The Children
The stubborn businessman was probably John Bruce senior, but might also have been John junior, who had followed his father into the textile business. The 1846/47 directory shows John junior to be a clerk at Ward Mill, having left home, though he still lives close by in Heathfield, off Hawkhill. By 1850, his two sisters have set up in business themselves, as milliners and dressmakers at 7 Crichton Street.
7 Crichton St, Dundee in 2005
The census of the next year shows that Augusta, aged 26, John junior, 24, and Elizabeth, 22, live with their aunt, Agnes Low, at 7 Crichton Street. Augusta is the dressmaker and Elizabeth the milliner, while John is a clerk at a flax-spinners. Agnes turned out to be the key to resolving just which John Low was the parent of John junior’s mother Elizabeth Low, since John Low is a very common name. Since she is the unmarried aunt to Augusta, John and Elizabeth Bruce, she must therefore be the sister of their mother, Elizabeth, and so we must look for a John Low who is father to both an Elizabeth and an Agnes. And there is only one candidate for such a person, fortunately.
The Crichton Street address is a typical block of tenements over shops. Crichton Street itself had been built from 1775 onwards. Until then, there had only been two routes from the centre of Dundee down to its harbour – both narrow, with one being the Couttie’s Wynd that had caught my eye on my first visit. At that time, Dundee was run by Provost Alexander Riddoch and Riddoch’s response to the pressure for a new route from Dundee’s High Street area to the harbour was typically parsimonious – both Crichton Street and Castle Street (1785), were narrow and steep, especially when compared to contemporary building in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Riddoch is a key figure in understanding the Dundee of that era, and even why the city is what it is today. His level head in controlling the riots in the town during the period of the French Revolution and his modernisation of the town, attracted admiration, but his ruthless control of the Council for nearly 40 years, together with several dubious land transactions where he somehow managed to buy land that the Council later required to build on, led to accusations of corruption. In truth, Riddoch’s real fault seems to have been that “his management of the town’s revenues had been characterised as niggardly rather than judicious”, with an emphasis on cost-cutting and not income-increasing. Sadly, his distaste for corporate planning was one of the reasons that Dundee, almost alone of all major Scots towns, was hardly touched by the neoclassical town planning that forms one of Scotland’s main architectural glories.
A few years later, in 1853, John junior and his two sisters live at 46 Reform Street, regarded as the finest neoclassical street in Dundee. Again, they live in flats (tenements) over shops. By this time, John has graduated from a clerk to being a manufacturer in his own right. His father, by contrast, fades from business sight, while his uncle James has climbed back to being a manufacturer and remains in Small’s Wynd – it seems his business was at number 5 and his house at number 2.
Elizabeth, though youngest, was the first of her siblings to wed, when she married James Brown, a tinplate worker, on 15 February 1854. John junior, as we will see later, married Margaret Prain in August 1854, while Augusta remained single, carrying on her dress-making, until at the age of 36, she married letter-carrier David Urquhart on 5 December 1859.
We know that Augusta’s father, John senior, was a witness at her wedding, but any happiness at the wedding of his eldest daughter must have been short lived.
Constable family grave in The Howff, Dundee - the last two burials are John Bruce senior
John’s mother-in-law, Margaret Constable (née McRitchie), had died at the age of 82 on 23 September 1859 but about 14 December, her daughter, John’s wife Janet, fell ill with gastric fever. Shortly after, this turned into typhoid and she died on the evening of Christmas Eve, 1859, at Rankine’s Close, off Murraygate. Janet was aged 52 and she was buried on the 29th in the Constable family plot in the Howff, where their gravestone can be seen today.
Trying to trace John senior, Janet and their family in the 1850s was a lot more difficult than, say, tracing John junior. Originally, you had to just take the film of the census and work through it, page by page. And John senior and his family were missing from the 1851 census in Dundee. We knew they were at 14 Thomson St in Dundee in about 1852, but eventually, once the computerised version of the census was available, John, Janet and their four children were found in King St, Broughty Ferry. The Bruce family would later be linked with Broughty Ferry for some years, but this was clearly a short stay there for they were back in Dundee later. In fact, three relics from Dundee survive in the possession of the descendants of Emily Bruce. One is an “education mortification”, dated 26 December 1851, that says that Robert was to be paid an annual amount of £8 for four years, while he was at school in Dundee. The second is a prize given by Meadowside Academy to Emily Bruce, in July 1856, “for eminence in English Grammar and Geography”. This is a book “The Travels & Adventures of Thomas Trotter as told by himself”, while the third is another book, signed on the title page by Robert Bruce himself, “The Life & Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, volume 2”.
Bruce of South Cheshire Family History 