The Real Neil McTaggart (Bio.) | The Man behind the Story Podcast 1099

Right, Today we’re going to talk about Neil McTaggart.

Now, some of you know that I’ve been writing a story, and you’ve been reading it on my blog and hearing it on YouTube.

 It’s called Neil McTaggart’s Crossing and today I want to give you some background information about who Neil McTaggart was. I have a school photo from 1913 and also more about where he grew up in South West Scotland. They all lived  in a little town called Kilbirnie which is still there and my parents grew up in that area as well. So that will give you a bit more biographical information about him before he moved to  Canada.

 Right, let’s begin. So you see here a school picture from 1913. I’ve tried to colourise it a little bit just to make it more human. Neil McTaggart is in this picture but I don’t know which one he is. This building has been destroyed and in fact this hamlet, which was a little village just next to where my ancestors all came from has now been destroyed, so this building has disappeared.It was called Barkip. That’s where this picture was taken. The school was called Kersland Barony and you can see it there. Now, Neil McTaggart, he is in this picture somewhere. My goodness me, the teachers look  just as young as the pupils do, don’t they?

 Here’s a picture of where Neil McTaggart would have lived. This street was known as Montgomery Street and it was something of a ghetto. The sanitary conditions were awful. People generally lived in one maximum two rooms. And they worked in the local factories.

And let me just show you what that looks like now. You’ll see here the policeman is standing more or less where that first picture was taken. So no trace of those old buildings. And there’s a new housing estate. This picture was taken at the time of a criminal act –  somebody was shooting from a window. That’s why the policeman is there.

Right, let’s move on and now we can see the remains of the mill where Neil and his family worked. Here, it’s just rubble. That’s the way I remember it in the 1980s but up until the 1960s and 70s, it was a very busy place and this is what it looked like. Now, I’ve actually colourized this brown to make it easier on the eye but I can assure you it wasn’t like that. It was gritty, it was dark, dark grey which matched the sky. And we’ll look more at that in a second but…..

 I want to tell you that this little row in the front,  things which look like they have red roofs, although in reality it was completely black and brown. That row of what looks like little…. maybe offices or perhaps just little  rooms. They were actually houses. These were mill houses. There was 13 of them. And they only had two rooms. One room for sitting, one room for sleeping, and my Great Grandparents had 10 of a family. I say my Great Grandparents, the people who lived here, who are one generation before. It’s actually my Great, Great Grandparents. My Great grandfather, he grew up here. There was no sanitation, there were no indoor toilets, no running water and  you can imagine the noise it must have came from the factory. Ten children living in a  2 roomed mill house. This was quite normal in the old days. And some of the children died. In fairness, though they weren’t actually children when they passed away, two of the girls who worked in this mill, they died at very young ages. Maggie, I think  was 16. And another girl around the same age called Maria died about 10 years earlier. It’s very interesting because they were never spoken about in the family. In those days death was something that was very personal and once when someone died, you never spoke about them. And I only found out about their existence by going through family records. My Grandfather never mentioned it, so anyway, you can see here I’ve written the photo has been colourized for effect. It was colourized by me. The buildings  were not brown though, they were grey.

So yeah, my my Great, Great Grandparents lived at number 13. And Neil,   my Great Grandfather, one of his brothers, would have been Neil’s father, (the Neil who Emigrated). Let’s continue then. This is the reality. We’re going to look at now. Of what this building looked like.

 OK, so let’s take a little look and see what the building actually looked like. There we are. You can see a black and white photo very depressing and hard to imagine. So many people living in these or what we called them were rows, rows of houses. This was called Dennyholm Street. And actually that street had a school and a church. So it’s kind of hard to imagine by our standards of today, just looking at this, isn’t it?

 Right. Uh, let me show you what the area is like now today. Uh, this is very interesting because it’s been completely reformed and changed. I’m a little bit sad about that though, because of course they’ve wiped out the memory of where my Great Great Grandparents lived, and there we are.

That gives you some background to Neil’s life before he emigrated to Canada and you can see there was a need for Emigration because really,  the living conditions here at that time were absolutely awful. Neil wasn’t able to read or write, and he only owned shoes for the purposes of work. Even my Great Great Grandparents. I’m told that my Great Great Grandmother she used to walk around the town without shoes. Very, very hard to imagine, isn’t it by today’s standards. I think she died in 1929.

Neil, of course, was her nephew, much younger, so he lived another number of years and you’ll learn more about him as we go through his story and that’s it. A little bit of a background to Neil McTaggart. I have no idea what his life was like in Canada. But from what I do know about his work, it was certainly more prosperous, but I don’t have any pictures of him or his life in Canada. Maybe somebody if one of my very distant cousins comes across this YouTube clip. Maybe they can fill me in and that’s it.

Thank you.