Part of the fascination (and emerging purpose) of this project is noticing the imprinted biases I use to both narrate and analyse my ‘heritage’/’our’ hstory. 

In the beginning (before I accidently barrelled through into the ‘dirty secret’ of my Scots ancestry), I framed this narrative in ‘class’ terms: Peasant, Proletarian, Capitalist and…perhaps problematically, Citizen.  (And then I discovered the ‘Nobs’ lurking deep in the Scot’s undergrowth!)

But the ‘Peasant’ category didn’t fit the story telling.  Yes: my Irish, Gael and Scots heritage does include ‘Peasant’ experiences: tenant farmers surviving by means of subsistence agriculture, paying their rents in kind until their proprietors’ greed for silver forced them into the market-economy.

But there are also burgesses[i], maltsters[ii], cadgers[iii], distillers[iv], grocers[v] and artisan weavers[vi].

So, I fell back on ethnicity as an organising principle for the period before these culturally-defined strands were drawn into the boorach of industrialisation in the towns of West-Central Scotland: specifically Paisley and Glasgow.  It is in this furnace that the distinctive cultural strands are, progressively, smelted and alloyed through migration, exploitation and inter-marriage.

My alloyed Gael-Irish-Scot identity (or identification) is a consequence of a progressive loss of identity over the course of the Anthropocene.  But it is, still, a narrative in which ‘the only way is down’ (at least until the 2^nd quarter of the 20^th century).

Only one individual in this ancestral narrative bucks the trend: Thomas Niccol (1768-1845)[vii].  The Capitalist.

The aberration lasted barely a generation, at least in the case of my ancestry[viii].  His son, Thomas Niccol (1829-1911), my great-great grandfather, lived (and died) a ship-yard worker, not a ship-yard owner. 

There is an African blessing: may the food in your mouth taste sweeter than it did in your mothers.

Ironically, given the importance to the Greenock economy of refining slave-grown sugar, Thomas, within the constraints of his time, experiences the greatest degree of ‘sweetening’ in this extended narrative.  He feels, to me, like a ‘class-enemy’, a beneficiary of the processes of capitalist accumulation that have led to our present predicament. 

But he is simply a man on the make, prospering on the ‘rising tide’ of imperialist exploitation, industrial development and ethnic clearances in the hinterland.   Who can blame him?  Though, of course, ‘I’ do.

Is Thomas, then, the ‘black sheep’ of the family, with fewer excuses and extenuating circumstances than most?

Perhaps these vignettes can cast some light…

[i] High degree of confidence

[ii] High degree of confidence

[iii] Medium degree of confidence

[iv] Medium degree of confidence

[v] Low degree of confidence

[vi] Low degree of confidence

[vii] Though clearly the Burnes, as merchants and burgesses, and the Steins, who went on to become important distillers of whisky in Scotland and Ireland, also enjoyed relatively high levels of prosperity for their time. (We’ll come to the Nobs later in the project.)

[viii] Though some of Thomas’ other children probably continued to prosper: for example, his son, Henry, who was a founding force in New Zealand’s shipbuilding industry and his daughter Catherine, who married the Greenock coal merchant and future sugar refiner, William Baird.