Saturday, December 3rd .....

Dad’s folk (as they say in Scotland) came from a small fishing village on the East coast called Gourdon. His father, also John, moved to Lanarkshire to find work and married Janet Gore from Motherwell. Motherwell was the home of the famous Colville Steelworks which produced the best ship-building steel in Europe and supported the Clydeside Shipyards.


My grandfather, though, was a miner and worked in the Blantyre Mine. My father was the first of three children. A girl, Anne, died young and his sister, Janet, married and moved to England. Looking through Dad’s family tree shows that generations of his family were fishermen, although the earliest direct ancestor I have found, George, born 1785, was a Limefiller. There are a few masons and similar occupations among the generations but, essentially, fishing was the family trade. The next generation had a John (born 1821) who was a Whitefisher, a term used to differentiate them from fishermen who caught lobsters and crabs,etc. This John was the first in the family line of boys named John. I'm the fifth in the line, and Jamie (John James!) is the sixth.

The third generation John was born in 1852 and had 9 children but only two boys. George probably died young and John, my grandfather, left the sea behind to seek his fortune in the steel-making towns of Lanarkshire. Sadly, he died in 1946, aged 51. I have a faint memory of him helping my brother who was learning to walk but I would have only been 3 years old and I can’t guarantee it’s not a false recollection, based on family stories.

One of Dad’s aunts married a fishermen called Alexander Gibb whose boat was called the Tunbury Castle. It was a converted canal narrow boat. We visited them in 1950 in Johnshaven, the next village to Gourdon and I have strong memories of that trip. Dad had already sailed for Australia so there was just Mum and my brother and I. We travelled from Glasgow in a Bluebird Coach
and we each had a comic for the trip. We got off the bus at the highway and walked down the hill to the little cottage right on the foreshore in Johnshaven. Uncle Alex had an upturned boat in front of his house, a smokehouse in the back-yard and an attic, which my brother and I were keen to explore. That’s where I keep my ferrets, said Uncle Alex, so we didn’t dare go up there.

That’s where I ate my first crabs and the taste in my memory is as vivid as the day I ate them.

So Dad’s generation produced 2 sons named Christie, and my generation has produced three: my son, Jamie, and Sandy’s sons, Andrew and Simon. Jamie has only one daughter and Andrew has two girls. Simon, though, has two boys, Jack and Ty, so the Christie name continues into another generation.