If you look carefully as you walk around Banff you can still find traces of a major industry in the town (see the photos). The area where Tesco supermarket is now would have been very different before 1955. Banff Foundry was developed on the site of a blacksmith’s forge (Robert Thomson’s blacksmith shop), bounded by […]
There are six pages of small print about Banff in the Banffshire Year Book of 1893, starting with the unproven fact that it was made a burgh by Malcolm Canmore, who died in 1093. It lists local bequests: “Misses Russell’s bounty provides £12 a year to each of 20 old women belonging to the town”. […]
In 1765 the Kirk Session of Banff gave 10s to Robert Thomson, master of the English School, “to assist in paying the funeral charges of his wife, he being in indigent circumstances”. Their son, George, then 8-year-old, went on to fame, as Robert Burns’ musical partner in collecting Scots songs, and George’s grand-daughter, Catherine Hogarth, […]
William Charles Dawes (1865 – 1920): there is tantalizingly little that can be said with surety about this man. Born in Surbiton, Surrey as the eldest son of four boys to Sir Edwin Sandy Dawes, a ship owner knighted for his contributions to the shipping industry and founder of the ‘Dawes Dynasty’, he will no […]
Banff was a town with a musical tradition. In the 20th century this expressed itself in singing. Steadily from 1925 into the 1970s there were regular productions. We can safely say that every single Gilbert and Sullivan light opera was performed in Banff, starting with The Gondoliers in 1926, the year the Operatic Society was […]
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ In 1759 Richard Birnie was born in Banff. He came from a respectable family and when he was old enough he was apprenticed to a saddler. Later he travelled to London to take up a position with McIntosh and Co., Saddlers and Harness Makers in Haymarket. This company undertook work for the royal family […]
This was soon after the 1914-18 war. The mortars went off at the coastguard station. My pal said: “Come on, we’ll get a badge”. So off we set at a run for the lifeboat station, then sited at the Macduff end of Banff Bridge. Arriving there we found the skipper throwing out armbands, the badges […]
The Ogilvies of Boyne were very important round here for more than 200 years. Sir Walter Ogilvie was body squire to two kings, James III and James IV, and in 1486 was given the thanage of Boyne. He was Sheriff of Banff, and married an heiress, Margaret Sinclair of Deskford and Findlater. His great-grandson, Alexander, […]
King David I of Scotland, who reigned from 1124 to 1153, once held court in Banff. The monks of the Pictish abbey of Deer, over in Buchan, copied a charter from the king into the Book of Deer, and the charter says that the monks had made their case before the king at Banff. The […]
Nowadays there are hundreds of church organists, though fewer than there were, and hard to replace. In the 18C they were very rare indeed. The Church of Scotland did not believe in instrumental music. There was a precentor with a tuning-fork. But Scottish Episcopalian churches always wanted an organ, if they could afford one. So […]