Martin's maternal grandmother, Mary Ann Pyne married James Murphy in 1914 at the age of 24. At that time she was a laundress and he was a coalminer. They set up home together in Cambuslang, Lanarkshire. Their first child arrived in the October of 1914 and over the next seventeen years, Mary went on to have another eleven children.
Of these twelve children, one, Elizabeth died at the age of four months, and Gerard died aged 51, but all the rest survived into their 70s, 80s, 90s - and Frances even reached her 100th birthday and received her birthday card from the Queen! These were amazing lifespans for these children, given that the older children were raised in cramped accommodation. Even more amazing is that they were brought up by Mary on her own after her husband James died at the age of 48, leaving her with eight children under the age of 16 and her four older children, one of whom, Mary, had both mental and physical disabilities.
Both parents had been dedicated to bringing up their children to be as fulfilled and educated as possible as this was one of the few routes out of poverty for working class families in Scotland at this time. Mary was also a strong character. In order to provide for her children after their father's early death, she knitted Paisley patterned shawls and tea cosies and sold them at the famous Glasgow Barras market and possibly was still taking in laundry.
So what of her children? Extraordinary for this time, three of the children - Frances, Michael and James - obtained university degrees and all three went into teaching. All the remaining children, except for Mary, obtained qualifications at night school, so none were dependent on physical labour as a means to earn a living. The men had escaped going down the mine, which would have been their destiny.
Of all the children, Frances achieved the most success. Her brothers, James and Michael had become headteachers, but Frances owned her own Montessori Nursery School in Terre Haute, Indiana, having emigrated to the USA in the 1950s. She never married, taught and oversaw the school until the age of 92, when she felt she had to retire after breaking her hip! She retired a very wealthy woman.
Martin's mother Teresa was also successful. Her Polish husband Jan was the main driver behind the family business he co-founded with her, but she was the one who understood finances as she had qualified as a book keeper. The business went on to become a household name in Scotland. Teresa also took over the care of her elder sister Mary, following the death of her mother in 1968, until Mary herself died in 1992.
Frances wasn't the only one to emigrate. Thomas, John, Veronica and Gerard all emigrated to Australia in the 1940s-1950s and only returned to Scotland on holiday.
Men left to right: Alfred, unknown, Gerard and Michael. Photo taken in the late 1940s.
From humble beginnings and a seemingly inevitable life path of continued poverty and hardship, this family managed a remarkable transition, achieving a lot in the process.
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