Glenbuchat Heritage

110 Broombrae Glenbuchat

John Johnson of the Milton at Broombrae cottage with Robbie Shearer. c 1950's

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Alan Cameron wrote about Robbie:

Robbie Shearer Broombrae

As you will note from the above picture Robbie was not exactly a good advertisement for his trade though I expect those were his old working “breeks”. He worked for my grandfather Walter Davidson in the tailor’s shop above the main shop at Craigton until he retired during the thirties. By that time there was very little demand for his services as cheap, readymade clothes, became available from the city of Aberdeen or by mail order catalogue. The tailoring business closed and Grandfather used the room for storing and preparing honey from his hives at the side of his house, As children we often played up there and there was an aid “Wind up” gramophone on which we loved to play a record called the “Inversnecky Fireman” sung by Harry Gordon.

Robbie was a professed communist, whereas Grandfather was a staunch Conservative and they had same furious arguments on the politics of the period whenever Robbie came down the “Brae” to the Shop. You will note reference to a load of “peats” in the picture above. Peat was the main fuel in those days for cooking and heating and it was obtained from the boggy hill area in the north east of the Glen.

I recall a few occasions during our annual holidays in the Glen, when cousin Ian Cameron of Sunnybrae Farm would take same of us children on a horse drawn cart to the “Moss” as it was known. The men cut the peats into blocks slightly larger than a house brick and stacked them in small heaps to dry. At the same time dry peat stacks; from the last visit, were loaded on to the can and taken dawn to the Glen far distribution. Whilst peat supplied heat, the lighting requirements were met by means of paraffin and all the buildings in the Glen had their “Royal Daylight” paraffin lamps. These worked by raising pressure in the fuel container by means of a small integral pump and vaporised paraffin burning in a silk mantle.

Grandfather Davidson was one of the first in have electricity in the Glen when be installed a single cylinder "Hot Bulb” paraffin engine anti dynamo in the late thirties. It was started by heating the engine “bulb” with a blow lamp and then cranking the engine by hand until ignition took place. The unit worked well even if the fighting fangs was limited, and was only made redundant when the Highlands Hydro Electric Service provided universal electricity supplies to the mare remake areas of Scotland, shortly after the Secund World War,,



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