#15166, Agnes KAYE

Agnes Kaye was born at Mill Brae, Cadder, near Glasgow. Her parents Robert and Bethia expected her to be well brought up and educated so she was sent to Edinburgh to school. She learned the piano and to sew, she wrote beautifully and requested her father’s permission to have a library ticket, so she enjoyed reading.

Her mother died when Agnes was 26, after which she took on the rôle of her father’s secretary, keeping his books. She learned to be scrupulously organised as he liked to keep tight control of his affairs. He wrote hand-written copies of all the letters he sent that were carefully filed.

Agnes married Matthew Gray, who was three years younger than she and became a frugal housewife and mother to their 7 children, darning their socks and getting their boots mended. She always valued her piano, that moved with them to London in 1866.

As Matthew succeeded in business she liked to indulge in a little more luxury, enjoying entertaining, going out in her carriage and dressing well. She disliked extravagance and frivolity but expected to be comfortably looked after.

Her sons travelled widely for their submarine cable laying work and when they were away she remained anxious as to their well being, giving advice and trusting them to behave sensibly. She prayed fervently that God would look after them. While she maintained regular correspondence with them, she insisted on return post giving full of details of their day to day lives by every mail steamer, as well as supplies of Coca. All these letters were kept; both theirs to her and hers to them. They were brought back to London for safekeeping and stored along with ALL her father’s paperwork. Her daughter Bessie kept every scrap of correspondence too. This family archive was handed down through her niece, Edith Mary Gray, to the present generation.

In 1870 on leaving Scotland for his regular climbing holiday in the Alps, the 40 year old Rev George McCorkindale, Minister of Gourock, where the Grays had lived, put a note of their London address in his pocket with a promise to visit. It was this note that proved the essential link in his identification when, after a tragic accident, his and other’s frozen corpses were brought down Mont Blanc into Chamonix. The story is told in her letters.

In 1872 Agnes took her son Matthew Hamilton Gray, then 18 years old, with her to Iceland. She wrote a diary of the trip in pencil though the diary entries petered out as she was being nursed to health by an Icelandic family. In it she sketched the bride’s traditional headdress at a wedding they attended. She illustrated their itinerary with charming sketches of the rustic local houses they stayed in. The diary is still available today and is a moving record of a courageous excursion.

Inheriting shops and other property in Glasgow from her father, Agnes managed the leases and upkeep herself, visiting Scotland often, both for that reason and for her and Bessie to keep contact with their many friends and family there.

Agnes often travelled with Matthew and other family members on his business trips to Europe: to France, Switzerland and Spain and to Canada where they visited friends and family. She was though reluctant to join him for shooting holidays to Scotland. Perhaps she didn’t relish the exercise.

In her later years she became diabetic and died from a carbuncle before any effective treatments were available. She was an independent woman before her time and in the social history recorded in her correspondence, left an important legacy for the present day.

Nicky Hibbin