What might
seem a small thing can have greater effects.
When Mrs. Peacock knocked the candle over during Hogmanay in a Heckling
Shed in Irvine, Ayrshire, (see above) and burned it down she ended the career
of a budding entrepreneur in the flax industry. Also a farmer he had to find other things to
do.
The story of his stay in Irvine is here and it is Robert Burns, who went
on to other things, notably an Excise Officer with a gift for words and song
for which he is better known. Had he
continued with the flax all sorts of possibilities arise. One is that he may have made his living in
Irvine.
But he might
have moved on to other places either in Ulster or elsewhere in Ireland or to a
part of England where the flax trade and industry was well established. It was only handful of years later that an
optician and clockmaker in Darlington invented a machine to do the messy
business of flax dressing.
Had Burns been
in the right place at the right time with either capital in hand or access to
it he could have become a leading industrialist having the qualities and
contacts etc. to make his way. It was a basic and expanding industry and the
chances were there.
Many areas of
work were not open to him. The
Incorporations of the burghs limited admissions to a number of key trades and
you had to be either family or close to family to enter them. It was why so many Scots moved on to other
places and other work in that period and with such ambition.
Banking was
one and in the vigorous, if erratic, expansion of the late 18th Century
financial sector in the City of London, Scots bankers, some from Ayrshire, were
well to the fore in imaginative schemes and risk taking. The idea of Burns the banker is a little hard
to take but it might have been.
The reason
this is intriguing is that one of my forebears was in Irvine at the same time
as Burns, close in age and married an Irvine girl. Some of their children were born in Ayr and
the others in Irvine and a grandson moved to Liverpool.
Could Burns
have become a Scouser in his time?
Perhaps it is better that Mrs. Peacock knocked over the candle.
It is fascinating to dwell on but impossible to know if a small event in our lives led to a major change of direction or if we would have ended up on the same track anyway.
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