This post covers the only two civilians on the War Memorial, including the only woman.
Sophia Campbell Edward was born on 28th March 1906 at 13 Queens Gate in the leafy west end of Glasgow. This address has been renamed and renumbered as 128 Dowanhill Street:
Note the house to the right (black door) still retains the original number 14 from it's Queens Gate days.
Her father was George Edward (then aged 40), a jeweller. Her mother was Charlotte Robertson Edward (nee Moir, then aged 29). Sophia was born one day before their first wedding anniversary and was named after Charlotte's mother. I suspect she was known as Sophy or Sophie but have used Sophia in this post.
Four years later and Sophia had two younger brothers, David (born 1908, named after George's father) and George Moir (born 1910); the 1911 Census finds the parents away and the three children at home with three servants, a cook, a housemaid and a nurse.
The next thing we know about the family is that they spent the month of July 1912 on holiday at Scalasaig on the Isle of Colonsay.
We know this for the most tragic of reasons: four-year old David was playing on the pier, fell over the side and was drowned. From The Scotsman:
And from the Oban Times:
Charlotte, Sophia's mother, was already pregnant and on 14th February 1913 she gave birth to a boy also named David but given the date his middle name was Valentine.
The next glimpse we have is in 1920, when the family had left 13 Queens Gate and moved to St Germain's a villa in Bearsden, overlooking the loch of the same name. This substantial property was to be their home for at least the next 15 years. This photo shows a general view of the loch and surrounding Victorian villas in 1952:
And this photo shows a close-up:
St Germain's is the lighter of the two villas, slightly further back on the left hand side. (The other house is Lochbrae.) The photo was taken from roughly above the old Canniesburn Hospital looking towards Bearsden Cross. Just above St Germain's, the existing building at Bearsden Station can be seen. Drymen Road runs across the photo in the top right corner with the shops including the present day Clyde Property, Peter Ivens, Kothel and Pizza Hut visible at the top of the picture.
This is approximately the same view today, using Google earth:
St Germain's and Lochbrae were demolished in the last 1970s.
In April 1924, George, father of Sophia, George and David, died quite suddenly:
I will come back to George's business at the end of this post. However, he was a wealthy man and left his family £58,865 after taxes (see Press and Journal, 1st September 1924).
While this might not sound a lot, adjusting simply for inflation it would be just under £4.5 million; looked at in another way, compared to an average weekly wage of £5, and adjusting for the rise in earnings, it would be worth £7.9 million. His widow, Charlotte, may have had her own funds as well as her father was a colliery owner.
Sophia's brother, George, went to Malvern College, an exclusive boarding school in Worcestershire, in the autumn of 1924, and David followed soon after.
Charlotte began travelling abroad with her children. I suspect this is only a partial record but the available lists from liners shows:
May 1927 Charlotte and Sophia spend about a week in France, landing at La Pallice
January 1928 Charlotte and all three children travel to Tangier in Morocco by the P&O ship, Narkunda.
They travelled in style and the passenger list always places them in First Class. Here is a cabin on that ship, taken the month before they travelled:
And here is the interior space:
For more photos click here. There is a record of them returning from Gibraltar three months later but it's not clear if this was the same trip. It is the last record of Charlotte and the three children travelling together:
Note the misspelling of their surnames.
Around this time, George would have left Malvern. I believe I have read that he worked for the Post Office, possibly using radio equipment, but cannot now find the source of this information. David also left Malvern and returned to Glasgow to enrol for a degree in engineering; he graduated with first class honours. Probably by 1937 he was working for Armstrong-Whitworth who made military equipment.
Charlotte left St Germain's between 1935 and 1940, but continued to travel. In March 1938 Charlotte and Sophia visited Madeira and in early 1939 Charlotte visited Durban in South Africa, seemingly alone. Later this year, Sophia visited Myanmar (or Burma as it was then known), a colony of the British Empire. The record of her return gives the last address as "Mrs Browns, Forestry Office, Prome, Burma" (now Pyay):
War was declared in Europe while she was away. We know that on the final leg of her journey home she was on the SS Yorkshire and we also know that ship left Rangoon (now Yangong) on 7th September 1939, so it seems reasonable to assume that was how she travelled. At Gibraltar the Yorkshire, carrying passengers and cargo, joined around 20 other ships in Convoy HG3 to the UK.
As so little happened on the land and (to a lesser extent) in the air after the declaration of war, this period is known as The Phoney War, but this was not the case at sea: on the first day of war the liner Athenia was torpedoed with 117 dead. Despite this the convoy from Gibraltar does not seem to have been escorted.
By the 17th October the convoy was several hundred miles north-west of Cape Finisterre, shown as the red marker on the map above. There had been an incident with a submarine firing on a British ship (not in the convoy) that morning less than 10 miles away; while the ships zig-zagged and a watch was kept, they were being observed. That afternoon a German submarine received the order to attack, and U-37 moved into position.
The Yorkshire was hit by two torpedoes in quick succession at 3.30pm. There was time to launch boats but some had been smashed by the torpedo explosion and others could not be lowered because of fires. Many passengers got into the boats and after around eight hours at sea they were rescued. Sophia was not among them. Accounts I have been able to find are either from officers reporting the overall events or from contemporary newspaper reports, which are confusing and often conflicting. We have occasional vignettes of what happened on board but there is nothing we can link to Sophia.
Of course, she has no grave and I cannot find she is commemorated on any memorial apart from the Bearsden War Memorial.
By this time Sophia's brother, David, was living in England, and in 1938 he featured in a short paragraph in the Midland Daily Telegraph:
In the 1939 Register he was living in Balsall Common:
He gives his job as "chief technician, installation of aero engines" which is impressive given that he was only 26 years old. He seems to have been working on the new Deerhound aircraft engine, shown here being assembled at the factory near Coventry:
Could one of the men in the photo be David? (For more on the Deerhound engine see this link, thank you to William Pearce for posting these.)
On 6th March 1940 a Whitley bomber fitted with the new engine took off from Babington for a test flight with David on board.
This is the aircraft involved.
It climbed steeply, stalled and crashed killing the pilot, David and the third man on board. The suspected cause was that the elevators had become locked or had been incorrectly set.
I cannot find any record of the grave of David (or of his father or mother).
Charlotte Edward, mother of Sophia, David, George Moir and David Valentine
Charlotte Robertson Moir was born on 24th August 1876 in Mount Florida, eldest child of a colliery agent, George Moir. They lived in Cathcart, then Dundonald in Ayrshire. I initially assumed the family would only have moved from cosmopolitan Cathcart to the tiny Ayrshire village to be nearer to George's work, but I found a fascinating article about a coal-mining venture in West Lothian called Southrigg that nearly bankrupted the owner, George Moir, a Glasgow coal merchant with no previous experience of running a colliery. The name George Moir is not uncommon and as far as I can make out this happened in the 1880s so it is not certain that this is Charlotte's father - however, the George Moir in the story seems to have owned another colliery at Westrigg so it is possible his business survived.
Charlotte married George Edward on 29th March 1905 at Queens Park Church in Glasgow:
She was 28, he was 39 and he gave his occupation as Master Jeweller.
After 1940, I can find very little about her life. At one stage she lived at 26 Cleveden Road in the west end of Glasgow. She died on 30th April 1963 in Killearn Hospital, described on the record of her death as her usual residence so she may have been there for a long time. The cause was fractured neck of femur and pneumonia.
George Edward
Charlotte's husband was 39 when they married. George was the son of David Edward, master watchmaker, and was born in 1865 on 25th August at 246 Bath Street, Glasgow (still standing):
He had attended Glasgow School of Art between 1881 and 1886 and seems to have been in training for a career following his father.
The Glasgow office backs on to Royal Exchange Square (I still think of it as Borders bookshop) and the London office is right in the heart of the city - that is the Mansion House on the left and the Bank of England is out of shot to the right.
He had a passion for the art of the Far East and a section of the shop in Glasgow was devoted to it. He also helped with the Japanese art selection for the international exhibition in Glasgow in 1901.
Given his fame, this seems very little to know about George. I am reminded of a phrase in the obituary of him reproduced above - "He was associated with the business ... throughout his life and devoted almost all his energies to its direction and development." Maybe he did not have energy for much else?
The company converted to limited liability in 1925. As noted below George's son, also George Moir became involved later on and the company was absorbed by Mappin and Webb in the 1960s.
George Moir Edward
George Moir's first 25 years have been covered above in as much detail as I can find. As George's eldest surviving son, he was inducted into the Bonnetmakers and Dyers Guild in 1929:
This sounds a little strange in the 21st century but would have been a group of businessmen carrying out charitable work for the social good.
George married Rhona Wace on 28th August 1937 at Christ Church, Harrow. She lived at Digby Hall, Montpelier Road, Ealing, London but by 1940 they were living in Bearsden. While I have seen the address transcribed as Tain Road, locals will recognise this as a misreading of Iain Road, where they lived at number 4, less than a mile from St Germain's.
Rhona was born in 1916 but while all family trees on Ancestry say this was in the the UK, I believe it to have been at Dera Ismail Khan, St
Thomas, Bengal:
Rhona's father was a British officer in the Indian Army (at that time a part of the British Army):
At the outbreak of World War 2, George joined the army, initially in the Royal Corps of Signals where by 1942 he was a corporal, and received his commission switching to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers as a Second Lieutenant:
I have not been able to find anything about his war service.
From public domain information, I can identify he had three children: Jennifer Anne (1940), Coralie Allison (1942) and Hamish Moir (1946).
After the war, George became involved with the family's jewellery business and by 1950 he was not only managing director but also the President of the Scottish Watchmakers and Jewellers Association, appearing as an expert witness in a court case.
Glaswegians among my readers will give a wry smile at the idea knock-off watches could have been on sale at the famous Barras market!
I have not been able to pin down when George Edward and Sons became a part of Mappin and Webb but this seems to have happened in the 1960s. By this stage, George and Rhona lived at 8 West Chapelton Crescent, Bearsden.
George died suddenly on Monday 5th January 1970 at 10.40 in the morning from a coronary thrombosis, outside the Savings Bank on Drymen Road, Bearsden. He was 59 years and 156 days old; his father was 59 years and 233 days old when he died (suddenly) 46 years earlier and half a mile away.
Of George's children, I can find nothing about Jennifer. (Coralie) Allison married and lived in Kent. Hamish Moir registered a silvermaker's mark in 1978 suggesting an interest in the old family line of work but he died in his mid 30s in West Kilbride, Ayrshire:
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