March is International Women’s History Month, so we’ve delved into the vaults here in Woodside to discover some of its women of note. Here are some of “Oor Quines.”
Mrs Jean Taylor
If you go down to the woods today… Well, you’ll find the Woodies. Rewind a couple of hundred years and you would be standing in a quarry, the Hilton granite quarry housed on the Hilton Estate. A wee bit down the road and you have the area of Woodside which goes right back to a few wee cottages back in the early 1800s. In 1834, the area of Woodside was created when Woodside, Tanfield and Cotton (a corruption of the Gaelic “cuitan” meaning small fold) were joined. Fast forward just a mere 30 years to 1864 and it has become a police burgh. The area continued to grow steadily in size and became part of Aberdeen City in 1891. This is where we meet our first Woodside quine, Mrs Jean Taylor.
Mrs Taylor has been a figure of note in Woodside for quite some time but it is important that we don’t forget those who have had a positive impact on our community. Mrs Taylor was the wife of John Taylor, a grocer by trade who both worked and lived in Barron Street in Woodside. Not the Barron Street beside Farmfoods today but one closer to Shmu. As a well-respected merchant in the community, the couple would have seen the majority of Woodsiders on a daily basis. They would have seen them through the highs and the lows. Usually the lows. Many were struggling and children were missing out. And it was this that compelled Mrs Taylor to act. Upon her death, Mrs Taylor left a sum of money to create a playground for the children of Woodside, and the perfect opportunity was about to show itself. In 1891 Woodside was to become part of Aberdeen City, and to commemorate this event, the Woodside Burgh Commissioners and Town Council were working on plans for a park. Mrs Taylor’s bequest was £500 which may not sound like much but in today’s money it is roughly £65,700!
Up until this point, the Burgh Commissioners were unable to find a suitable site to position the playground. As talks of the burgh merging with the city progressed the Commissioners saw an opportunity to get their playground. And it was agreed that the Town Council would contribute to sourcing land for the establishment of a park for the community. The Town Council gave £4000 towards the project for the purchase of land from the former Hilton estate and the Stewart Pleasure Park with ponds, flowers, meandering paths, and playground was open on 4 June 1894. It was named Stewart after the then Lord Provost but the Burgh Commissioners wanted a tribute to Mrs Taylor for the ‘Taylor’s Children Playground’ so a fountain was built in memorial to her in 1903.
The next time you visit the Stewart Park spare a thought for Mrs Taylor who always had the welfare of the people of Woodside at heart. She left provision in her will for her community, so that even after she had gone some good could still be done.
Margaret Penny (1812-1891)
Margaret is known as a female explorer and pioneer. She was married to an Aberdeen whaling captain, William Penny (1809-1892). She spent a year, from June 1857 to August 1858, with her husband and son at Baffin Island in Nunavut Canada. It was extremely rare for a woman to travel on a ship back then as it was considered bad luck. But not only did she buck this trend but is considered to be the first European woman to winter in the Arctic islands north of Canada.
Margaret wrote of her journey nearly every day (except in winter). She described the weather, the state of the ships, how the crew were doing and information about the Inuit people she met. Back in 1832 when she was 19, she lived with her family at Hayfield Farm, Hilton. Her father, George Irvine, was a farmer. The Hilton estate was mainly farmland located on the outskirts of Aberdeen. The area has changed beyond anything Margaret would recognise today but the memory of Hayfield Farm has been retained in the street names of Hayfield Place and Hayfield Crescent.
I feel that Margaret would have been a formidable woman. She would have known her own mind and have been courageous to go on such an adventure and take her son with her. The Aberdeen Arctic Company Shareholders recognised her contribution to the exhibition by presenting her with a silver tea set which now resides in the Aberdeen Art Gallery.
There is a set of lower jaw bones from a whale that were gifted to the Stewart Park by the Captain of the Arctic Whaler Benbow in 1903. Could this have been someone known to the Penny family paying tribute to their home area?
Inez Mary McKay Ferguson CBE (1895-1981) Suffragist
Inez Ferguson was only five years old when she appeared in the 1901 census. She lived at Hilton House with per mum and dad, brother Francis and three servants. But things were about to take a strange turn for this wee toot. The very next day her dad, who was a local solicitor, vanished! More shocks were to come when the family found out that he owed £50,000 and a warrant had been issued for his arrest. The mystery continued and it was thought in 1902 that he had left the country. By the time it got to 1909, Inez had moved to Berkhamsted in England to live with her mother’s family. Did this strange start hold her back? No! When we reach 1917 Inez has earned herself a distinction in a Diploma in Economics and Political Science from St Hilda’s College, Oxford. It is also at this time that she grew an interest in what she is known for, becoming a suffragist.
Here’s where you have to pay attention to family trees. Inez’s grandma’s brother was James Skelton Anderson and he married Dr Elizabeth Garrett, who upon getting married changed her name to Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. And it’s Elizabeth’s sister, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who was the leader and founder of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), popularly known as the Suffragists.
The Suffragists had been peacefully and legally campaigning since 1897 to get women the right to vote. In 1918, a year after graduating, Inez was the societies press secretary, moving swiftly on to become Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s secretary the following year. Meanwhile in Scotland, Inez’s maternal aunt, Jane Corbett Barker, was serving with the Scottish Women’s Hospital for Foreign Service in Serbia during World War I. The NUWSS financed women’s hospital units employing only female doctors and nurses.
After the war in 1921 Inez was involved at the headquarters of Women’s Institute in London. She married Frederick C. Jenkins in 1923 aged 27. Fast forward to the Second World War, and Inez is Assistant Director of the Women’s Land Army. It was for this work that she was awarded as a Commander of the British Empire, a CBE in 1943. Now heralding from the North East of Scotland, the Press and Journal jumped on the story reporting that she was an Aberdonian! She died in 1981 aged 85.
Author: Nicola Watson