my third cousin once removed, so I suppose she was also a kind of aunt; her grandfather and my great grandfather were brothers, and I was her nearest living relative. On 1st October 1955 I had the privilege of meeting her for the first time at 11.00am on the steps of Manchester Central Library. She was on her way to Birmingham to return to teaching after a summer break with her uncle and aunt on the family croft, known as Whitegates, situated at Braelangwell on the banks of the river Carron.
Christina had been staying with friends in Leeds the previous day and was very happy to break her journey to the South to meet me and my family.
It was indeed an interesting meeting since I was only seventeen and Cissie was nearly twice my age at thirty-two! Walking up the steps at the agreed time she advanced, hand outstretched towards me. A nice smile, having recognised me from the photo I sent to her, she quietly uttered a Scottish sounding 'hello John' and we were friends. I well remember thinking that although she was a wee bit on the small side, describing herself as small and dark, she was a charming lady, but at thirty-two, I considered that she should by then have been snapped up into marriage by some feisty Scot!
We returned to my family home and over some lunch I was delighted to make Christina's acquaintance and subsequently enjoyed some correspondence with her over one or two years. In those early days Christina was very helpful in my quest to trace my Scottish ancestry and provided me with some family contacts which were the basis of my recent family history research.
Whilst a student I made my own visit to the Highlands. In the summer of 1956, on a holiday with friends on Skye and along the west coast as far as Ullapool, I travelled east and made a visit to call on Christina's Uncle and Aunt at Whitegates. I was lucky to find the croft in a most remote place down a grassy track and some way off the road winding up the Strath. Christina had informed me that her Uncle Alex, whom she spent many summers with, would be pleased to see me, but what I didn't realise then was that Alex was something of a recluse. Unfortunately he had never really recovered from a hammer attack perpetrated by an adversary in his youth, and his sister Mary had by then a problem with her memory. However, I recall that they were both pleasant and friendly.
To me Alex at sixty-nine appeared to be a very elderly man with few teeth of his own; he did not think to invite me inside their home and we talked on the doorstep for about twenty minutes when I decided that as it was then late in the afternoon it was time for me to take my leave and make my way home to Manchester.
In May last year my wife and I made a short holiday visit to the area to further my interest in the Ross Clan and in particular the Rosses of Strathcarron, Ross Eyre as they were known. I had no idea of the whereabouts of Christina, whether she had married or was indeed still alive and well. On arrival up in the Strath I enquired if they knew anything about Christina or Cissie Ross and after a few local calls the next day I was informed that somebody remembered her and that she had moved back to Scotland, and was living at Mull Hall only a few miles away en route for Inverness.
My phone call to the care centre yielded no results, 'There's nae a Cissie Ross a-livin' in this hame' was the response. However I persisted and on making further enquiries was informed that she had at sometime married a fellow called John Campbell.
'Och aye, Christina Campbell, you nae mentioned her, she's doon the ward wi' us all right', was the response.
So we met her, enjoyed over an hour chatting to her in her well appointed room with tea and biscuits and reminisced about the years gone by. 'You must have known me for a long time' she said on my first appearance, 'No one calls me Cissie nowadays!'
I felt really honoured to meet Christina again and am so pleased that I was able to awaken in her the pleasure of past memories; by the time we left there was a twinkle in her eye and I'm sure she also enjoyed our visit. She asked us to come back and I resolved to visit her again before the end of the year.
So it was that during September last year, on a further visit to the Highlands with my brother, I called again to see Christina at the Mull Hall Care Centre, Barbaraville, it gave me some satisfaction to present to her the results of my work on our family history. She was delighted to have the copy of our family tree that I had prepared for her and perused it with close interest, eventually proclaiming its accuracy and confirming that there seemed to be much illegitimacy around the Highlands at the time of the century that she was born, as if it was a virus that was causing an increased birth-rate!
Cissie's mother, also called Christina, was born in 1884 and one of seven children; she helped her father Donald Ross, my great grandfather's brother, and later her brother Alex to run the family croft. She was a good cook and eventually ran her own catering business from some premises that were probably in the village of Ardgay or the town of Bonar Bridge.
Cissie's mother died in 1943 at the age of fifty-nine years when her only daughter was just twenty years of age. Six years later the young Christina decided to seek employment in the wider world, and took up a position as a school teacher with the Birmingham Education Authority. She, of course did some travelling, and on arriving in London on one occasion, on Paddington railway station, she overheard one of the coffee bar attendants talking with a Scottish accent which she instantly recognised as akin to her own. He was a good-looking Eastern Highlander from Moray; 'I know where you come from' she said, and that was all that was needed in the way of introduction for in good time they were married.
In 1930 John James Campbell was born in Borham, Morayshire, a few miles south east of Elgin in the region of Speyside where the distilling of whisky from the mountain burns is as old as the hills themselves. John migrated to the South, met and married Christina in the 1960s, and they lived happily in Birmingham for many years where he worked as a driving instructor whilst Christina carried on with her teaching. Christina was seven years older than her husband and, to my knowledge, they had no family of their own. However, I believe that John had some family; brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces, and so later around 1982 they move back North to the Whitegates family croft in Strathcarron, inherited by Christina following the death of Christina's uncle Alex in1974. At that time her aunt Mary, who had been struck down with dementia was moved into a care home and lived on until April1985. Over the years Whitegates croft had become known as Mary's cottage; she had been born there in 1894 and lived there for eighty years!
Eventually John and Christina moved and settled in retirement on the Black Isle, where they spent many happy years together. Sadly in 2001 John died of a massive heart attack and the shock of so suddenly losing her cherished husband took its toll on Christina. Shortly afterwards my aunt moved to the Mull Hall Care Centre, Barbaraville where she lived for a further eight years very happily until she herself died peacefully in the early hours of Saturday morning the 31st January 2009. Christina's funeral took place at 1.00pm today at the Cromarty West Church and the committal followed at St Martin's cemetery in Cromarty.
May she Rest in Peace.
John Ross
5th February 2009
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