Ancestors of Robert McCutcheon

John Gunn Calder

#9, (24 Apr 1899 - 18 Apr 1951)

Relationship

Grandfather of Robert Stewart McCutcheon.

Last Edited

25 Nov 2007

Charts

My ancestors
Adam Henderson's descendants

Father

Alexander Calder (25 Nov 1868 - 12 Jan 1902)

Mother

Margaret Gunn (29 Mar 1870 - 12 Aug 1932)

Birth*

24 Apr 1899

18 Union Street, Pulteneytown, Wick, Caithness, Scotland

Marriage*

6 Nov 1926

Elizabeth Graham; 11 Royal Terrace, Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland¹

Death*

18 Apr 1951

76 Albert Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, Paralysis Agitarus - several years and Pullmonary Tubercolosis.

Occupation*

Electrical cable jointer

Note*

One abiding regret of mine is that my grandfather died three years before I was born, so we didn't have a part to play in each other's life. In contrast to my other grandfather, Jock Calder was tall, dark and handsome and, from recollection of those who knew him, soft -spoken with a Caithness lilt. I can see why my grandmother fell for him. I have a photograph of the two of them early in marriage or perhaps even in courtship, and the young couple look positively radiant.
John Gunn Calder, known to all as 'Jock', was born in 1899 in the Caithness fishing port of Wick. The house where he was born in Union Street, in the quiet grey district of Pulteneytown, no longer stands, it has been replaced by a telephone exchange. My grandfather was the fourth of the five children of Alexander Calder and Margaret Gunn. He was only two years old when his father died from what appears to have been a stroke.
Some time either shortly before or during the First World War the Calder family moved south to Leith, from one port to another. This may not have been a leap into the unknown because there were already Calder cousins settled in Leith. Although the Calder family had, by and large, traditionaly worked in harbour jobs, either curing the Silver Darlings as herring was nicknamed, or as coopers, making the barrels in which the cured herring would be put in for transportation to Britain and the Baltic countries, whose people had acquired a taste for this particular fish. My grandfather on the other hand worked as an electrical cable jointer.
Margaret Calder and her grown up children lived in a ground floor tenement flat in Admiralty Street, just off North Junction Street, a few minutes walk from the docks. Some of my earliest memories are of visiting the house - which curiously had an organ in it - when it was occupied by my spinster great-aunt Jessie Calder, my grandfather's older and only sister. But to return to my grandfather, when he married my grandmother, Elizabeth Graham, known to all as Bessie, in 1926 he was residing in a tenement flat in Gorgie Road. How he met the lass from Galashiels, who was working as a domestic servant for a family who lived in the Haymarket district, I have no idea. But in the first year of marriage, their only child, my mother, was born. At the time my mother was born, Jock and Bessie had moved to the Pilrig area, yet another tenement - this time a second floot flat in 76 Albert Street, the only home they lived in thereafter. I believe the house previously belonged to my grandmother's older brother George Graham, who worked as a railway policeman.
My grandfather worked at Portobello power station, the striking red brick edifice which was sadly demolished in the 1980s. Some time in the late 1940s my grandfather was injured in an accident at the power station. It is believed this accident contributed to his terminal illness of Parkinson's Disease. In his last years he was bed-ridden, and cared for by both my grandmother and mother.²

Residence*

1926

191 Gorgie Road, Edinburgh, Scotland¹

Family

Elizabeth Graham (9 Aug 1898 - 6 Apr 1967)

Child

Sheila Margaret Muir Calder+ (1927 - 1984)

Citations

Copy marriage certificate: John Gunn Calder and Elizabeth Graham, 6 Nov 1926.
Robert Stewart McCutcheon, Nov 2007.