When Kitty Came To London

By Teresa Pyott

In 1952, Teresa Pyott’s father received an inheritance, including a London house, from a woman to whom he was not related. Teresa’s parents, hardworking but modestly paid actors, found their lives transformed by this change in their fortunes. Teresa had grown up with stories of ‘Aunt Catherine’ Linklater, as she was known in the family, but it was only much later, after her father’s death, that she asked herself how this inheritance came about. Was there a long-buried family secret to unravel? What was the connection between the Linklaters and the Pyotts? Did it all begin when ‘Kitty came to London, a little girl,’ and, if so, when was that?

The search for the truth led Teresa to Orkney, Essex, London, an asylum, elementary schools, and seafarers who voyaged to the Moravian mission settlements in Labrador and across all the world’s great oceans. In her quest, she found tragedy and triumph against the odds in family stories spanning a century and found the answer to the question she began with.

When Kitty Came to London is a captivating story about family secrets concealed in the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Apr 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805148289

Teresa Pyott

Teresa Pyott grew up in North London and Aldeburgh, Suffolk, and is the daughter of actors Sheila Raynor and Keith Pyott. She was educated at boarding schools in Tunbridge Wells and France. After raising her family, she went on to work in higher and further education. Now retired and living near Brighton, she enjoys her grandchildren, researches family history and leads a U3A group called ‘Writing Your Life Story’.

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Copyright © 2024 Teresa Pyott

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Troubador Publishing Ltd

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Web: www.troubador.co.uk

ISBN 9781805148289

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

To my father, Keith Pyott (1902–1968), actor

And to his beloved ‘Aunt Catherine’ (1870–1951), teacher, whose legacy meant so much to my Pyott family

Contents

Acknowledgements

1  In the Beginning

2  Joe’s Letter

3  Joseph Linklater of Graemsay

4  Margaret Corrigill of North Walls

5  Joseph and Margaret – Married Life

6  Margaret – The Missing Wife

7  Schooling in Stromness

8  Joseph’s Seafaring Career and Later Life

9  Joe – The ‘Poor Unhappy Laddie’

10  Catherine – ‘The Intellectual One’

11  Annie – The Legendary Cook

12  John – Another Life on the Ocean Wave

13  Farewell to Stromness

Epilogue  Journey’s End

Acknowledgements

Throughout the fifteen or more years that I have been researching and writing the story of Catherine Linklater and her family, I have received invaluable help and advice from many people and organisations in Orkney and further afield.

As I set out on my quest for Aunt Catherine and her family, I made two visits to Orkney with my husband in 2008 and again in 2010. It was a privilege to visit Hopedale, the home of Archie and Elizabeth Bevan, who made us so welcome and provided a wealth of information about the history of the house and its occupants. We were also fortunate to meet Jim and Marion Knight. Jim, a relative of the Linklaters and himself a sea captain, told us of Joseph Linklater’s work with the Moravian Church mission ships. On Graemsay, Mick Braddock kindly took us to the Kirkyard and showed us Fillets Farm, Joseph Linklater’s childhood home. On a later trip, thanks to Arthur Budge, we visited the site of the Hall of Seatter in North Walls, the childhood home of Margaret Corrigill, Catherine’s mother. To all those, in Orkney and elsewhere, who have welcomed us and helped with my research over the years, I am most grateful.

In Orkney

George Gray and his colleagues in the Orkney Family History Society office in Kirkwall.

Janette Park and Rebecca Marr at the Stromness Museum.

Lucy Gibbon at the Orkney Archives.

Patricia Long, for her assistance in searching the Orkney Archives, including a wealth of information from the Stromness school logbooks.

I am also grateful to Norman Davidson, who grew up on Graemsay and is related to the Linklaters, for his helpful advice and interest in the project.

Like anyone interested in the history of Orkney, I acknowledge a huge debt of gratitude to the writings of Bryce Wilson.

In Scotland

Jane Harris of Janeology, a professional researcher from whom I commissioned a report on ‘Graemsay and North Walls Schooling’. This proved invaluable and I have referred to the texts she identified in my resumé of education in these places.

Carole McCallum, university archivist at Glasgow Caledonian University and co-author of Glasgow Caledonian University: Its Origins and Evolution.

The staff of the Special Collections Library at the University of St Andrews.

In Canada

Kory Penney at the Maritime History Archive, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Ashley Schers at the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Archives of Manitoba.

In Australia

Max Gleeson, wreck diver and author of The Vanished Fleet of the Sydney Coastline.

Mark Grealy, researcher at Archival Access Victoria.

In England

Lorraine Parsons, archivist at the Moravian Church Archive and Library in London.

Jayne Shrimpton, fashion historian and ‘photo detective’.

A.B. Demaus, author of Ships with a Mission, and his son, Robert Demaus.

Diane Kendall and the heritage volunteers at the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in London.

Louise Harrison at the London Metropolitan Archives, who searched out invaluable information on Annie Linklater’s teaching career in London, and her colleagues.

Valina Bowman-Burns at the Thurrock Museum.

Jane Bass and colleagues at the Essex Record Office.

The ever-helpful staff at the British Library and the National Archives.

Many thanks also to Carolynn Smith and Patrick Ferriday, who read early versions of my manuscript and provided valuable feedback; and to Jenny and Steve Kirton who made helpful suggestions for cover ideas.

Mike Warren, photographer, for enhancing the image of my father, and photographing the Orkney chair. The images of Catherine Linklater (front cover) and Keith Pyott are from the author’s collection.

And finally, last but by no means least, a very special thank you is owed to my husband, Bernard Hall, whose wisdom, advice and constant encouragement has sustained me throughout the researching and writing process.

1

In the Beginning

In 1952, my father, Keith Pyott, received a substantial inheritance, including a London house, from a woman called Catherine Linklater, to whom he was not related. In my experience, such windfalls are, to say the least, unusual. If my father was not related to ‘Aunt Catherine’, as she was known in our family, was she a friend? But if a friend, how close? And if not a friend, then what? Did some dark, unspoken family secret lie buried between the sheets in a murky, never-to-be-mentioned past?

The inheritance transformed the material lives of our family overnight. My parents, Keith Pyott and Sheila Raynor, were successful but far from affluent jobbing actors. The family income depended on their work in repertory theatre and later in radio, films and television. By the time I was born in May 1950, my brother, David, was eighteen and our family was living in modest circumstances in a rented North London flat. The inheritance enabled my parents to buy a cottage in Aldeburgh, Suffolk and a car, and later to pay for my boarding school education. They continued as actors throughout their working lives, but in changed material circumstances.

Long after my father’s death in 1968 and that of my mother in 1998, when it was too late to ask either of them, I wanted to know how it was that Catherine Linklater came to make my father the principal beneficiary in her will. What follows recounts how I found the answers to many of my questions in the remarkable lives and times of a branch of the Linklater family from Orkney – Catherine; her father, Joseph; her mother, Margaret; her brothers, Joe and John; and her sister, Annie.

Like the tide going out on a deserted beach, my research gradually uncovered an entirely innocent and long-lasting friendship between our families, the Linklaters and the Pyotts, going a long way back to the West India Docks in London in the nineteenth century, where the Linklater men were seafarers and my great-grandfather, James Pyott, was a marine chronometer maker and watchmaker. It was this proximity in London, and perhaps a common interest in ships and their equipment, that probably led to the initial contact between the families. What follows is the story of the Linklaters of Stromness – the Pyott story is for another time.

2

Joe’s Letter

Among the papers I waded through after my mother’s death, I found this remarkable letter. The writer, Joe (Joseph) Linklater, aged thirty, is writing to Arthur Pyott, aged thirty-one. The two young men are clearly close friends and it is evident from the letter that the families have been intertwined for some years. The letter is undated, though there is evidence pointing to it being written on Sunday 20 August 1899, the day before Joe’s ship, the Tasso, sailed from Tyne Dock in Newcastle for Galveston in Texas.

S.S. Tasso

Tyne Dock

Sunday

Dear Arthur

I received your letter yesterday but too late to wire to the General. I was very sorry I couldn’t get away to see him before he went. We shall miss him very much and I suppose you are realising that now 74 will not be the same place without him.

He will be specially grafted on our memories by a number of little dramatic incidents we will never forget. Now he is gone the stake that has held us to nearly all our old associations is drawn and we shall all be spluttering in a new sphere.

I only hope we shall always keep together as much as possible which on the strength of an association as old as ours should not be difficult to do. It began when all the family were together and Kitty came to London a little girl.

How on earth the General exercised so much toleration towards me in years past I can’t understand. I must have tried him pretty sorely sometimes. Poor unhappy laddie Ah! God bless ma soul. No more sighs in the shop now. No more fiery dramatic speeches. No one to go to when you want information on any conceivable thing. No one to tell us what to read and bring it to our memories after we have read it. No more apparitions on the stairs at three o’clock in the morning. No more wee droppies together (which had got quite common lately) … We shall miss him indeed. With no 74 and no Emma in it, I shall feel very uncomfortable in London for a long time to come. Good old soul, what she has done for me. The influence of your angel mother works through the whole piece from beginning to end.

I should have liked to have met Nell in the old place somehow, which I would have done had I got off. I will see her next summer if not before. Give her my love.

I posted a couple of views to Edith last night. I addressed it in the Post Office and as I forgot the number of her office I sent them to 74. One is a view of the port of Barcelona and one of Columbus’s monument there. I hope they arrive alright. I expect a letter will arrive for me this week, it will only be a receipt for a suit of clothes I got on the strength of getting a holiday this time.

I think the Hamburg affair is slowly dying out, going the same way as the others. Perhaps one will come to stop some day.

I am wiring the General at Port Said, ought to catch him there.

We sail tomorrow for Galveston. Write in a week to Tasso, Messrs Muller, Galveston, Texas, USA. How about the chinamen business? The best way to get them would be to make a contract with one, I should think.

Nothing more just now. Give my love to Emma and Edith. Give Annie my address. She should be in London soon. May meet you in Cardiff next time.

Always yours affectionately, Joe

I did not at first appreciate the significance of this letter beyond the immediate emotional impact of the fondness between those mentioned. Yet here, in the names of members of the two families, was evidence of the close relationship between my father’s family, the Pyotts, and the Linklater family, which included Catherine.

It took me a little while to unpick who was who in the letter and how it confirmed the link between the two families. Joe, writing to ‘Dear Arthur’, was the eldest of Joseph and Margaret Linklater’s four children. Arthur was Arthur Pyott, my grandfather, a year older than Joe and recently married. Emma was Emma Pyott, Arthur’s sister. The ‘General’ was James Pyott, Arthur’s father and my great-grandfather. The reference to ‘74’ meant 74 West India Dock Road, where the Pyott family lived from the early 1870s until about 1901, and where James Pyott had a business making and selling nautical instruments. ‘Your angel mother’ was Alice Pyott, Arthur’s mother, who had died in 1885. ‘Nell’ was Helen Wilkes, Arthur’s wife and my grandmother. Edith was Edith Pyott, another of Arthur’s sisters. Annie was Annie Linklater, Joe’s sister.

And what of Kitty, of whom Joe writes: ‘It began when all the family were together and Kitty came to London a little girl’? Kitty is Catherine Linklater, the second child of Joseph and Margaret Linklater, who was preceded in the family by Joe and followed by Annie and John. The letter makes clear that it was Kitty coming to London that began ‘an association as old as ours.’ Many years later, when Catherine died in 1951, leaving her worldly possessions to my father, it could be said that the association that began in London in her childhood came to an end at that point.

Through the letter, I understood something of the affection and closeness between the Pyott and Linklater families, but I was left with unanswered questions: how did it come about and why did one of the Linklater family or their descendants not inherit rather than my father?

To answer these questions, I set out to discover the story of Catherine, our benefactor, and her family, looking all the while for the points where their lives crossed with those of the Pyotts. The story begins with the life and times of Joseph Linklater, father of Joe, Catherine, Annie and John.

3

Joseph Linklater of Graemsay

Joseph Linklater was born at Fillets Farm on the island of Graemsay, Orkney, on 7 July 1838. His parents, James Linklater and Ann Mowat, were married on 28 December 1830. James Linklater had been born at Fillets on 23 February 1805 and lived there until his death in 1872 at the age of sixty-seven.

At the time of the 1841 census, the farm was occupied by two Linklater households: James and Ann and their family at Upper Fillets, and James’ brother, Henry, his wife, Margaret, and their family in the other half of the property. The two wives, Margaret and Ann, were sisters who had grown up on the island, the daughters of Hugh Mowat and Christian Oman of Sandside.

The island of Graemsay, about a mile and a half in length and a mile in breadth, sits in Hoy Sound to the south of Stromness and north of Hoy, its gentle green slopes little changed since the time of Joseph’s birth. The island’s population recorded in the 1841 census was 214. Ten years later, it had grown to 286, an increase largely accounted for by the arrival of workers to build and operate the island’s lighthouses, which were commissioned in May 1851. Bryce Wilson’s account of the island at that time depicts a community on the cusp of change as the old industries of kelp-gathering and straw plaiting gave way to agriculture and cattle-rearing.¹

For the men, given the small size of the thirty-five individual crofts on the island, the sea had traditionally offered alternative employment, whether as fishermen or crew members on voyages further afield, including the Arctic whaling fleets. It was a means of supplementing the family income and enabling them to pay the rent and to feed and clothe their growing families. In the 1841 census, James Linklater is recorded as a ‘seaman away at sea’. In 1851, his occupation, like that of his brother, Henry, is listed in the census as ‘seaman and farmer of four acres’. Ten years later, James and Henry are shown as farming thirty acres. According to Bryce Wilson, the number of crofts on Graemsay had almost halved by 1881, their size increasing as they decreased in number. Increased opportunities to raise cattle and grow arable crops for export had led to new farming methods and a demand for bigger land holdings.²

Joseph Linklater was the fourth of James and Ann’s eight children, two of whom (James, born in 1833, and Hugh, born in 1846) died in infancy. His siblings were: Christina, born in 1831; Margaret, born in 1836; James, born in 1841; Ann, born in 1844; and William, born in 1850. During the period that James and Ann were raising their family, nine children were born to Henry and Margaret,