Jane Haining E-Book

Mary Miller

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 394

Beschreibung

'Balances detailed research with powerful storytelling to create a well-written and heart-wrenching account' - Nicole Gemine, Press and Journal Jane Haining was undoubtedly one of Scotland's heroines. A farmer's daughter from Galloway in south-west Scotland, Jane went to work at the Scottish Jewish Mission School in Budapest in 1932, where she was a boarding school matron in charge of around 50 orphan girls. The school had 400 pupils, most of them Jewish. Jane was back in the UK on holiday when war broke out in 1939, but she immediately went back to Hungary to do all she could to protect the children at the school. She refused to leave in 1940, and again ignored orders to flee the country in March 1944 when Hungary was invaded by the Nazis. She remained with her pupils, writing 'if these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness'. Her brave persistence led to her arrest in by the Gestapo in April 1944, for "offences" that included spying, working with Jews and listening to the BBC. She died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz just a few months later, at the age of 47. Her courage and self-sacrifice, her choice to stay and to protect the children in her care, have made her an inspiration to many.

Leseprobe

JANE HAINING

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

ISBN: 978 0 85790 207 8

Copyright © Mary Miller 2019

The right of Mary Miller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcoglaf S.p.A.

To the memory of Jane Haining,her brave colleagues on the staff of the Scottish Mission to the Jews in Budapest 1932–45, and her pupils and their families whose lives were lost in the Holocaust of 1944

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer. The Holy Spirit challenges us to do good in Minute Particulars. Anything less is not of God.

(William Blake, The Holiness of Minute Particulars)

If these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness.

(Jane Haining, Budapest, 1940)

Oh little did ma mither ken

The day she cradled me

The lands I was tae travel in

Or the death I was tae dee.

(Scots Ballad of Mary Hamilton)

Contents

List of Plates

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Prologue

  1   Dunscore

  2   Glasgow: A Career Girl in Paisley

  3   Moving Towards Mission

  4   Budapest, 1932

  5   Days of Sunshine

  6   The Scottish Mission to the Jews

  7   ‘Most Glorious Years’

  8   The Gathering Clouds

  9   Days of Darkness

10   Nightfall

11   Night

12   What to Believe?

13   Aftermath

14   In My End Is My Beginning

Sources

Bibliography

Acknowledgement of Sources

Index

List of Plates

Jane’s parents, Thomas Haining and Jane Mathison.

Dunscore Village School, 1902.

The Haining family around 1905.

The three Haining sisters.

J. & P. Coats Number One Mill, Paisley.

Albert Road, Pollokshields, in the 1920s.

Jane Haining as a bridesmaid at the wedding of her school friend Agnes Rawson in 1921.

Thomas Haining with his second wife Robertina Maxwell (Bena).

Jane Haining in 1932.

Budapest in the early 1930s.

The Scottish Mission building, Budapest.

Margit Prém, Headmistress of the Scottish Mission School.

A group from the Girls’ Home on holiday.

Outside the Scottish Mission School at going-home time.

Summer holiday at Lake Balaton.

Rev. MacDonald Webster.

Girls from the Scottish Mission School at a restaurant during an excursion up the Danube, 1934.

Staff of the Scottish Mission in Budapest, 1935.

Teachers at the Scottish Mission School.

Jane Haining with George and Nancy Knight.

Staff outing to Dobogoko, 1935.

In the Girls’ Home.

Summer at Lake Balaton.

Jane Haining, late 1930s.

Jane Haining and Margit Prém at Dunscore in 1939.

Page from the album Jane Haining made for Margit Prém of their holiday in 1939.

Staff of the Scottish School, 1941.

Margit Prém at the time of her retirement, 1941.

Envelope containing Jane Haining’s will.

Pupils in the Girls’ Home, 1940s.

Jane Haining and Margit Prém with Ildikó Patay, January 1944.

Jewish women and children arriving at Auschwitz.

The Chain Bridge, Budapest, destroyed by the Germans on 18 January 1945.

Entrance to Jane Haining’s rooms at the Scottish Mission after the siege.

Detail from the memorial to Jane Haining made by pupils at Dumfries Academy.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many people who have helped in writing this book. Putting it together has been a team effort, with the participation of several people who are long-time admirers of Jane Haining and have generously contributed their knowledge, expertise and enthusiasm, and with the assistance of many others.

I thank Jane Haining’s niece, Deirdre McDowell, and her husband George for welcoming me to their home in Derry and for all Deirdre’s help in sharing precious material and for reading my first draft and making helpful suggestions. Also her brother Robert O’Brien, sister Jane McIver, and any other family members who contributed comments and information.

Particular thanks go to Rev. Ian Alexander, Secretary of the Church of Scotland World Mission Committee in Edinburgh, and his colleague Carol Finlay for their continuing help and support, for reading the draft and for helping with contacts, photographs and answering my many questions. Also to their admin staff for photocopying and making archive material available to me, and to Linda Jamieson, Secretary to the Church of Scotland Principal Clerk, for her time and assistance. Thanks too to Alison Metcalfe at the National Library of Scotland for all her help.

Many thanks also to Morag Reid and Lexa Boyle from Queen’s Park Govanhill Church, and to their minister Rev. Elijah Smith. Very many thanks to Pam Mitchell at the Jane Haining Memorial Centre in Dunscore Parish Church for her inexhaustible enthusiasm and help, to Sheila Anderson for her expertise in local history and to Donna Brewster in Wigtown for sharing her wealth of information about Jane Haining’s family and the Wigtown Martyrs. Also thanks to Rev. Alison McDonald and Rev. Susan Cowell, former minsters at St Columba’s Church in Budapest, for giving me their time; to Elizabeth Dickson for kindly sharing her knowledge about Jane Haining and the invaluable letter from the late Matthew Peacock of J. & P. Coats to her mother Mrs Jane Dickson. Thanks to Janet Craig. Sincere thanks to Euan Nisbet for his information about his father, Rev. Bryce Nisbet and his time in Budapest.

In Budapest, enormous thanks to Margit Halász, writer, and teacher at the Vörösmarty School, for her friendship, hospitality, inspiration and help; to Lídia Bánóczi, great niece of Margit Prém, for so generously sharing material from her rich archive and for all the materials related to her film From Jane with Love; to Annamária Rojkó for her excellent series of articles on Margit Prém and for sharing with me her research materials related to Jane Haining; to Annamária’s daughter Fanni for translation. Many thanks to Zoltán Tóth, Communications Officer at the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest, for so patiently and persistently answering my questions, and to Professor Szabólcs Szita, Centre Director, for his time and assistance. Thanks also to Professor Peter Balla, Rector of the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. To Teresa Wontor-Cichy, at the Research Centre in the Auschwitz Museum, for answering my enquiry about Jane Haining. My warmest thanks to Mrs Agnes Rostás, former pupil of Jane Haining and Auschwitz survivor, for being willing to meet with me, and to her daughter-in-law Edit Horváth for helping to share her memories. Also warm thanks to Rev. Bertalan Tamas, retired minister of St Columba’s Church, for his time and for giving me a copy of his wonderful collection of memories by former pupils of the Scottish Mission School. Many thanks to Rev. Aaron Stevens, the current minister, for all his help, for welcoming my husband and me to worship at St Columba’s and in particular for his time devoted to helping me with Hungarian names. Most sincere thanks to my translator, Viki Nemeth in Glasgow, for her amazingly quick and helpful translations from Hungarian when required.

Huge thanks to Sally Magnusson, for making available to me all the research by 1A Productions for their marvellous documentary, Jane Haining: The Scot Who Died In Auschwitz.

Thanks to all the authors listed in the Bibliography of this book, to whom I am completely indebted for all the information it contains; particularly to Nicholas Railton whose book Jane Haining and the Work of the Scottish Mission with Hungarian Jews, 1932–1945 I have found absolutely indispensable.

Many thanks to Ann Crawford for her continuing support and encouragement and also to the publisher Birlinn, for giving me the opportunity to write this book, particularly Andrew Simmons, Mairi Sutherland, Jan Rutherford, Kristian Kerr and Lucy Mertekis.

My warm thanks as ever to my friend Neil MacGregor for his deeply informed reflections on the draft and for correcting my German.

Lastly, thanks to my daughter Sarah Metcalfe and my son-in-law Jim Metcalfe for reading the draft and making encouraging comments, to my son James for his interest and encouragement, and to James, Pete Kappes and Andy Allen for help with photographs. Most of all I thank my husband John for his constant support, for his informed criticism, for his endless supply of information from the Church of Scotland Fasti, for supplementing my inadequate biblical knowledge, and for very frequently making the tea.

Author’s Note

Jane Haining was one of Scotland’s heroines. She was born on the threshold of a century whose first half became the most cataclysmic in European history; her life was shaped by that history, and her death, in particular, was determined by it. She devoted herself to the Jewish girls in her care in Budapest in the 1930s and 1940s and refused to leave them in their hour of greatest need, even when she was ordered home at the outbreak of the Second World War. Her courageous stand against the Holocaust led to her arrest, and she died in Auschwitz in 1944. For that reason alone her story should be told and thought about and better known.

Among some of those who already know of her, there is a tendency to regard her as a saint. The problem with sainthood is that it tends to mythologise its subject and to lose the details of the life that was actually lived – the life of a real person, with gifts and talents, with strengths and weaknesses, with hopes and ambitions, dreams and disappointments. It seemed important to me to rescue Jane from sainthood. She had only the tools of an ordinary person, with which she lived a life of most unusual unselfishness, bravery and commitment.

Her story also compels us to remember the Holocaust – the murder of the Jews and others by the Nazis in the 1940s. Through the details of that one lost life, we realise the uniqueness of all and the need to remember that they were not ‘the six million’, but six million individuals. Jane Haining was one of them.

In addition, as we read the story of Jane and the Scottish Mission to the Jews in Budapest, we should give some thought to Scottish history and culture. Scotland unreflectively shared in fifteen hundred years of antisemitism in Europe – ‘institutional antisemitism’ that was embedded in the Christian culture to the extent that most people were probably unaware of it. From the early nineteenth century, among the European churches there was a movement to evangelise the Jews, in which the churches in Scotland enthusiastically shared. It had the best of intentions and yet continued to imply that Jews were somehow alien, inadequate and in need of conversion by those of a superior faith. The extent to which this unconsidered assumption eventually made it possible for the Nazis to regard the Jews and other minorities as less than human, and therefore to subject them to mass murder on a previously unimaginable scale, is impossible to measure.

The way in which the ‘superior’ approach changed, in the Scottish Mission to the Jews in Budapest, is one of the themes of this book. As the appalling reality of what was happening in the 1930s and 1940s became evident, a courageous core of members of the Scottish Mission increasingly abandoned dogma in favour of common humanity. Jane and the majority of her Hungarian colleagues, both Jews and non-Jews, defied the compromises to which many felt forced under hostile occupation. They chose to resist, and for her resistance Jane Haining eventually was rightly recognised by the state of Israel as ‘Righteous among the Nations’.

Her story is important because it reminds us that, whatever the circumstances, ordinary people can and should make that choice.

Searching out her story was not easy, for she was, by virtue of her time, her background and her character, a reticent person, who spoke very little of her own feelings and never considered herself worthy of being singled out in any way. But she inspired extraordinary affection and regard in others, and by exploring their accounts and the events through which Jane lived, we get to know her life in its various aspects.

Prologue

Budapest, April 1944

This is how I imagine it.

Jane is glad to get home to the Scottish Mission. It’s still early, not much after half past seven, but she had gone out at five. The rucksack she has been carrying is heavy because she managed to get potatoes, wheeling and dealing at the market where there are vendors she knows. One or two of them still have a secret sympathy for the Mission and the children Jane is trying to feed. Others will gladly sell to anyone with cash in the devastated streets of Budapest.

Coming back, she had to pass patrols of German soldiers, newly arrived, alarmingly well dressed and well fed. Some had appeared nervous and uneasy, others displayed a sneering swagger. She had not made eye contact with them, hoping to avoid being questioned, having to show papers, being delayed on her way home when she has work to do. Now her mind is running on what the girls and the Mission staff will eat today, whether there is enough flour to make a full batch of loaves, whether the domestic staff will turn up for work in the new situation. She is aware of their fear, their anxiety for their families, their conflicts of loyalties in the new terror that can no longer be ignored for anyone seen to be helping the Jews. She has not yet discovered the extent to which no one can now be trusted.

She comes into the kitchen, and Schréder is sitting there. He is the son-in-law of the Mission cook, whom Jane has recently had to dismiss because of the new law that no Aryan can be employed in a household where there are Jews. Schréder is wearing a new leather jacket, and boots, which when he sees her he insultingly displays by leaning back and resting his feet on a chair. He does not look apologetic or contrite. Instead, he looks at her with triumph. Worst of all, he is sitting in front of an empty plate, which bears the unmistakeable traces of egg and some breadcrumbs.

And it is at that moment that Jane’s whole life pivots and the events which will determine her future are set in train. She knows and detests the source of Schréder’s new prosperity and has resolved each day over the past five years to fight it, with all the limited means at her disposal. She and her colleagues will protect her girls; she will at all costs maintain a safe and structured life for them. Although they can do little now beyond the walls of the Mission, against seemingly invincible military might, within their walls, where their authority holds sway, they will maintain a life of order and love.

Schréder has defied the Mission’s rules by spending the night on the premises; now he has eaten some of the breakfast desperately needed by the girls. Jane does not calculate. She has not yet taken in the extent to which the fabric that had remained of the Budapest she knew has been swept away. She thinks she is still in charge.

She expresses her outrage to Schréder and orders him to leave. Confused and insecure at heart, forced to face the confrontation as an individual without his militia at his back, he gets up and leaves. But he is not downhearted. He pushes away his brief humiliation with his new certainty: we are the Masters now. He leaves, but he does not go back to the barracks where he has recently been deployed.

He goes to the Gestapo.

1

Dunscore

Ae lang branch o’ the brambleDips ere she pass,Tethers wi’ thorns the hairO’ the little lass

(Helen Cruickshank, ‘In Glenskenno Woods’)

The sequence of events that took Jane Haining directly to her death began in Budapest in 1944, but her life began a long way away in a very different place and history. It seems right to start with what we know of her mother.

Jane Mathison was a farmer’s daughter, born in the small village of Terregles in Kirkcudbrightshire (now Dumfries and Galloway), south-west Scotland, in 1867. She married Thomas John Haining, a farmer’s son, in 1890 at the age of twenty-three. Their first home was on the Larbreck estate in Dumfriesshire. In 1891 their first child was born, a daughter, named Alison after Jane’s mother. In 1893, they had twin sons, James Mathison and Thomas, but they sadly died within two days of each other at the age of four and a half months. Two years later Jane and Thomas had their second daughter, whom they named Margaret. This was a family name, and Jane had a niece also named Margaret.

In the spring of 1897, the family moved in with Thomas’s father at his farm, Lochenhead, outside the village of Dunscore about ten miles from Dumfries. Thomas’s father remained with them there for several years after that and, when he died, Thomas inherited the farm in his own right.

Jane was pregnant when they moved, and on 6 June 1897, at 7.15 in the evening, a third daughter was born in the little farmhouse, in the upstairs bedroom on the left. She was named Jane after her mother and was given her mother’s maiden name, Mathison, as a middle name. Like her siblings, she was baptised in Craig United Free Church in Dunscore.

By all accounts, this little Jane was very close to her mother and it is easy to imagine her earliest years spent with Jane senior, ‘helping’ with tasks around the kitchen and farmhouse. There was a lot to do. Water came from the pump just outside the garden at the front, and had to be drawn and carried round to the kitchen at the back. There was endless labour washing, preparing meals, dairy, chickens, farm chores and more. The children also played in the big, muddy farmyard behind the house, with long stone steadings along two sides and the wash-house, dairy and privy in small stone outhouses outside the kitchen door.

The census of 1901 shows that, in that year, the household consisted of Thomas Haining, aged thirty-four, whose occupation is recorded as ‘employer’, his wife Jane who was then thirty-five, Alison aged ten, who was known in the family as Ailie, Margaret, six, and little Jane, three. In the family, and by close friends, Jane was always called Jean. There was also a resident maid, recorded as a ‘general servant’, a young woman named Rankin Park, aged seventeen, who had been born in Cumnock, Ayrshire. Little Jane must have known her very well in her earliest years.

Lochenhead farmhouse was a fairly prosperous dwelling, containing ‘six rooms with one or more windows’. As windows were taxed, this was a luxury that many could not afford. There were two bedrooms upstairs, and four small rooms including the kitchen on the ground floor. The house looked out beyond the front garden on to a steep downward-sloping track bordered by hedges and fields, and across to the hill on the other side of the road, where a track led up to the neighbouring Lochenlea Farm.

That summer Jane senior developed pernicious anaemia, for which she was given such treatment as was available by the local doctor, Dr Morton. She became pregnant again, and her last baby, Helen, was born on 20 July 1902. Presumably due to her condition, Jane senior did not really recover from the birth and she died on 4 August 1902, at the same early evening hour when her daughter Jane had been born five years earlier. Dr Morton recorded her death as being due to collapse brought on by pernicious anaemia of thirteen months duration. She was just thirty-six.

Margaret Haining, who was then aged seven, later wrote, ‘Father was left with his double responsibility of bringing up a family of daughters. This he took very seriously . . . Lilie McShie, later McKnight, who was household help when mother died, persevered with us nobly for two years. She is now dead but she never forgot the charges of her youthful years. Our cousin Margaret Fitzsimon, now Guthrie, gave up her career and came to be foster mother to the three of us – the baby died a year and a half after her mother.’

Given the character which the whole Haining family, and Jane in particular, displayed, it seems clear that they were raised with love, care and devotion despite the sorrows of these early years. It is easy to imagine little Jane herself, in that busy, bereaved household, developing a special bond with baby Helen and being closely involved in her physical and emotional care.

Weeks after her mother died, Jane started at Dunscore Village School alongside Alison and Margaret. We can picture her on the cold, windy afternoons of that first sad autumn, hurrying home from school, trying to keep up with her sisters. In the kitchen, where the domestic life of Lochenhead Farm centred round the range, with her mother no longer there, Jane may often have lifted baby Helen from her crib and held her, for their mutual comfort. Perhaps the baby’s early death was partly responsible for Jane developing a lifelong tenderness towards the needs of vulnerable children and a focus on caring for them to the limits of her capacity.

Jane and her sisters walked about a mile to school and back each day. In the mornings it was mostly downhill, uphill on the way home. At the corner of a short row of houses before the final slope down to the school, Jane would meet up with her friend Annie McKnight, whose family lived there. (Later Alison Haining was to marry Jamie, an older McKnight.)

Scotland had at that time a proud tradition of primary education. As early as 1530, the Protestant Church in Scotland, in its First Book of Discipline, set out a plan for a school in every parish. By the late seventeenth century there was a largely complete network of parish schools in the Lowlands, and an Act obliged local landowners to provide a schoolhouse and pay a schoolmaster, known as a dominie. Church ministers and local presbyteries oversaw the quality of the education.

In 1845 the New Statistical Account of Scotland records satisfaction with the standard of education in Dunscore parish: ‘There are few, if any, children above six years of age, who have not been entered at school; and none above fifteen are known to be without the elements of common education, to the value of which the people are fully alive.’

Dunscore was a typical, stone-built school of its time, attended by all the Haining girls in the early 1900s. It had two classrooms, one with a coal fire, and sometimes as many as fifty pupils in each room. A house for the headmaster was built alongside. Margaret Haining writes, ‘[Jane] learnt her earliest lessons from Miss Sloan, who was a very kind if strict infant mistress of that period. She wore a tight-fitting braided bodice with a huge brooch which fascinated all the youngsters who passed through her hands.’ Jane was a very bright child, who read every book she could find from her earliest days as a reader. By the time she was in primary seven she could stand up for herself, and two of the neighbours, Dick Farish and his friend John Crockett, who were young boys then, remembered Jane, in her pinafore and long skirt, as ‘quite bossy’ and that she ‘would take no nonsense’.

The New Statistical Account assures us of a climate in which bright pupils were encouraged:

There is no general library in the parish, but juvenile libraries for children attending the Sabbath schools have existed for some years, and have been productive of benefit among the youth, many of whom have acquired a taste for reading. Nor does the habit of reading prevail among this class only, for the parishioners generally are substantially educated, and fond of books.

Popular children’s authors of the time included L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz); J. M. Barrie, who was sure to be read locally since he went to school at Dumfries Academy; Rudyard Kipling (Just So Stories was published in 1902); E. Nesbit and Beatrix Potter (the first Peter Rabbit story was published in 1902). In view of her later aspirations, Jane may also have read and been inspired by a popular book by Mrs George de Horne Vaizey entitled A Houseful of Girls.

We can be sure that Jane spent a great deal of time reading the Bible. Church was the centre of social and community life in the towns and villages of Scotland at that time, and the Haining family were deeply religious. They attended Craig United Free Church in Dunscore, where John Farish, the father of Jane’s school friend Dick, was the Session Clerk. At the time when his wife died, Jane’s father was a deacon there and he was later ordained an Elder – one of the group, all men in those days, ordained as the ‘rulers’ of the congregation. An Elder of the Kirk was much respected in the community. Margaret Haining writes, ‘His religion controlled his daily life and his attitude to life in general.’ Talk in the household would include frequent discussion of church events, such as the building of a shed for stabling at Craig Church in 1905, towards which Thomas Haining probably contributed.

The girls attended church and Sunday school and there were probably family prayers and Bible reading at home as well. The school day opened with Bible reading and prayer, and passages from the Bible would be learnt by heart. As a sensitive, imaginative child with a flair for languages, Jane was nourished by the beauty of the Authorised Version and the rural and agricultural imagery of the Old Testament and the Psalms. The centrality of the Bible to Jane’s life and thinking was established in childhood and she seems never to have questioned it.

As a child she would also be familiar with the then best-selling classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress, written by John Bunyan in 1678, which continued to top the bestseller lists for 300 years. Jane in adult life introduced it to countless children in Sunday school and in her care. It is also likely that she read many accounts of the lives of missionaries and explorers, such as David Livingstone in southern Africa and Mary Slessor in Nigeria. Their stories were disseminated widely by local churches as well as at school.

As Jane progressed through the village school, and roamed more widely in the neighbourhood, and as she listened to her father, she began to become aware of the world beyond the farm: of Dunscore and its environs. The countryside around Dunscore is a landscape of low steep hills, with small fields, mossy stone walls and beautiful woodland. On days of alternating rain and sunshine the shadows of the clouds race across the hills. Since long before Jane was born, sheep and cattle have been pastured on the grassy hillsides and the moorland beyond. There is enough relatively flat, fertile land to grow root crops and grain and there was a busy grinding mill in the parish until the 1940s. The Cairn Water flows to the west of Dunscore village along a deep, wooded gorge, and there are Iron Age forts and several ancient burial mounds. Dumfries, the county town, is famous, among other things, for the funeral of Robert Burns, which 10,000 people attended in 1796. Burns is buried in Dumfries in St Michael’s churchyard.

Jane was born into a part of the world, Dumfries and Galloway, with a long tradition of radical, independent thinking among people who saw themselves as answerable only to God. John Welch, the son-in-law of John Knox (the famous Reformer and scourge of Mary Queen of Scots) came from the area, where his father was laird of Collieston in Glen Esslin. In 1662, in the reign of Charles II, an Act was passed at Westminster aimed at wresting control of the Church from Presbyterians and re-establishing its government by bishops and archbishops with the king as head. In protest, the following year the Rev. Mr Archibald, minister at Dunscore, led the congregation out of the church there to join the Covenanters, who had pledged to maintain Presbyterian doctrine and governance in Scotland and refused to submit to the king as head of the Church, acknowledging no king but Christ. They took to the hills to conduct their worship in what were known as conventicles, a routine which lasted until the Revolution of 1689 when Presbyterianism as an option was again restored.

Jane would certainly have been familiar with the story of the Wigtown Martyrs. One of them, local heroine Margaret Wilson, was the daughter of a Galloway farmer and had family connections with Jane’s family. In 1684, in response to an attempted rebellion in Galloway, the Privy Council enacted an Oath of Abjuration swearing allegiance to the king. Everyone aged thirteen and over in the county was required to take it. Margaret and her younger brother Thomas, refusing, hid in the hills with the Covenanters together with their young sister Agnes. When Charles II died in February 1685, hoping for a relaxation of the regime, Margaret and Agnes, then aged eighteen and thirteen, came down to Wigtown and made contact with friends. They were betrayed by a friend of their father’s who deplored their defiance of authority. The girls were arrested and imprisoned, along with an older local woman, Margaret McLachlan, aged sixty-three. All three refused to take the Oath. They were charged with attending conventicles and, absurdly, with fighting at the battles of Bothwell Brig and Airds Moss. Inevitably they were found guilty on all charges and sentenced ‘to be tied to palisades fixed in the sand, within the flood mark of the sea, and there to stand until the flood overwhelmed them and drowned them’.

The girls’ father, Gilbert Wilson, travelled to Edinburgh and managed to secure Agnes’s release on the grounds of her age and by paying a ruinous fee of one hundred pounds. The two Margarets were also officially pardoned but the piece of paper signed in Edinburgh had no effect. On 11 May 1685 they were taken down to the estuary below the church in Wigtown and tied to stakes in the tidal mouth of the river Bladnoch. Margaret McLachlan was tied deeper within the channel, with the intention that witnessing her death would compel Margaret Wilson to conform. However, she again refused a last demand to take the Oath. John Wilson of Kilwinnet describes how, while she was being tied to the stake, Margaret sang verses from Psalm 25 and then ‘went on to quote from the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, as the waves were lapping round her neck. When the waters began to engulf her, she was praying.’ The vividness with which the story is still told in the area today testifies to its lasting impact.

Robert Burns farmed at Ellisland, less than five miles from Dunscore, during 1788–91, and wrote Tam O’Shanter there. And Thomas Carlyle was another independent thinker whose roots were in Dumfriesshire and who was deeply influenced by his family’s strong Calvinist beliefs. He was born in Ecclefechan and lived at Craigenputtock, at the top of Glen Esslin, from 1828 to 1834. He was then in the early stages of creating his History of the French Revolution, published in 1837. This extraordinarily vivid history was compulsively read and re-read by Charles Dickens while he was writing A Tale of Two Cities. When asked by a visitor who built the parish church, Carlyle is said to have replied, ‘The Cross of Christ built Dunscore Kirk upon the hill.’

The Free Church of Scotland itself was founded in 1843 following the Great Disruption in the Kirk, when a third of the ministers of the Church of Scotland and their congregations walked away from their manses and church buildings. This was in protest against the use of tiends, a state tax, to fund the ministry, and against the interference of patronage in the appointment of ministers. The issue of the proper authority of the state versus that of the Church was of central importance to the Reformed Church in Scotland, and Thomas Haining was much involved in such discussions.

Every Sunday the Haining family walked to church down a road known as ‘Black Brae’, (because of the number of black-clad villagers walking up or down it to the various churches) as far as the river, passing the Farish house, Broombush. Then they turned left just before the bridge, passed the old mill and walked on up the hill to Craig United Free Church. On their way they would pass by two other Presbyterian churches, Renwick Church (United Presbyterian) and Dunscore Church (Church of Scotland). This made it a journey of an hour each way, in all weathers, but it was a matter of principle.

In 1919 the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church Assemblies passed a joint statement on the subject of state authority, and in 1921 Parliament approved the Church of Scotland Act, recognising the spiritual independence of the Church ‘in matters of worship, government, doctrine & discipline’. This paved the way for the reunion of the Church of Scotland in 1929. So the priority of allegiance to the Church over allegiance to the state was part of the ‘given’ with which Jane Haining grew up. She was not a person predisposed to be impressed by the Third Reich and its claims to eternal glory.

She was also trained in the importance of the individual conscience. Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which proclaimed that there was no salvation outside the Church but that to be part of the Church was to ensure salvation, the Reformed Church was based on the understanding of salvation as an individual matter. Each Protestant must choose for himself or herself whether to accept Christ as his or her saviour. This meant that the individual conscience was the ultimate arbiter of behaviour and not the group. Decades later, therefore, Jane Haining was destined to be fundamentally opposed to Nazi ideology, which held that loyalty to the state, and in particular to its personification in the Führer, was everything, and that individual rights did not exist. Hitler asserted that populations derived their rights on a national or racial basis determined solely by the dictates of the Führer.

In 1900 this was still a world away from Dunscore. The population of the parish was about 800, living in the village and in small settlements, farms and single cottages. There was no industry to speak of, besides country weaving, and apart from a few wealthy landlords, people made their living by agriculture. The most lucrative crop was grain of all kinds, followed by potatoes, turnips and cabbages, then hay, from meadow and sown grass. Cows and sheep were pastured. Both agriculture and domestic life, in these early days of mechanisation, were highly labour-intensive and there would be no idle hands at Lochenhead Farm.

However, the world was changing and a general move from the countryside in Scotland into the towns had already begun. A great event in the community occurred in 1905 when the railway reached Dunscore. The first train on the Cairnvalley Light Railway travelled in that year from Moniaive to Dumfries, stopping at Dunscore, Stepford and Newtonairds. We can be fairly sure that the whole Haining household, along with the rest of the village, turned out for this event. The station had cost £212 to build and was made of red brick, with red roof tiles. There was an extension at the front, a booking office and a waiting room. A house was provided for the station master, an electrically controlled signal system was put in place and there was a telephone system installed for communication between stations. A railway viaduct with three arches, faced with red brick, bridged the River Cairn just below the station. In its first ten months of operation the railway carried 42,417 passengers, so it clearly transformed daily life in the area. Jane and the other Dunscore children knew the times of the trains and heard the steam engine as it chuffed its way through the village. Direct access to the wider world was established.

In 1909, Jane moved on from the village school. Margaret Haining recounts, ‘Mr. Gold, the headmaster, brought [Jane] through the junior school stages up to scholarship stage. It was a proud day when the results of the bursary examination came out and Jane was to follow us to the Academy at Dumfries.’ At that time Dumfries Academy operated as a grammar school for academically gifted children, based on exam results. It was a prestigious school with an excellent academic record, and the bursary scheme had been initiated to ensure that appropriately promising children from throughout the area could attend.

Margaret Haining writes, ‘That was the year of the opening of the Moat Hostel for girls. It was quite an event beginning a hostel for girl pupils from the country. Jane was the youngest resident in the opening year . . . She spent six years at the Academy living in the hostel, coming home at stated weekends for the holidays. They were happy years.’ This was Jane’s first experience of living away from home and it was to inform the care and understanding which she was later to offer to the girls who came as boarders to the Scottish Mission School in Budapest.

Rev. David MacDougall, who knew Jane as an adult and wrote a biography of her published in 1949, tells us

We know that she was shy, timid and retiring, yet had a marked propensity for mothering other girls. As a rule she seemed older than her years, and people often took her sister Margaret and herself for twins, for Jane gently mothered her as if Margaret were the junior sister . . . Being, so to speak, one of the pioneers [of the hostel], she delighted to take charge of newcomers, to show them the ways of the place and to make them feel at home.

Margaret herself said, ‘Jane was younger than me. Two years, four months and six days was always her reply when asked. Between six and ten years we were usually taken to be twins, but she soon passed me by both physically and mentally and took the lead in all our escapades. She was always kind and thoughtful and unselfish. Her plans were mostly in the interests of others and very often did not turn out very happily for herself.’ Jane did, however, make at least one lifelong friend of her own age at school, Agnes Rawson. Agnes was a day pupil who lived in Maxwelltown and used to take Jane home to visit on Saturdays.

The routine of the hostel, after the manner of the day, was strict, although there is no suggestion that the Haining girls found it harsh. On certain weekends they were allowed home; otherwise on Saturdays they were allowed out for dinner and tea. On Sundays the hostel girls were walked twice in a ‘crocodile’ to Buccleuch Street Church, where Jane and Agnes would meet up again as Agnes attended with her family.

The minister, Rev. John Cairns, was highly thought of, and Jane looked up to him and was considerably influenced by his preaching. Significantly, following his studies for the ministry in Edinburgh in the 1870s, he had studied at the University of Leipzig. From 1909, when Jane arrived as a boarder at Moat hostel, he was Convener of the Church of Scotland’s Continental Committee, which looked after Scottish congregations in mainland Europe. He was later Convener of the Colonial and Continental Committee, with responsibilities throughout the British Empire, from 1913 to 1922. In 1921 his book Our Continental Mission and Its Historic Background was published in Edinburgh. So there was a focus on international concerns in many of the sermons to which Jane was obliged to listen each week, and a keen awareness of the wider world beyond the confines of Dumfries and Galloway.

Between services, in good weather the girls went out, also in crocodile, for a Sunday walk. This would be a quiet affair, for it was required on the Scottish Sabbath that all shops and places of entertainment were closed and the swings and slides in the playpark were chained up. Only ‘serious’ reading would be permitted in the hostel on a Sunday.

McDougall also tells us that Jane ‘played games with zest’, and approached her schoolwork ‘with a certain eagerness and ease’. He comments, ‘Jovial she seldom was, though of happy disposition; there was a root in her of gravity which perhaps went back to the mother who was gone, and which yet went well enough with the characteristic dry humour of the countryside.’ She seems to have been happy and secure in the quiet, ordered and stable life of the hostel.

Back home in Dunscore, her main recreation as a child and young person was walking and picnicking with other children around the hills and streams of the district. She knew all the trees and flowers of the area; she was awarded the prize of the same book on botany in two successive years at Dumfries Academy. Walking and picnicking remained a joyful recreation all her life, in the Glasgow parks, in the hills of Budapest and on the holidays she snatched with her sister Margaret in Switzerland and France. Poignantly, one of the prize books on botany was found in Budapest among her meagre possessions after her death.

As Jane entered her last year at school, the wider world invaded with the outbreak of the First World War. Agnes Rawson’s father was no longer present at the weekend teas, for he enrolled in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSBs) and left to fight in France. The memorial for Dumfries Academy pupils killed in that war lists 115 names, mostly from ranks of the KOSBs, the Royal Scots and the Black Watch. Jane must have known a considerable number of them, and would have heard the discussions and the plans, at first excited, of the final-year boys who were her companions in the classroom and anxious to be released to join up.

The news that followed over the next four years cast a black cloud on everyone and changed life forever, even in rural Scotland. On the First World War memorial in the tiny village of Dunscore there are forty names, and it is likely that the Haining family knew them all or their families, or knew of them. They will certainly have known William Cringean, John Fergusson, James Todd and William Wilson, who were from Craig United Free Church. Such was the atmosphere of Jane’s mid to late teenage years, when a whole generation of young women lost sweethearts and potential husbands. Many of these women went on to astonishing achievements in spheres no previous generation of women, tied down by child bearing and domestic labour, could have entered, but all became acquainted with grief and sorrow on an industrial scale.

Jane was a most able pupil, with a love of learning, and at the end of her first year at Dumfries Academy she won seven prizes, including prizes for Latin, French and English. Overall she won forty-one prizes during her time at Dumfries and in her final year was dux of the school: her name can still be seen on the Honour Board that hangs in the school hall. She passed her Higher Leaving Certificate in English, Mathematics, Latin, French and German.

She left school in 1915 and returned for a while to the farm where her labour was desperately needed, with so many of the young men away at the war. However, her family were proud of her achievements and she was not destined to remain at Lochenhead Farm. Just after she turned twenty, she set off as a family pioneer to attend the new Glasgow & West of Scotland Commercial College at the Athenaeum in Glasgow – a serious but happy, healthy, adventurous girl.

2

Glasgow: A Career Girl in Paisley

The war revolutionised the industrial position of women – it found them serfs and left them free.

(Millicent Fawcett, 1918)

A contemporary witness in 1893 described the migration of young women from the hard labour of the Scottish countryside to the cities:

A young woman will hand over her ‘kist’ (anglice, chest or box of clothes) to the porter, get her ticket for Glasgow, pull on her gloves, laugh and talk with her parents and comrades, jump into the train, pay her adieu, wave her handkerchief, sit down oblivious to bandbox and unencumbered with bundles, and thank her stars that she is at last leaving the unwomanly job for domestic service and town society.

Jane Haining was not bound for domestic service, but for college, when she left Lochenhead Farm in the summer of 1917 and came to Glasgow to begin her new life.

Glasgow at the start of the twentieth century was the second largest city in Britain, after London, and was known as ‘the second city of the Empire’, with a population of over a million. It was also known for the appalling conditions in which the industrial workers lived (and worked). A Parliamentary Report on housing in 1839 stated, ‘I have seen human degradation in some of the worst phases both in England and abroad, but I can advisedly say, that I did not believe, until I visited the wynds of Glasgow, that so large an amount of filth, crime, misery, and disease existed on one spot in any civilised country.’ And conditions did not improve substantially for the working classes until after the Second World War.

Despite the drudgery of farm and domestic labour in and around Dunscore, conditions for the poor were still reckoned to be a bit better than in the cities. A Borders shepherd, Andrew Purves, remembers his infant teacher of the time, who had taught in city schools, telling his class how well off they were compared with city children. He saw little sign in the Borders of the terrible, hopeless poverty of working-class people in the towns. Certainly children from the countryside at that time were taller and heavier than those in the towns.