Lives in Cricket No 39 - Alec Watson

14 George Watson Robert Ireland | | Robert m Elizabeth (Rebecca?) ___________________________|___________________________ | | | | | George Rebecca Alexander Elizabeth John m Ann(ie) ___________________________|___________________________ | | | | | | | Frances Rebecca George Catherine Alexander Mabel Robert We do not know exactly why the Watsons left Ireland, but, as earlier remarked, the likely cause was the Great Famine in Ireland produced by the failure of the potato crop in the mid to late 1840s. The worst of its terrible effects were in the west of the country, but Ulster did not escape, and there would have been pressure on many of its inhabitants to consider emigration. Many did indeed go to the United States, but considerable numbers also came to Scotland. The main attraction there was the work available in the Lanarkshire coal mines and iron works. Their expansion had meant a shortage of labour there, and Devine in The Scottish Nation (p503) tells us that the Lanarkshire industrialists placed advertisements in the Belfast newspapers for specific jobs for skilled and semi-skilled workers. Housing, and schooling for children, was also to be provided. Probably these promises attracted the Watsons to Scotland, though there may still have been problems. Obviously they were not among the 47,000 Irish ‘paupers’ which Devine mentions as being deported back to Ireland, but there was still hostility towards the Irish, particularly the Roman Catholics among them; though, as noted above, the Watsons seem to have been Presbyterian Protestants. The Rev W. Thomson in The New Statistical Account of Scotland (Volume VIII, p655) notes that ‘a great many Irish are everywhere to be found’, and deplores the consequent friction between the parties. Perhaps that is one reason why Alec Watson seems to have wanted to suppress his Irish origins. By the time of the 1851 census the Watsons had settled in Merrystone Square, with the children probably attending the Langloan School which the ironmasters had established. By the 1860s Langloan Parochial School is shown in The Third Statistical Account of Scotland (Volume VIII, p220) as having an average daily attendance of thirty taught by one master. Unsurprisingly none Early Life