James Grossart Sharp (1848-1928) and Margaret Linklater (1853-1911)
As I worked my way down through the generations I kept wondering what the distaff side brought to the mix. What did Agnes Mitchell and Isabel Dall contribute, back in the first half of the 18th Century? Janet Grosart’s family looks like it may have had a commercial bent, but what about Thomas’s wife, Mary Marshall? I haven’t found out much about Maggie Linklater or her family either — except that they’d changed their name from Linkletter — but we do know that, like Great-Grannie Sands in the previous generation, Maggie was going to have a big impact on the family fortunes.
If you followed the census records you might conclude that James Grossart was multi-talented, had a chequered career and/or a sense of humour.
The first mention I’ve found of him is in the census of 1851, when he was a three year old living with his parents Thomas and Mary at Possil Road. He was still there in 1861, a “message boy and scholar”, and there again in 1871, when he was a 23-year old “engine pattern maker” — a skilled trade creating wooden models, or patterns, used to make the moulds from which engine parts were cast in foundries.
In ‘71 his future wife Margaret Linklater was a seventeen year old dairy maid living in, or at, “Butler’s Kirk”, an address I can’t locate.
More significant is the previous census, 1861, when 7-year old Maggie was living at Batterflatts, Stirling, an address that looms large in the Sharpe story. Back then she was living with her grandmother, 89-year old Janet McGregor, the head of the household, and her mother, 50-year old Margaret Miller.
I assume there was a Mr Miller, Janet McGregor’s married name, but if so he isn’t identified in ancestry.com, and neither he nor their daughter’s husband Robert Linklater was in the house for the 1871 census. In fact the only male in the household that day was Margaret Linklater’s brother. What does all that mean? Maybe nothing, but what will certainly become significant is that the Batterflatts property clearly came down from the Linklater side of the family, not the Sharpes’.
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Curiouser and curiouser
Where James Grossart and Margaret Linklater lived after they married in September 1873 I don’t know, but the 1881 census found them somewhere in Glasgow. His occupation then was “commercial traveller”, like his father Thomas. You might wonder from that whether he was going to take over the family business, whatever that was, but Thomas died a couple of years later, and in 1891, a few years further on, James Gossart’s occupation was “professional vocalist”. He’d sung to his wife on their wedding day, so he could obviously carry a tune, but this is the first suggestion I’ve found that he’d turned professional. He was certainly versatile, though. When his daughter Mary married George Christie in 1912 he was listed as a retired publican. I get the impression that Thomas and his son James Grossart were an entrepreneurial pair but not in the sense of building a business.
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Regardless of that, in the 1891 census, James Grossart was recorded as head of household at Batterflatts Dairy in Stirling, with his wife Margaret and their four children, Maggie, Mary, James Thomas and Emily, who were aged between 8 and 17. But the fact that he was “head of household” didn’t mean he owned the property. At that time the owner would presumably have been Maggie’s father Robert.
Nor was the property what we think of as Batterflatts today, a large Category B listed building. Batterflatts House was built a couple of years later, in 1893. But who financed the building of it? Maybe the Linklaters. Or maybe James Grossart was a wealthy man who tipped the money in but never registered an interest in the property. Because it seems, somehow, to have come down to Robert Linklater’s youngest child, Maggie, James Grossart’s wife. And how that came to pass I don’t know.
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Two of the girls died young, Margaret first in 1902. There’s a probate record for a Margaret Burns Sharpe Ker, wife of James Goldie Ker, Corn Exchange Hotel, Stirling, who died intestate on 10 February 1902. I can’t find any record of a marriage or children, but I’ve heard somewhere that she died in childbirth. And Angus writes that Emily Linklater Sharpe, unmarried, died of heart failure on 27 April 1913.
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Manor Steps and Kennetpans
At the time of the 1901 census Robert Linklater, aged 72, was living with the Sharps following the death of his wife Mary a few years earlier — and the household had moved to Manor Steps.
It’s an interesting side note that, Batterflatts aside, the Sharps rented their homes back then. Angus said they had no idea why. Manor Steps was in the Parish of Logie, a few miles North East of Stirling. I can’t find a family photo, but Google gives a contemporary idea of the place. It’s where the Sharp family were living at the time of the 1901 census.
Their big household then included James Grossart, a commercial traveller once more, his wife Maggie, their two younger daughters Mary Armour Marshall (24, dairy keeper help) and Emily Linklater (17, mother’s help), their 22-year old art student son, James Thomas, Maggie’s father Robert Linklater, Janet McGregor (a visitor), three female boarders in their 40s and 50s (all “living on own means”) and four servants — a domestic, a gardener and two cattlemen. So like Batterflatts, Manorsteps clearly included a dairy farm.
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Another residence was Kennetpans, on the Northern bank of the Forth, downstream from Alloa. Kennetpans has had a long and chequered history. “Pans” refers to salt panning activity on the banks of the river in the Middle Ages. Kennetpans Distillery claimed to be the first commercial scale Scottish whisky distillery, and was associated with some famous names and brands in the whisky industry. It’s thought the Steins — local farmers — first learned the art of distilling from the friars of the old Kennetpans monastery, and by the 1730s theirs was the largest distillery in Scotland. In 1751 a John Haig married a Stein girl, and their five sons went on to found Haigs, the biggest selling Scotch in the mid 20th Century. Another branch of the family established Jamesons, the leading Irish whiskey.
Kennetpans House was built next to the distillery in the mid 1770s, and extended in the early 19th Century. “A two-storeyed west wing with a bow front was added. This provided a fine large dining-room, curved at one end and lighted by a Palladian window and others, with a floor shaped like the deck of a ship, and above it on the first floor, a large drawing-room with a high ceiling enriched with a moulded plaster medallion in the centre and a decorated cornice.”
In the 1860s it became a reformatory —
…for individuals who, having led a somewhat intemperate life, have come hither of their own accord, or been placed here by friends, in the hope that the retirement of the locality, the exclusion from scenes of excitement or dissipation, and the salutary regulations of the establishment, may unite in effecting not only a moral but a physical reformation.
The recent owners don’t seem to know what happened to the property after that — at least not until the 1930s, when it was occupied by a family who converted the distillery into a jam making factory.
But somewhere around the turn of the century this rather grand establishment was rented by James Grossart and Margaret Sharpe, whose son James used to regale his sons Douglas and Angus with stories of childhood japes here and at Batterflatts and Manor Steps.
Kennetpans is an interesting story of boom and bust. These days the distillery is a national monument, but in ruin. The house was demolished in 1945 and the “rubble and stones … used to bolster up the foundations of Pier 19 of the Kincardine Bridge.”
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Maggie’s legacy
As I said earlier, how Batterflatts and its 4-1/2 acres became Maggie Linklater’s to bequeath I don’t know. Nor do I know why she decided to disinherit her own family and leave a legacy to the Church of Scotland instead — the house,
four and a half acres of land plus thirty thousand pounds cash to be used for the benefit of the deaconesses of the said Church.
Rumour has it, however, that it was due to the misdemeanours of her only son, James Thomas Sharpe, Angus’s Dad and Heather’s Grandfather.
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Angus wrote that although other benefits may have been passed to her children, they (the grandchildren) never knew of any. In fact he wouldn’t have known about the legacy to the church were it not for a 1911 cutting in the Stirling Newspaper that was discovered by Douglas among old records found after their sister Maggie died and the house was being sold.
He said that when Margaret Linklater died in 1911, her husband James Grossart, apparently now a “Spirit Merchant”, wasn’t there to sign the death certificate — he may have been travelling at the time. Her son James, although by then living in South London, was present and signed instead. James Grossart lived another 17 years, and when he died was staying with his surviving daughter Mary and her husband George Tait Christie, a Station Master.
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Angus met his Grandfather not long before he died. It was on the family’s Summer holiday in Scotland. “I recall being on the bank of the local stream at Lady Mary’s Walk, where brother Norman was standing in the water trying to fish, and Grandfather James Grossart came down wearing a funny wee Turkish style hat.” Angus says this was his earliest memory. “We were probably staying in a local hotel, as Uncle George and Aunt Mary Christie (Aunt Polly) couldn’t have accommodated our family of parents and seven children aged between eighteen and the youngest — me, age three.”
Lady Mary’s Walk is outside Crieff, where Duncan, too, described family holidays beside the River Earn and being “welcomed by Auntie Polly, Uncle George and Cousin Margaret”.
But wait a minute! — I want to ask them — didn’t Polly and George and Cousin Margaret, and, by then, Grandfather James Grossart too, all live 130 miles away in Wigtown? Did they all holiday together? It would be nice to think that they did.
Like so often in these posts, more questions than answers. Ask them while you’ve still got them.