Glenmoriston of the Past

By John Grant

PREFACE

Early in the year 1951 my employers in the Far East offered me the post of manager of their branch in Sibu in Sarawak where they had a trading post and a timber concession. About the same time I received a letter from my Uncle Murray suggesting that I might like to take charge of Glenmoriston Estate.

It did not take me long to decide. While the job at Sibu, some 50 miles up the Rejang River surrounded by mangrove swamp, would have been very interesting and remunerative, it would have kept me away from my family of whom I had seen precious little since my elder son was born in 1939. I therefore set sail from Singapore on the 14th of June 1951. It had been my home since 1923 when I had signed a three years contract with Messrs. Adamson Gilfillan & Co. East India Merchants.       

As it turned out I did not get my first leave until 1929 but I did not regret having left the City of London where clerical salaries were pretty miserable in those days. Back in the year 1923 Singapore, Penang and Malacca were known as the Straits Settlements – an offshoot of the old East India Co. Adamson Gilfillan occupied a barn-like building on the waterfront, Collyer Quay. The office was on the upper floor below which was their "import godown" in which were the piece goods, cotton thread, brandy and all sorts of stuff for sale in the bazaar. Their "produce" godown was some distance away on the Singapore River, a stinking creek up which there was access for lighters. From here they exported to Europe and America copra, pepper, gums, nutmegs, tapioca, rattans brought in from the hundreds of islands in the British and Dutch East Indies. Most of the trade was with the Chinese although "bazaar" Malay was the accepted language in commerce. Singapore in those days still retained a Joseph Conrad atmosphere but conditions had, of course, radically changed by the time I left that thriving city twenty-seven years later.

There had been the grim days of the slump in the nineteen thirties when rubber and tin, the two staple products of Malaya, fell to rock bottom prices followed by the Japanese occupation with their insane barbarity. Despite these black spots, when, on board the S.S. Carthage, I sailed from Singapore harbour past the Raffles lighthouse, I felt very sad at leaving many old friends.

We stayed in Knockie Farm cottage for several weeks before moving into Creagnaneun in September 1951 when I took over from Mr. Duff, the Estate Factor. He had been very helpful in handing over and introducing me to the tenants. My Uncle Murray had, in the year 1927, made over his Glenmoriston properties to a Private Limited Company. I think that my Uncle Frank, the businessman of the family, was largely responsible for this move, which seems to have been a wise one but with the ever changing fiscal policies of successive Governments, we can never be sure about this.

When I took over the factorship, Mr. Robert Gilbert, the family solicitor, was company secretary. He gave me much valuable advice in dealing with difficult tenants and other such problems. The Estate Office at the time, in fact until 1972, was in the East wing of the old Home Farmhouse. It contained no such thing as a typewriter or a filing cabinet but the walls were lined with cupboards, shelves, drawers and pigeon holes in which were kept the rent books, correspondence arid other records going back to the beginning of the last century. There were also some tin trunks containing older documents such as marriage settlements, heritable bonds and timber contracts. The outward correspondence for many years back had been recorded in press copy books, a quite efficient system provided that the letters are properly indexed, while the inward letters were tied up in bundles for each year.

In course of time I was able to sift through most of these old papers and it then occurred to me that the family might be interested in an account of what went on in the Glen in the nineteenth century. When however I sat down to write about the state of affairs starting in the year 1800, I realized it was all linked up with earlier history. In fact that I was starting in the middle of the story. I decided therefore to go back to the very beginning although there are no accounts of Glenmoriston in the dim ages. I must acknowledge that much of what I have written about events in the last century has been extracted from the publications listed over-leaf, the authors of which have long since passed away.

John Augustus Grant

                                                                                                               17th July 1977

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

I am indebted to the authors of the following publications for certain information contained in this narrative;

CONTENTS

Contents