From the pen of Jillian on 30th Sept 2024, Maybe she has finally to to meet them now Justine x

I never met my two grandfathers, both had died before I was born. They were very different characters. My paternal grandfather was a Scot from the highlands of Banffshire, near Aberdeen.
As a young man he competed in the Highland games, throwing the hammer and tossing the caber. He was recoded as a man of great strength.  Maybe that is where he gained his strong character from. Life must have been hard for people and work must have been scarce or maybe he wanted more from life as he moved down to the city of Liverpool, to a district called Kirkdale, where he joined the police, and rose to the rank of inspector. He took lodgings in the house of a young widow, with a young son. In the fullness of time, they married 
and had seven children, six sons and one daughter. My father was the seventh child.  I am told that he was a very strict father and lectured his sons on the evils of hard liqueur, which he had seen in his day-to-day duties as a police officer.  In my youth I met a police officer who in his early police career remembered him as an inspector. My paternal grandmother died before him, but he lived into his seventies I'm told. A hardy Scot.

My maternal grandfather was a very different character, so I'm told. He was a shop keeper. A grocer rising to the position of manager.  Unfortunately, he gave his female customers too much credit (a nod, a tick and a wink,) and eventually lost his position and was forced to take a job on the docks. When my grandmother married him, he was a widower in his mid-thirties with four children, one boy and four girls.  My grandmother was a nineteen-year-old domestic servant. She must have thought she had fallen on her feet when he began to court her and proposed marriage. He was a slick dresser and a very likeable character. When he left the pub, he would dance down the street like the Pied Piper with the children following him as he dropped pennies from his pockets for the children to pick up. My mother said he was a lovely father, a good provider but maybe not such a good husband.  But all the ladies loved him. He was a ladies’ man and a dandy. But that was his downfall.
Five children arrived from their marriage, one boy and four girls. My grandmother took on quite a task, but she loved children, and such a life was the one the most women lead in those days.

They were both called Alexander, One a native Scot and the other, an hereditary Scot.
One from the highlands and the other from the lowlands, the city of Glasgow. A tradition in my father's family was the first son would be called Alexander shortening the name to Sandy, 
When I was born the hoped for boy didn't arrive, otherwise I would have been a
 Sandy. My sister is called Ann after my paternal grandmother.

They were so different I would have liked to have met them both.


Jillian Riddoch