MY NATIVE LAND SAE FAR AWA
On 22nd July 1879, nineteen year old Andrew Baird arrived in Dunedin, NZ on the ‘Calypso’ after a 3 month voyage from London. He journeyed alone. Andrew had been born on 8th March in Kilmaurs, Ayrshire in 1860. He was the son of Hugh Baird (b 1834) and Mary (b 1837, nee Mary Anton) who were born and married (24th June 1859) in Sorn, Ayrshire.
By 1891, Andrew was well-established enough as a farmer in Thornbury, Southland to marry a local girl Hannah Maria Foster in the house of Hannah’s father in Riverton on the 16th of December. Among their children was Hugh Charles Leslie Baird (1906-1993) who went on to marry Edna May Shaw (1910-1997) – great grandparents to my 2 younger sons.
The picture above shows Andrew as a prosperous Southland farmer, resplendent with a large and newish car in 1941. He was then 81 years old – and he is shown proudly posing with his NZ grand-daughter, 5 year old Shirley Baird.
Fortunately form a research point of view, the fine online tribute to the Baird family that has been compiled by Kenny Baird provides the means of unravelling the deeper ancestry of Andrew Baird (see ‘Baird History and Genealogy’ at: http://www.bairdnet.com/).
Andrew’s father Hugh Baird Sr. was the son of Andrew Baird Sr. (b 1792, Sorn) and Jean / Jane Mitchell. It seems that both Andrew Sr. and Jean may have died by 1841 as the census of that year records the three younger sons James (12), Andrew (9) and Hugh (7) as living on the farm of George and Jean Mitchener.
The elder Andrew Baird was one of the 14 children of James Baird (b 1742) and his wife Jean (nee Jean Miller) of Blackside Farm, Sorn who had married on 12th March 1769. James in turn was one of the 11 children of Hugh Baird and Sarah Howat who farmed at New Cumnock, Ayrshire and who had married in 1729.
The past stretches back then to a prolific family, with the Ayrshire strands ultimately contributing to a wider Scottish ‘Clan Baird’. And, if one explores the Ayrshire family history in more detail, one sees that there was a constant flux in tenant farming families between farms and localities, with younger sons drifting off to work as agricultural labourers, miners or factory operatives in the textile mills.
Also of course there was an accelerating drift overseas – at first particularly to the West Indies where Ayrshire farm boys became plantation overseers and mechanics (as once tempted the poet Robert Burns) – and then as farmer settlers in North America, Australia and New Zealand (as is evident from the family trees supplied online by Kenny Baird).
So Andrew Baird and his family also provide a wider opportunity to relate to some of Burns’ poetry - in terms of both the harsh life that the Burns and Baird farming families faced and the hard choices that had to be made about moving up and away to pursue independence and financial security.
And like as not, Andrew left a lassie behind in Scotland:
‘O sad and heavy, should I part,
But for her sake, sae far awa;
Unknowing what my way may thwart,
My native land sae far awa.
Thou that of a' things Maker art,
That formed this Fair sae far awa,
Gie body strength, then I'll ne'er start
At this my way sae far awa.
How true is love to pure desert!
Like mine for her sae far awa;
And nocht can heal my bosom's smart,
While, oh, she is sae far awa!
Nane other love, nane other dart,
I feel but her's sae far awa;
But fairer never touch'd a heart
Than her's, the Fair, sae far awa’.
THE LAND LOVED AND LOST
We know from the 1861 census that Andrew’s father Hugh was then working in Tarbolton, Ayrshire as a ploughman. As a younger and possibly orphaned son, he struggled to gain the stubborn independence that his grandparents James and Jean had enjoyed at Blackside Farm (see top photo above).
On a fine early summer’s day, a ploughman could sing with the joys of life:
‘As I was a-wand'ring ae morning in spring,
I heard a young ploughman sae sweetly to sing;
And as he was singin', thir words he did say, -
There's nae life like the ploughman's in the month o' sweet May.
The lav'rock in the morning she'll rise frae her nest,
And mount i' the air wi' the dew on her breast,
And wi' the merry ploughman she'll whistle and sing,
And at night she'll return to her nest back again’.
But then again, the rich could sing their own songs by the fire accompanied by the piano at any time of year – and they rarely spared a thought for their tenants and farm workers. Reflecting on this, Burns provides a bitter epitaph on the death of the local squire James Grieve, Laird Of Boghead, Tarbolton:
‘Here lies Boghead amang the dead
In hopes to get salvation;
But if such as he in Heav'n may be,
Then welcome, hail! Damnation’.
Looking more objectively at the local agricultural economy, farmers and their workers were constantly pushed towards poverty by poor soils, a harsh climate, competition for resources among a rapidly rising population, and the absence of sufficient surplus for investment.
Writing in 1898, Helen Steven (‘Sorn Parish - its history and associations’) describes the context of the privations that the Bairds and Burns would have faced:
‘The parish of Sorn consists of about 19,000 acres, and a century ago there were 3000 acres of moss, 7000 of hills, moor, and other pasture lands, 200 acres of natural wood or plantings, and of the remaining 9000 or so of arable ground, all was not under actual cultivation. Few tenants possessed more than a ploughgate of land, and many of them much less.
‘Those small holdings were a decided disadvantage to the parish, as the farmers could not afford to keep the necessary implements or horses, and so were often dependent for ploughing upon hired labour, or had to wait until someone else could lend them implement or horse, and often they missed their season.
‘They seldom could afford to pay a rent, or paid a very small one when the season was good; and there was not sufficient work on their small holdings to keep them busy all the year through. The proprietors of such small farms, if they farmed their land themselves, simply made a shift to exist and exerted themselves as little as possible. A farm of moderate size was much better kept and more profitable than the very small holdings, and much more provocative of industry.
‘But even the best of farmers was very far behind, as looked at from the standpoint of scientific farming of today. The leases were for eighteen or nineteen years, and a rotation of crops was prescribed, but, through inattention of farmers and absence of landlords, was not strictly enforced.
‘The general rules of rotation were the following: Only one third of a farm to be ploughed at a time, the first two crops to be oats, the third bear and grass seeds, the fourth hay, and the next five years pasture. The farms were not properly subdivided, however, and the farmers were careless of rules made by absent, uninterested landlords. Too often, instead of varying the third and fourth crops, a crop of oats was taken from the ground three or four years in succession, and then, without any kind of seed being sown at all, it grew a rank kind of pasture for the cattle.
‘Farm-houses were beginning to be rebuilt, a century ago, in a better style than the cot-houses or hovels which formerly were the dwelling-houses, with men and cattle living under the same roof, and often only a narrow passage between the byres and the kitchen. Some of the cot-houses fell into ruins and the pendicles were annexed to the adjacent farms. The cottars went to live in the villages, where they found employment of various kinds, the young people readily getting work in the new mills at Catrine.
‘The rent of the arable farms under the old leases was only about five shillings an acre; but as the leases expired the rents were much raised, and a century ago, ten or twelve shillings an acre was quite common, and near the villages as much as twenty or thirty shillings was asked and obtained.
‘A ploughman received £10 or £12 per annum for wages, a woman-servant £4. A farm-labourer earned 1s 3d a day in winter and 1s 8d in summer. Tailors went from one farm to another and made the household garments, of good home spun, on the spot. A tailor received one shilling each day, and his food; a mason received is 8d per day. All those prices are quoted as a great advance on what had been until a few years previously.
‘In 1790 a man-servant's wage was £7 or £8; a woman's £3 10s; a tailor received 8d a day; a labourer 10d in winter and a shilling in summer.
‘There were three corn-mills in the parish and a wauk-mill or bleaching mill, all on the river Ayr, and the farmers were thirled (bonded) to a particular mill. The farmers reared most of their own horses, some of the old diminutive breed of the country, others middle-sized and hardy and suitable for purposes of agriculture.
‘There were about eighty ploughs in the parish and twice that number of carts. Farmers' gigs were utterly unknown, and the farmer rode to market with his wife seated behind on a pillion. The cattle were almost all black, of a small ancient breed, and were reared for dairy purposes, few, if any, for the market.
‘The making of cheese had just been introduced into the parish by some farmers who had settled there from Dunlop. Before the advent of the cheese-makers, butter, exclusively, was made in the dairies and sold in the neighbouring villages and in Glasgow.
‘The potato was a staple article of diet both for man and beast, for it seems at that time both horses and, cows were partly fed with it, and many of the villagers rented a small piece of ground from the nearest farmers to grow the favourite tuber. For the ground they paid a small rent and a hundred acres were under such cultivation.
‘Every farmer and cottar grew a small quantity of flax, sufficient for his own domestic, purposes, but little or none for sale. Wheat had been grown experimentally and successfully on some holm-lands, but oats and bear (inferior barley) were the principal crops’.
Notwithstanding the toil, the farm families were often relatively well-educated for the times. Backed by the teachings of the kirk and the relatively open and progressive village schools, the best developed a rugged personal morality and staunch independence – poverty regardless – as Burns describes in his tribute to his father:
‘My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border, O,
And carefully he bred me in decency and order, O;
He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne'er a farthing, O;
For without an honest manly heart, no man was worth regarding, O.
....
No help, nor hope, nor view had I, nor person to befriend me, O;
So I must toil, and sweat, and moil, and labour to sustain me, O;
To plough and sow, to reap and mow, my father bred me early, O;
For one, he said, to labour bred, was a match for Fortune fairly, O.
Thus all obscure, unknown, and poor, thro' life I'm doom'd to wander, O,
Till down my weary bones I lay in everlasting slumber, O:
No view nor care, but shun whate'er might breed me pain or sorrow, O;
I live to-day as well's I may, regardless of to-morrow, O.
But cheerful still, I am as well as a monarch in his palace, O,
Tho' Fortune's frown still hunts me down, with all her wonted malice, O:
I make indeed my daily bread, but ne'er can make it farther, O:
But as daily bread is all I need, I do not much regard her, O.
When sometimes by my labour, I earn a little money, O,
Some unforeseen misfortune comes gen'rally upon me, O;
Mischance, mistake, or by neglect, or my goodnatur'd folly, O:
But come what will, I've sworn it still, I'll ne'er be melancholy, O.
All you who follow wealth and power with unremitting ardour, O,
The more in this you look for bliss, you leave your view the farther, O:
Had you the wealth Potosi boasts, or nations to adore you, O,
A cheerful honest-hearted clown I will prefer before you, O’.
A NEW AND BONNIER SCOTLAND IN SOUTHLAND
Honest and hardworking, young Andrew Baird ended up by doing quite well for himself when he settled in New Zealand – with no serious hints of ‘mischance, mistake and good-natured folly’.
The landscape that he found in his new home would respond much more favourably to hard work than his native soil. Before European settlement, the low plains of Southland were covered by bush – mataī, rimu, lowland beech, kānuka and mānuka, interspersed with tussock grasslands, and swamp and bog in low-lying areas. Clearing this land took the effort and patience that had long been bred into the Scots.
Settlement of the Southland plains began in the mid-1850s. The shore whaling stations like that of Riverton had all closed by 1850, and inland pioneers including some former whalers, took up pastoral leases. Both Campbelltown (now Bluff) and Invercargill were surveyed in 1856, with Bluff becoming the port, and Invercargill the commercial focus for the new farming districts, such that they gradually replaced Riverton as Southland’s main town.
Much Southland lowland was swampy – a result of a high water table and low evaporation rates – and drainage was needed to make it suitable for farming. Rain also leached the soil of nutrients, especially lime. Early farmers became pioneers in the large-scale use of lime on pasture (again a practice that was common in Ayrshire –as it also was in my home county Cheshire).
The rural population of Southland increased steadily from the 1870s until about 1911, along with the number of farms, as the bush was cleared and flats were drained. From the 1880s the advent of refrigerated shipments of meat and dairy produce to the United Kingdom brought prosperity to the Southland rural economy. Within eight years, four freezing works opened – two at Bluff, in 1885 and 1892, and the others at Makarewa (1887) and Mataura (1893). The first NZ cheese factory opened at Edendale in 1882 – and by 1932, Southland had 80 dairy factories.
As for the settlers, between 1860 and 1863 more Scots left their homeland for New Zealand than for any other destination. In 1864 the Scottish-born accounted for nearly one fifth of the non-Māori population, with a strong concentration in the southern provinces of the South Island. In 1871 they made up about a third of the total population in Otago and Southland, with Lowlanders predominating.
The economic and cultural influence of the Scottish settlers remains strong today throughout New Zealand. The landscape of southern New Zealand is thickly sown with Scottish names like Clyde, Invercargill and Dunedin. And by way of a more direct example relating to the Baird family, the little settlement of Otautau, (formerly in Wallace County), Southland has both Sorn and Katrine Streets.
Red hair and Scottish surnames remain extremely common, with Burns and Baird being well represented - and Wellington is the only English-speaking city that I know where Macdonalds outnumber Johnsons in the phone book. Furthermore, the Lallans ‘Soond o Scots’ still touches everyday speech in Southland and Otago where the burred rolling ‘r’ is still sometimes a feature of speech. Following her grandfather, my mother-in-law still greets visitors with ‘How would ye be?’ and talks of her ‘wee’ grandchildren.
As for Thornbury, where Andrew settled initially, the 1906 Cyclopedia of New Zealand notes that it ‘is the name of a rich agricultural district which stands at an elevation of only fifteen feet above the level of the sea, and is twenty miles from Invercargill and six miles from Riverton, with the district having a population of 262 in 1901’.
The township had been founded by pioneer settlers Matthew Instone and Robert Foster and it was named by Robert Foster after his wife's birthplace, the market town of Thornbury, in Gloucestershire, England. And there we have a merging of the Scottish and New Zealand histories, with Andrew Baird marrying Robert Foster’s daughter Hannah Maria on 16th December 1891.
Somewhat to the discomfort of my wife, this establishes that she also has English forbears – in the persons of Robert Foster who had been born in Lancashire and Helen Matilda Hopton (sometimes referred to as Ellen but actually registered only as Matilda) who he had married in Australia. The Hoptons it seems had had a pub in Thornbury but went bust - maybe they drank all the profits!
There is some Celtic redemption though as Andrew’s son Hugh Charles Leslie Baird laid aside some Presbyterian prejudices for a spirited and fine-looking bride in the form of Edna Mary Shaw. Edna was the daughter of John Thomas Shaw (1879-1946 born Taieri - whose parents were Samuel Shaw and Mary Woodcroft). Edna’s mother was Mary Beatrice Deegan (1879-1958 born Riverton) whose clearly Irish forbears Edward Deegan and Kate McCarthy married in New Zealand 1875.
For all the old country prejudices against their neighbouring nationals, I hazard that Robert Burns would have been very proud of the Tree of Liberty planted in New Zealand under the Union Jack and Southern Cross:
"Let Britain boast her hardy oak,
Her poplar and her pine, man,
Auld Britain ance could crack her joke,
And o'er her neighbours shine, man,
But seek the forest round and round,
And soon 'twill be agreed, man,
That sic a tree can not be found,
Twixt London and the Tweed, man.
"Without this tree, alake this life
Is but a vale o' woe, man;
A scene o' sorrow mixed wi' strife,
Nae real joys we know, man,
We labour soon, we labour late,
To feed the titled knave, man;
And a'the comfort we're to get
Is that ayont the grave, man.
"Wi' plenty o' sic trees, I trow,
The warld would live in peace, man;
The sword would help to mak a plough,
The din o' war wad cease man.
Like brethren wi' a common cause,
We'd on each other smile, man;
And equal rights and equal laws
Wad gladden every isle, man.
"Wae worth the loon wha wadna eat
Sic halesome dainty cheer, man;
I'd gie my shoon frae aff my feet,
To taste sic fruit, I swear, man.
Syne let us pray, auld England may
Sure plant this far-famed tree, man;
And blythe we'll sing, and hail the day
That gave us liberty, man."
Click here for: Song celebrating Millom by Andy Smith
