Strathblane and Blanefield: a chronicle of change

On the surface, there is little to link this modern, cosmopolitan 2000-strong community with that of 150 years ago. Then, the area was dominated by the belching chimneys of a huge calico printworks where at its height 500 men, women and children toiled at least 12 hours a day for meagre pay. Meanwhile, industrialists and landowners lived in luxury, waited upon by legions of servants. Beyond a scattering of farms and a handful of shops, there was little else.

Do the old and new communities have anything at all in common apart from the backdrop of the Campsie Fells? Today there is little visible sign that the printworks, which produced cotton fabric with a small, all-over floral print, ever existed. Magnificent Victorian engineering still carries the Glasgow water supply from Loch Katrine through the valley but the whistle of locomotives on the Blane Valley Railway, which linked Glasgow with Aberfoyle, last sounded more than 50 years ago.

And yet, Strathblanefield, as some now insist on calling the conjoined villages, is full of pointers to the past: homes bearing dates from the 1890s, the black cast-iron door of the smithy's furnace, the half-submerged plaque marking St Kessog's Well, a memorial to a wartime tragedy that took the lives of a mother and her two young children. The list goes on. My first home here, a tiny three-roomed cottage flat, had been formed from two single-ends knocked together. Each had once held a printworker's family, with five or six children apiece. Today our family occupies what was the home of the printworks manager. Herald photographer Martin Shields, my collaborator in this venture, owns the lodge house of one of the magnificent Victorian mansions that pepper the district.

The raw material was an extraordinary slideshow of old postcards and family photographs shown by Strathblane Heritage Society at the village summer fair in 2011. Some of the scenes and buildings depicted had barely changed, while others were unrecognisable. Waiting in the queue at The Herald cafe a few days later, Martin and I came up with the idea of collaborating on a book of the best of these old images, matched with the modern equivalents. I would be the caption writer and we would use it to generate funds for other local history projects. We imagined it would take a few weeks.

It was a slow start. The glass-plate technology used by Victorian photographers produced perspectives that were sometimes difficult to replicate with modern equipment and lenses. Not to mention the hundreds of trees that have sprung up in inconvenient places. Alastair Smith, a resident who had attempted the same feat for the village magazine, summed it up well: "Initially, I thought all I needed to do was find the holes where the photographer had placed his tripod and take up the same position." At one point we nearly gave up but Martin persisted, slightly altering some angles and using a telephoto lens where it helped.

People began coming to us with treasures from their family albums, adding to the material borrowed from the heritage society. We started to understand the thousands of piecemeal changes that had transformed the parish, like so many across Scotland, from a smelly, polluted, poverty-stricken place of smoking chimneys to the well-heeled area full of "sought-after properties" that it is today. A number of the older buildings that are now family homes were once shops and businesses. Housing estates have swallowed fields that hosted village bonfires and agricultural shows. Searching among the ferns and ivy, still you can stumble upon the crumbling remains of railway sidings and sluice gates.

The "caption writing" soon got out of control. Two sources were invaluable: John Guthrie Smith's idiosyncratic history of the parish of Strathblane, published in 1886, and the vast quantity of material accumulated by our late lamented local historian Alison Dryden, whose own book on the history of the community will be published shortly under the title Strathblane 1870 To 1970: A Century Of Change.

Strathblane And Blanefield Now And Then is not intended to be a comprehensive village history; the story it tells is the story of many communities across Scotland. It is a series of glimpses of village life, told through 30 double-page spreads on the now and then theme. The book's designer, former Herald artist Roy Petrie, has ghosted many of the old pictures around the new ones, giving the haunting impression of the past reaching into the present. Glasgow printer John Watson kindly offered to partially sponsor the project and gave expert advice.

Today the community has households that have settled here from Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Conversely, Blanefield and Strathblane have a huge global diaspora. Perhaps it is the beauty of the place, nestling at the foot of the hills, or the warmth of the welcome, but even those who moved away decades ago seem to stay closely in touch and visit when they can.

But there are also families who never left, families whose accumulated experiences run through the community like veins, pulsing with stories: the Grahams, the Muirs, the Wallaces and, of course, local lairds the Edmonstones, who moved in around 1434. We talked to Duncan McKellar, the retired village officer, whose father worked as coachman and chauffeur to the family for 52 years. And Ailsa Gove, who was born at Blanefield Post Office and went on to become its last postmistress. And Alastair Wallace, who remembers his younger sister taking possession at Strathblane Station of a pony delivered all the way from the New Forest in Hampshire by rail. There were stories that made us laugh and others that had us fighting back the tears, not least that of Jean Keddie.

Jean, now a chirpy 94-year-old widow, resplendent in her trouser suit, appears on the steps of her home. (She declined to be photographed with her sticks lest they make her look old.) On the opposite page is a portrait of Daniel and Mary Muir, in the same spot 101 years ago. The caption reads: "Mr and Mrs D Muir. First Sunday to church after marriage, 1911." Daniel and Mary were Jean's parents but her life had a calamitous start. She was born in 1918 at the end of the Great War but two months later her mother was dead, a victim of the terrible H1N1 flu pandemic that swept the world, taking with it between 20 and 40 million people. Though many who died had been weakened by life in the trenches on the Western Front, millions were previously fit, healthy young people like Mary. More died in the so-called Spanish Flu outbreak than during the whole of the First World War.

Daniel was a builder. In fact, he had built the house where he poses with his new bride and where Jean has also lived for more than 50 years. He looks the embodiment of the Edwardian gent in his top hat, while Mary, who wears a huge dark hat, is perhaps holding her wedding bouquet. Jean and her brothers Arthur and Victor were brought up by their father, supported by family and friends. She remembers accompanying him to work on building sites and being left to play in the sand – enough to give a modern health and safety officer apoplexy.

"I had a job the day I was born," says Jean, with only mild exaggeration. At age 10, she was already tackling darning, washing and ironing, while the boys took on other household chores. Jean's outstanding feature is her infectious laugh and she recounts her story without a hint of self-pity. (Arthur's sons John and Kenneth continue to run a plumbing firm in the village.)

Daniel Muir was also the builder of Crosshill, another house on the main Glasgow Road featured in the book. It was built in 1894, immediately after he completed his apprenticeship and the work was carried out by Irish navvies, in the parish for the construction of the Second Aqueduct for the Glasgow water supply from Loch Katrine. They were partly paid for their labours with barrels of beer, according to Jean. (Cue more health and safety apoplexy.) The old picture features "Widow Muir", Daniel's formidable mother, who used part of the building as a small drapery, selling grim-looking garments, dress material and reels of cotton. By contrast, today's equally formidable homeowner is a newcomer, Harley-Davidson enthusiast Sarah Bridge, a gas engineer originally from Grimsby, who is not averse to being referred to as "the dyke on the bike".

Some views are barely recognisable. One features the last passenger train coming through Blanefield in 1958 receiving a suitably momentous welcome from locals and rail buffs. A dark-haired young lad on the left stares open-mouthed at the camera. His name is Willie Wallace, now a white-haired semi-retired builder, who lives in the only part of the printworks still standing, the old drying rooms. We took him to the same spot, along with 89-year old Jim Craig of Strathblane, who once drove steam trains on the Blane Valley Railway. Today it is just a footpath.

Another shows two men, one with a young girl, on the temporary railway built at Cantywheery to bring in stone for the Second Aqueduct in the 1890s. The girl, known by her family as "the Pearl of Strathblane", was Peggy Graham. The Grahams of Ballewan owned the land on which much of the work took place and still live in the area.

If there is one scene that stretches the credulity of the reader to breaking point, it is the modern view of where the Blanefield Printworks used to be: two neat modern cul de sacs, lost in the trees. Yet the 1865 Ordnance Survey map shows a large triangular area covered by a vast industrial complex, dominated by a 160ft-high "great chimney stalk". Dozens of print designs from the works were registered with the Board of Trade. We managed to extract one of them from the National Archives. They look surprisingly trendy in the context of the sort of retro chic favoured by Cath Kidston and the like. Maybe the time is ripe for a revival.

In 1869, Anthony Sykes Coubrough, son of the original owner, told a government inquiry into working conditions in printworks: "We should very much object to being obliged to send children to school more than we do now, which is twice a week for four hours each time, to a school which we have provided in the works." Around 50 children were employed. Mr Coubrough also told the inquiry that he had no objection to working hours being restricted to 6am to 6pm, so long as other owners were obliged to do the same. The workers lived in the rows of cramped cottages that were thrown up around the works, some of which survive as larger flats. For instance, Wood Place, which houses just 13 today, had a population of 87 in 1881.

By the 1890s the cotton trade had decamped to Lancashire and Scottish calico printers struggled to meet the transportation costs. There was also serious overcapacity in the industry and the works closed in 1898. With little other employment except on farms and landed estates, the population plummeted by nearly half to 880 by 1901. The workers' cottages in the Wood Place and West Row area emptied, only to be taken over during the Fair Fortnight by Glasgow holidaymakers looking for cheap accommodation and during the Second World War by families fleeing the Clydebank Blitz. On the night of March 14, 1941, a stray German bomb fell on one block – Sunnyside – killing Clydebank refugees Margaret Wood and her children Isabella and John, as well as John Stockdale in an adjoining block. They were the only civilian casualties in the area during the war.

The residents of Strathblane and Blanefield have no need of Downton Abbey to remind them of the social upheavals of the 20th century. Duntreath, where Edward VII enjoyed discreet liaisons with Alice Keppel, the laird's sister, and where innumerable servants lit innumerable fires in innumerable rooms in a castle that could rival Hogwarts, was reduced to a third of its former bulk by the current Sir Archibald Edmonstone, after the family was hit by death duties twice in quick succession. These days he runs what he terms "an economical house; well, fairly economical", opening the grounds to raise cash for various charities and renting it out for upmarket weddings. Recently the estate granted a lease for ground to be turned into allotments.

No family now lives six to a room and, as historian John Guthrie Smith wrote in 1886: "This century has seen many improvements in Strathblane, and though we are not yet very far on the road to perfection, still we have made a start on our journey and there is no reason why we should now pause."

Strathblane And Blanefield Now And Then by Anne Johnstone and Martin Shields is published on October 26, priced £12.99 (£10 until December 10). It can be purchased at Strathblane Library and Pestle & Mortar delicatessen in Blanefield, and other outlets including Milngavie Bookshop, the Balmore Coach House and the Smith Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling or via www.strathblanefield.org.uk. Mail order: c/o 19 Kirkland Avenue, Blanefield, Glasgow G63 9BY (add £3 P&P). Cheques payable to Strathblanefield Community Development Trust. All profits will go to the SCDT for future local history projects.