Readers of these pages will recall that the first ever International Coubrough Family Reunion happened in Kingston, Ontario, in the middle of a heat wave and an accompanying drought. Things could hardly have been different for the second edition. Held this past Easter weekend in Katikati, New Zealand, this year's reunion was accompanied by two days of cold, driving rain. For a variety of reasons, many folks just couldn't make the trip, so our crowd was a little smaller this time, but the rain and the chill didn't dampen anyone's spirits, and we had a great party.

My own journey started in Kingston, with a short break at Edmonton, Alberta, to collect my Mom. In our days of instant everything, the 22-hour trip from Edmonton to Christchurch was very long. Compared to the three or four months of sea travel it took the first Coubroughs to get from Scotland to Otago, on the South Island of New Zealand, in 1864, our travels were but a moment. But we got there in one piece each, and it was absolutely wonderful to finally meet so many people with whom I had only had e-mail contact. Everyone we met was wonderfully friendly and helpful; New Zealand is definitely on the list of places to visit again.

Saturday morning, April 19, dawned grey and drizzly, but not terribly cold. Around 10 AM, about 30 people gathered at the Katikati RSA hall for coffee and muffins--and Talk! Some of us were young (under 20 years) and some had been around a little longer--80 years or more. As before, we were from all walks of life; we were pilots, housewives, farmers, nurses, personal-care workers, students, businessmen and women, lawyers, biologists, historians, environmentalists, Churchmen, and soldiers. Once again, we were from three of the four main branches so far identified--just not the same three branches as last time. As one might expect, nearly all those present were New Zealanders, mostly descendants of Malcolm Coubrough and Jean Buchanan (married 1796). Some of the "locals" were the fourth generation born there, some were newcomers who had moved there within the last year or two, and one was the sole representative of the Strathblane line (John Coubrough and Jonet Buchanan, married about 1703). We were a few "foreigners," too: a couple of native New Zealanders who had abandoned civilization to move to the end of the world (also known as Australia); and five from beyond the edge of imagination -- two Canadians and three Americans, representing the descendants of James Coubrough and Jean Muir (married about 1785).

By this time, everyone knows that there are hundreds of Coubroughs all over the world, but that didn't stop anyone from discussing those vague, shadowy Scots ancestors. As starting points, there were printouts of the Malcolm Coubrough-Jean Buchanan family tree, with computerized versions of the others, and lots and lots of pictures to talk about. And talk we did, for most of the afternoon, until about 3 PM, when, under the guidance of ladies from the local tourism office, we went for an hour's stroll to enjoy murals of the town's history. It was just starting to spit rain when we returned to the hall for tea and a lovely chocolate cake, which bore the traditional greeting "ceud mile f ílte!"(A hundred thousand welcomes!).

Of course, you can't have tea and cake without more talk, so that's what we did. The time before supper was filled by telling each other a bit about our own lives, our immediate families, and how we got where we are. Most of the talks were fairly short. Yours truly, however, never one to pass up a captive audience, gave a short spiel with a bit of the family history and a condensed version of the Coubrough surname project. (Victims' opinions may differ!) By the time we had finished, the folks at the RSA kitchen had supper ready. A buffet supper of ham, chicken, and vegetables was followed by dessert of pavlova, fruit salad and brandy snaps, all accompanied by ... you guessed it: more talk. By about 9 pm, everyone seemed to be all talked out at last. The end of the evening was marked by a mass exodus into a driving rainstorm.

A gentle downpour on Sunday morning wasn't enough to stop our party-goers from boarding a bus for a scenic trip (with stops for lunch and shopping, of course) to Tiaru, located in the west-central North Island. It was here that Malcolm Coubrough, son of Archibald Coubrough and Margaret Pairman, settled when he moved to New Zealand in the last quarter of the 19th century, and where he took his new bride, Alice Blackman. (Alice and Malcolm were great-grandparents of our reunion host.) Strangely for us northern hemisphere folks, Easter (1) is late fall in New Zealand. Stranger still is a climate where everything was greener in the fall than we have in the spring. In spite of its being almost winter, the "home farm," with thick, intensely green grass covering its rolling hills, was breathtakingly beautiful--even in the rain. The farm is still in the family today, operated by one of Malcolm and Alice's great-grandsons, and by one of their grandsons.

Upon return to the RSA, we found that supper was once again ready. (Are you detecting the theme here? I think we spent most of our time in New Zealand eating!) After supper--and more talk--we made our farewells amid hugs, promises to write, and visions of the next reunion dancing in our heads.

Jim Coubrough's family line is pretty well documented; his wife Annie's family is different kettle of fish. Other than Annie, we have no firm evidence that they ever existed. We have only the vaguest idea of when they came to Canada, and no idea whether they came straight here, or went somewhere else first. I have heard that "all the Macdonalds around there (2) were related to Annie." We have known for a long time that Annie and Jim's farm was purchased, in 1858, by a Coll Macdonald, who held the mortgage on it until they paid it off in the 1880's. Unfortunately, none of the Macdonalds who live near Rutherford now have ever heard of our Annie, and the only Coll they know of was born too late to have been Annie's benefactor. Poor Annie has been on the alien list for a long time, but there may still be hope.

While I was in New Zealand, I had an e-mail from Pat O'Brien, who had seen the names of Coll Macdonald and his wife, Mary Ann Graham, on an Internet post. Coll was apparently from a family who had originally gone from Scotland to Cape Breton, where his sister, Flora, still lived at the time of Coll's death in 1904. Mrs. O'Brien was short on detail, but she had enough to make me think further search in that direction will be useful.

In 1901, Annie's brother Ronald was living with Matt and Liz. According to that year's census, Ronald had arrived in Canada in 1834 (3). The same census said that Annie had arrived in 1854. We now know that Annie had been in Halifax at least as early as the summer of 1851 (4), so someone was a bit confused. If her family had been somewhere in Nova Scotia, it might help explain why Annie was in Halifax when she met Jim.

On the other hand, if her family was in Cape Breton, what was she doing in the big city? Did she go looking for work? Was she married before? She was between five and eleven years older than Jim's 20 years, so she could have been a young widow. Has anyone ever heard any rumours to this effect? Were her parents really in Cape Breton? Maybe they were in Halifax, and it was a son/daughter/cousin who established the Cape Breton branch? Annie's mysteriousness makes me unable to give up on her. I feel I must keep looking, so you can expect to hear more rambling in future editions.

Mathew Coubrough & Jean Allan were the parents of ten children. We know what happened to most of them: James, of course, came to Canada and married the mysterious Annie MacDonald; Robert married Agnes Morton, moved to England and four of their eight kids ended up in Wales; Jane married James Campbell and had six kids of her own; Barbara never married and worked in a calico factory all her life; the first Mathew died before his third birthday; Malcolm was a 27-year-old watchmaker who was unmarried at his death from tuberculosis; Margaret never married either, and in the 1901 census, was living with her widowed sister Jane; Mathew Gibb married Margaret Dowall and they also had six children. Ann, born 1840, and William (Malcolm's twin brother) were unaccounted for. Well, Ann is still a mystery, but brother Bill.... Some time ago, in a census, I ran across a William Coubrough and his wife Jeannie, that I thought might be our boy, but other than being about the right age, there was nothing to positively identify him. Thanks to Mr. Bruce Hosie, who lives is Wales (not connected to our Robert), we finally have the answer. On July 12, 1883, at the age of 38, William married Jeannie Deuchar. She was a steam loom weaver, and a year younger than William. Now if we could only find Miss Ann.....

Of course, we also know that in genealogy, every answer brings more questions, and this one is no different. Their marriage record says William was the son of Mathew Coubrough and Jane Allan. His bride, however, was the daughter of William Deuchar and--you guessed it--Jane Coubrough! William D and Jane C had been married in 1836, but in those days, the records rarely listed the parents of bridal couples, unless they belonged to the local gentry. Obviously our boy married one of his cousins; the question is, which one…?

Many Coubrough ancestors seem to have been involved in the production of some sort of cloth. Matt Coubrough, son of James Coubrough and Jean Muir, was a "block printer" and his daughter Annie was a tearer, or printer's assistant/apprentice. Many of their close relatives were wage earners in various stages of the cloth-making process: handloom weavers and powerloom weavers and tenters, fullers, dyers, bleachfield workers, colour mixers, block printers, "tearers," drying shed workers, cloth "lappers," and general labourers. Annie Macdonald, who married Matt's son Jim, was a handloom weaver. The 1861 Canadian census says she made 50 yards of woollen cloth. This would have been plenty to make new clothes for everyone in the family, so she may have sold some of it. Anthony Park Coubrough, of the Strathblane line, owned a calico printing factory, probably similar to the one where Matt and his daughter Annie worked.

Handloom weaving, so called because the loom was powered by the muscles of the weaver, was fairly common until the early 19^th century. It required a fair amount of skill, but could be well paid. They usually worked from home, and an expert weaver could do quite well for himself and his family without the strain of the long hours required of some less-skilled tradesmen. The highest-paid weavers were men, of course, but there were also many women in the trade, in various cottages around the countryside, who managed to support themselves and their families on their earnings. It was respectable employment, but women were often contracted to make the poorer (read cheaper) grades of coarse woollen cloth, rather than more expensive fine linens, cottons and silks. Then, because the cheap cloth sold for much less per ell (5), women could be paid much less--often less than half what a man was paid for making the same cloth. It is interesting to note here that the reason men were paid more had nothing to do with their having families to feed: many women needed the money to supplement the starvation wages their husbands made. The real reason was that women were not considered to be as intelligent as men, and were not, therefore, capable of producing as fine a quality of work. (Sadly, not only men thought this way.)

In the early 1800s, powerloom weaving began to be more common. In spite of the high capital cost, the powerloom, whether operated by water or steam power, had some major attractions for the owner. Not only could it produce much more cloth, of a more consistent quality and much more quickly, than a handloom weaver, it didn't require years of practice to operate correctly. They could hire inexperienced labour, give them minimal training, and turn them into competent operators, who would not only be more productive, but could be paid less than a handloom weaver. These new "entry-level" jobs were attractive to young people; for the out-of-work handloom weavers, the factories were a calamity. Unless they could somehow make the transition from handloom to powerloom, they were doomed to the margins of society, and their standards of living dropped accordingly. To a manufacturer, the great advantage was the decrease in wage costs. The combination of increased output and decreased payroll quickly compensated for the capital expenses of the machinery and increased the profit on every yard of cloth.

The huge cloth manufactures that sprung up in Scotland had their attractions for workers, too. Unlike their hand-operated predecessors that could be scattered about the countryside in the weavers cottages, powerlooms required a constant source of power to run. The early ones, running on water power, had to be located near a creek, or small river; later, steam-operated looms were tied to their source of steam. These fixed locations meant workers now had to come to the work, rather than the work going to them. The result was the industrial villages that sprang up in the vicinity of the new mills. Previously, all farm work was done by hand, thus requiring every farm to have many hands. With the rise of mechanized farming, fewer people were needed on the land, and more people found themselves in need of a way to earn their bread. Even without the loss of farm employment, the comparatively high wages offered by the new industries must have been very attractive to people used to the lower rates of the rural communities. Whatever their reasons, unemployed farm hands and other country people moved to the cities in droves.

Unfortunately, many migrants failed to consider that while wages in the new jobs were much higher than one could make shovelling out animal barns, it would also cost considerably more to live in the city than on a farm or in a rural village. Many of these people and their children ended up no better than slaves in the very factories which had seemed like the answers to their prayers. They suffered diseases, accidents, malnutrition--if not outright starvation--and serious overcrowding (6); once they were there, they often lacked the means to leave--and had nowhere else to go if they could. Some factory workers were children as young as 4 years of age, and many died from disease, malnutrition, industrial accidents, and just plain overwork before they reached what we would consider school age. Besides the families who were so poor that both parents had to work just to feed everyone, and the families that had no other way to avoid leaving a young child completely unattended, many industrial machine jobs required an assistant, whose wages were paid out of the pocket of the person they assisted; having one's own child as one's assistant was an obvious advantage. Some of the jobs were in such cramped quarters that only a child was small enough to do them, and once they grew too big, might find themselves unemployed. If a child survived to the age of 10 or 12, he or she might be hired on their own merit, but they were given no special consideration on account of their youth. If a machine operator's shift was from 6 AM to 6 PM (or later in the summer), with a 15-30 minute break once or twice a day, the operator was expected to tend the machine for those hours, whether he or she was 10 years old or 60.

Fires and explosions were ever-present risks in most 19^th-century factories. Many owners did not think it incumbent upon themselves to make their factories safe places to work, and there are numerous cases recorded of hundreds of people being hurt or killed in factory fires because the emergency exit doors had been chained or bolted shut to prevent employees sneaking out. Even enlightened owners might not always waste money on things like equipment repairs that would improve the safety of their factories. Anthony Park Coubrough was a great benefactor in his community of Strathblane. He paid reasonable wages, built a school for the local children, sponsored night school reading classes for workmen, built a bowling alley and donated it to the village, etc. Yet in 1864, when a boiler explosion at his Blanefield Printworks killed seven people and wounded seven more, four seriously, it was said that the cause was an over-pressure release valve which had failed to open. Anthony Park was accused of ordering sawdust dumped into the boiler to stop a leak, rather than shutting down production in order to repair the boiler correctly. It was said that this sawdust had made its way into the over pressure release valve, jamming it closed, and causing the boiler to explode. One of the workers killed in the Blanefield explosion was Patrick Dunnion: he was 12 years old.

While the Blanefield Printworks doesn't seem to have been a lot better or worse than its contemporaries, factory conditions generally were so bad that the Scots government directed Lord Tremenheere to enquire into the matter. The result was a "Report on the Printworks Act and on Bleaching and Dyeing Works Act," completed in 1869. One of those who gave evidence to the investigators was Anthony Sykes Coubrough, eldest son of the Blanefield Printworks owner. Anthony S. told the commission that their Printworks did both machine- and block-printing, and depending on their production requirements, employed 250 - 500 people.

Like most of the competition, the Coubrough factory's hours were nominally 6 AM to 6 PM, with two hours a day for meals. An exception was the dyehouse, where, due to the nature of the work, fourteen hours was a standard day. This "glitch" could cause erratic hours in other parts of the process. The block printers (like our Matt) usually quit work at 6 PM, but might work until 10 PM in very busy times. The block printers, being highly skilled tradesmen, were allowed somewhat more leeway in their hours than other workers. Most of the block printers were men, though there were women, too, known as "grounders." Both were assisted by a "teerer," whose job it was to apply the colours to the pad on which the printer pressed his design block before applying it to the cloth. As usual, male printers were paid more than their female counterparts, but this was partly offset by the fact that men had to pay the teerer's wages from their own pockets, while the factor owner often paid for the women's assistants. According to Anthony S., male printers might work as late as 10 PM, while the women usually quit by about 7:30, though all of them were pretty much free to decide when and whether they wanted to take breaks. Most of the factory's other departments, like Bleaching, Drying, Dyeing, and Finishing, employed mainly women and girls, whose work hours often extended until 8 or even 10 PM, and whose only control over their hours was how fast they could work. In a place like a drying shed, they didn't have even that much control. (In our days of 37˝-hour weeks, for adults, with special rules governing the types and length of employment of children under 16, it is hard to imagine 6-year-olds being at work at 6 AM, let alone staying there until long past when many adults go to bed now.)

One of the reasons for Lord Tremenheere's enquiry was to regulate the hours for printfield workers. The Coubroughs apparently had no objection to their workers' hours being limited to those between 6 AM and 6 PM, but they wanted to make sure that the regulation would apply to all workers in all factories, not just theirs. Another reason for the enquiry was to make sure that the children who were employed in factories had a chance to go to school. Anthony S. and his partner weren't keen on the idea of having to send children to school more than twice a week for more than four hours at a time. The majority of children employed in the factory were apparently printers' assistants: Anthony S's objection to extended school hours was that the block printers had to stop work while the children were away, which no doubt seriously reduced their productivity. It seems that the Coubroughs paid reasonable wages, since Anthony S. also told the commission that it was hard to persuade people to send their children into the factory, as the majority were well enough off that they didn't have to send their children to work.

Local market competition was not a strong principle in the Strathblane of the Printworks era. In common with their fellow factory owners, the Coubroughs insisted that their employees shop only at the company store. In hard times, the employees' wages might be paid in goods from the store. In ordinary times, a watchman was posted to look out for Works employees entering the store across the street from the factory gate. Anyone caught was subject to a fine, but people at least had the option of taking that risk. If they were paid in goods from the company store, they had no cash with which to even risk shopping elsewhere, and they were at the mercy of whatever inflated prices the company might charge. Perhaps this was not quite as onerous as it sounds (in Strathblane at least), if in his testimony to the Tremenheere inquiry, Anthony S. was complaining about how hard it was to get children to work in the factory because workers were so well off that they didn't have to send their children out to work. Other places may have been less generous, as witnessed by Matt and Jean's 10-year-old Annie working the same hours as her father.

In the beginning of the industrial age, highly skilled people like engravers and printers were scarce because their trades required so much experience. They were very well paid and lived quite well. Eventually, as their jobs became more mechanized, these wages went down considerably, though printers and engravers seem to have remained near the top of the wage hierarchy. Strathblane Printworks employees seem to have been slightly better off than some of their peers. During the Printworks' heyday in the mid-1800's, Blanefield, where the factory was located, was a rather remote village. It was at least 10 miles from Glasgow, and some distance from the coal mines that were the source of fuel for the steam boilers. While both of these factors eventually contributed to the factory's closure, in earlier times it must have also meant that employees' standard of living was higher; at the very least, they would have had less of the overcrowding that made life so dangerous for their city brethren. The village of Thornliebank, where Matt and Jean were born, seems to have been in a situation similar to Strathblane. While not quite as far from Glasgow, it was still not actually a part of the city at the time that Jean and Matt lived there. In common with the folks of Strathblane, many textile workers in Thornliebank seem to have been descendants of the agricultural families who had lived there for generations. If the village was home not only to Matt and Jean, but to their ancestors as well, it must have caused them considerably less stress than for folks who had to pull up stakes and move to a city in a different part of the country. For people who came to the city looking for a better life, the early deaths from disease and accident, high prices and low wages, filthy streets, and squalid tenements, must have been a terrible disappointment.

From our 21^st-century vantage point, it seems highly unlikely that our forebears in the "lower orders" cared as little for their children as their upper-class masters seemed to think. The suffering caused by starvation diets, with their accompanying disease and the poor health of their children must have been a sore trial to people who only traded poverty in the fresh country air for poverty in the stink of the city. Even Matt and Jean, who seem to have been at the upper end of the wage earners and lucky enough to live near other members of their family, didn't have it all roses and sunshine. They buried at least two infant children, and Jean herself was probably little more than 40 when she died. Even being "well-off" for his time and place, Matt and Jean must have worked very hard to make better lives for their children. Nearly all of those children seem to have started out in the textile industry, but only Margaret seems not to have escaped the drudgery of the factory floor.

Jane started off as a powerloom weaver, but doesn't seem to have continued working after 1865 when she married James Campbell. Margaret never married; in 1901, she was still working as a cotton weaver, and living with Jane in Pollokshaws. Annie was gone from home by 1861, but whether because she had married or because she had passed on, I don't know. Of Matt and Jean's sons, James is the only one not recorded as having worked in the printfields. He was 10 years old in the spring of 1841, and while the census did not record any trade or occupation for him, he may have been a teerer for his father. By 1851, Jim was already in Halifax, so it may be that Annie became the new teerer when her brother joined the Army. Robert was a colour mixer in 1851. This seems to have been a sort of apprentice printer, but I don't know if he was his father's assistant, or whether he worked for someone else. By 1881, he was still in the cloth business, but had moved his family to England, where he was selling calico, not printing it. Malcolm became a watchmaker, so his parents must have had enough money to buy an apprenticeship in a less unhealthy atmosphere (7). Sadly, their efforts couldn't save him from "consumption." His twin brother, William, was made of sturdier stuff. He likely started in the factory too, but by 1891, he was a steam engine fitter; if he was still at the calico factory, he was pretty near the top of the heap of paid workers. Mathew Gibb (9), also stayed in the calico factory, but managed to get out to the front office, where he was a clerk.

1790 - Block printing begins at Wester Ballewan, at what was called the Ha' House (Ballewan House). The stables were used for block printing, and the dyeing was done in a building not far away. Workers were housed in nearby small villages. [The Strathblane Coubroughs were from Mid-Ballewan-- perhaps they got a start here?]

1797 - Block Printing business relocated to a vacant factory in the village of Netherton, by its owner, Walter Weir. Both cotton and linen cloth are printed here.

1809 - Walter Weir retires; the factory is taken over by Messrs Aitken, McIndoe, & Foyer. The works remains closed for two years after various problems cause it to fail in 1821.

1823 - Messrs Sharp and Buchanan buy the Works, and begin printing cloth again.

1830's - A new type of cloth called "Delaine," a mixture of cotton and wool, is introduced to the industry. Workers all over the country strike in protest of the increasing mechanization of printing methods. [Did our Matt take part in this national strike? In mid-1839, after eight years of marriage, he had five children and a pregnant wife.]

1840 - Printworks is taken over by the firm of McGregor, Pollok & Brown.

1843 - Anthony Park Coubrough joins the firm, following the death of Mr. Brown in a riding accident. A.P. Coubrough and his family will eventually become the sole owners of the factory. [It was also at about this time that A.P. bought a small, plain home called Blanefield house and began to turn it into a residence suitable for the local millionaire.]

1850's - As many as 500 men, women and children are employed at the Strathblane Printworks during this decade.

1864 - A boiler explosion on September 9^th kills seven employees, and wounds seven more. Four of the dead were under 20 years of age.

1865 - Improvements in machinery have increased production to nearly half a million pieces of cloth every year, despite large reductions in staff size.

1875 - On May 28^th, the entire Printworks is consumed by fire.

1876 - The opening of the rebuilt Printworks is delayed by a lawsuit alleging pollution, launched by Sir William Edmonstone [Possibly a family squabble here? Sir William Edmonstone may have been a relative of Anthony Park's half-brother, Archibald Coubrough, son of Agnes Edmonstone, who was the first wife of A.P.'s father. Agnes died soon after Archibald's birth.]

1898 - Printworks is sold on November 18^th. Having become unprofitable due to changes in the world markets, the Printworks is closed almost immediately after being sold to a syndicate of calico printers. No other industry appears to have taken it's place, and today, Strathblane seems to be very close to, if not actually part of, the city of Glasgow.