Born in Braid Street, Glasgow (near St George’s Cross) on 10 November 1879 to James and Agnes Cook (née Henderson). Her parents were married on 7 November 1879 (three days before she was born) in the St Rollox district of Glasgow. Her father was a lithographer, and Agnes herself was a cardboard cutter at the time of her marriage to Thomas in 1910.
Duncan Graham Livingstone
Brother of Thomas, born in Balmoral Terrace, Lurgan, on 2 June 1880. Worked for Anchor Line Cruises and sailed the Glasgow-New York route aboard the TSS (twin-screw steamship) Columbia from 1908 to 1910. Fought in the Army Service Corps from 1918 to 1919. Lived between Belfast and Glasgow.
Joseph Livingstone
Father of Thomas, born in 1847 in Lurgan, County Armagh, in the north of Ireland, the son of John Livingstone, a teacher of English, and Mary Ann Livingstone (née Hare, she died near Rutherglen in March 1881). Lurgan is 19 miles south-west of Belfast, and was known as a centre of the linen industry. He was married three times: to Sarah Gilpin in 1867 in Seagoe Parish Church (she died in January 1873); to Mary Cairns on 3 October 1873; and to Jane Weir in January 1885 (she died in 1909). All of his children were with Mary Cairns, whom he married in Maralin (or Magheralin) in County Down in the north of Ireland. She had previously been married to a Mr McKinlay. She died in October 1884 shortly after the birth of her youngest daugher, Mary Livingstone, while still at the Lurgan residence of her father, Thomas Cairns.
Joseph Livingstone worked as a clerk for the Caledonian Railway Company from 1876, and later as a mercantile clerk. He moved to 10 India Street, Rutherglen, in the 1880s, then lived at 3 Greenlodge Terrace, Bridgeton, Glasgow. He was a member of the Ancient Order of Foresters, a friendly society, and the Carnbroe Loyal Orange Lodge, a Loyalist and Unionist ‘secret society’ with its origins in the north of Ireland. Carnbroe is a village to the south of Coatbridge.
Josephine Livingstone
Daughter of Samuel and Nellie Livingstone. Thomas’ niece. Born 28 April 1902 in Glasgow. Also known as Ina.
Mary Ann Livingstone (née Hare)
Mother of Joseph and paternal grandmother of Thomas. Died of chronic bronchitis on 7 March 1881 at 3 George Gray Street, Eastfield, Rutherglen.
Nellie Livingstone (née Muir Meikleham)
Married to Samuel, Thomas’ brother. Her parents were James Meikleham and Elizabeth Meikleham (née Muir).
Samuel John Livingstone
Brother of Joseph and uncle of Thomas. Born 1856 and worked as a railway clerk and as a coal merchant. He was married to Mary Elizabeth McColl, a draper’s assistant, in 1883 by a Church of Scotland minister at their home at 543 Dalmarnock Road, Glasgow.
Samuel John Livingstone
Brother of Thomas, born in Balmoral Terrace, Lurgan, in 1878. Worked as a grocer’s assistant, then a grocer’s manager, in a branch of Cochrane’s. He was married to Nellie Muir Meikleham on 28 January 1902 at 217 Broad Street, Mile-End, Glasgow by a minister of the United Free Church. They had two children, Josephine (also known as Ina) in 1902 and Samuel John, in 1919.
Samuel Livingstone Junior
Son of Samuel and Nellie Livingstone. Thomas’ nephew. Born 1919.
Thomas Cairns Livingstone
Born 4 June 1882 at 10 India Street, Rutherglen, the only one of six children of Joseph and Mary Livingstone to be born in Glasgow. Josephine, Lily, Duncan, Samuel and Mary were born in Lurgan, County Armagh, in the north of Ireland. Thomas’ mother died in 1884 when Thomas was aged two, and he was raised by his father, his older siblings and his step-mother Jane. The family moved to 4 French Street, Bridgeton around 1900. He was schooled in Rutherglen and took extra classes in English and French.
Thomas started work in 1895 and began courting Agnes Smart Cook in 1903. They were engaged on 19 December 1908 and married on 10 June 1910 in Agnes’ home at 37 Whitefield Road, Ibrox, by the Reverend John Tarish of the Tron United Free Church.
Their first home was at 20 Morgan Street in Govanhill, where their son Thomas Cairns Livingstone Junior was born in 1911. They moved to a tenement house at 14 Morgan Street in 1913.
Thomas worked as a mercantile clerk at 170 Ingram Street in central Glasgow in the offices of the firm of Paterson, Baxter and Company, which manufactured linen and sailcloth. Given that this address was in the heart of the warehouse district of the city, manufacturing may have taken place at different premises.
Thomas Cairns Livingstone Junior
Born on 9 August 1911, the only child of Thomas and Agnes. Attended Victoria Primary School in Batson Street, Govanhill. At the time of his birth, it was the custom in Scotland to give a first son his paternal grandfather’s first name and his mother’s maiden name as his middle name. This happened with Thomas Senior in 1882, but when it came for him to name his son, he broke with tradition, choosing to continue his own mother’s maiden name rather than that of Agnes’ mother. Generally known in the diaries as Wee Tommy.
Claude Maxwell
Brother of Miss Maxwell, Wee Tommy’ teacher in Victoria Primary School. He joined the Royal Highland Regiment (the Black Watch) as a Private and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Durham Light Infantry. He was wounded but served the full term of the First World War.
Jenny and Kate Roxburgh
Sisters who lived in Radnor Street, Clydebank. Agnes probably knew Jenny through her earlier employment as they were both in the stationery trade, Agnes a cardboard cutter and Jenny as a stationery assistant. Later Jenny worked as a nurse on Maryhill.
Ruglen
The local pronunciation of Rutherglen.
John White
Married to Lily, Thomas’ sister. A telegraphist, he worked for the General Post Office.
Lily Florence White (née Livingstone)
Sister of Thomas, born in Hill Street, Lurgan, on 15 May 1878. She worked as a power loom weaver and on 9 November 1911 was married in Trinity Church, Anderston, Glasgow to John White. At the time, her address was 3 Greenlodge Terrace, his was 1054 Argyle Street, both Glasgow. She died on 28 October 1914 of uterine septicaemia, pleurisy and pneumonia, at her father’s home on Greenlodge Terrace, although her married residence was 44 Clincarthill Road, Rutherglen.1 She was buried in Rutherglen Cemetery.
1 Lily’s death certificate lists three causes of death, in order of likelihood. Doctors at the time tended to do this in the absence of a post mortem examination.
The great War may have begun with ‘the shot heard around the world’ when the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on 28 June 1914, but the roots of the conflict lay in the previous century. In broad terms, its origins involved the national politics, culture and economies of the combatant states, and a web of alliances struck between the leading European nations during the nineteenth century, following the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815 and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–5. In response to the murder,