On not being Scottish: The Orange Caledonian Society

My aunt Madge Marston ready for Burns night.
A year or two later, she ‘remade’ this dress
 for me to wear to my final
Orange High School social, at the end of third year, 1955.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s I went with my Aunt Madge to the Caledonian Society Saturday night socials. The hall was in Peisley Street Orange, just past the Strand but before you reached the old cement swimming baths. We danced til we dropped, with pipers from the band playing Strip-the-Willow, the Gay Gordons, foursome and eightsome reels, the Highland Schottische, and calming us down with a leisurely Pride-of-Erin. The men politely took turns whirling the kids around. 

There were Wisharts, Tillets, McConnells and Mackenzies —Jock McConnell had a garage and Jock Mackenzie had started the pipe band. Their kilts were dark blue and green, colours I have loved together ever since, despite ‘blue and green should never be seen’. I grew to adore the Scottish accent. We celebrated Hogmanay and Halloween (long before trick or treating). We had to kneel down in front of a barrel with apples bobbing on top, hands behind our backs and try to grab one with our teeth. There were bowls of mashed potato with threepences hidden inside (imagine real silver, about half the size and thickness of a five cent piece).

Robbie Burns night was adults only. I went to the Presbyterian Church and so I was Scottish through and through. Rev. Torrance, kept us in line with threats of fire and brimstone. I remember being terrified when I first met Barry’s grandfather, a staunch Mason, when he queried my family name ‘Kelly’. I explained I wasn’t Catholic, I was a Scottish Presbyterian Kelly. By the time I got the family history bug in the mid 1990s my mother and all my aunts were dead. I gradually started collecting birth certificates. My great Grandfather Levingstone wrote Glasgow as his place of birth on ten of them—I could never trace one for their first child, Michael.

I was researching in the Orange library around 2003 and came across a book of articles written by William (Bill) Folster, compiled by his grandson, Paul Weathersten. Bill wrote about James Livingstone: ‘Born in Dublin, he worked as a linen weaver in both Ireland and Dunfermline Scotland. At the latter town he worked as a boy with Andrew Carnegie, The Scottish-American millionaire. The old man remembered well working on the table linen which was being made for the first great exhibition at the Crystal Palace, and making a shirt front for the Prince Consort.’ So perhaps his ‘Scottishness’ came from working in Scotland during his boyhood. He was likely educated while working in the mills.

The article went on to list his battles with the British 77^th regiment of foot in the Crimean War, and success on the gold fields at Lambing Flat before moving to the Bathurst area. According to the article, James had had tea with Mr HM Keightley two days before he was held for ransom by Ben Hall and his gang at Dunns Plains in 1863.

I paid a military researcher in London to get his army records (now freely available) and discovered James Levingstone was born in Craigs, Ballymena, County Antrim, and so there is nary a Scottish bone in me, much to the chagrin of Barry whose mother 'Wee Mary McNaught' really was born in Glasgow.

Orange City Pipe Band circa 1955 Photo courtesy Des Riach (second from right, back row)