Iain Whyte’s talk will deal with a problem that occurred after the Disruption of 1843 when nearly 500 ministers left the Church of Scotland, taking many members of their congregations with them, to form the Free Church. In order to build churches for the new Free congregations funding was sought from a range of sympathetic sources. The problem arose when it was accepted from Presbyterian churches in slave-holding communities in America. Needless to say, this was extremely controversial. The Reverend Dr Iain Whyte is a retired Church of Scotland minister who has published three books on attitudes to black slavery in Scotland.
A new home for the Antiquaries
In October 2014 problems with our previous meeting venue forced the Antiquaries to look for a new home. We discovered that the Park Centre in Kerr Street, Kirkintilloch, was available on Friday evenings and decided to move there. Two meetings were held in November, including one to make up for the forced cancellation of our October meeting, and a further meeting was held in the Park Centre on 5th December. All three were well attended and many comments appreciative of the ambience of the Park Centre have been received by the Committee. Warm thanks are due to the Society Vice President, Rosalind McMeekin, and the caretaker of the Park Centre, John McLaren, for their part in achieving this smooth transition. However, nothing is ever ‘writ in tablets of stone’ and the Antiquaries Committee is always keen to receive members’ views on options regarding date and place of meeting. Meanwhile we are grateful to have achieved a speedy and apparently painless transition to new surroundings.
William B Black: "The Templeton Mill collapse": Friday 5th December 2014
Our member Bill Black will describe a tragic event of 1889, when during high winds, a wall under construction at Glasgow’s famous Templeton Carpet Factory collapsed into an adjoining weaving shed. He will attempt to correct some of the mythology surrounding this event in which twenty-nine young women lost their lives. The Society is lucky to have Bill as a member and regular speaker, with his seemingly unlimited supply of talks, on a wide variety of interesting subjects, from all over the West of Scotland.
Don Martin: 'Kirkintilloch and Lenzie fifty years ago': Friday 21st November 2014
During the early 1960s the Society’s present secretary took a very large number of photographs of the Kirkintilloch/Lenzie area. His main purpose was to record local transport services, especially the declining railway network, the replacement of steam on the railways by diesel haulage, the disappearance of the Lawson branding on local buses, and the last years of the Forth & Clyde Canal before its 1962 closure. However, he also photographed many other local subjects, including street scenes. This year he has been re-visiting many of the sites to take 50-year equivalent views. Both old and new will be presented in this talk, postponed from Friday 10th October 2014.
Thomas Miur Festival: 13th -24th November 2014
The Thomas Muir Festival of local history, art and culture takes place in various locations in East Dunbartonshire during 13th - 24th November. The festival's programme may be accessed by clicking here.
Tom Dowds: 'The Scottish clergy and Bannockburn': Friday 7th November 2014
During this anniversary year there has been a great deal of interest in the Battle of Bannockburn, especially by way of attempts to reconstruct the different phases of the battle and establish the exact nature of the military activity that took place. However, the War of Independence was about much more than just military matters. Tom Dowds has researched constitutional aspects of the Scottish nation at the time, and especially the way that the Scottish clergy made out a strong case for Scottish independent nationhood, beginning with ‘The Pleading’ of 1301 to the Pope in Rome, involving three canon lawyers, and extending through to the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320.
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