Vol 47, No 2 Autumn/Winter 2011 - Finlays

Strands of Memory
Two very different memoirs, fascinating reading for
anyone with an interest in the Finlays past, are
reviewed by Juliet McCracken.
A Tiger’s Wedding: my childhood in exile by Isla Blair
The celebrated
British actress
Isla Blair is the
product of two
generations
of Finlay tea
planters. Being
obliged to
exchange the
sunny, spicescented
warmth
and security of
a South Indian
childhood for the chill embrace of a
British boarding school and years of
family separation was a fate not merely
endured by successive generations of the
children of the Raj and their parents but
accepted as inevitable.
The strength of Blair’s book is that, while
ploughing this often lonely furrow, it
never descends into mawkishness or
self-pity, opening instead with a most
joyous evocation of the Eden that was
South India for a tea planter’s child and
ending with a celebration of family ties
unbroken by the strain of parting.
This author has the gift of total recall
for the sights, sounds and, above all,
the scents of a golden childhood: the
‘crushed sunshine’ of a marigold garland,
the thrill of meeting a panther on an
afternoon walk; parties and gymkhanas
at the High Range Club; the reassuring
presence of indulgent servants. But, lying
in wait for not-quite-six-year-old Isla
and her older sister is a bleak Perthshire
boarding school, complete with all the
agonies of homesickness, chilblains,
tripe, liberty bodices, and cuddling a
cooling hot water bottle ‘because it felt
a bit like Ayah’.
It was to be five years before Isla and
Fiona saw their parents in India again
and another long stretch of schooldays
intervened before the family was
permanently reunited. Blair casts an
unflinching eye on the gulfs in
understanding that open within the
closest families as a result of long
separation. Other difficult topics are
tackled with similar insight and
compassion: the impossible challenge
that life in a jungle outpost posed for
some city-bred expatriate wives; the gin
and adultery that, for others, filled the
gaps left by absent children; the caste
system; the ambivalent relationships
between sahibs and servants.
Finlays readers, especially those
with South Indian connections, will
be intrigued by her pictures of an
earlier era: days of tent pegging and
thunderboxes, and when the company
paid planters an allowance considerably
greater for a horse than for a wife.
Blair takes wing when writing about the
trials and triumphs of establishing a
career in acting in the London of the
1960s, of marriage to the actor Julian
Glover and about her beloved family
which, today, includes two small
granddaughters. If ever a memoir
deserved the adjective ‘heartwarming’
this is it.
A Tiger’s Wedding is available
at £18, also as an ebook from
www.amazon.co.uk and as an audio
download, recorded by the author,
from www.audible.co.uk.
A Lot o Genuine Folks and a Wheen o Rogues by Richard Stenlake
Richard Stenlake gathers up the many
threads that make up the story of
Catrine, to weave a compelling picture
of a Scottish mill town in its heyday
and its decline. The first section sets
the scene: a model enterprise born of
the 18th century Age of Improvement,
built on the lines of Richard Arkwright’s
revolutionary water frame mill and a
foundation stone of the thriving new
Scottish cotton industry.
James Finlay & Company bought Catrine
in 1801 and, for more than 160 years,
their mill was to provide the raison d’être
of an entire village. Its story is told in the
Ayrshire voices of some of the now
elderly people who once worked there.
Their detailed, hands-on descriptions of
every aspect of mid-20th century cotton
processing – carding, roving, spinning,
weaving, beetling, bleaching and dyeing
– will be a boon to future historians of
industry. Amid the technicalities are
poignant images: children ducking under
the clattering looms; spinning machinists
working in bare feet because the oil on
the floors made shoes fall apart; the
sewing machine accidents that could
leave a operator with a needle through
her finger.
Even more interesting is the picture they
paint of a vanished community, one
where everybody depended on everybody
else in a village known as the Queen of
the West. Away from the hard, dirty and
sometimes dangerous work of the mill,
these memories often take on an idyllic
quality. This is a world of Clydesdale
horses, of milk cans and penny caramels,
where the children play street football,
go birds nesting and swim in the mill
lade and the mill girls queue to stand in
the sinks after work on Fridays ‘getting
ready for the dancing’.
In 1970 harsh economic reality blew it
all away and the mill was sold for £1.
We should be grateful to The Catrine
Community Trust whose Memories
Project, financed by the Heritage Lottery
Fund, has unearthed a goldmine.
A Lot o Genuine Folks and a Wheen
o Rogues is available from Stenlake
Publishing Ltd. www.stenlake.co.uk.
or from www.amazon.co.uk. Price £16
22 Autumn/Winter ’11