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Every Object has a Story: the Dingwall Museum Blogs
- Murdo MacAskill Police cartoon (1897)
.- Aitken Map of Dingwall (1788)
- Hospital Harmonium (1886)
1897 Cartoon by Murdo MacAskill
This is one of over a hundred cartoons of Dingwall people in the 1890s, drawn by Murdo MacAskill, a son and namesake of the Free-Church minister here.
This shows the Police Force here in 1897 and I am attempting to identify them. The first two are easy, as we have photos of Chief Constable James Gordon with his bushy sideburns and Superintendent Kenneth Cameron with his distinctive moustache. The Sergeant has very shiny buttons. He is likely to be John Ross, Sergent here in 1899 and DS in 1903. Who were the PCs? I have a few contenders: William Dingwall, a miller before and after a short career as PC here and who died of TB in 1901; John Mackenzie who had been a professional painter before joining as a PC; Donald MacLennan had been a PC based in Dingwall Prison a few years before. I don't know who is that police officer looking in at the bottom. Perhaps he is Malcolm MacAulay, the incoming Chief Constable who would replace Gordon just a year later.
Can anyone offer more data from your family?
1788 Map by David Aitken
David Aitken made plans of many Highland estates in the 18th Century. He retired with his family to manage Pitglassie farm.
This plan shows the Burgh centre nearly a quarter of a millennium ago. You can see the High Street with the 50-year-old Town House, Castle Street leading to the ruins of the original Dingwall Castle, Church Street with the parish church before the present one, and the spaces between fields that flooded at high tide. The Canal was not yet dug and the Tulloch plans for a housing scheme north of the winding Peffery could be reached by the new Peter's Bridge named after Tulloch's factor Patrick Reid.
There is more about David Aitken on the Kirkmichael web page [here]
Who were the 'Little Boys' who raised the money for the Ross Memorial harmonium?
The fever and surgery hospital dedicated to the memory of Dr William Ross, long-time physician and one-time Provost (1847-50) of Dingwall, was opened in 1873, four years after his death at his farm in Dunglust.
George Clark of the National Bank saw potential in the singing voices of some of the children of Dingwall and trained and helped a group of friends—perhaps with extra incentive from their parents—up to the stage that they could perform a fund-raising concert in Alex Ross’s National Hotel and make enough money to buy this harmonium.
On August 31st 1886 the harmonium was presented officially to the hospital in an evening event attended by the Hospital Board and others of the professional class in the town. The speeches praised the six ‘Little boys’ who raised the money:
Willie Stewart; Johnnie Robertson (14) son of the hotelier; Willie Joass (11) son of the architect and Burgh Surveyor William Cumming Joass and later a marine engineer; Nesbitt Kemp (7) son of architect Alfred Kemp who had married Lizzie Grigor here and went to the USA; Archie Ross and his sister Rita were playmates of Nesbitt’s; Henry Joass (7) Willie’s younger brother
After the speeches, Nesbitt’s mother played the new machine and the boys sang. She had brought Nesbitt from California for an 18-month visit to see where their family had come from, and they stayed with his grandmother Ann Grigor, née Moxey, in Park House and he attended Miss Cameron’s school while here. In later years he became a banker, and worked with his childhood friend Henry Joass in London and stayed with MacMillan cousins also from Dingwall. It is not known how well the playing of the harmonium contributed to the well-being of the hospital patients, nor when it was decided that it was no longer needed there. The news got to Nesbitt and he fetched it across the Atlantic and the width of America to Oakland in California where it remained until his descendants felt it should return to Dingwall and the Museum received the welcome gift in 2017.
The Dingwall Museum welcomes any memories you might know of this instrument or of the families of the ‘Little Boys’.
Dingwall book collection
- Dingwall Museum booklets
- Prehistory, Picts and Vikings
- Mediaeval History
- Modern History and Geography
- Military, esp Hector MacDonald and the 4th Seaforths
- Reference works
- Dingwall Diaspora
- The Railways
- The Clans
- Fiction
- Religion
- People
Registered Museum. Charity Number SC 053119
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