This house was previously known as 24 Princes Square, and is the end house in Robert Weir’s terrace built in 1877-8. You can read Robert Weir’s story elsewhere, though I warn you it’s a sad one.
The subsequent residents were mostly typical Glaswegian middle-class businessmen, selling calico, timber, boilers, fish, ice and gas. Here are their stories.
The last article in the series on Strathbungo’s commercial motor garages, but this one covers much more than just Scottish Cars. You wouldn’t believe it now, but Titwood Road was once a hive of industry, covering cars, photography, catering, indoor tennis, bowls, boxing, engineering, boot making, cold storage, veterans, and a large dairy. Almost all evidence of this has now vanished.
Lane off Waverley Street, the original line of Titwood Road
Titwood Road was originally a farm lane that led over the railway where Crossmyloof Station now sits. The tenements of Waverley Gardens were built with their back courts facing directly onto the lane, but in 1922 the road was realigned a little further north, providing new plots for the Pollok Estate to feu on the south side of the road. At the Pollokshaws end, these plots were used for housing, as extensions of the Moray Park development of red sandstone houses by James Wright (Strathbungo’s Gardens) and the white houses of William Todd Aitkenhead (Carswell Gardens). From opposite Carswell Gardens up to Minard Road, the plots were all feued for commercial purposes.
The story of 6 Moray Place concerns two Glasgow family firms; first the slippery business of the Fergusons, specialists in soap, oil and lubricants, and second the bunnetry of the Grays, hat and cap manufacturers. The following is research based on the database entry for 6 Moray Place. The Ferguson family is well documented on Ancestry.co.uk by the user GKang, with pictures from user Ian Faris, and the following includes a summary of that work .
John Alexander Ferguson. Source: Ian Faris, Ancestry.co.uk
John Alexander Ferguson was born to William Ferguson, a smith and farrier, and Mary White, both of Muirkirk, on 27 February 1819 at Garscube Road in Port Dundas. Mary died in 1825 and William remarried. Of thirteen children, 10 of whom were boys, John was the oldest surviving son.
John married Elizabeth Ferguson, daughter of David Ferguson and Mary Ann Galt of Girvan, in Nicholson Street in September 1846, and they had nine children over the next seventeen years. They lived in the Gorbals and Tradeston in the 1850s. Addresses included Crown Street, and in 1861 at 8 South Apsley Street, but business was good and shortly after they moved to the newly built property in Moray Place, where their final child Alice was born.
Some letters survive; Elizabeth added a note to a letter of her husband’s in 1848, which gives some idea of how difficult life could be in the Gorbals, even for the better off.
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