He is Kirkcudbright through and through and has captured his town’s social history on film for more than a decade.
Talking to Sam Kelly one thing is obvious – he loves the place in which he’s lived all his 78 years.
Through the years he’s seen Kirkcudbright’s character change as old industries fell away to be replaced largely by a booming tourist trade.
But he’s proud that something of the essence of old Kirkcudbright remains in its streets and wynds where innumerable artisans once plied their trade.
Sam, I learn, was born in November 1944, six months before the end of the war in Europe.
“I was brought up on High Street and my parents Douglas and Grace had a family draper’s business on St Mary’s Street,” he recalls. It was a real old-fashioned draper’s and in those days a lot of the business was men’s working clothes.
“All the tradesmen and farm workers would come in for bib and brace overalls, pinnies, working caps and hats.
“They sold trousers and jackets and all the women’s stuff but did not measure suits. My wife Gladys worked in the shop along with my mother. She took it on when my mother retired until she herself retired in 2000.”
Sam and Gladys married in Dalbeattie Parish Church in 1964 – and the 19-year-old groom was over the moon at winning a woman two years his senior.
“I was chuffed!” Sam says with a chuckle.
“I had first met Gladys at a Saturday night dance in Kirkcudbright Town Hall.
“I had a dance with her and said ‘how about going to the pictures the morn’s night?’
“‘I’ll have to see’ she told me and I had to wait a week for an answer. I think she was checking up on me! We went to Dalbeattie picture house which is a furniture shop now. I can’t remember what film was on – I must have been too excited.
“That was the start and we were never apart after that. After we got married we stayed in Union Street, then moved down to above the draper’s shop. Now we live in St Mary’s Street near the garage.”
Before he married, Sam remembers Kirkcudbright as “a quieter bit” than the bustling town of today.
“The fishing did not really start until the late 1950s and early 1960s – there was only a few old fishermen with wee wooden boats for the lobsters,” he says.
“But there was a hell of a tradesmen – joiners, builders, electricians, plumbers, painters, the lot. Everybody I knew was involved in some kind of trade and there was a lot of farm workers then as well.
“They all stayed in farm cottages and would come into town to do their shopping and come to the pub. Now a lot folk from the farms have come into the town to stay.”
Asked about the Artists’ Town, Sam smiles at the suggestion the concept is somehow novel.
Artists had always earned a living in Kirkcudbright – just without the cultural fanfare.
“Everybody praises the artists living here, which is fine,” he says. “But back in the 1950s folk did not think about artists because they were too busy doing their own work.
“There were a lot of them but they were only artists, whereas nowadays they are celebrities. You had Tim Jeffs on High Street and there’s a plaque saying where he worked. I can remember Jessie M King at Greengate – a lot of artists stayed down the close there.
“There was Miles Johnston on Castle Street who was a nice artist who sold paintings, decorated pottery, ornaments and painted plywood animals.
“It was a different artists’ toon then because they were just working folk like anybody else. They were all sorts of characters who hadnae a lot of money. They weren’t out wining and dining and partying – they were just ordinary folk.”
Sam spent ten years at Kirkcudbright Academy from the age of five and, like many teenage boys in the late 1950s, couldn’t wait to escape the classroom.
“I was not really interested in school – I just wanted to leave,” he smiles.
“To tell the truth I did not like some of the teachers. I got the belt now and again but I was not a persistent offender like some.
“I was very polite at the school because I was brought up that way.”
A regular church attender as a boy, Sam recalls many happy days spent on the shore at summer school.
“Some of the happiest days of my life were at what we called ‘the minister’s camp’ at Carrick,” he says. “In those days there were only two or three huts scattered over the bit.
“The first week the lassies went and the next week it would be the boys.
“The wee hut had bunk beds and the beadle was a guy called Tommy Welsh, from Kirkcudbright. He did all the cooking and looked after us. We learned to swim, played games, and got sunburnt in that week. That was for three or four years until I was about 11 or 12.”
A year ago Sam went back to try and find his old camping hut at Carrick – and it wasn’t easy.
A small village of holiday chalets had sprung up along the stony track, making it difficult to get his bearings.
“Eventually I found it and I was amazed how wee it was,” he laughs. “I thought how did we all squeeze into it? There must have been 15 of us. We were all pals – we had no enemies there.”
Sam’s outside adventures also took him on camping trips with the Boy Scouts across to Wigtownshire – and Switzerland.
“We were the first local Scout troop to go to the Scout base at Interlaken in the Swiss Alps,” he recalls. “It was a big lodge and boys from all over the world would join up there.
“We would have to trek over the hills and we were starving the whole time. It was quite an experience and I remember seeing the glaciers. It must have been quite a responsibility for the Scout masters looking after all these boys.
“Raymond Taylor from Castle Douglas was our skipper and Jock Paterson, the janitor at Johnston School, was his sidekick.
“Donald Haining the butcher would also go and Jackie Paterson who did the spray painting at McMurray’s Garage in Kirkcudbright.
“He was a keen cricketer and bowler.”
Sam recalls school summer holidays lasting forever – with water, both fresh and salt, invariably the objective.
“When we got out of the school we would go on our bikes to the Dhoon for a swim.
“There was a big rock called the Bell Rock and we used to dive off it. We would swim in the harbour too – although we were told no tae because the sewerage ran in there.
“Sometimes we’d cycle up to Tongland Dam for a swim. We didn’t go in the dam itself – we’d go down the Monks’ Way and follow the burn back up towards the dam to the Black Pool below the dam. We were always telt no to go up because they might let the dam out but we went anyway. I would only be about 11 or 12.”
A worker all his life, Sam got his first job at 15 straight from school – but it wasn’t exactly glamorous.
“There was a battery hen factory down Dee Walk owned by Joey Sassoon and George Watson,” he tells me.
“George was a Kirkcudbright man who had a business abroad, made his money, then came back. The bit had been the Stewartry Dairies building and they ripped it out and put all these battery hens in it.
“They bought the Isle Estate too, which had these massive greenhouses in the garden. They took them away as well and put in a hut for rearing hens. The Dee Walk factory was the egg laying plant and all the hens were in cages.
“I had to gather the eggs up, keep the cages clean and remove all the s***e.
“It was a rubbish job and the smell was hellish.
“It was stinking and that’s why I never stuck it. After that I started as an apprentice with Gavin Millar the upholsterer and I did four years, then two at the Scottish Milk Marketing Board’s powdered milk factory beside the creamery.
“It was all shift work – the day shift from eight till five, the back shift from two to ten and the night shift from ten to six.
“I didn’t like getting put out with the milk bottles but it was a right enough job.”
It’s fascinating listening to Sam as he sketches a picture of Kirkcudbright half a century ago. There’s no real trace of nostalgia, simply an acknowledgement, perhaps tinged with a little sadness, that things move on.
Certainly, employment wasn’t hard to come by in the seventies when the town’s industrial profile was very different to that of today.
And having had enough of milk powder, Sam switched to timber to earn a living.
“I went into working with local contractors on local estates as a woodcutter,” he explains.
“Sometimes I would work at Dick Baty’s sawmill at Gibbhill, which he bought from Jones of Larbert.
“The bit had been a coastal rescue station during the war. But mostly I worked for haulage contractors, felling trees to keep their lorries going with loads to the sawmills. I worked up at Dundeugh and the Bennan near New Galloway cutting down mature conifers, mostly Sitka, larch and Norwegian spruce.
“JJ Murdoch of Castle Douglas were haulage contractors and I worked at Parton with them.
“I would get so much per ton for the work and sometimes I would work with a horse to haul the logs out. I did that at Glengap at Twynholm and worked for Mrs Millar and her husband who had a wee sawmill just outside Laurieston, on the back road to Gatehouse.
“I mind Mr Millar got dragged into the machinery when he got caught up in the belt. He got battered about very badly and was never the same after it.”
Felling 100-foot trees with a heavy duty chain saw was hard and challenging work.
But mercifully Sam emerged from his years in the forests largely unscathed.
“Even in those days you had to have protective clothing,” he says. “You needed to watch what you were doing or it could mean a serious accident.
“The worst that happened to me was when a log rolled on top of my foot and I broke my ankle. I had to drive all the way home from Laurieston. They couldn’t do anything at the cottage hospital and I had to go to Dumfries.
“That was the only accident I had. After that I got a job with the local council as a general labourer for two years then was a self-employed window cleaner for 22 years.”
Now retired, Sam goes for a fortnightly back massage from a local practitioner, his aches and pains a legacy of hard labour in the forests.
“I’m still lifting stuff I really shouldn’t be lifting,” he laughs. “But I’m just like that.”
Meanwhile, Sam takes real pleasure in his flower garden, which every year is a real show stopper for St Mary’s Street passers-by. “I’m not a member of any club – I just do my own thing,” he says modestly.
“I am in the Kirkcudbright Art and Crafts Trail each year though – billed as Sam’s Surprise Garden. I usually make some unusual items to make the garden more interesting.”
Going abroad had never featured in Sam’s life but in 2010, with more time on his hands, all that changed.
“I picked one of these holidays when you climb up hill and down dale – in Thailand,” he chuckles.
“We stayed in a village to see how the Thai folk lived and the heat was hellish. I suppose it was an adventure type holiday.
“Gladys called me for everything when we were there. She was not chuffed – she kept saying to folk ‘I’ll kill him when I get home!’ But before I went I bought a wee video camera and I filmed everything.
“That was me hooked and after we got back I joined the camcorder club in Castle Douglas. I bought a better camera and started photographing and filming local occasions and events.
“Then everybody got to know me and things just snowballed from there.
“Kirkcudbright Summer Festivities, school concerts, pantos, nativity plays, Burns suppers, the Rotary young musician of the year, you name it I filmed it.
“Whenever I made a video I put everything on disc and put one into the museum and one in the library so folk can take them out.
“Stewartry Museum also had old 35mm film footage from the late 1940s and 50s taken by Wullie Bendon who owned the picture house where Tesco is now.
“I digitised all that for them – it was mainly pageants and parades which was really all that was going on in those days.
“It’s all on YouTube on Sam Kelly Kirkcudbright videos. The museum does a lot for the community.
“They have all the stuff I have done over the years. It means that in years to come folk can look back and see what Kirkcudbright was like in the days gone by.”
