The young Miss Lyon.
5.6.1885 –
15.4.1983.
The little old lady, accompanied by a small and
aged white fox terrier, walking through the streets of Dornoch, was
a familiar sight a few years ago. Almost everyone knew her, if only
by sight – she did not know everybody ... "how could anyone
be expected to know all these people ",her overall term for almost
everyone who was younger than she was, or who had come to live in
the town since she had first known it? To the casual observer her
clothes-might have looked a little shabby, though closer inspection
would have revealed that they were good, and had once been
expensive, and she almost always wore at least some of her jewellery
– a beautiful diamond crescent brooch, dangling earrings of
aquamarine or amethyst, large lumps of these same stones set into
brooches, a gold naval crown, pretty rings. She wore them not to
impress, but just because they were part of her heritage, had been
left to her by her mother and grandmother, and they were there
simply to be worn. She lived in an undistinguished house in the
middle of the town and no one, looking at it from the outside, could
have guessed what treasures there were within. Indeed, it might have
been difficult for the untrained eye to notice them, covered as most
of them were in a layer of dust and the clutter of day to day
living. Like the jewellery, her pictures, furniture and silver had
all been left to her, and were relics of a sometimes happier and
much more interesting past, constant reminders of places and people
connected with her youth, and therefore much to be cherished (if not
dusted) on that account, and not for their intrinsic value
only..almost everything in the house had a story attached to it.
There are no prizes for guessing the subject of these notes...most
people locally will realise that the old lady was Miss Kathleen Jane
Lyon, who lived in the small house in Castle Street for the last
sixteen years of her life, and whose forebears owned and occupied
Ospisdale House in the county of Sutherland from 1797 until 1929.
There were other treasures in that house too –
boxes of letters, photographs, documents, maps and ledgers, some
going back over two hundred years, and all providing a fascinating
window on the 19th century world. It is from these papers that I
have been able to compile the previous chapters. Actually, the ones
with which I have been privileged to deal were but a fraction of the
number she had originally, around 50 boxes of them having gone to
the Record Office in Edinburgh during her lifetime. Miss Lyon was
born in New Zealand in 1885, the daughter of a naval officer, Alex
Lyon and Georgiana Jane Gilchrist Lyon, known as Nainie within the
family circle. Her father had left the navy to go to New Zealand to
run a sheep farm which had been purchased by his father, a Liverpool
businessman, as an investment. Whatever made this gentleman imagine
that his son, who had embarked on his naval career at the age of
twelve, and had no experience whatsoever of either farming or estate
management, would be able to make a success of this venture, is hard
to understand, and the newly wed Lyons were definitely not
successful. They first lived in lodgings (£1 a week each) and later
moved into a house which they seemed to like well enough, though
there was not enough money to furnish it properly, and worse still –
servants were hard to get and expensive. It may seem ridiculous to
us now, but Nainie Gilchrist had been brought up on a cushion of
domestic help and life without a houseful of servants must have
seemed to her to be almost insupportable. She wrote to her mother
that her expenditure on ‘help’ amounted to £128 a year ‘without any
comfort’ whereas ‘you, with five in the house, only spend £96 Even
Commander Lyon had to assist on occasion with filling baths and
emptying them. True, they had a string of horses, which was some
consolation, since Nainie loved to ride and was an excellent
horsewoman, but horseflesh was cheap in the New Zealand of the 1880s
(£5 would buy a good hack) and when times got really hard and they
tried to sell one or two of them,- no buyers could be found.
Incidentally, there was horsemanship on the other side of the family
too. Kathleens Lyon’s paternal grandfather had been a keen rider to
hounds and on occasion had hunted with the Empress Elizabeth of
Austria, who from time to time came to England, mainly to indulge
her love of the sport but partly perhaps to escape for a while the
rigours of Viennese court life. Small wonder therefore, that
Kathleen too was completely at home in the saddle when she was young
– there is a charming photograph of her on her pony, together with
her parents and groom, taken standing in the middle of what is now
the A9, by the stone which stands at the roadside not far from the
gates of Ospisdale. This stone had fallen in a field, and the Lyons
had retrieved it and re-erected it, and maybe this picture was taken
to celebrate the event.
But to return to New Zealand ... money, or rather
lack of it, was always a serious problem, and this together with the
terrible boredom ‘every day is the same’ eventually got Nainie down
and increased the desperate homesickness which she suffered from the
beginning. She kept hens and a few cows, hoping she would be able to
make enough butter to sell, altered and made clothes for herself and
the baby, while at the same time they lived very simply, but
finances did not seem to improve. Mrs. Gilchrist, Nainie’s mother,
did what she could, sent what money she could spare even though not,
by now, well off herself, and she possibly even paid for their
passages on the one occasion that they returned to Scotland for a
holiday. This was when Kathleen was about a year old, and it was
whilst on the return voyage that she was held in the arms of an old
gentleman who had actually been present at the execution of Marie
Antoinette in Paris in 1793. This man’s father had been a minister
in Paris at the time of the Terror and when the date of the Queen’s
execution was set, had been told that he and his whole family should
make a point of being present if he wished things to go well for
them in the future. The old man on the steamship was but an infant
in arms at the time, and of course remembered nothing about it, but
what a link with the past that encounter was! After this trip the
family returned to New Zealand for a few years, coming back to
Britain for good when Kathleen was six or seven years old. All that
she could recall about that voyage was that the ship had called at
Colombo and the passengers were able to go ashore for a few hours.
Rickshaws were lined up on the quay waiting to be hired and little
Kathleen, always modest, was allowed to choose which one she
preferred – she said she immediately chose the one pulled by a
coolie who appeared to be wearing more clothes than the rest!.
After they had quit New Zealand for good, the Lyons
lived in London for a time though of course there were the wonderful
summers in Sutherland to look forward to, when hats and gloves and
the other trappings of town life could be abandoned, and a child
could run wild. But though she may have run wild all week, Kathleen,
like other Victorian children, had to go to church on Sundays. They
went alternately to Dornoch Cathedral and to Creich Church, which
sadly no longer stands where she remembered it. Services started at
1 p.m. so there was no question of a Sunday dinner, but Kathleen
said she well remembered coming home after service to a marvellous
high tea, with goodies that included home-cured ham and Grannie’s
wonderful gingerbread! Whilst in London, Kathleen went to a private
day school, but for the final year of her education she was able to
follow in her mother’s footsteps and go to Cheltenham Ladies
College. There she revelled in English Literature, polished up her
French and enjoyed the art classes, but foundered absolutely when it
came to mathematics, so much so that she was allowed to give up the
subject and choose another in its place. She chose photography,
which was somewhat advanced for those days, but she certainly
profited from the experience and she became an excellent
photographer, and was even able in later years to sell some of her
photographs to magazines such as Country Life and the Scottish
Field. She spent two years after she had left school studying at the
Paris School of Art (‘you needn’t think that I don’t know what the
male body looks like – in Paris we had living models in the Life
Class’), and it was not until after her death that her portfolio and
an album were found, and we realised what a very competent artist
she had become – her watercolours of local Sutherland scenes were
especially pleasing. Also about this time she learned to be a
proficient skater, going to a rink at one of the London clubs. She
was photographed there, wearing a hat and a long skirt, with only
the tips of her boots and skates visible – what would she have
thought of the minimal skirts worn by the skating girls of today?
Around the year 1901 the Lyons left London and came
to live permanently at Ospisdale in order to help and look after
Granny Gilchrist, who was by now into her 80s. Both her sons had
died, as had the spinster Aunt Margaret, while Aunt Kate (Catherine)
was married and living far away from home. Life must have been
quiet, even humdrum, at the old house in those days; as usual, there
was very little money to come and go on but I feel sure that
Kathleen was happy enough. She loved the place, especially the
garden, and she had her dog (a previous Trixie who later came to
grief through getting under the wheels of the governess cart outside
the Clashmore Inn), and her water colours, and there were occasional
visits from relations including some from a favourite cousin, Nigel,
a young naval officer. Her mother too was supremely happy just to be
living again in her old home. Nigel, whose surname I never remember
hearing and who doesn’t seem to appear on the family tree, sadly
went down with his ship in 1916, taking with him, we suspect, a
bundle of hopes and dreams. She had a little glass scent-bottle on
her dressing table which had been a present from him, and she asked
that this might be placed in her coffin eventually, but this was not
possible as she had also asked to be cremated, so we put it in the
casket containing her ashes, together with the photographs of Nigel
– taken at various stages of his naval career – which we had found
in the house. He was a very nice looking young man.
At various times the Lyons managed to spend one or
two summers abroad and explored parts of Germany and less well known
spots such as the Dalmatian coast and the foothills of the
Dolomites, places which today are over-run with tourists but in the
pre-1914 years must have been remote and unusual, and very
inexpensive into the bargain, but these trips were only achieved in
the years when both house and shooting had been successfully let for
the season.
During the first World War life must have become
even more quiet and seemingly remote. Kathleen was desperately
anxious to undertake some kind of war work, and nursing seemed the
obvious choice, but her mother was loath to let her go. Not only had
Commander Lyon returned to some sort of naval appointment, but the
gardeners and other servants had left to join up and she was needed
at home. She found herself trying hard to maintain the garden (she
said that after the war she never willingly grew another
vegetable!), bicycling down to Dornoch to do the shopping and
generally coping with the household. When the war was over, her
father, whose health had been precarious for years, became an
invalid and her mother too was getting increasingly frail, so poor
Kathleen had her hands full. She kept poultry and bees, and even
tried her hand at breeding pigs in an attempt to augment their
slender resources, though this last effort seems not to have been
successful. In the end, it all became too much for them, and the
estate was put on the market, and finally sold in 1929 – house,
land, grouse-moor, the lot for £11,000. To make matters worse, the
shock and sadness of leaving Ospisdale affected Mrs. Lyon’s mind,
and she lost her memory completely. They went to live in a small
house on the outskirts of Chester with the idea of being nearer to
some of the Lyon relations. Here both her parents died, her father
leaving the pathetic sum of only £104.9.5p.
After this Kathleen moved again, this time to
Overton-on-Dee a few miles away just over the border into Wales.
This used to be a pretty place, and perhaps still is, and there for
a few years she enjoyed a freedom she had never known before, and
had time to plan her garden, write articles for magazines, use her
camera and paintbrush, as well as doing a certain amount of work for
the Red Cross. The daily domestic chores, which she had always found
very boring, were taken care of by Annie who came to her as a sort
of’ housekeeper and general factotum, and who stayed until she
(Annie) died. Kathleen had a fondness for Annie, even though she
said that the woman was unreliable with money and an inveterate
gambler, if only in a small way, and used money which had been given
her for other expenses, such as insurance stamps, for her flutters;
she also removed articles from the house which were never used and
would never (she thought) be missed, and pawned them. I thought this
was horrifying and wondered how anyone could keep a servant who did
such things until I learned that the unfortunate Annie was never
actually paid – ‘She was an illegitimate orphan, and I took her in
and gave her a home -surely that was enough’ – well, it all depends
on how one looks at things, I suppose. When the second war started,
Kathleen was then in her early 50s, and having been forced by
circumstances to miss helping during 1914-1918, was determined not
to let the next one pass her by, so she joined the ATS and soon
found herself Recruiting Sergeant in the small Welsh town of
Wrexham. She was able to go there daily in her little car and I’m
sure she must have enjoyed this new experience, but her army career
was short-lived .. she became seriously ill with meningitis after a
few months and had to retire permanently from service life.
Kathleen had been back to Sutherland several times
on short visits, but around 1955 she decided she would like to come
back for good, so when a small house in Dornoch, 12 Castle Street,
became available, she promptly purchased it for a very modest sum,
and moved up with Annie, her dog, cat and as many of her possessions
as she could fit into the house. The dog was not another Trixie, but
a ‘rescue’ of indeterminate breed, referred to merely as ‘the old
dog’. After his death, she acquired the third and last Trixie, a
smooth haired fox terrier, much beloved by her mistress. In Dornoch
life continued much as it had in Overton – she painted some charming
water colours of local places, made her small back garden a blaze of
colour in summer, and wrote a good deal, including the start of a
history of the Gilchrists of Ospisdale, though it is unlikely that
this was ever finished. The faithful Annie cleaned the house after a
fashion, looked after the animals and did the cooking, as well as
serving the meals..this routine continued until a sad day when she
was taken ill, and removed to hospital where she died. Thus it came
about that at the age of 80, Kathleen had to teach herself to cook,
she who hadn’t so much as boiled an egg up until then. She managed
this remarkably well – a souffle was no problem to her and her layer
cakes were beautiful to behold – but it was sad to see her, towards
the end of her life, having her meals alone in her dark and somewhat
Edwardian kitchen, because the dining room was too cold. She had
been brought up to better things, and her thoughts must have gone
back to the old days at Ospisdale and her grandmother’s lavish
table. By the time we came to live in Dornoch, Kathleen was 89,
still wonderfully active, but finding it something of a problem to
summon enough energy to give Trixie the exercise she needed, so,
since I was walking my own dog almost every day, Trixie came with us
and we all became good friends. Later on, I went to the house even
more regularly to help with some of the simple chores, or just for a
chat, and found her such entertaining company. Her stories of
Highland life in the days of her youth were wonderful, and she was a
mine of information on so many subjects – archaeology, the old
Sutherland families, antiques – the list is endless, and in
listening to them I was repaid a thousandfold for the little I did
for her. My only regret is that I did not listen more carefully or
ask more questions. One of her stories concerned a great uncle of
her grandmothers who lived to be well aver 90. Her grandmother well
remembered being told by this old man when he was a small child his
home had been in Preston Pans, and after the battle in 1746 the
English soldiers had come to the house to ask for water. His mother
had given it to them, and milk and bread as well – what a link with
history! She also used to tell how she had all but danced her feet
off at the Northern Meeting in Inverness in Edwardian days,
describing some of the interesting and unusual people who used to be
there. Once an Indian maharajah was one of the guests and dazzled
everyone with the magnificence of his jewels, and there was another
gentleman who got a little tipsy, and insisted on trying to dance
with a curtain! But her thoughts were not always of the past..she
kept up with the news of the day, despite the fact that she
steadfastly refused to have television in her house. Indeed she
derived great satisfaction from being able to tell an investigator
from the BBC that she did not have a set, and wouldn’t have one if
it was presented to her as a gift! However, she did occasionally
look at other people’s, and indeed spent the last Saturday afternoon
of her life watching the Grand National in our house on what she
always referred to as ‘the coloured radio’!
Time catches up with all of us eventually, and the day came when
coping with the trials and troubles of daily life became too much
for her, and she had to retire to Cambusavie Hospital as a long term
patient, while Trixie - now about 17, came to stay with us. It was
necessary to be a dedicated dog-lover to cope with Trixie...the
household at No 12 had always revolved around her and so it was not
her fault that she was a very spoilt little dog, and would snap at
the hand that fed, and any other hand, if things did not suit. We
had her for just over a year and during that time I took her up to
the hospital every week. I cannot imagine any other hospital
anywhere being so tolerant and understanding...the dog was allowed
everywhere, even on the bed, and if it happened to be meal time
while we were visiting, a small separate portion always arrived for
Trixie. She finally succumbed in February 1983 aged over 18, and her
mistress, at nearly 98, followed her two months later. I could have
wished it had been the other way around, but we cannot arrange these
things, and finally Kathleen departed peacefully in her sleep,
having been up and dressed as usual the previous day, wandering
through the wards and talking to other patients. Who could ask for
more than that at such an age? She was the last surviving member, as
far as is known, of the Gilchrist family, a great and unforgettable
lady, whom to know was indeed a privilege, and whose like we may not
see again.
