Catriona Dunn:
After widowhood, Elizabeth lived in a cottage in Clydebank, which was destroyed in an air raid, after which she lived with the family in Dalmuir (htough death certificate states she died at Balloch). Whenever we passed the site of the cottage, your uncle Angus would say “There’s a bag of melted sovereigns under that new house”.

Alex, his brother Angus, and his sisters went to school in Fintry. Alex would leave home wearing boots, but as he approached school he would take them off and leave them in a hole in a wall and continue to school in bare feet. He did this as so many boys had no shoes that he didn’t want to be different. On the way home, he stopped at the hole in the wall and put his boots back on.

Alex was a serious, high-principled and intelligent man. Angus would say that his father’s idea of fun was to take down Pendlebury’s Arithmetic and spend an evening solving puzzles.

The name McKay that keeps cropping up as a middle name in the family is, I believe, the maiden name of Alex’ granny on his mother’s side.

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