Murrays Raws

Blantyre's Ain Website

Blantyre, Lanarkshire, Scotland

Blantyre history

Murray’s Raw’s

Another bite sized chunk of Blantyre History

Merry's RawsHere on this corner starts the famous Merry”s Row’s or Murray’s raw’s as we the folks of Blantyre called It. Now called Elm Street.

I have some figures that I come across in my research that I am going to post which may be hard to believe but the census will back me up on this.

There was a family that moved into Blantyre in 1877 they were the first family of that name to stay in Murray’s Raw’s.
From 1877 – 1922 a matter of 45 years, there were 20 families all from the same Grandfather with slight variations of this name, who lived at 20 different addresses in Murray’s Raw’s

The offspring from these 20 families was 134 children all born in Murray’s Raw’s. Some had 12, 13, children in the family all living in a wee raw’s house, they had nothing else.
So for this particular named family there were 20 husbands who worked at the Auchinraith pit for Merry’s and Cunningham (@%$*&%^$*&#@$!) sorry about the language.

Murray’s Raw’s ended at Auchinraith Road, for the miners It was a trip across the street, through the pen close of the tenement building, then through the washings hanging out to dry, leg over the railway sleepers and over the railway line and in to the hands of the masters. You may ask why did they not get another type of job, and of course the answer is there was no other to be had, and those who owned the mines made it very hard for you and your kin to escape from their clutches.
I won’t go any further into the lives of the miners, there are a lot of historians who have covered it much better than I ever could.

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Duncan Slater wrote, “I was born in #79, that is the house with someone at the door, also I can give you the names of some of the people who lived here, in 1937 all the people were moved to new houses on Priory and Calder streets.
#1 Croft Family (Frank)
15 Croft family  (Robert)
20 Kalinsky family
22 Woods
24 Duncan
39 Schlothaeur
43 Longmuir
64 Mc.Inally
86 Patterson
79 Slater
81 Carabine (with 8 children, one who played football for Scotland, Jimmy).”

Duncan Slater remembers, “On the other corner of the Murray’s Raws was an Iron Duke. This was a open air toilet made of cast iron. It was real handy for the men in the later years when the buses started to run, you could stand there and have a pee and still look through the perforated mesh at the top and see if your bus was coming down the road. This was right at the bus stop, it could not have been pleasant for the ladies queuing up for the bus”.

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Continuing the conversation between Thomas Dunsmuir Hartman in Chicago, formerly Logan Street, (known as TDH or Drapadew) and Margaret in Queensland Australia on TalkingScot.

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Blantyre, Lanarkshire, Scotland

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