Bruce

In 1124 a Norman knight called Robert de Brus rode north with a charter from King David I granting him Annandale. About 150 years later his descendant took the throne of Scotland as Robert I, the Bruce. Six hundred years after that, the name was still being written into Scottish registers by parish clerks. One of those entries belongs to our family.

This is the story of that family, told from the records it left behind: a weaver in Clackmannanshire, an innkeeper in Dunfermline, a penman in Edinburgh, a writing master in Sydney, a warehouseman in Epping and a Presbyterian minister. These are the people you meet in census books, ship registers and death certificates. Each one is real and each one is documented, and most of them never imagined anyone would come looking.

The paper trail runs unbroken from today back to a James Bruce born around 1819 whose father was a weaver. Beyond the weaver the trail goes faint, in exactly the place you would hope it might: Clackmannan, ancient seat of the Bruces who were the king's own kin. The Long Line follows that thread and shows where the last gap lies. What Comes Next explains how a DNA test could close it.

We know the weaver from a single line of handwriting, set down a world away. On 22 August 1889 a deputy registrar in Brisbane filled in the death of a seventy-year-old Scotsman. In the column for the father he wrote: James Bruce, Weaver. For the mother: Ann Hood.

That son told every census enumerator who asked that he came from Clackmannanshire or Fife, and twice he said Clackmannan outright. So the weaver most likely worked a loom in or near the little county town on the north bank of the Forth, in the years when Napoleon was fighting his way across Europe.

Weaving then was a cottage trade. The loom stood in the main room of the house, and its clack set the rhythm of the day. During the French wars the weavers did well; after Waterloo in 1815 their wages collapsed. Ann Hood came from a local family too: Hoods were marrying in Clackmannan, Alloa and Dollar in the same decades.

Two baptisms from Clackmannan parish show who else was there. In 1776 the miller at Linmiln, James Bruce, had a son James baptised. In 1792 a daughter was baptised “in his own house” to Lieutenant James Bruce, sixth son of the late Lord Kennet, of the Bruces of Kennet, a branch of the Clackmannan family. Either household could be the weaver's own. That puzzle is the subject of The Long Line.

James Bruce was born around 1819, the son of the weaver and Ann Hood. That was the very winter the bones of Robert the Bruce were lifted from the ruins of Dunfermline Abbey, ten miles east of Clackmannan.

By 1841 James had come to Dunfermline and was working as a linen weaver, his father's trade. On 2 January that year his banns of marriage were entered in the parish register with Elizabeth Drysdale, a Dunfermline girl whom the family called Betsy. The census that June finds the young couple, both about twenty, setting up home together.

Then James left the loom. By 1851 he was an innkeeper on Kirkgate, the old street that climbs to the Abbey doors, with Elizabeth as innkeeper's wife and three children at home: Thomas, Ann and baby John. Eldest son Thomas had been born in November 1841. A daughter, Helen, born in 1845, is not with them, and she probably died young. Ann was given her grandmother's surname, Hood.

The business grew. On 10 September 1854 Elizabeth gave birth to another son, James, and the register gives the father as James Bruce, hotel keeper, Guildhall Street. Guildhall Street ran off the High Street beside the great spired Guildhall, which had itself served as the Spire Hotel until the county took it over a few years before.

In 1861 the enumerator found them still on Guild Hall Street: James and Elizabeth, both 42, with John 12, Elizabeth 9, James 6 and Charles 4. A servant girl, Janet Aitken from Charlestown, lived in with them. Three rooms had windows. In twenty years James had gone from a rented loom to a hotel with a maid.

By 1871 the family had moved to the capital. James senior, now past fifty, was a coal agent, selling the coal of the Fife and Clackmannan pits to Edinburgh's homes and works. His sons had become clerks.

Young James, sixteen in 1871, was a clerk. In a world without typewriters, a clerk's handwriting was his livelihood. Ledgers, letters, invoices and contracts were all written by hand, and a clear, fast, elegant hand could make a career. James's hand was better than clear.

On 3 August 1880, at No. 23 London Street in the New Town, he married Mary Guthrie Seath, daughter of the builder Alexander Seath and Mary Anderson. Both were 25. The Rev. James Robertson of the United Presbyterian church in Broughton Street conducted the service in the bride's home. The groom's brother, Charles Drysdale Bruce, signed as a witness. The groom gave his address as No. 9 Antigua Street, his parents' house a few streets away.

Their first child, another James, was born on 30 May 1881. That spring's census shows the couple keeping house as a mercantile clerk and bookseller and his wife. Round the corner, James senior and Elizabeth, both 61, were still at 9 Antigua Street with their unmarried daughter Elizabeth and son Charles.

James was teaching by now as well as clerking. Through the 1882–83 session he was assistant writing master at the Watt Institution and School of Arts in Chambers Street, the forerunner of Heriot-Watt University. He also taught writing and book-keeping at George Heriot's Hospital evening classes. When he resolved to emigrate, the writing master he had assisted wrote him a reference, on the notepaper of the Ladies' College in Queen Street. The family kept it for more than a century:

“He writes a fine hand, keeps excellent order, knows the best methods of teaching, and is very conscientious in the discharge of his work. His moral character is excellent and high toned. It is a matter of regret to myself and a number of educational friends that Mr Bruce has resolved upon leaving this country…”Testimonial, Edinburgh, 29 May 1883

Within a few years of that 1881 census, almost the whole family had left Scotland. They did not go together. Like many emigrant families, they went one by one, each following the one before.

The parents seem to have gone first. When James senior died in 1889 his death record said he had been eight years in the colonies, which puts his arrival in 1881, within months of the census. Elizabeth was recorded as about three years in New South Wales when she died in 1885. Young James followed in 1883–84 with Mary and little James, the toddler born in Edinburgh. Their second son, Sydney Alexander, was born at Newtown on 19 August 1884, the first of the family to be born Australian.

Charles came too. On 30 December 1884, at her parents' home in Sydney, he married Annie Campbell Munro. The Sydney Mail printed the notice: “Charles Drysdale, youngest son of James Bruce, of Edinburgh, to Annie Campbell, only daughter of James Munro.” Unmarried Elizabeth came as well and lived out her life in Sydney, dying at St Leonards in 1922. Only John, the bank clerk, stayed in Scotland.

Elizabeth Drysdale did not have long in her new country. She was living with her son James at Camden Street, Newtown, when she died on 8 November 1885, aged 66. Her death was recorded as cholera, which in the language of the day usually meant a violent summer fever of the gut. James registered his mother's death. Five days earlier his wife had given birth to a daughter, Mary Elizabeth. Betsy was buried at Rookwood.

The eldest son, Thomas, made the longest journey. On 2 September 1886 he sailed from Glasgow with his wife Jane and a shipload of children on the Lizzie Iredale, bound for Queensland. They came ashore at Moreton Bay on 2 January 1887 after four months at sea: Thomas 42 and Jane 41, with Janet, James, Archibald, Jane, Mary, John, Charles, Frederick and the baby, Nimmo, who was one.

Old James, now a widower, went north too. He died in the Brisbane Hospital on 20 August 1889, aged 70, and was buried at Toowong the next day. His death entry listed his six living children and their ages: Thomas, John, Charles, Anna, Elizabeth and James. That Saturday The Queenslander carried a notice:

“BRUCE.—On the 20th August, at Brisbane, James Bruce sen., late of Dunfermline, Scotland, aged 70.”The Queenslander, 24 August 1889

In June 1884 a young Scot named David Angus opened a second-hand bookshop at 110½ Market Street, Sydney, with fifty pounds of capital and books sent out by a friend in Scotland. To announce it, a new arrival from Edinburgh wrote out one hundred opening notices by hand. His name was James Bruce.

Angus's shop became Angus & Robertson, the great Australian publishing house of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. The firm's archive history still names “James Bruce, later writing master of Sydney”, among the handful who helped it open.

He set himself up as Mr James Bruce, Professor of Penmanship, late of the Watt Institute and School of Arts, Edinburgh, with a private class-room at 60 Elizabeth Street. He taught commercial handwriting, the Civil Service hand, ladies' handwriting “in the fashionable styles”, and book-keeping and correspondence. Classes ran at midday, in the afternoon and in the evening, at two guineas a quarter, or one guinea for juniors. He wrote a textbook too, Bruce's Guide to Business Writing, “highly commended by the press”, price five shillings. His handbill was printed as a specimen of his own hand: To be preserved as a Specimen. The family did preserve it.

The family grew in Newtown, Petersham and Enfield. After Sydney Alexander came Mary Elizabeth (1885), Amy (1887), Arthur (1889) and Stanley Norman (1890). On Arthur's birth entry the father's occupation is simply Teacher. In October 1887 they lost little Sydney, aged three, and buried him at Rookwood.

James became the writing master of Sydney's schools. In December 1904 Sydney Grammar School printed its staff list, and there among the masters stands James Bruce, Writing Master. His obituary lists the rest: Newington, Scots College, St Ignatius' Riverview, the Presbyterian Ladies' Colleges at Croydon and Pymble, Edgecliff Preparatory, St Scholastica's, and Sydney and Ashfield Technical Colleges. On top of all that he ran private classes in the city for forty years.

Mary Guthrie Bruce died in 1908, aged about 53, and was laid in the Rookwood grave with her little son. Around 1916, at about sixty, James married again. His bride was Lily Hubble, and at the end of that year, when he was sixty-two, she gave him a last daughter, Hazel.

He was still a visiting master at half the good schools in Sydney when he fell ill with cancer. James Bruce died at his home, 87 Epping Avenue, Epping, on 5 June 1935, aged 80, and was buried at Rookwood with Mary and Sydney. The Sydney Morning Herald gave him his notice:

“Mr. James Bruce, visiting writing master to Sydney Grammar School, Newington, Scots, and St. Ignatius' colleges… died at his home at Epping on Wednesday. He also conducted private classes in handwriting in the city for 40 years. Many addresses of loyalty from Australian Parliaments were written by him. Before coming to Australia, about 50 years ago, he was Professor of Penmanship at an Edinburgh college.”Sydney Morning Herald, 8 June 1935

The other half of the story begins in the far north of Scotland, on the fertile Easter Ross shore of the Cromarty Firth.

John MacKenzie was born at Alness. Catherine McKenzie was born at Fearn, daughter of the farmer Roderick McKenzie and his wife Jessee. On 31 May 1881 they married at Calrossie, a farm between the two. Within two years they had emigrated to Queensland. They did not settle on the coast. They went inland to the goldfields of Charters Towers.

John worked as a labourer, a farmer and a miner. Their daughter Jessie Rachel was born on 4 February 1886, followed by Elizabeth in 1888, Catherine about 1891 and Hannah Campbell in 1893. One daughter, probably little Catherine, died young.

Catherine lived out her life in Charters Towers. She died in King Street on 28 March 1925, after 42 years in Queensland. Jessie, her eldest, gave the details for the register.

On New Year's Eve 1928, at St Stephen's Presbyterian Church in Phillip Street, Sydney, the writing master's eldest son married the miner's eldest daughter. James Bruce was a packer from Burwood, and 47. Jessie Rachel MacKenzie, of Woollahra, was about 42. Neither had married before. The Rev. Hugh Paton married them.

They made their home on Glenfern Road, Epping, then a railway suburb on the edge of orchards and poultry farms. There on 10 May 1931, in the depths of the Depression, Jessie gave birth at 45 to their only child. He was a James, of course, but everyone would call him Jim.

His eulogy remembered the household as strict Scottish Calvinist: “pretty much porridge and the catechism.” When the Epping minister proved too modern and allowed dancing in the church hall, James and Jessie moved to the church at Eastwood instead.

Jessie died at home, 3 Glenfern Road, on 26 March 1960, aged 74. The informant was her son, the Rev. James Bruce, of The Manse, Dungog. James lived on until 22 July 1968 and died at 87. They share a headstone at Macquarie Park Cemetery: In Loving Memory of Jessie Rachel Bruce … and James Bruce.

As a schoolboy Jim got to Epping station early so he could help the station master load the chicks into the guard's van. As a young man he worked in the signal boxes. Fifty years later he could still rattle off their names, and the thrill when something went wrong and the signalman was “in the cart”.

One evening in 1948 he walked into Scots Church in Sydney, where the visiting British preacher Dr Wylie Blue was in the pulpit, and went forward at the end of the service. From then on the Church had him. He threw himself into the extramural course for the ministry and served student placements all over Sydney. At Ryde North he met Bobbie, and they married in 1957.

On 18 December 1958 he was ordained at Dungog in the Hunter Valley. There the children grew up: Hamish, Margaret and Iain. Forty years later Dungog invited him back for the anniversary of his ordination, and he was overwhelmed by the welcome.

In the first week of spring 1970 he married Deidre. As minister of Hunter Baillie he began visiting Presbyterians in Royal Prince Alfred and the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children. He went on to found the Presbyterian chaplaincy at the Children's Hospital. He mentored deaconesses, served as Clerk of the Presbytery of Sydney “in his own meticulous fashion”, and later as its Moderator. When the Cowra congregation farewelled him at his retirement in 1998, they presented a quilt they had made in secret.

He retired to the far north coast, then built a home on the water at Saratoga to be near his children and grandchildren. He never really stopped working, and he was still supplying pulpits in his last weeks. On Sunday 28 May 2000 he preached at St Andrew's, St Ives, on the old motto of the Puritan Richard Baxter:

In things essential, unity.
In things doubtful, liberty.
In all things, charity.

The following Sunday, 4 June 2000, he died. At his memorial in St Peter's, North Sydney, his friend Peter Boase closed the eulogy with the words Jim had lived by: “I have done my best in the race, I have run the full distance, and I have kept the faith.”

Every first son in this story is a James. The weaver was James; so were the innkeeper, the writing master, the warehouseman and the minister. The minister's first son was a James too, James Alexander, though everyone knows him as Hamish, the Gaelic form of the same name.

Long before this site existed, Jim and then Hamish began the work it rests on. They ordered certificates from Edinburgh and Sydney, wrote to and heard from distant cousins, and built a tree tracing the Jameses back five generations. It all went into a binder. Every chapter above began as a page in that binder, and the new Scottish register images now sit beside those originals.

The family's pride in the name goes back a long way. Hamish has long kept a framed Family Name History, filled in on 10 October 1992. Firms like the Historical Research Center sold these to anyone called Bruce, and its account of the first generations borrows from Victorian legend. Its arms are a nice touch all the same. They are not the plain Annandale saltire but the version with a blue lion on a silver canton. That version belongs to the Earls of Elgin, chiefs of the name and a branch of the very Clackmannan family this story keeps returning to. Beneath them is the motto Fuimus: “we have been”.

He is the writing master's great-grandson, the innkeeper's great-great-grandson and the weaver's great-great-great-grandson. Through that unbroken chain of fathers and sons he carries the same Y-chromosome as all of them, back to the weaver of Clackmannan and whoever came before him. That is what makes the last chapter possible.

Follow the Long Line → Explore the family tree →