A presentation by Duncan Downie.
Despite the title of this evening's talk, it does not mean to say that Kemnay had a monopoly of the quarrying industry in the northeast. Far from it, there were quarries in most areas, as the availability of transport for stones in these long gone days was mainly horse and cart and distance was a big consideration. The main quarry in the area around here was Craigenlow and it was operated in the late 1870s by Messrs Francis Christie and Son, to obtain stone for the additions Dunecht House then being carried out. An unfortunate incident in 1881 led to the stoppage of building works and eventually the estate passed into the Cowdray family in the early years of the 20th century and much work was carried out on the estate using granite from Craigenlow. These include extensions to the big house, the towers at the east entrance, much of the dykes on the road to Aberdeen, several steadings on the estate, the houses on the Terrace as also the estate offices and workshops.
The quarry was operated for some time by W J Brown and Son of Aberdeen and in the 1930s was supplying stone for houses in Aberdeen. Quarries were also operated on the hill of Fare which produced pink granite which was used in, amongst others, a bridge at Kelvin Grove in Glasgow, Byker Bank Buildings in Newcastle, Queen Victoria memorial at Windsor Castle, and many buildings in the Banchory area.
But to return to our tale:
Until the middle of the 19th century, Kemnay was little more than a rural backwater and the only thing that had put it on the map was its school which was presided over by a man who started out in life with little or no formal education but whose approach to the teaching of the young had made him known the length and breadth of the country.
However, the middle decade of the century saw railway mania sweep the country and railway bills were being submitted to parliament on an almost weekly basis. The Kittybrewster to Huntly Railway opened on 12th September 1854, the Huntly to Keith Railway opened on 11th October 1856. Two opposing schemes were then put forward to lay a railway to Alford. One by a Mr Duncan who proposed to construct a line branching off from the Deeside line near Drum and the scheme put forward by the Great North of Scotland Railway to lay a railway up the Don valley, which latter scheme received Parliamentary approval.
Construction started soon after and Adam Mitchell, the mason who was building bridges on the line, mentioned to John Fyfe, who was supplying stones for the bridges from the quarries at Tyrebagger that he thought it could be possible to obtain stone from the Hill of Paradise at Kemnay thus making a considerable saving on cartage costs. Fyfe visited the site with an engineer and took a 19 year lease of part of the hill for a quarry. Stone had been extracted from the hill by the laird, John Burnett, some thirty years previously to provide building materials for extensions then being carried out at Kemnay House.
Slide of John Fyfe
John Fyfe was not the first to start quarrying operations at Kemnay. Quarries were operated at Whitestones from the early 19th century, if not before, and stone from these quarries was used in the construction of Waterloo Bridge in London as well as in New London Bridge. During the years 1820 and 1821, 2065 tons of quarried stone were purchased by the firm of Joliffe and Banks. Quarries on Leschangie Hill provided stone for the West Lodge at Kemnay which, at the time it was built in 1876, was considered ‘the most beautiful Lodge in this part of the country.’ And several workings had been started on Paradise Hill.
John Fyfe was thrown in at the deep end of the quarrying business following the death of his father in 1846 when John was only sixteen years old. His father is buried in the churchyard here at Kintore. The family were operating at the quarries at Tyrebagger to the west of Aberdeen and the young man rose to the task with great vigour. By the time he was twenty four, he was sending out more stone from Aberdeenshire than any other man in that business.
Not everyone had the foresight and conviction of John Fyfe.
After he had opened his quarry at Kemnay, he was standing on the platform waiting a train when a farmer belonging to the district came and accosted him saying, “Are you Mr Fyfe?” and being answered in the affirmative, said, “You’ve taen that Quarry?”
“Yes.”
“Oh man,” the farmer said, “gang an gie it up.”
“Why?” asked Mr Fyfe.
“Oh man,” he says, “Look roon about ye there, and nae a fairmer for twall mile roon bit has got up a new hoose. There winna be a stane wintit oot o’ yer quarry for the next nineteen years.”
The Railway Company about the same time were equally short sighted. Before they would sanction a siding for wagons, they stipulated 25 wagons per month as out-put. In the days of the Forth Bridge etc. this would have been a poor average for a day’s output.
Quarrymen were by the very nature of their work, big powerful men. Some of the quarry picks in use at that time weighed between 15 and 20 pounds.
The quarrymen had a name for rough living and the following story was told by Mr Fyfe himself. Driving home from Inverurie one day, he overtook a lady with a basket of provisions on her arm, and, with his usual free and obliging disposition, he offered her a lift in his gig. After they came in sight of the quarries his passenger burst out with, ‘Oh! there’s that Kemnay Quarries. That’s a man Fyfe he has hauled a’ the orra folk i’ the face o’ God’s earth in aboot. Kemnay was a dacent placie afore that drunken quarriers cam in aboot it.’
Mr Fyfe heard her out and then said, ‘Oh, don't be so hard on the quarriers, mistress, I’m a quarrier myself.’
‘Guid preserve me,’ she said, ‘lat me oot, and far did ye steal this horse and the gig.’
Many men travelled from Ireland to work on contracts throughout Scotland and considerable distances were travelled by these men It was no unusual thing for squads to travel on foot over the Black Mount from Loch-awe to Kemnay and the Forest or vice versa. The following tale relates an incident of that era.
Three men were caught poaching on the Monymusk Estate. Two of them managed to escape but one was captured by two keepers. One keeper went away to get a policeman, leaving the other with a retriever dog to watch the prisoner. As soon as the keeper was out of sight, the prisoner made a dash for liberty and the dog was sent after him. The man, however, had some rabbits in his pockets, and every time the dog reached him, he dropped a rabbit which the dog always carried back to the keeper. In this way the man got off and rejoined his mates, whereupon the three men booted it over the hills by Ballater and in due course landed at Craigpoint, Argyllshire and started work.
The quarriers had a name for hard living and at that time there was no alcoholic licence in the village. One of the places to which the quarriers resorted for refreshments was the shop at Burnhervie. The practice at licensed grocers was that no drink was allowed to be consumed on the premises. The patrons therefore purchased their drink and went outside to consume it, a practice that continued until the 1970s but which has now died out, in this area, altogether.
On one occasion, a number of quarriers had spent the time drinking at Burnhervie and proceeded to set off for home – this was before the shakkin briggie was built - and they had to cross the Don by ford. One of their number who was quite inebriated and not a little obstreperous was left behind until they should return for him. To prevent him from wandering into the Don, they laid him face down and put a large boulder over his legs to restrain him.
No doubt there are many tales told of the escapades of the quarriers and many more have been lost over the years as the quarrier gradually faded from our midst.
But to return to our tale:
The working of granite is not a simple matter of cutting stone as one would slice cheese off the side of a kebbuck. Granite originated millions of years ago as a molten mass deep below the surface of the earth. It slowly cooled to the form we know it today.
Over the years other rocks appeared, sometimes as intrusions within the granite itself or as pockets of different colour within a mass of rock. At Kemnay there is an intrusion which has always been known as ‘black bar’.
Slides 3, 4, 5.
Slide of Rosehall (6)
It was used as a ‘sneck’ in a number of the houses in the village, part of Davidsons buildings on the High Street (7), Lily Cottage (8), the Aquithie Road elevation of the Costcutter shop (9), Rose Hall (10), Hope Cottage (11), Garryvene (12) Wellbank (13), Dunrobin off Kendall Road (14) where the string course along the top of the wall is also black bar.
Granite has a grain to it which could be read by those who worked it, and who used it to their advantage when cutting stones. One old mason, Willie Brechin, described the stone from Rowrandle, a small quarry on Monymusk estate, which was worked for a short time after the Second World War by The Glen Quarry Company as ‘it splits graun ae wey, bit the divil in hell winna split it the tither’.
Initially stone was extracted from a face quarry at Kemnay.
Slide 15, face quarry.
That is, they worked in on the level and all waste was pushed down the hill from the workings much the same way as a dog working from a rabbit hole. This waste was eventually to reach almost to the road passing the north side of the quarry and on it was a network of railway lines along which were pushed the hand bogies which took supplies of stone to the cassie men spread around this area and also to take their made setts to the loading banks.
Slide 16, spion kop over siding
Slide 17 back over bridge to spion kop.
By 1865 two faces were being worked, one of forty feet the other seventy feet. It was envisaged that these would eventually merge into one face of a hundred feet. At that time there were five steam cranes operating, each capable of lifting ten tons, and rock to the length of thirty feet and weighing a hundred tons was sometimes encountered. London was the biggest market for stone and the monthly despatch of stone was 1200 tons.
Soon, however, it was discovered that better stone was available by going down rather than into the hill. This posed the problem of getting stone out of a pit. Initially a road wound its way down the side of the pit to the bottom and stone was carried from the pit by horses.
The fertile brain of Mr Fyfe was soon at work and he devised the aerial cableway crane, which was to revolutionise quarrying world wide. It consisted of a steel cable which was strung across the pit and on this sat a cradle which could be moved back and fore across the pit at the discretion of the operator.
Slide 18 Blondin 1879
From this cradle was suspended a box which could be raised or lowered and set down in any part of the floor of the quarry. The capacity of these was initially around two to five tons, eventually a blondin, for such was the name given to this piece of equipment, with a capacity of twenty tons was installed at Rubislaw in Aberdeen.
Slide 19 Abergeldie
The germ which sparked off the development of the blondin is said to have come to John Fyfe one day when travelling in upper Deeside. He spied an ingenious apparatus which the local postie had for delivering mail to the other side of the river. It consisted of a post on either side of the river and an endless rope which travelled through a pulley fixed to each post.
The idea was developed at Kemnay by quarry staff including Charles Fyfe, an uncle of John, and Peter Clark, one of the blacksmiths at the quarry. Many of the castings were obtained from the steel founders in Aberdeen while much of the work was carried out by the local staff. Initially there was only one mast used, the other end of the cable being anchored to the wall of the quarry, a practice which was used at Rubislaw throughout most of its life. In later developments, two masts were used, one on either side of the quarry opening. The original masts were constructed of pitch pine whereas the later ones were built of steel.
Slides 20 to 24 - blondins
A number of blondins eventually spanned both quarry holes the capacity of the biggest being ten tons. This was the one that spanned from the spion kop (Dutch for 'look-out hill') across the big hole.
Slide 25 – Spion Kop
The others had a capacity of around three tons. There was also what was known as the hutches. These were boxes by which the men were lowered down the hole, a faster alternative than using the ladders.
Slide 26 –big hole 1900.
There were many firsts for the quarry industry initiated at Kemnay. In conjunction with Andrew Barclay of Kilmarnock, the Scotch Steam Derrick was devised and developed.
Slide 27 steam derrick
Another first at Kemnay was the use of electricity in blasting. In March 1873 Mr D Wright, electrician of George Street in Aberdeen demonstrated this method on a scale never before seen in Scotland. The operation was carried out during a period of severe weather, which aided rather than hampered the work. The frost prevented the water in the bottom of the workings from flowing into the boreholes, of which there were eleven, twenty feet deep and six feet apart. The holes were duly charged and the shot fired. ‘On examination, it was found that the great mass of granite, along the whole extent of the charges was duly started, and the work thus successfully accomplished. The mass of granite being, however, left in an excellent condition to admit of an extra charge of gunpowder and a second blasting, which was expected to save much work to the workmen.’ (Aberdeen Journal March 5 1873, page 3 col.6) It was estimated that around five thousand tons of granite was displaced.
Slide 28 – 1879
The ingenuity of our forefathers can be seen from the slide of 1879. It shows a massive wall built from the floor of the quarry and from it was built a railway, which went right across the side of the quarry. By this means stone could be readily lifted from the floor of the quarry directly into the wagons which could be then moved directly to the railway line at the foot of the hill. It was recorded in the Free Press of 12th March 1883 that ‘trucks were run alongside the principal quarry and 40 tons of dressed stone were raised from a depth of 200 feet. The stones were placed into trucks, which were then run down into the railway siding - all in the short space of an hour and three quarters’.
The heyday of the quarrying industry was the latter quarter of the 19th century. In the 1860s the city fathers of Aberdeen decided to erect new buildings to serve both the city and county administrations. Peddie and Kinnear, an Edinburgh firm of architects, were commissioned to design this edifice which was to be erected on the corner of Broad Street and Union Street.
Slide 29 – Town's House
They specified the use of sandstone, in the mistaken belief that there would be an insufficient supply of granite for the size of the contract envisaged. It was only when John Fyfe personally guaranteed he would supply all the stone required that the architects changed the specification. This could be described as the first prestigious contract carried out by John Fyfe, and was carried out some ten years after the start of quarrying at Kemnay.
To list buildings or works in which Kemnay granite was used would take up almost an evening in itself, the following are but a few examples: docks at Hull, Leith, Aberdeen, Sunderland, Shields, Newcastle, Middlesborough; Thames Embankment; Forth and Tay Bridges; Kew, Putney, Tower and Chelsea Bridges in London; Clyde, Jamaica, Rutherglen and Albert Bridges in Glasgow; King Edward Bridge, Newcastle; Bonnington Bridge, Edinburgh; Victoria and King George VI bridges in Aberdeen; Savoy, Metropole and Waldorf Hotels; Northern Assurance Buildings, London; Royal Insurance, Lombard Street; Waring's Buildings, Oxford Street; Wallace & Co's Buildings, Crosby Square; Chartered Bank of India and Mercer's Hall, London; the handsome street of buildings known as Electric Avenue in Brixton. Mr Fyfe was entertained to a dinner in the Council Chamber of the Holborn Restaurant, London in 1896 by the merchants and other tenants of his property in Brixton who were anxious to recognise his enterprise and public spirit in developing the district; White Star Offices, Royal Insurance, Parr's Bank, Royal Linen Buildings, Royal Liver Buildings, Liverpool; Usher Hall in Edinburgh, most of the principal buildings in Aberdeen. Mention has already been made of the municipal buildings and to that may be added His Majesty's Theatre.
Slide 30 HMT
Although most of the frontage is Kemnay, the rest of the building is in Tom's Forest. Kemnay stone was used in the extension to the theatre in 2005, Public Library, (Education, Salvation and Damnation), Palace and Grand Hotels, Savings Bank, Parish Council and School Board Offices, Post Office, Royal Insurance and Northern Assurance Offices, Beechgrove and Holburn UF Churches, Salvation Army Buildings (31); Art Gallery and Grays School of Art which combines with Kemnay the use of the lovely pink stone of Corrennie.
Slides 32, 33, 34
The same combination is used in the Cowdray Hall; and the War Memorial. Few would deny that the cream of them all is Marischal College Buildings in Broad Street.
Slide 35
There are others of a more modern vintage such as the former Majestic Cinema, and the former C & A Buildings at the corner of Bridge Street, (slide 36), the extension to the Bridge of Don at Aberdeen in the late 1950s and Telephone House in Dundee. Material for these last three works came from one stone, which was procured in 1956, possibly the biggest single stone ever to be obtained at Kemnay.
Slide 37 - Kemnay big stone and Slide 38 – Moruya 2000 tons.
When the Bon-Accord Centre was being built in Aberdeen in the 1980s Kemnay granite was requested for the facing work of the buildings. The management of the time felt that not enough speed was being made in obtaining the stone and sub contractors were employed to carry out the work, but in their haste they caused considerable damage to the quarry and much waste was tipped into the old quarry.
More recently Kemnay granite was again specified for the parliament building at Holyrood and the management of the day – by this time the firm was no longer trading under Fyfe but an English conglomerate- had to be given considerable financial encouragement before they would even consider looking for stone. A considerable quantity of good stone was obtained but this I fear was the swansong of the quarry. Kemnay stone was also used in the construction of the Battle of Britain monument in London, 2005.
The big hole closed down around 1959 for a variety of reasons. Cost of production was one, a factor which had plagued the industry for many years and the increasing use of concrete blocks and bricks, which were far cheaper to produce and work with, and the fact that the hole was flooded during a summer break together with the cost of working at the considerable depth which had been reached.
The industry had been on the slide for most of the twentieth century – it never regained momentum after the First World War – and the increasing use of tarred surfaces on roads put many a nail in the coffin of the sett maker. But where the production of cube or dimension stone declined; the demand for crushed stone increased.
Slide39 First Crusher
Crushing equipment had been installed at the end of the 19th century in an effort to curtail the ever increasing spoil tips around the quarry and in 1938 new crushing equipment with storage bins was built in a position where railway wagons could be filled from the bins and moved into a siding beside the main railway line thus reducing considerably the amount of manual handling of the crushed aggregate.
Slide 40 View across hole showing storage bins etc.
Fyfe's purchased the quarry at Craigmyle and crushed the waste tips from there, as also those at Whitestones quarry. The whole area of waste tips to the north and north-west of the quarry hole were crushed.
The crushing plant was extended in the early 1960s and by the late 1960s a start was made on crushing the waste tips on the top of Paradise Hill which had been a landmark to generations of Kemnay folk. To fill the insatiable demand for aggregate during the boom time of the late 1970s and 80s, quarrying was restarted round the edge of no. 2 hole, more commonly known as the howler.
Slide 41 aerial view of quarry 1990s
To extract granite for producing aggregate, the quarrier wishes to break the pieces into as small particles as he can, and to achieve this powerful explosives are used. Some thirty years ago the explosive mixture used was ammonium nitrate and diesel, whereas nowadays the components although similar, are scientifically mixed and mechanically placed in the 100mm bore holes. At Tom's forest quarry, which has been developed over the last 35 years or so as an aggregate producing unit, blasts amounting to some 40,000 tons are taken out on a regular basis and few of the stones would be too large to put in a wheelbarrow.
To produce cube or dimension stone, on the other hand, it is the desire of the quarrier to take out as large blocks as possible, by means of nudging rather than blasting. This is achieved by the use of black powder used quite sparingly in 40mm or 50mm boreholes and in the heyday of the quarry several shots were sometimes used before the stone was eventually freed. The rock was then cut to more manageable sizes to facilitate removal from the quarry and to prepare it for its final use.
Initially the method of cutting stones was to form a line of slots along the length of the desired cut and insert wooden wedges into these which were then soaked and the resulting expansion of the wood resulted in the stone being split. These holes were made by the use of picks and were some three inches long and two inches deep.
Slides 42, 43.
The use of wedges was in time superseded by plugs and feathers.
Slide 44
These consisted of a steel plug and two steel shims or feathers and were placed in a line of holes bored in the stone and driven in by sledgehammer to cut the stone. One of the benefits of this method of cutting the stone that there was less work involved in dressing out the plug holes.
Slide 45
Stones of considerable size could be split by this method and the stone cutter made good use of his knowledge of the stone in cutting to the best advantage. Sometimes in the case of a difficult cut or where a thinner stone was being cut, holes might be bored all the way through the stone. Slide 46. This method only came into its own following the introduction of powered rock drills.
A later innovation was the bull wedge – a small steel wedge also used with two steel shims. These were greatly favoured by the cassiemen for splitting smaller blocks which they were more often using. It came into vogue in the 1930s when course heights in houses dropped from the more usual 13" to 15" courses to 9" or 10". Nowadays when splitting stones in the quarry 38 mm diameter holes are bored and the stone is split by means of hydraulic splitters. This has proved far safer than the use of plugs and feathers. Reduction of stone in the yards is done by diamond tipped saws up to 3 metres in diameter and by wire saws tipped with silicon.
To many people stone is an inanimate object, but for many years that same stone was the lifeblood of Kemnay and the surrounding area. Oh yes! It was a hard life. In fact, it was the death of many people over the years, but that is another tale.
Many men sweated their life away working the stone to earn a living to bring up their families. Life in the quarries then was not regarded with the sentimentality that I look upon it. One old quarrier once said that the best thing about the quarry was the day you left. These images which you have seen and the few more you will yet see are almost all that remains of a bye-gone era, gone even from most of the families involved as most of today's young folk are more inclined to look forward rather than look back into a world that is now completely foreign to them. Gone are the blondins, they outlived their usefulness. Extraction has reverted to the past where a roadway winds down into the quarry, but it is not a small beast of burden that treads the path, but a mighty truck which may take out about twenty tons of stone at a load. Gone are the cassiemen from their scathies and now replaced by a large coating plant with a daily output of 400 tonnes of roadstone to varying different specifications.
Ah yes! you might think that all cassies or setts as they later were called, were just the same but within the trade there were several different specifications. The original cassies were natural stones gathered from the fields or around the coasts near Aberdeen but as time went on and the quarried stones came more into use, more care had to be taken in setting these stones by hand. Thus the term of hand setting was used in the constructions of the roadway, but the two words eventually merged into the word sett. The heyday of the sett trade was from the 1890s up to the First World War and was due to the conversion to electric tramways in most of the cities, which necessitated the relaying of many miles of streets. The production of setts from Aberdeenshire in 1903 amounted to 41,000 tons. Imagine if you can, over 1000 present day artic Lorries sitting nose to tail fully loaded with setts, and this will give you some idea of the quantity.
The setts were initially cut to suit the horse era and were about three or four inches on top being random length and maybe five inches deep. Those of you who can cast your minds back to these days can imagine the hard work of these poor beasts as they pulled their loads from the harbour up into the city of Aberdeen. Many of these coming up Market Street employed a second horse or tracer to help ease the load. Coming up the Denburn, where the dual carriageway is now, the carters kept the wheels of their lorry close to the kerb so that in an emergency they had the use of the kerb as a brake to stop a lorry should it start to go back down. There was quite a deep track along side the kerb, worn by generations of iron clad wheel rims.
There were three different types of dressing; the standard or reeled sett, the head of which was roughly finished off the reel or hammer used by the settmaker. Puncheoned setts were dressed with a puncheon and were of a somewhat better quality than off the reel. Nidgers were the cream of the bunch. Princes Street in Edinburgh was relaid in the 1930s. The specification given by the City Engineer was as follows: Nidged Setts : Fine Dressed- These setts shall be 4 inches in depth, 5 inches in breadth, and from 6 inches to 10 inches in length. They must not vary from the above dimensions as regards breadth and depth more than one-quarter of an inch; any stone failing to comply with this condition shall be rejected.
The setts shall be finely nidged, axed, punched, or otherwise dressed on head or exposed surface, showing little more than daylight when a straight-edge is applied to the surface in any direction. The setts shall be similarly dressed on the four sides, to the extent of one inch in depth all round below the head. They shall be laid hard to hard so that there must be no bulge or projection on the sides or ends of the setts below the one-inch dressed margin referred to, which would interfere with close laying, nor must they be undercut.
The setts shall be dressed so that the sides and ends shall be square and parallel, with clean, sharp arrises running straight and full to the corners so as to present the best possible appearance when laid. All setts must be free from cracks and flaws.
The setts for the contract were supplied by John Fyfe Ltd.
Slide 47 Inchcape 48, 49.
INCHCAPE
The stone depicted in the slide was about forty tons in weight. Standing on top of the stone about to bore holes in order to split it are Stanley Daun and Jim Fraser. The stone, when split was about twenty tons in weight and Slogger (A G Reid) then scabbled it down to about sixteen tons. Charles Alexander had at that time acquired an old four wheel Ushers beer lorry on the floor of which were laid sleepers. The stone was laid down on the lorry which I don't think had nearly the carrying capacity of the stone. It took two hours for it to travel in to Seaforth Road in Aberdeen. The other men pictured are; Alex Reid, Peter Nicol, Jock Bruce, Coffee Rooms, a Dey from Glenhead, Dod Smith, Jock Daun, Walk Brown, David Sang, Dod Taylor and the Brewer (Alexander Clark).
Over the years many folk worked at the quarry; the following is but a small sample.
Slides 50 to 60
The following verse was penned following the death of John Fyfe.
'Epitaph on the Granite King'
Here lie the bones of Mr FyfeA pushing hero all his life
A worthy, wise, and good man here
Could well adorn a higher sphere;
And when his soul went up the hill
His busy mind was active still
He sold in Heaven, before an hour,
Ten thousand tons of four by four
And wanting to encourage trade
He wired to Moir* to have them made.
*William Moir was for some time manager at Kemnay quarry.