Papa’s Birthday

….. and the Grandmother.

What the odds of two people meeting and getting married having the same birthday! My Papa was born in 1890 and the grandmother in 1902. Married in 1923. He was 33 and a veteran of the Great War and she was 19, a student and 6 months pregnant with another mans child. God knows what the story was behind that which we will never know.

It’s fair to say I look upon my grandfather as a legend. Apart from the bravery of enduring and surviving a war fought in the trenches of Belgium and France, he fought a bigger battle in 1932 against his runaway wife to search central Scotland to find and bring back home his three year old daughter (my mum), with him to Braco. All While working shifts on the railway. It’s an amazing story, documented in a court document from 1933, when he took his wife to court to be divorced and gain custody of my mum. I often think about this, wondering how he went about it and how he must have felt when searching. But he never gave up and in finding her ensured she had a stable and loving childhood .

My grandmother never married the man she ran off with, he was already married. She had four children with him, first a daughter Angela (named after my grandmothers new name changing from Mary Findlay to Angela Meers) twin boys Kenneth and Lesley, and Margaret. Kenneth was burned to death in a fire in Glasgow in the early 60s . Him and Lesley were involved in the taxi wars that was going on then. Their home life seemed pretty unstable, I met Margaret way back in 2011 when we were on holiday in Winchester meeting in Lymington as she lived in Bournemouth. She told me lots of stories about their life growing up. She was estranged fromher Mum for many years but reconciled a few years before she died, finding her in London, pretty worse for wear, basically she was an alcoholic and was shacked up with a man who had spent all her money. Margaret put her in a nursing home where she lived happily for a good few years and died in 1998 aged 96. Her life was a tangled web of secrets and lies. I do wish I had met her but I have found out so much from the internet from where she lived, court documents and newspapers archives in the Mitchell in Glasgow.

But it’s not about her this absent women in the life of my mum, it’s about the strong, loving and caring man who fought and won for the custody of his only daughter. If he hadn’t done that, been a lesser man and given up, then many of us wouldn’t be the people we are here and now. Although he died when I was 7 I have proper memories of him as we were inseparable.

Robert Cowper
6.4.1890

Me and Papa in St Monans in 1962
The grandmother third from the right in a show in Braco. When she ran away she joined an singing group performing round Central Scotland. Maybe this is where Cameron gets his musical talent from.