[here a view looking back up the Slitrig to a Drumlanrig Bridge - still two arches, though widened in 1828 - originally it was only one cart wide with a recess on either side -  and altered in 1900 to lighten the look of the bridge by replacing the stone parapet by open ironwork.
Info from Douglas Scott's Hawick Word Book, photo from riverwatcher05 on Flickr]

The bridge had been paid for by public subscription and opened by the Toun Piper and the drums and fifes, with the Bailies and Council processing behind. Baillie Hardie gave a speech – and Cornet Richardson waved the Flag on top of the bridge.

Song singing? very likely – but not Teribus as we know it.

Whatever was sung, it wasn’t It certainly wasn’t “our” Teribus “Scotia felt thine ire, O Odin!….”
James Hogg’s “New Common-Riding Song” was sung for the first time only in 1819.

An older common riding song was one written by Arthur Balbirnie, a foreman dyer at the Orrock Place carpet factory and originally from Dunfermline – “We’ll a’ hie to the muir a-riding……… Here from Robert Wlson’s 1825 Sketch of the History of Hawick [full text is on Google Books, this is on page 347]

Though this sings quite nicely to the current Teribus tune, Balbirnie’s words wouldn’t have been written until the 1790′s – he wasn’t working in Hawick until then. Certainly not in the 1770′s.

I haven’t come across any older version of the words – they may never have been written down until Balbirnie came to the town.  And maybe he tidied them up a bit – the first line sounds OK – though the next three are a bit forced -  and the chorus sounds pretty natural, but the language of the verses ?? “Drumlanrig gave it for providing / ancestors of martial order / to drive the English off our border” is pretty convoluted grammatically – and the “dear memorial of our valour” line doesn’t sound at all Hawick.

Maybe it was the tune which was the important thing in the first instance, and was the town song, and the words came afterwards.

[My wife is from Linlithgow, and their "Rock and the Row and the Wee Pickle Tow"does have words, but it is the tune which gets Black Bitches going.

Although I think of "Teribus" as a fife and drum tune - here by the Fife and Drums in Drumlanrig Square

with the tune whistling away above the ratt-tat-tatting of the drums, you don't really "need" the words.

Before the Fife and Drums started up, Teribus would have been played on the border pipes by the Toun Piper - and it was written down by Walter Ballantyne the Toun Piper for the first time in 1777.

This Youtube clip gives us that 1777 version of Teribus played on the border pipes by Matt Seattle and Bill Telfer

Matt says of the 1777 tune that

it is the most structurally sound version of all, and very satisfying to play on the pipes. Simple but powerful.

and since I originally posted, he and Bill have a further version of the 1777 Teribus on Youtube

So in 1777, maybe Cornet James Richardson didn't actually sing any words to Teribus; but he would have waved the Flag while the Toun Piper played Teribus, as he did at the opening of the Bridge, maybe in the Selkirk way .

And it wouldn't be until 1825 that the first words were added, so he had none to sing.

To get back to Cornets, and what else do I know about James Richardson? [Courtesy - as always - of the Hawick Word Book!]

Cornet James Richardson would have been born about 1750-1760, and probably in Hawick
The cornets list describes him as a wool merchant – and he still was in 1796 when he was a witness to the birth of merchant George Gray and Mary Potts’ daughter Jane Gray.
I have nothing of him as Cornet – apart from his probable flag waving.
It is apallingly slipshod to use the LDS family search – but maybe he married Katherine Brydon on 1 January 1785, when he would have been about 25-35.
The Edinburgh Gazette on January 1821 has a notice to the creditors of James and William Richardson , late wool mechants and manufacturers as a company and James as an individual advising that the solicitor would be in the Tower Inn to pay a fiunal dividend from the estates. The Hawick Word Book – and it is always right! – has James and his brother William contributing to the war against France in 1799, and in partnership with William at the Whusky Hooses mill built in 1788 at 14 Slitrig Cescent, Hawick  There, the Richardsons dealt in wool; and manufactured carpets; and dealt in salt, tar and whisky – before the firm folded sometime around 1812, with the final winding up in 1821 – the Whisky Houses premises were  bought in about 1815 by the Pringles which may have signalled the end of the company.

The long Napoleonic wars seemed finally to be over – Napoleon had invaded Russia, and then retreated from Moscow, leading to a hundred French, German and Polish officers from his army coming to Hawick as prisoners of war ,  with a marked effect on the small burgh  “the presence of so many well dressed persons for so long a period [from 1812 until 1814 ] produced a marked reform of the costume of the inhabitants”
and as John Gibson was to find out, be very likely to turn the head of at least one respectable Hawick wife.

In 1813, Napoleon was defeated at Leipzig, and “the town is illuminated in honour of the victory at Leipsic”. Conveniently, the council had that year “resolved to light the streets with sixty oil lamps”

Then in 1814, Napoleon was forced to abdicate, and went into exile on Elba , arriving on 3 May 1814.

And there was lots going on in Hawick – in March 1814, the body of the new born child of Janet Weens, daughter of a shoemaker in the town, had been pulled out of the Teviot, and Janet was charged with concealing her pregnancy and murder.

On 11 April, the Caledonian Mercury reported that the Cossacks were near Boulogne, Wellington was nearing Toulouse,  the French Senate had deprived Buonaparte of the throne, and had appointed a Provisional Government which had declared that “property shall be preserved, as well as the public debt and public pensions, that the press shall be free, subject to certain restrictions”  … and that the Emperor of Russia had promised to release all French prisoners.

And then the paper printed a list of “persons indicted to stand trial at the following circuits”
Aberdeen – Robert Middleton rape
Ayr – Robert Gibson, collier for robbery; John Macmanua, private soldier in the 27th Regiment for murder; David Young and Adam and David Galt for riot and deforcing officers in the collection of taxes
Dumfries – William Wright horse stealing
Glasgow – Alexander Brown assault and murder; James Jackson murder; Agnes Findlater theft
Jedburgh – John Gibson murder; Robert Ford horse stealing.

John Gibson wasn’t a Hawick man – he was born in Ayr in 1774 and was a soldier in the 91st Regiment of Foot, the Argyllshire Fencibles, when he arrived in Hawick  in 1795. The soldiers been posted there in case of unrest – in case the spirit of the French Revolution spread amongst the workers in Scotland [and it did - the Government was increasingly concerned by the activities of the Friends of the People who erected Trees of Liberty in places like Auchtermuchty, leading to state show trials which transported their leaders]

John was in a good billet with Gideon Renwick, who was not only a butcher, but a butcher with an unmarried daughter, and the 21 year old John promptly married Janet Renwick before the year was out.
As a soldier, John was on the move with postings to Lanark, then Berwick, then to Ireland in 1798 to suppress Wolfe Tone’s  United Irishmen . Janet followed John, but after their 4th child [of 11] returned to Hawick, where John Gibson settled in 1802 as a nailer.
However he re-enlisted – or was tricked into re-enlisting – and deserted before being press-ganged into the navy , and jumping ship, then setting up in business in Langholm and Kelso before being arrested and tried – and acquitted – for desertion. By 1810 he was back in Hawick with Janet and her 11 children, and living in the Millport, which even today is an odd, out of the way place, even although it is a stone’s throw from the Tower Knowe.

Walter Wilson was a baker’s apprentice with his father, just up the Howegate.

There were three Wilson properties in the 1824 map – but people don’t move around all that much – so that moving up the Howegate we have Hugh Goodfellow’s baker’s shop at number 1 at the corner of the Sandbed [with the future John Goodfellow, 1822 Cornet] ; then Wilson the shoemaker at the bottom of the Howegate at number 2 – next to  Cumming the hardware shop; then another Wilson at 6 Howegate – a grocer and spirit dealer; and so up to 8 Howegate , where John Smith the whip and thong maker’s wife Elizabeth had just given birth to James Smith the 1846 Cornet.
And finally up to 10 Howegate, and our Walter Wilson the baker.
[and of course another baker - the Kedie house of the 1776 and 1836 cornets appears at the bottom right hand side of the map in Kirkstyle]

Back in the Millport, the 1814 inhabitants can’t have changed much from what they were in 1841 and the census. Running down from the Tower Knowe, at the first house, number 1 Millport, the trades of the inhabitants were listed as  chimney sweep, a pauper, a handloom weaver and family, and agricultural labourer. Presumably the chimney sweep and wife, and female pauper in basement rooms, the family weaving on the first floor, and the single ag lab up in an attic room. This is likely to have been the house where John Gibson murdered his wife, with a stocking maker in the attic; the Gibsons on the main floor, and soldiers billeted on the ground floor.

Next door at 2 and 3 Millport there was a collection of people presumably each in a single room – an army pensioner with his 3 children; 3 pauper children – a brother and sister aged 7 and 10 and a 10 year old boy; and a 70 year old pauper shoemaker – all locals born in Roxburghshire. Then people born outside the county – a woollen spinner with wife and child; two labourers; a printer; a basket maker and wife; a 20 year old “pit man”; husband and wife hand loom weavers from Ireland with three children; a widow with 2 children under 5; and a labourer.
At number 4 an army pensioner; and a four families of Irish weavers.

So Millport would be the sort of place that a soldier would be billeted in – and if the house belonged to Gideon Renwick, your wife’s father, it was exactly the sort of place you would live in.

John Brook, a stocking maker, had a room in the garret of the house [probably number 1], and described at John Gibson’s trial on 6 April 1814 , that he had heard an argument between the Gibsons about 11 o’clock one night, and then screaming at about 3 in the morning “which the witness conjectured were occasioned by some soldiers who lodged in the house” so he jumped out of bed and went down stairs to be told “Gibson’s murdered his wife”. In the room, he saw Gibson standing in his shirt , with blood on the floor and the bed. He said “Man, man, what have you done” to which Gibson responded “Frenchman! Frenchman!” and “yes, I have sold her to a Frenchman now”

The trial only lasted a single day, but appeared to be quite thorough – two doctors gave their accounts of the body., with three different cuts to the windpipe, one of which was a deep cut from the wind pipe across to the left side of the neck which had cut through two muscles, the jugular vein and the carotid artery. But there had been no signs of any other violence. The floor had been washed, but there was a pool of blood under the bed – and Gibson’s penknife could have been the weapon used.

James Turnbull a shoemaker who had lodged in the house, testified of quarrels with Gibson accusing Janet of keeping back fourpence from some nails she had sold; of finding “Gibson with his wife’s head under his arm, beating her very severely in the face with his fist” and thought that “Mrs Gibson a very respectable woman, and he had never heard any thing injurious to her character”.

Aside from some ill feeling towards the Renwicks because they had refused to transfer Janet’s share of the property into his name as her husband “the old people ought to be in hell, and he should burn the house”, the main motive appeared to be allegations about a French prisoner.

Although John had no doubts about the paternity of 10 of his 11 children, he was suspicious that the 7 month old baby belonged to “a French officer was in the habit of frequenting the house” although he had “never seen familiarities between them”.
Feeding this suspicion was his conviction that Janet was putting poison in his tea.
For about 10 days before the murder, “his wife always contrived to raise some dispute, then rose from the table, and she would take no tea. Last Thursday he took tea by himself and saw his wife sneer at him and immediately felt himself seized with a pain more severe than formerly; said to his wife she was poisoning him; she laughed but made no answer” He then had some high words with his wife, and went to bed about 10 o’clock – during the night, he thought he saw the Frenchman coming into the room …….  and so on and matters escalated until he felt for his penknife in his waistcoat pocket  …….

One witness who wasn’t heard was the one of the three children who were still alive – Gideon Gibson then 10 years old [and still living in O'Connell Street in 1841] but he was considered too young to give evidence, even although he said that he wanted to “tell about his mother’s death”.

Whatever Gideon might have said, the trial closed with evidence that John was “labouring under a considerable degree of melancholy”, and then on Saturday 9 April 1814 he was judged Guilty, and he was taken back to Jedburgh prison and fed on bread and water until 12th May, when he was to be “hanged by the common executioner on a gibbet until he was dead” and his body was to be given to the Drs Monro senior and junior , Professors of Anatomy in Edinburgh, for dissection. [They later turned to Burke and Hare to supply corpses for dissection]

On the day “a little before 10 o’clock he was put in a carriage at Jedburgh … and escorted by yeomanry cavalry of the county. About two o’clock they reached Hawick, where the gallows was erected on a green nearly opposite to the house where the murder was committed”
Presumably then, just across the Teviot Bridge on the main road out of town, on the common Haugh – and long before Commercial Road was built.

The 1824 map – but showing how the other side of the Teviot looked then – and where the gibbet would have been erected – symbolically facing the Millport for the condemned man to see as he was hanged; close to the main road so that the heavy timber for the gibbet could have been brought in easily enough, and with enough space for the cavalry to graze and water their horses – and keep the crowds at bay.

“the scaffold was surrounded by a detachment of local militia. After spending some time in devotion, he mounted the fatal drop and was immediately launched into eternity. Gibson was a stout, but not a tall man, of about 40 years of age. …   An immense multitude attended on the occasion, the first time that such a scene had taken place in the town  .. his body has been brought to the city [Edinburgh] for desection”

For Walter Wilson, it was a short stroll from the Howegate across the Sandbed to the Teviot Bridge

Down the Howegate, past Hugh Goodfellow [baker, farmer, corn dealer, later of Trow Mill] and round past where they were starting to prepare for the opening of Buccleuch Road and across the Teviot Bridge. There are accounts of public hangings – enjoyable and sobering at the same time. But any worse than the millions of people who sit comfortably watching TV cop series showing beatings, rapes, murder and grisly violence of every kind. At least Walter Wilson watched only one hanging – no rewind button, no close-up, no music playing in the background. Just a simple scene – a gibbet, on the Haugh, opposite Millport, with a short stout 40 year old who he probably knew – probably by sight and certainly by common gossip – “married to Renwick the butchers daughter” .

And then for Walter, it wasn’t long between mid-May and his moment as Cornet.
The same crowds on the same Haugh – but watching horse racing rather than a hanging.

Aftterwards – Walter married Isabella and carried on Wilson the Bakers at 10 Howegate, with son Walter a bakers apprentice; eldest daughter Jane about to marry another baker John Armstrong [of 1 Sandbed in the 1840s]; and another 7 children. [His wife Isabella was to carry on the business with sons Walter and James until the 1860s]

Walter became Burgh Treasurer, and was “the most prominent townsman to die” in the Cholera epidemic of July – September 1849 which claimed 197 lives. He was buried in the  Wellogate cemetery which opened only a fortnight before the first cholera funeral.

Which isn’t very satisfying – I want a name!

My Granny’s cousin Cornet was of Lanark stock – and Lanark‘s Lanimers is very [very!] like the Hawick Common Riding. They have a Lord Cornet as standard bearer, horsemen riding the marches , a Safe Oot, Safe In ceremony, and horse racing on the Moor. And it has been going on a long time – since they were iven Royal Burgh status back in the 1100s. The list of named Cornets goes back further than ours – though only to 1670 and John Aitkein. It isn’t a complete list – there are only 13 names between John Aitkein and James Tod in 1703, but it is better than we have.

And don’t mention Selkirk – they have the name of the first standard bearer, Fletcher from 1513.
They have a tremendous post-Flodden story with one man – town clerk Fletcher – struggling back to the town as the only survivor of the Selkirk men who fought at Flodden with a captured English flag, which he then casts three times [here in a 1930's newsreel] before lowering it to the ground to show that the Scots had been defeated.
And if Fletcher doesn’t qualify as a Cornet responsible for riding the marches, then they have names from as early as 1540 for men responsible for riding the marches. In 1540 James Kein and James Scott were elected as baillies to ride the boundaries of the town lands.

Unfortunately, Hawick doesn’t have a Lanark tradition going back as far as 1140, or a heroic story of Fletcher bringing an English flag back from Flodden. The kind of 1514 story I grew up with was a fairly naff kind of half hearted affair – some young lads from Hawick sneak up on a small bunch of English soldiers sleeping off the booze at a nowhere-special place called Hornshole and steal their flag during the night and ……………er , well that’s it, basically.
No stories of any great fight, nobody killed, nobody hurt, no big deal, no Rambo style heroics, no Fletcher type wounded hero – life went on, the English raids went on, skirmishes went on, and tradition went on.

Think Hawick, mediaeval Scotland then : think Helmand Province, mediaeval Afghanistan now.

No strong central government; local warlords living by blackmail, extortion, and corruption, and always willing to change sides if the price was/is right; a long tradition of lawlessness going back to invasion and partial pacification  – Hadrians Wall / Antonine’s Wall with the Romans, North West Frontier and us.

And in both, an utter disregard for the little people: it was and is, the soldiers who count.

The arrival of a squad of soldiers would be a problem in Hornshole/Helmand.
They feel they are winning a major fight, and have might on their side, and they are unpredictable – they might just be showing the flag, but they do tend to kick doors down, take your young men away, trash your house, trash your life. So what if the little people were kicked about a bit, or lost a few of their cattle – that was the price they paid for living in a buffer zone in a border region.

Maybe Hawick itself was safe – maybe there was some sort of agreement that you laid waste the countryside but left the towns intact, or maybe the Tower provided some sort of protection, or maybe the local Douglas family had bought off the English.
It would be possible but dangerous for the English to disturb the Douglas stronghold in Hawick – but who knows what revenge he would exact? and with James IV dead and many of the Scottish state players dead, the English probably made the decision that Douglas might occasionally be a local nuisance for the northern counties, but he had no grand strategy with regard to England. He was more of a problem for the Scots than for the English. An untouched, strong  Douglas meant that Scotland had to cope with the reivers – if the English weakened Douglas, then central Scotland could forget the borders problem, and focus on rebuilding the state, to the extent that they might pose a threat to England.

But soldiers at Hornshole were dangerous. So a small scale ambush would push back the problem for a while. And small scale night ambushes are confused sorts of affairs that don’t produce any coherent story – then or now.

So no names! Except that there are names. The men who signed the Town Charter in 1537, were the householders and tenants of the burgh, and so they would be the Hornshole group, the surviving middle aged men – pushing 40 or beyond – who were the “youths who stayed from Flodden”

We can knock out some of the names, not everybody would have been at Hornshole 24 years before.
For starters, three priests are listed including Sir John Scot who was the Vicar of Hawick, and probably would be unlikely to have participated [though when Hawick was raided in 1548, Sir John Scot was one of the priests killed]
Then there are the big tenants David Routledge for the Branxholme area , Robert Scot of Howpasley, and Robert Scot of Alanhaugh ] who might have been old enough, and of sufficient status, to have been at Flodden.
So let’s assume that they weren’t at Hornshole – or Simon Chepman, the son of the Walter Chepman, the first printer in Scotland, and Edinburgh based.
Or the named women -  Margaret and Janet Liddersdale [nowadays Liddle?] , Bessie Wylie.

Which leaves 61 names to pick out our Cornet.
There were probably about 360 men of the right age in Hawick at the time  – so 61/360 = we have the names of about 15% of the group who would have gone to Hornshole.
So for any name we pick there is a 15%, or 1 in 6, chance they were at Hornshole in 1514.

[Statisticians need to avert their eyes here - my statistical reasoning is pretty ropey! But here goes.
Estimates of size are really difficult - in 1755 Hawick had  2718 inhabitants plus Wilton, at say, 1300 = 4000.
The population of Scotland as a whole is estimated at 1,265,380 for 1755, and in 1600 only 800,000, so an assumption would be that Hawick would also be a third smaller in 1600, at about 2,500 - something of the size of Duns [2710] nowadays, though the Callants Club website estimates that Hawick had 110 houses – so about 5-600 people – Denholm size.

I’ll stick at 2500 people – which translates very roughly into 1200 men.
With an age structure where 50% would be under the age of 25, and say 70% under 40, then there would be about 360 men of roughly the right age [40 upwards in 1537] to have been at Hornshole [15 upwards in 1514]

And with a spread of ages in the 15-25 age group, there could be 10 Cornets in that group, so any name we pick has a 10/61 = 1 in 6 chance of  having been a Cornet.  If we pick 6 names, we will in all likelihood be naming at least one man who, when young, was in the Hornshole raid; and one man who, when young, was a Cornet – maybe even the first Cornet.]

Without any further dodgy dossiers, the First Cornet elected to ride the marches in 1515 -
Assumption 1 : would be in this group of names randomly taken from the spreadsheet of names
Thomas Scott
Philip Lidderdale
William Scott
William Storie
Alexander Paslay
John Rowcastill
Assumption 2: and using a pin to pick two names -
Thomas Scott was the 1515 Cornet; and John Rowcastill was the Hornshole veteran,

Which would leave William Scott, William Storie, Alexander Paslay and Philip Lidderdale as four men who either didn’t go to Hornshole that night [all the young men wouldn't have gone to Hornshole if Hawick was Duns sized] or who were too young at the time [5 then, 30 in 1537]

Mystery solved – we now have the name of the first cornet [maybe!]

Next – where did he live?
The Charter lists the amount of land which the men owned or rented in terms of their street frontage, north or south of the High Street. The Charter records grants of 125 roods, used here as a measure of house plot frontage of 20 feet, so 64 plots on each side of the High Street at 20 feet a plot gives a street frontage of 1280 feet or 400 yards. Measuring Woods map of 1824 from the East Port to the West Port gives a length of 400 yards [approx]
So piling dodgy inferences on dodgy figures, I can [and will] sort out where anybody in Hawick lived in 1537 – including the first Hawick Cornet who was [probably] Thomas Scott.

Taking a photograph was a rigmarole involving glass plates and wet chemicals and portable tents and large cameras. Photographic Societies were just being started to promote the art and science of photography [the Scottish Photographic Society founded in 1856 drew attention to  a new portable camera made by Mr Bell of Potterow "capable of taking pictures 8 ins. Square, weighing 8 ¾ lbs. without the lens and folding into a space 18 ins. Long by 10 broad and 2 ½ deep"

And results could be very variable - in 1862, Mr MacPherson atributed his poor photographic results during Lent to “the garbage of fish which the hens ate during Lent, and which affected the albumen so as to cause a want of success”

But this is a very good picture - though Andrew Leyden certainly looks as though it was taken "the mornin after the night afore"

He is standing with his Right and Left Hand Men - Adam Knox Cornet in 1856, and John Elliot Cornet in 1855.

They are outside , standing on a cobbled surface against a big wooden gate. My first thoughts are for the courtyard of the Tower Hotel - which I recall being cobbled, and the courtyard would probably still at this stage be open at this stage though a bit gloomy because of the height of the Tower Hotel and the next door building. The big bolt on the door would give some sort of security for the coaches in what was at the time a coaching hotel [ remember the theft of five silver watches made by the 1781 Cornet James Wilson from the Bull and Mouth coaching inn in London]. And it would seem an obvious place to take a photograph.

[and the photographer? might have been William Beattie, grandfather of the William Beattie who sculpted the Horse in 1914 - he was living in the Back Row and is known to have taken a photograph of Hawick around this time. Or, more likely, the professional photographer William Walker who was a member of the Scottish Photographic Society in 1856, exhibited at the Exhibition that year, and had a studio in Wilton.

The three of them are wearing what must be green coats with favours tied in the button hole; white/cream/yellow trousers, lum hats , and brightly coloured silk waistcoats.
Guessing at colours here, but maybe yellow and quite plain for Andrew, and a more patterned but still light coloured green and yellow ? waistcoat and pale tie for Adam Knox, a flesher.  John Elliot, a railway clerk, has really gone for it -  strongly coloured maybe red and blue waistcoat with a two coloured bright tie and some sort of flashy chain or cord draped over it. The Left Hand Man John Elliot is quite a rakish figure - his lum hat is tipped forward at a bit of an angle; his hair is flying out over his ears and he looks really comfortable in his stance - feet firmly planted apart, right leg straight, left leg bent - and his hands and arms in easy positions, holding that whip across his trousers. C'mon Lassies! [This fits with with his upbringing - he grew up in 3 Orrock Place, at the Sandbed, in a spirit dealers and inn kept by his father for 30 years or more. Later, this became the Ewe and Lamb - better known as The Monkeys]

The Right Hand Man is altogether a more reserved character – standing much more upright, a more dignified and reserved stance altogether – legs just so, arms by his side, whip held higher and neatly coiled, sideburns and hair both neat; his hat absolutely square on his head, and his Sunday School face on.

Andrew Leyden looks in a terrible state – he is a short man for a start, half a head smaller than the other two and so looks shrunken beside them, and  awfi stookie.
His feet are at right angles to each other in an awkward kind of way, he has nothing to hold and his hands look very clenched – he just doesn’t know what to do with them.
His jacket is buttoned and pulling across his chest, with his collar half up, half down.
His waistcoat looks rumpled, and his hat is wearing him, rather than the other way around.

And his face? I don’t see a young man in any good state for a 27 year old.
He looks peely-wally and/or hung over.
Eyes dark and sunken, with puffy dark eye bags [hay fever?] and very close together.
Pale, maybe freckled skin, with maybe a pale ginger moustache which doesn’t show up well in the photograph – and rubbery protruding lips – or is that a moustache/beard combination which isn’t picked up well by the early photographic process ?

Andrew Leyden grew up in the Back House, 66 High Street with his father Adam, an agricultural labourer, mother Margaret Laidlaw from Melrose and his woollen stocking maker brothers and sisters.

His mother died in May 1856, the year before he was Cornet; and although they were still living in the High Street, his father was by then a farmer of 30 acres, and Andrew at 22 was a coal agent.

This was a time of great change in Hawick – and before the opening of the railway from Edinburgh in 1849, coal from Keilder and the Newcastle area had to be traded at the Carter Bar, and brought back into Hawick  in 5 stone creels on the backs of long trains of ponies by way of Ormiston, Wellogate and down the Cross Wynd [and after the 1820s by the new Bonchester Bridge road]; or over Laurieston Fells and the Bloody Bush. The ponies were often used at the common-riding, according to the Hawick Word Book.

Two years after his common-riding, Andrew married Margaret Elliot from Newcastleton, settled in  6 Cross Wynd, had 5 children, and prospered as a Coal and Lime  Agent.

Just as we have nicknames for bankers now , so it was then – he was “Old Cash”.

He was about the first one in Hawick – becoming agent for the Bank of Scotland in 1792 [though he may just have been pipped at the the post by the British Linen Company Bank].
He was a merchant of some description, and so presumably becoming a bank agent solved a problem for him and the Bank. For him, he had something to do his cash at the end of the day – before the days of night safes and so on – he lent it to other people on the bank’s behalf, and charged them interest. And for the Bank, as a merchant William would have secure storage – so somewhere to store the money which customers would want to deposit.
Roughly the same principle applies now as supermarkets are happy to offer cashback to debit card customers, because it means that the supermarket has less cash to bag up and take to the bank, where they are charged a paying-in fee.
But they don’t always give cash back, as my aged mother found out when she paid for her messages with cash – and then tried asking for £30 cash-back. It’s a different world up Waverley Terrace!

William was unmarried, and lived till 1808, so must only have taken to banking late in life, in his mid 50s.

His other interests included books, and the Church – he was the principal subscriber to building an addition to the Old Wilton Church in 1800 [Princes Street - demolished 1963]

And there are two poems about him – one about him as the Laird of Coffer Ha’, referring to the chest he kept the Bank money in – and this more personal tribute to Old Cash –

Banker Cash, a daintie carl
Wha was ower guid for sic a warl’;
Guid-natured soul! His doings tell,
He thought a’ ithers like himsel’ -
Trustworthy, honest, just and good,
Disinterested, naeways proud,
Had mony frien’s an’ ne’er a foe,
Nane could hate him that did him know;
For ne’er a neighbour would he wrang,
He’s sooner in  a halter hang;
Sae ilka bodies pickle gear
Was lodg’d wi’ him without a fear

Rev David Waters

The Rev Waters was a Hawick man, went to school in Damside, a spinner at Lynnwood Mill,  and the third person in the town to sign the Total Abstinence Pledge. He went into the ministry from evangelical meetings in the Cross Wynd Church – but died in Shipley, Bradford.

I don’t have anything else to illustrate the life of the 1758 Cornet – but Rev Waters tells us all we need to know about William Oliver in his poem – he was a worthy Cornet indeed

There was a particularly significant increase in the amount of drainage following the Land Drainage Act of 1847, but in 1846 Cornet James Smith experienced a noteable flood – possibly something like that of 2005

and from his house at 8 Howegate, the water must have seemed perilously close when the Slitrig burst its banks after midnight and poured down through Silver Street to flood the Sandbed to a depth of 6 feet.. The 2005 flood map shows how the waters lapped at the foot of the Howegate.

He painted the water level on the wall in Towerdykeside, and freshened it up during his life, until he and friends replaced it with the current plaque in 1902 “Flood Mark July 1846″ to remind him of the Flood, and the year he carried the colour.

Hawick in 1846 was still a different place – the railway was coming in 1849, but not quite there yet.

The navvies had a hard time of it, crammed  into their sod huts – according to the Scottish Herald of April 1846

If they were made when the earth was dry, they weren’t too bad. You could always whitewash the inside walls, they were often rent-free, and in summer they nodded pleasantly with grass and flowers. But if the sods were cut wet, the huts steamed. One sod cabin, twenty-seven feet by twelve, on the Edinburgh-Hawick railway in 1846, housed twenty people. Another was built on Saturday and occupied on Monday. Its back wall was a bank, sodden with ground water. Water, soaking through the sod walls, trickled into the beds (and the contractor charged a rent).

But in 1846 with no railway, people had to rely on stage coaches to travel, and travel slowly as the “Border Watch” reported

James Smith was a 22 year old cornet, a painter who must have served his apprenticeship with one of the painters businesses in the town – probably William Miller in the Howegate,

James lived at 8 Howegate west side, back house with his father John b 1791 a “whip and thong maker” [a thong being the braided part of the whip joining the flexible part to the handle], mother Elizabeth b1801 and his sisters Christian and Helen, and younger brother Walter b1835.

We have a good picture of the 1846 Common Riding – there is a painting in Hawick Museum dated 1846 by Andrew Kennedy, showing three horsemen crossing the cauld. [not the Coble Pool, Kennedy is painting from the Health Centre side of the river, looking across to the new Sainsbury's - with Wilton Mills on the far bank. The racing didn't move copletely up to St Leonard's until 1854 - see Charles Smith 1840 Cornet]

And the painting is also the first image ever of a Cornet  – James Smith in 1846, coming away from the horse racing on the Haugh with his Right and Left Hand Men, and Colour held proudly aloft. Photographs hadn’t been invented quite yet, so the first photo is Andrew Leyden in 1857  – but James must have looked very similar. In the painting, the principals seem to be wearing light trousers, short jackets and top hats – just like the 1857 group.

Although the 1846 painting no longer hangs where it used to hang in the Museum, so a painting of John Smith can’t be seen there, there is a photograph of him [flagged up by in Douglas Scott's magnificent Hawick Word Book ] together with his Right Hand man Francis Kyle. This “Group of Old-Time Hawick Cornets” organised by JED Murray in the 1890s has clear [though not alas in my snap!] of James 1846 with Francis Kyle 1845

and in the middle row, the 1845 and 1846 Cornets as old men

. No doubt it rained at the racing, just as it does up the Muir nowadays, but The Flood came after the Common Riding, at the end of July. James, as a painter, was quick to paint the level of flood water, and although his original painted, and annually repainted, mark has been replaced by a bronze plaque, the water levels were incredibly high

The cause of the floods was a gigantic thunderstorm which began on the evening of Wednesday 29th July  and continued all night – the Caledonian Mercury described flooding in Carlisle, Canonbie, Hawick and Newcastleton, Kelso and Berwick

Wednesday evening closed with an unwonted gloom at an early hour. The sky was murky – the air still and heavy. The skies were occasionally lit up by gleams of electric light, and it was soon evident that a fearful storm was about to burst upon us. The expectation was fulfilled. Each successive flash of fire became more vivid, and the distant rumbling of thunder waxed deeper and deeper till brattle followed brattle like the discharge of heavy artillery above the town. The storm was of long duration; commencing soon after seven o’clock , it continued with but short intermissions till near four o’clock on Thursday morning. The storm was evidently moving slowly north east, reaching Hawick a couple of hours later. There, the horizon started to become overcast between 7 and 8pm, the torrential rain started between 8 and 9pm and continued without a break for almost three hours. Shortly after midnight the Slitrig burst its banks, pouring through Silver Street and down into the Sandbed where it was about 5 feet deep. Several bridges were swept away and a 12 foot deep hole scooped out of the road at the Mill Port.

Letter writers passed on the news- here from Newcastleton

And Robert Renwick writing to George Wilson, Portobello from Hawick Mills on August 5th, 1846

After the excitement, life got back to normal, and James got on with his – within 5 years he was no longer an apprentice but a House Painter; married – to Agnes 20 in 1851, with year old Margaret and baby Elizabeth; and living in 8 Howegate west side [and up the same close lived the Gilligan family [Clothes Merchant, Furniture and General Broker - James had been born in Sicily], the Riddles [John a Shoemaker, Maria a Boot and Shoe binder], Wallaces [father and eldest son both Fleshers, son-in-law a wool sorter] – and still in one of the back houses, his father John Smith [now just - or would this be a step up? - a Thong Maker] and mother, and brother Walter an apprentice shoemaker, and unmarried sister Helen a glover with – oh dear – a six month old granddaughter.

Moving on to 1871, and James, now 48 and still a House Painter, and Agnes have moved to 3 Green Wynd, off Myreslawgreen with their their 7 children – Margaret now 21 and a Woolllen Hosiery Finisher, like Elizabeth, and 17 year old Hannah. The eldest boy John is at 15 a Woollen Factory Worker, but Jemima 7, Ann 4 and Agnes 10 months are too young to work.

John Smith became Cornet ten years later in 1881, when James was his Acting Father – and John has his own 1881 entry here.

By 1881, James had moved up to 4 Loan where he was a “House Painter & Keeper of House of Refuge” This wasn’t the Hawick Poorhouse / Workhouse  [what became the Drumlanrig Hospital ] In Hawick in 1881, both instituitions were there, and very close to each other – as I have scrawled on this map

The Hawick Poorshouse had a Governor who had been in post for over 10 years, and 42 inmates; the House of Refuge our James Smith  “Keeper and House Painter” with 6 inmates. The difference in inmate poulation appears to be that the poorshouse inmates are mainly Hawick people, with a few from Dumfries and Fife – whereas the House of Refuge has three English [one a 14 year old unemployed labourer], two Irish, and one Canadian inmate. The poorshouse would be paid for by the Town, and so only accepted people born in, or maybe having connection to, Hawick parish – shall I call them the “respectable poor”; whereas the House of Refuge was probably a night refuge or night hostel for short term, travelling, homeless people – here unemployed English and Irish labourers, joiners, tailors, iron turners, and woollen spinners. [England developed a casual ward system, think  Dickensian London ]

It may well be that the 1919 Cornet Tom Winning’s father John Winning, who was Chairman of the Parish Council and responsible for administration of Poor Relief might have been involved with the funding of the night refuge – or it might have been that James Smith just turned over a shed [or a stable?] up his close to house homeless people without payment – he was a civic minded character [ex-Cornet, maintainer of the Flid Mark, son a Cornet, Acting Father] and he might well have set up the Hawick House of Refuge as an act of civic pride, or Christian piety, or common humanity. Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dundee all provided Night Asylums or Refuges tor Shelters to those ‘on the road’ because the Scottish Poor Law system made no provision for those dealt with in England through the casual wards.

Edinburgh’s Queensberry House, now incorporated into the Scottish Parliament buildings had two units – a House of Refuge for semi-permanent occupants, and a Night Refuge for those on the move. And there was also a Night Asylum in Fishmarket Close, and a Girls House of Refuge in Dalry Road.

By 1891 James had given up the House of Refuge [maybe on the death of his wife Agnes?] and moved to 1 Silver Street, now a widower but still a Painter at 68, with  his four Factory Worker daughters Jemima, Elizabeth, Agnes and Nellie.

[1881 Cornet John was in a separate house at 1 Silver Street with wife Annie and infant James Dryden Smith - named after James Smith's grandfather James Dryden "Deacon Dryden" Cornet in 1772]

In 1901, James has moved again – not very far – to 19 Howegate and is now, at 78, a Retired Painter, living with Jemima 37 Woollen Powerloom Weaver, and Helen 27 Wool Hosiery Machinist.

I don’t know when James died but it must have been after 1902 when he replaced his painted Flood Mark with a plaque – it would be fitting if he died in 1903 at the age of 80 after a long and good life , before the sadness of the death of his son Cornet John Smith 1881 in 1904.

So – a West Ender with a long life lived in the Howegate, Myreslawgreen, Loan, Silver Street area.
A house painter for 60 years, and the Keeper of a House of Refuge for less than 10.
A Cornet’s grandson, a Cornet, a Cornet’s father
Strong and lasting memories throughout his life of the summer of 1846 – which began with the pride of being the Cornet crossing the Cauld with his Men, and ending with 6 feet of water pouring out of the Slitrig and down through Silver Street into the Sandbed at the foot of his street.

“ Wool sorters were the craftsmen who processed the fleece before yarn could be spun.
Different breeds of sheep produce vastly different types of wool. The variations include fineness and length of the staple, softness of handle, crimp, colour and lustre, and different types of cloth required wool with different characteristics.
Wool Sorters identified the correct quality of fleece for a specific cloth, essential to ensuring top quality fabrics and required a high level of skill. The wool sorter worked at a bench on which the fleece was unrolled. Badly soiled parts were discarded, and then the fleece was sorted by sight and touch into wool of the various qualities” A 1924 video here shows Australian fleeces being sorted in an unidentified Scottish mill, and processed into tweed.

I worked one summer in Wilton Mills as a labourer on the wool sorting gang.

Our job started with lorries bringing in great sacks of fleeces, mostly about 6x10ft, which were winched up to the top flat, where two men with dockers hooks swung the bags into the flat. [Health and Safety Risk Assessments - don't ask!  They did have a hand grip at the door to hold onto though].
The bags were barrowed in to have the twine cut to release the fleeces.

The wool came from all over Scotland, though mainly from the West, and the size of the bags varied enormously. The largest and most numerous bags were from the big estates, with good clean wool. There were a good many small sacks from crofters, usually crammed with dirty coarse fleeces – so weighty, and unpopular with us. The photo here is from an Australian sheep farm in the 1890s, but shows how those bags must have been trampled full by the farmer, before the flap was sown shut with twine.

Once open, the fleeces were thrown into a large wooden chute in the centre of the flat, throwing it onto the sorting table below – you had to get the pace right or the wool sorters soon let you know. The 1890s Australian photo gives an idea of a farm based sorting, with no upper flat.

The sorters pulled the fleeces apart to assess the quality, and threw it into the big bins around the room – a skilled job, with an apprenticeship lasting up to 5 years.

The bins had to be emptied and wicker baskets pushed around to – I forget what happened next, I wasn’t involved! Much of the wool seemed to be of low quality – the despised “Bradford mattress” grade!

So that was what Andrew Burns was doing in 1869 when he was Cornet.

He was living in the Crown Inn at 20-22 High Street, with his mother Jane Burns

Jane Burns Head 58 b Southdean , Hotelkeeper
Andrew Burns son 21 b Selkirk, Journeyman woolsorter
Agnes Burns daughter 19, b Selkirk
Helen Burns daughter 16, b Edinburgh
Jane Brodie granddaughter 7 b Hawick
Margaret Cowan niece 22 b Selkirk, Waitress
along with Margaret Ker 38 Cook; John Oliver 19 Groom; William Scott 36 Billiard Marker; and Thomas D Kidd 78 a retired dentist from Lilliesleaf.

But that family looks familiar [to me at least !] and looking back to 1861, there is the Burns family keeping the Railway Hotel, 14 Princes Street in Wilton.
Andrew Burns is there as an 11 year old schoolboy, with his younger sisters Helen and Agnes, and cousin Margaret Cowan.
Their father George Burns however, must have died in his early 50s leaving widow Jane as Head of the family to look after the Crown Inn by 1871, with the family to help. Bessy Burns an older sister is there in the Railway Hotel – she might be the mother of the 1871 granddaughter Jane Brodie.

Most interestingly is the oldest son – John Mein Ferguson or Burns – the 1861 Cornet

And sure enough the two half brothers were together in Selkirk with George and Jane Burns at the Crown Inn .
The 1861 Cornet John was described as a stepson, and used the name Ferguson;
and 1869 Cornet Andrew is listed as a son, and a Burns.
[The distinction between sons and stepsons was probably important to the family at that census because 1861 Cornet John's father James Ferguson, keeper of another Inn in Selkirk, had died only about 4-5 years previously, and Jane had in the meantime married George and moved her family to George's inn]

Andrew Burns must have enjoyed two Common Ridings more than the others – first in the Railway Hotel as an 11 year old when his older brother John Ferguson/Burns was Cornet in 1861; and then in 1869 in the Crown Inn when he was Cornet.
Not bad going for a couple of Selkirk brothers!

The New Daily Advertiser of 5 June 1778 reported a major robbery from the Bull and Mouth Inn in Holborn early that Sunday morning.

The Bull and Mouth crops up often in the trial records of the Old Bailey. I can’t find any trial record relating to the theft of our Cornet’s watches, but the trial of Elizabeth McDougal in December 1789 for theft from the Bull and Mouth Inn is typica

Found guilty of the Grand Larceny of what we would call second hand clothes valued at £2, she was transported to Australia for 7 years, arriving in 1791 on the Third Fleet

But the theft which involved our Cornet’s watches was more serious, with £21 available from the Blind Beak Sir John Fielding for information. The haul was also considerable – £15 of gold and silver, 24 yards of brocade and other costly materials, a great many boxes and parcels broken open – and 10 silver watches, including four numbered pieces made by James Wilson of Hawick – and Hawick Cornet in 1781.

There is some information available about him – but it would cost £10 to see the record, so I won’t be doing that anytime soon.

The photo below isn’t his long case clock, but a fine one by John Turnbull of Hawick of the same period [who may have been related to the clockmaker James Turnbull,  Cornet in 1776. OK - I admit that this is pure speculation]

James Wilson’s two longcase clocks would be very much in the same fashion, though presumably he would have his own style.

The pocket watches of this date would be similar to this one [here Perth in 1790]

And that is it, I am afraid – I can’t find anyone tried at the Old Bailey for the robbery, I don’t have any information on James Wilson’s whereabouts in Hawick, or a marriage, or a birth [though there is a likely one recorded on 18 May 1760, to father Robert Wilson and Sarah Scott]

All I know about him is that he had produced at around 51 silver watches by 1778 [unless he started his numbering system at , say 10 so that people wouldn't be put off buying his first efforts], and he later produced at least one long case clock.
And we know roughly what his watches looked like, and have a better idea of the long case clocks from one made by John Turnbull [and I cling to the idea that he might ,just might, be in some way related to the 1776 clockmaker Cornet James Turnbull.

and having carrid out the ceremonies of the day, retired to a well earned meal at the Tower Inn for the “more aged and grave citizens”, and the livelier do in the Town Hall, provided by Mrs Hay of the Crown Inn

Living with Mrs Hay, and presumably helping with the sumptuous dinner , was 13 year old Thomas Hay – who would die by the time he was 23, having been Cornet in 1847.

The Old Town Hall which was used for the Cornet’s dinner – and then off to the Races – in the Haugh, they weren’t moved up to St Leonards till 1854.

They don’t write newspaper reports like this anymore! “and thus will the recreations and amusements of this year materially add in time to those voluntary subscriptions which alone form the groundwork of this humble but popular festival”

The racing was in the Haugh – here the scene in 1846, looking across the Coble Pool to Wilton [or I think more likely, looking across Laidlaw's Dam which used to cross from Teviot Crescent to the Victoria Laundry - with racing on the Haugh and the Wilton mills such as Langlands Mill clustered opposite]

But on the Friday, there were also races on the Muir, so that the Town Purse of £10 and the Trades Purse of £3 was on the Muir, and [followed by????] the Trades Purse of £5 on the Common Haugh.

and there were also races on the Saturday – had the racing moved down to the Common Haugh after the first races on Friday at the Muir?

and then there were the Saturday Sports – including sack races, as well as the more serious stuff

Charles Smith’s Common Riding had obviously gone well.

And that is the last we see of Charles Smith – he had appeared briefly in Pigot’s Commercial Directory as a Grocer in the High Street in 1837 [with Mrs Ann Hay at the Crown Inn also listed]

He is Cornet – and that is it – but he isn’t on the 1841 Census in Hawick, or elsewhere in the Borders. And there are very few Smiths at all – it just isn’t a particularly common name here.

The only candidate in the 1841 Scotland Census is Charles Smith a 25 year old, just married, grocer – living in Paisley

He is the only Charles/Chas  Smith [and there aren't many Smiths at all in Scotland] of the right age and the right occupation – and he would have been unmarried in 1840, since Elizabeth is only 4 months old in 1841.

But born in Paisley? At least it’s not G*l*shiels!

Thomas’ innkeeper father Robert Hay, had died aged 51 in January 1832 [according to Wilson's Record of Deaths], so Ann, born in Langholm, had been left as a 30 year old widow with 5 year old Thomas and 7 year old Jane, to run the Crown Inn since then.

In 1847, Thomas appears in the list of Cornets as a millwright, so he must have been apprenticed to the trade when he was 14-15 or so, in 1842 or 1843.

His mother dies in January 1848; and then Thomas himself dies in October 1851, just over 4 years after he was Cornet, at the age of 23, and he is buried with his mother and father in St Marys churchyard

His sister Jane was left to carry on the Crown Inn business as a married woman – she had married the boy next door, Robert Grieve, in May 1846 , so they had had about eighteen months to learn the business before mother Ann Hay died at the start of 1848.

Robert was a Solicitor’s Clerk from Teviothead who was lodging at Waldie the tailor’s shop next door to the Crown, and he would have been able to help with the legal transfer. Ann left £22 in cash, £202 in wines and spirits, and debts of £3 – an estate worth [though estimating "worth" is pretty tricky] £12,000 in todays money, which would be enough to buy 1,000 days of a tradesman wages or 13 horses or 40 cows = say  £100,000, which sounds right for a good-going and well established business on the High Street.

But Robert also died young in 1853, and Jane was left to carry on at the Crown as a widow for another 10 years until she had to give up the Crown Inn in 1863, with substantial debts to be settled. However, she was able to carry on as a hotel keeper till the 1870s at 8 Bridge Street, albeit on a smaller scale, with only one general domestic servant, and her daughter Annie Little Grieve, a governess.

But to return to our Cornet – what would his obituary have said about Thomas? At a guess, that he was

• sociable – brought up in the Crown Inn on the High Street, he would know and be known by most people in the town
• hard-working – with his father dead, he would be expected to play a full part in the running of the Inn
• popular with girls – he deserves this in his short life. He would be used to female company, with a mother and elder sister, and with the young female servants in the inn, his would be a working female environment
• bright and practical, good with his hands and his brain. Millwrights were key technical people in Victorian Britain – a look at The Young Mill Wrights  Guide tells us a lot about Thomas and where he worked – presumably at one of the water powered mills in the town – the current Tower Mill wasn’t built until 1852, but it may just be Thomas was involved in equipping it
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