Jimmy Sinclair, my great grandfather, was born in Caithness in 1887 and died in Edinburgh in 1964. This short summary is the first of two posts I shall publish, at the same time, about his life. The other piece, Sapper Sinclair’s War, will focus on his military career and above all his heroic action in World War One. To read that article please click here: Sapper Sinclair’s War
The previous post on this site (click to read): My Sinclair Ancestry – The Mystery of James Sinclair the Ploughman, described the numerous searches that I have undertaken to try and discover the identity of Jimmy’s father. James Sinclair, who was around at his birth in Wick, Caithness, in 1887. In the future, I shall also explore how I am still using DNA to try and identify who James and his forebears were. He remains a mystery, unlike his son Jimmy, whose war medals, letters and postcards are some of my proudest family possessions.
Caithness Childhood
All Jimmy’s early life was spent in the far north, mostly in the town of his birth, Wick, on the east coast of Caithness. He grew up there under the guardianship of his uncle, William Simpson. Nothing is known of his father, James Sinclair, other than the fact that he signed the registration of Jimmy’s birth in November 1887. The story of James remains a mystery. Family rumour has it that he was drowned in the Pentland Firth soon after the birth was registered. Perhaps because of this, Jimmy’s mother, Margaret Simpson, soon left Wick and returned to her work as a servant at Barrogill Mains, a farm on the north coast in the estate of the Castle of Mey, which still exists today.
Margaret and all her Simpson family were from the Isle of Stroma, an island less than a mile long, brutally exposed to the vicissitudes of the North Atlantic weather, between Caithness and Orkney. After her father, a fisherman and crofter also named William Simpson, had died on Stroma in 1872, many of the family moved over to the mainland in the 1880s. That included Jimmy’s grandmother, Mary Simpson (born Mary Cook), who was a midwife and assisted with his birth in September 1887.
After returning to her work at Barrogill Mains, Margaret, Jimmy’s mother, went on to have children with two other men. First, a young servant called John McGregor who fathered a daughter Helen in 1892. Second, in 1893, she married John Dunnet, a fisherman from East Mey, at the Free Church at Louisburgh in Wick, before they moved to Castletown, on the north coast, where she spent the rest of her life until her death in 1946. Margaret and John had four, or maybe five, Dunnet half siblings for Jimmy – David, Williamina (Minnie), Jessie and Mary, (and possibly also William Manson). In a letter from Jimmy in 1915 to his wife in Edinburgh, he describes how he is looking forward to bringing presents of a brooch up to his mother and sister Jess in Castletown, as well as other gifts for Minnie.
Decades after Jimmy’s death, links between his descendants and the Simpson and Dunnet families of his mother continue. The Isle of Stroma itself is deserted, its population having dwindled during the twentieth century until it was completely abandoned in the 1950s. It is owned by a Simpson family who I believe share the same ancestry as Jimmy’s mother, Margaret Simpson, her father William and the twelve Simpson siblings she had, all born on Stroma. Many of the descendants of that family still live in or near to Caithness, albeit on the mainland now.
Of these Simpson/Dunnet descendants, in spite of the significant generational gap, I am in regular contact with members of the Sutherland and Bain families who descend from Jess Dunnet, and also with several members of the Mackenzie family who descend from Margaret’s sister Helen Simpson (and her husband Maxwell Dunnet). But it was Jimmy’s half-sister Minnie Dunnet who he was closest to. In the 1920s, she lived with him and May Jane in Edinburgh whilst training as a specialist nurse, and she is the one who has passed the most information down to his Sinclair descendants, not least through the many holidays that some of us had with her as children at her home in Huntly, North East Scotland, with her husband Gordon Rhind.
Returning to his earlier life: with his mother away working, young Jimmy grew up with those of her Simpson family who had moved to Wick. In 1891 he was recorded in the Census there as being 3 years old, and being the nephew of the Head of the household, William Simpson, 28, a Meal Merchant in the town. Also in the house, 9 High Street, Wick, were his grandmother, Mary, still a Midwife, and his aunts Annie and Mina Simpson. William Simpson was listed as Jimmy’s guardian when he started primary school in Wick later that year, and became his employer as a young man when Jimmy worked in William’s grain store.
In the 1901 Census, when 13, Jimmy was recorded as visiting Annie Simpson and her two young children in Back Bridge Street, Wick – by then Annie had married John Clyne, a rider on the local mail coach. Jimmy’s mum, Margaret, now Mrs Dunnet, was recorded in that census as being in Castletown, with John Dunnet, described as a Salmon Fisher, and their children David, Williamina, Jessie and Mary, with another Mary Dunnet, probably related to John, also at the house.
Sometime after this, later in his teens, Caithness stopped being enough for Jimmy, and he spread his wings further south. The trade he initially developed was that of a painter and decorator, and he returned to that later in his life. In the mid 1900s, he worked around the country, but he ended up gravitating towards two homes: a geographical one in Edinburgh, and a military one in the Royal Engineers. The rest of this article will focus on the former, with the other blog describing his army life.
Edinburgh and the Maguires
Jimmy spent most of his adult life in Edinburgh, when not serving abroad. Having enlisted in the Royal Engineers in 1908, a year later he married Galashiels born May Jane Maguire (who he always called Janie), in St Mary’s, the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Edinburgh.
The Maguire family’s Catholic faith had come with them from Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, when May Jane’s grandfather, John Maguire, had left there with his wife Margaret Lilly during the Irish Potato Famine and emigrated to Galashiels in the Scottish Borders. At the end of the nineteenth century, John Maguire’s son, James, had moved up to Edinburgh with his daughter May Jane and several of her siblings, after the death of his Borders born wife, Margaret Tait, a woman who believed herself descended from the famous Border Reiver, Johnnie Armstrong. Once settled in Edinburgh, James Maguire continued to live there with his daughter May Jane for the rest of his life.
Before marrying Jimmy, May Jane had already had one son, also James Maguire but always known as Duksie. By the start of World War One, he was joined by three brothers: Eddie Sinclair, David Joseph Sinclair (my grandfather), and Tommy Sinclair, Then, Jimmy went off to war. As described elsewhere, whilst a Sapper in the Royal Engineers in Mauritius in 1910-12, he had already dealt with riots in that sweltering outpost of Empire. Now with a wife and three young sons, as well as a stepson, at home, he was to face a quagmire of death in the mud of France and Flanders with the British Expeditionary Force 1914-15. Finally, before coming home to a quieter life, he then experienced revolution and the dawning of Arab independence in Egypt, in 1919.
Life after the War
Once back in Edinburgh, Jimmy was moved into the Army Reserve and returned to work as a Painter and Decorator. It is said that whenever he came home drunk at night, May Jane would throw him out the back of their flat with a paintbrush.
Three further children had followed their now older brothers: May Sinclair born in 1920, Joan Sinclair in 1922, and Hughie Sinclair in 1925. Like their brothers, these were all born and raised in Edinburgh, and brought up as Catholics. But all of them were very aware of their father’s Caithness roots in the far north of Scotland, which he continued to visit regularly until the end of his life to see family and friends, and where his name is still remembered to this day.
Strangely in a way, I know less of Jimmy’s later life than his earlier years. He and May Jane remained at the same address for the rest of their days, 45 Albany Street, keeping many close family connections with the Simpsons and Dunnets in the north and the Maguires in Edinburgh and Galashiels. In the years after WW1, James Maguire continued to live with the Sinclairs, although Duksie Maguire, and in time the Sinclair children, all moved away, some locally, some to England, and, one, Joan, to the USA with her husband Bill McCall.
Their first grandson, David James Alexander Sinclair (my father) was born in 1935, and in 1962 one of their great grandchildren was brought to Albany Street – me. I do not remember that day, but knowing it happened has helped me want to ensure a memory continues of Jimmy and his family, as well as rebuilding links between us Sinclairs and many descendants of the Dunnets, Simpsons and Maguires.
all i can say is wow what an amazing extended family i have got so if anyone wants to contact me feel wellcome i am tommy and mary sinclairs grandaughter.