After two and a half years at Collieston, Glover was given what would prove to be his last posting in the Coastguard. According to the records he requested the move to the Bridge of Don station then situated at the mouth of the river Don, north of Aberdeen. There could have been several reasons for his request. Collieston was a little isolated and Tom, Alex and Martha were nearing the age for secondary schooling. There was also the problem of work for the older children. The transfer to the then fast-expanding, affluent Aberdeen area was a good move for the Glovers. The station was a big one, but at the age of forty-five and with a salary of £100 a year, running the Bridge of Don operation with a staff of six or seven was as far as Glover senior would go in the service.
The move from Collieston would have been short and relatively painless. In November 1849 eleven-year-old Tom moved with his family into the substantial, two-storey house which went with the Aberdeen appointment. The house adjoined a terrace of cottages where the Coastguard seamen and their families lived. Fronted by large vegetable gardens, it faced south and overlooked the Don spilling into the North Sea. Wild and open to the elements in winter, the situation of the house in the long summer days was especially pleasant.
From the upstairs windows of his new house Tom could see the prominent landmarks of the village of Old Aberdeen, an easy walk from his home. These were the twin fortified towers of St Machar’s Cathedral and, just a little further south, the stone crown on the roof of King’s College. These landmarks had dominated the skyline of Old Aberdeen for hundreds of years. The shops of the village would have supplied the Glover household with its everyday needs. For anything more the burgeoning city of Aberdeen was only a short carriage – or horse – ride south along King Street. Indeed, it was possible for Tom to see the mushrooming mill chimneys and church spires of the city from the garden of his house. The harbour and port of Aberdeen had developed round the mouth of the Dee and a second Coastguard station was sited on the north bank. Close by were clustered the city’s bustling shipyards. The golden sands of Aberdeen Bay covered the couple of miles between the Dee and the Don.
A schoolmate of Tom later wrote of ‘swimming in the Don with the son of the captain of the Coastguard’. Any swimming would have been done a mile or so upriver from the station house, in the less dangerous neuks beneath the Brig o’ Balgownie where even in the warmer summer months the water is still icily cold. This was the part of the Don where the young Lord Byron had swum on his half-holidays from Aberdeen Grammar School, fifty years before the young Tom Glover.
Tom, Alex and Martha would have spent many happy days exploring the endless sand-dunes and country and riverside on their doorstep. The three older boys were in their middle to late teens at the time of the move to the Bridge of Don and already in work or training.
The Census returns of 1851 record Charles, then aged twenty, as still living at home and list him as a clerk. He is likely to have been in training with a firm of shipping and insurance brokers in Aberdeen. The second son, William, was eighteen and had already left home to begin a long career at sea in the merchant marine. James, then aged seventeen, is also listed simply as a clerk and, like Charles, is likely to have been involved in shipbroking and insurance in Aberdeen. Both brothers had connections with a firm trading in Marischal Street, close to the city’s harbour and shipyards.
The three younger children, Tom, Alex and Martha, were thirteen, eleven and nine respectively at the time of the Census and all are listed as ‘scholars’. Since the move from Collieston there had been another addition to the Glover family. Alfred, the seventh surviving and last Glover child, was born in the Bridge of Don station house in November 1850. His mother was forty-three and his father forty-five at the time of Alfred’s surely unplanned birth and the baby five months old when the Census was taken. The only other resident at the station house, apart from the Glover parents, was a local girl, Ann Strachan, the domestic servant. With such a large family and a little baby to look after, it is likely that other domestic help came on a daily basis, perhaps daughters or wives of the station seamen.
Tom and Alex were enrolled as day pupils at the Gymnasium, or Chanonry House School, in Old Aberdeen. It was the best school in the area, sited in the village’s Chanonry and attended by the sons of the better-off. Old Aberdeen, never more than a large village but for centuries a separate burgh from ‘new’ Aberdeen, was beginning to be absorbed by its fast-growing neighbour to the south. The school attended by Tom and Alex was about a one-mile walk from their home. On their way to school the Glover boys would have crossed the Don by the ‘new’ Bridge of Don, within sight of the centuries-old Brig o’ Balgownie upriver.
Joining Don Street, they would have continued on into Old Aberdeen by the Seaton Estate, skirting the medieval St Machar’s Cathedral round which the burgh of Old Aberdeen had originally developed. The gracious, tree-lined Chanonry, the street where before the Reformation the canons of St Machar’s had lived, runs from the Cathedral to Old Aberdeen’s Town House. The Gymnasium stood on the west side of the Chanonry, just before this juncture north of the Town House and is the site of present-day Cruickshank Botanical Garden, part of the Aberdeen University complex.
The school’s curriculum emphasised the Classics and Religion and young Tom Glover received the typical Victorian education of a middle- to upper-class schoolboy. There was, though, an Engineering classroom at the school and it was perhaps here that Tom picked up his ability to work on a lathe – a hobby and skill which he kept for the rest of his life.
The Gymnasium was run to a strict routine and for a lively lad such as Tom it must have been restrictive. Yet there were organised games and sports for the boys of the school to burn off any excess energy. There was no St Machar’s Drive bisecting Old Aberdeen in those days and the playing fields of the Gymnasium stretched far up Cluny’s Wynd. The setting for the school was idyllic.
Perhaps Tom and Alex were a little jealous of their elder brothers having attended the more prestigious Aberdeen Grammar School. But the Gymnasium had its own reputation for excellence and, best of all, it was at most a twenty-minute walk from their home.
Away from the school Tom learned to row and sail. Almost certainly all of the Glover boys were trained in elementary seamanship by their father and his crew. Coastguard boats were tied up on the riverside, only yards from the front of their house. In one surviving photograph, young Alfred is pictured wading in the Don among the boats. It is likely that the Glover lads rowed and sailed with the regular crew of seamen living at the station. The sea dominated the lives of all the Glover family. As well as Glover senior serving as a Coastguard Chief Officer, William was in training as a ship’s master and Charles and James were beginning to make their way as shipbrokers in Aberdeen. It was an ideal place for the boys to begin that particular business – the shipyards of Aberdeen then had a reputation for fine ships throughout the maritime world.
Fishing was a popular pastime for the boys. Period photographs of the station house show various sized rods and fishing gear lying against the porch. The countryside around them gave young Tom the opportunity to learn to shoot bird and game. Most likely taught by his father, Tom would continue shooting into his old age.
In 1853, with Tom a fourteen-year-old attending the Gymnasium, the SS Duke of Sutherland was wrecked in Aberdeen Bay. Sixteen people were drowned in this tragedy which was witnessed by many hundreds watching from the flat shoreline of the Bay. The ship had foundered when entering Aberdeen harbour on 1 April of that year in an incident long remembered by those who watched. The harbour lifeboat was launched but capsized. Tom’s father was based on the Donmouth, a couple of miles north of Aberdeen harbour, but almost certainly would have been involved with his crew in the attempts at rescue. With his home and school within sight of the Bay, it would seem certain that young Tom was one of the many who viewed this drama.
The earliest Glover family photographs date from the mid- to late 1850s. Certainly they were taken before Glover retired from the Coastguard in September 1864, vacating the station house. The