and Fraserburgh would have been a very long way indeed in the mid-1840s. During this period of Tom’s childhood he would have received some primary education in Fraserburgh, most likely at the local parish school which opened the year he was born. Close to the Coastguard station was the harbour’s slip-dock on which the boats of the town’s fishing fleet were dragged clear of the water for maintenance and repair – a magnet, surely, for the children of the area. The fishing industry brought many northern Europeans to Fraserburgh and the presence of foreigners at the town’s weekly market was taken for granted by the thriving community.
As the three Glover boys began to settle at their school in Aberdeen, the rest of the family were on the move. In October 1844 Lieutenant Glover was transferred to the Sutton, then Saltfleet, stations – both situated near Grimbsy. Tom, then aged six, and his little brother and sister would have moved with their parents to the new location. Lieutenant Glover’s next career move came almost three years later, in May 1847, and shortly before his ninth birthday young Tom was back in his native north-east Scotland. This time the new posting was the Collieston station, about ten miles north of Aberdeen. Collieston is a picturesque and peaceful fishing village set high on a cliff with dramatic views of the craggy Buchan coastline to the north and the beginning of the sweep of Aberdeen Bay to the south. The Glover family were now reunited. Charles had been attending Marischal College, Aberdeen, since 1844 and William and James were nearing the end of their secondary schooling. Tom, Alex and Martha would most likely have enrolled at the Collieston village primary school.
A big event of this period was the visit of Queen Victoria to Aberdeen in September 1848. She was en route to her newly acquired castle at Balmoral, situated about fifty miles west of the city on the banks of the river Dee. At the time Tom, aged ten, would have gone with his family and the thousands of others from the north-east who flocked to the city for the arrival of the young queen and her consort at Aberdeen’s harbour in the royal yacht.
After two and a half years at Collieston, Glover was given what would prove to be his last posting in the Coastguard. According to the records he requested the move to the Bridge of Don station then situated at the mouth of the river Don, north of Aberdeen. There could have been several reasons for his request. Collieston was a little isolated and Tom, Alex and Martha were nearing the age for secondary schooling. There was also the problem of work for the older children. The transfer to the then fast-expanding, affluent Aberdeen area was a good move for the Glovers. The station was a big one, but at the age of forty-five and with a salary of £100 a year, running the Bridge of Don operation with a staff of six or seven was as far as Glover senior would go in the service.
The move from Collieston would have been short and relatively painless. In November 1849 eleven-year-old Tom moved with his family into the substantial, two-storey house which went with the Aberdeen appointment. The house adjoined a terrace of cottages where the Coastguard seamen and their families lived. Fronted by large vegetable gardens, it faced south and overlooked the Don spilling into the North Sea. Wild and open to the elements in winter, the situation of the house in the long summer days was especially pleasant.
From the upstairs windows of his new house Tom could see the prominent landmarks of the village of Old Aberdeen, an easy walk from his home. These were the twin fortified towers of St Machar’s Cathedral and, just a little further south, the stone crown on the roof of King’s College. These landmarks had dominated the skyline of Old Aberdeen for hundreds of years. The shops of the village would have supplied the Glover household with its everyday needs. For anything more the burgeoning city of Aberdeen was only a short carriage – or horse – ride south along King Street. Indeed, it was possible for Tom to see the mushrooming mill chimneys and church spires of the city from the garden of his house. The harbour and port of Aberdeen had developed round the mouth of the Dee and a second Coastguard station was sited on the north bank. Close by were clustered the city’s bustling shipyards. The golden sands of Aberdeen Bay covered the couple of miles between the Dee and the Don.
A schoolmate of Tom later wrote of ‘swimming in the Don with the son of the captain of the Coastguard’. Any swimming would have been done a mile or so upriver from the station house, in the less dangerous neuks beneath the Brig o’ Balgownie where even in the warmer summer months the water is still icily cold. This was the part of the Don where the young Lord Byron had swum on his half-holidays from Aberdeen Grammar School, fifty years before the young Tom Glover.
Tom, Alex and Martha would have spent many happy days exploring the endless sand-dunes and country and riverside on their doorstep. The three older boys were in their middle to late teens at the time of the move to the Bridge of Don and already in work or training.
The Census returns of 1851 record Charles, then aged twenty, as still living at home and list him as a clerk. He is likely to have been in training with a firm of shipping and insurance brokers in Aberdeen. The second son, William, was eighteen and had already left home to begin a long career at sea in the merchant marine. James, then aged seventeen, is also listed simply as a clerk and, like Charles, is likely to have been involved in shipbroking and insurance in Aberdeen. Both brothers had connections with a firm trading in Marischal Street, close to the city’s harbour and shipyards.
The three younger children, Tom, Alex and Martha, were thirteen, eleven and nine respectively at the time of the Census and all are listed as ‘scholars’. Since the move from Collieston there had been another addition to the Glover family. Alfred, the seventh surviving and last Glover child, was born in the Bridge of Don station house in November 1850. His mother was forty-three and his father forty-five at the time of Alfred’s surely unplanned birth and the baby five months old when the Census was taken. The only other resident at the station house, apart from the Glover parents, was a local girl, Ann Strachan, the domestic servant. With such a large family and a little baby to look after, it is likely that other domestic help came on a daily basis, perhaps daughters or wives of the station seamen.
Tom and Alex were enrolled as day pupils at the Gymnasium, or Chanonry House School, in Old Aberdeen. It was the best school in the area, sited in the village’s Chanonry and attended by the sons of the better-off. Old Aberdeen, never more than a large village but for centuries a separate burgh from ‘new’ Aberdeen, was beginning to be absorbed by its fast-growing neighbour to the south. The school attended by Tom and Alex was about a one-mile walk from their home. On their way to school the Glover boys would have crossed the Don by the ‘new’ Bridge of Don, within sight of the centuries-old Brig o’ Balgownie upriver.
Joining Don Street, they would have continued on into Old Aberdeen by the Seaton Estate, skirting the medieval St Machar’s Cathedral round which the burgh of Old Aberdeen had originally developed. The gracious, tree-lined Chanonry, the street where before the Reformation the canons of St Machar’s had lived, runs from the Cathedral to Old Aberdeen’s Town House. The Gymnasium stood on the west side of the Chanonry, just before this juncture north of the Town House and is the site of present-day Cruickshank Botanical Garden, part of the Aberdeen University complex.
The school’s curriculum emphasised the Classics and Religion and young Tom Glover received the typical Victorian education of a middle- to upper-class schoolboy. There was, though, an Engineering classroom at the school and it was perhaps here that Tom picked up his ability to work on a lathe – a hobby and skill which he kept for the rest of his life.
The Gymnasium was run to a strict routine and for a lively lad such as Tom it must have been restrictive. Yet there were organised games and sports for the boys of the school to burn off any excess energy. There was no St Machar’s Drive bisecting Old Aberdeen in those days and the playing fields of the Gymnasium stretched far up Cluny’s Wynd. The setting for the school was idyllic.
Perhaps Tom and Alex were a little jealous of their elder brothers having attended the more prestigious Aberdeen Grammar School. But the Gymnasium had its own reputation for excellence and, best of all, it was at most a twenty-minute walk from their home.
Away from the
