Tour Scotland 4K short travel video clip, with Scottish music, of the exterior and interior of Holmwood House on ancestry, genealogy, family history visit to Cathcart, Glasgow, Britain, United Kingdom. The house is the finest and most elaborate residential villa designed by the Scottish architect Alexander " Greek " Thomson. Holmwood was constructed for James Couper, a paper manufacturer in 1857 and 1858. Couper and his brother Robert owned the Millholm paper mill in the valley of the White Water of Cart immediately below the villa. The polychromatic decoration was designed by Thomson and executed by Campbell Tait Bowie. The most notable survival is in the dining room which has a frieze of panels enlarged from John Flaxman's illustrations of Homer's Iliad. Alexander "Greek" Thomson was born on 9 April 1817 in the village of Balfron in Stirlingshire. The son of John Thomson, a bookkeeper, and Elizabeth Cooper Thomson, he was the ninth of twelve children. His father, who already had eight grown children from his previous marriage, died when Alexander was seven. The family consequently moved to the outskirts of Glasgow, but tragedy struck when the eldest daughter, Jane, and three of her brothers died between 1828 and 1830, the year that Alexander's mother died. The remaining children moved with one of the older brothers, William, a teacher, and his wife and child to Hangingshaw, just south of Glasgow. The Thomson boys all worked from a young age, but the children were also home schooled. Alexander's older brother, Ebenezer, was employed as a bookkeeper in a lawyer's office, possibly Wilson, James, and Kays, and later became a partner in the business. Alexander Thomson began work in 1834, as a clerk in a lawyers office in Glasgow. One of their clients was an architect, Robert Foote, who was impressed by seeing Thomson's drawings and took him on as an articled apprentice. On 21 September 1847, Thomson married Jane Nicholson, granddaughter of the architect Peter Nicholson, in a double wedding ceremony with her sister, Jessie, who married John Baird II. They had twelve children in total and would later lose five of them in an epidemic. Thomson died on 22 March 1875 at his home in Moray Place in Strathbungo, Glasgow, fittingly in one of his own creations. The architect was buried in the lair adjacent to that in which his five deceased children were laid to rest, in Gorbals Southern Necropolis, on 26 March 1875, and he was joined there by his widow, Jane, in 1889. Of interest to folks with ancestry, genealogy or Scottish Family Roots in Scotland who may wish to visit one day. Find things to see and do in Scotland where you are always welcome.
All photographs are copyright of Sandy Stevenson, Tour Scotland, and may not be used without permission.
View the most recent Tour Scotland photographs
No comments:
Post a Comment