Pittencrieff Park

Princess Margaret

Ancient Foundations

Dunfermline Palace

Abbot House

Dunfermline Abbey

Dunfermline

Dunfermline

In the centre of Dunfermline, at the corner of one of the hilly streets, is a squat and simple cottage. Its small windows look directly on to the pavement. In a downstairs room is a loom; in a small bedroom are two built-in beds. Those are the things we first notice. A simple Dunfermline cottage. Its sparse furnishing tells of frugality, its waiting loom of industry. It is a cottage typical of a weaving town, and such an interior was common enough at one time in this town "of the crooked linn".

On the ground floor of the cottage is an inner door. We open this. We shall never forget the surprise of that opening. We walk from the humble dwelling into a grand hall, passing from the brown shadows into the glow of gold and silver and rich colours. This opening of a door, this walking of only a few paces have carried us a long way indeed-carried us from the beginnings, from the birth-chamber of a man and through his whole life and right into the full blaze of his stupendous achievement.

In the bedroom of that cottage on a November day in 1835 was born Andrew Carnegie. In the hall beyond the cottage walls we are shown what the name of the fabulous Andrew Carnegie became. Behind us is the simple cottage of the Dunfermline lad; around us is his name engraved on caskets of gold and silver presented to him by the cities of the world, ceremonial robes, honours, orders, addresses, medals, urns-all the accumulated richness of an immense life, an overpowering richness, a bewildering richness. We move amazed through the vast collection. We move from one object to the other, from glittering precious casket to illuminated address. What one thing of the many might halt us might not halt our companion, who has been drawn to some other piece over which he now studies and reflects on the name of Andrew Carnegie. We, for instance, might gaze at the Roll of Honour of the Carnegie Hero Fund, its pages heavily illuminated and glinting with gold. Another might look at the robes. Another at the orders. There are so many of them, so many of these relics-proud, ceremonial and lavish-of a rich, an impossibly rich life.

We leave it all, this glass-encased collection, this most strident glory, and go back into the shadows of the cottage. It is a good place, this, in which to begin our visit to Dunfermline, for however we seek to tell it, the story of Dunfermline must be the story of two people, Andrew Carnegie and another. Totally different are these two people: so different that the coupling of their names might at first thought appear altogether audacious. For they are centuries apart. One of them is a woman of royal blood, and the other the son of a damask weaver. One is a Queen from across the seas, and the other a man who powerfully built a staggering empire of wealth. One is a Saint and the other a short, rough-faced, tough man born of Fife.

Two Great Legends

But we put them together, this Queen Margaret of 900 years ago and this Andrew Carnegie of yesterday, for their names, more than the names of any two others, belong most vividly and assuredly to Dunfermline and stand out in its history as gloriously as those glinting capitals on the Roll of Honour or as those infinitely beautiful decorations in the 900-year-old Gospel book she carried. For they have one thing in common. Upon the story of the Queen the long passage of centuries has laid so much wonder that she seems to have become a figure of legend. And in the short span of mortal life the man Carnegie did so much, so very much, that now, only a few years after his death, his story likewise seems to belong rather to legend than to fact.

We have not time, here in Dunfermline, to tell in full the stories of these two people. For the story of the Queen embraces the story of a whole age, and is in fact a long chapter telling the birth of a conscious nation. And the story of the man Carnegie is also the story of an age, a story of gigantic industrial development. So it must suffice us on this visit to see the memorials to their name which form the fabric of the town that is theirs. And because we have begun our visit at the cottage on the corner of Moodie Street and Priory Lane, we will look first at the things created by that 19th-century son of Dunfermline, the son of the damask weaver.

Before we leave the cottage there is one thing we must look at with a closer examination. This is a simple relic of his life, and perhaps the most appealing of all the relics. The loom in the downstairs room, the loom upon which his father worked, established for us the character of the life into which Andrew Carnegie was born, a life simple, industrious, frugal. But it is not the loom, nor the table-cloth woven at it five years before Andrew's birth, that we should look at now. The one thing which, having seen, we shall not forget, and which, in fact, will remain as vividly in our memories as do the glittering glories of the treasure-house beyond the cottage walls, is a patchwork quilt. It was made by a mother for her son. It is em-broidered "Andrew Carnegie 1882 from Mother". A simple motherly gift, the product of patient, loving work. But suddenly we turn to read the date again. It is that date which makes us pause. 1882! Why, in that year Andrew Carnegie was 47. The son for whom a mother patiently worked a simple patchwork quilt was already a power among the men of mighty wealth.

Now we can go into the town and see how richly it benefited from having borne in an attic room that fabulous child, the lad who left with his parents in the "hungry forties", began work as a cotton worker at the age of 13, and conquered the world of the United States iron industry. The essence of what he did for his native town can be savoured in one building in the town. In Abbot Street are the offices of the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust. From this headquarters are directed the many charities with which the munificent man endowed his native burgh. His first gift was that of the public baths which were built in Pilmuir Street in 1877. But by 1903 he thought them out-of-date, so he built new public baths and a gymnasium at a cost of £45,000. It was in that year that he established the Trust-a body consisting of nominees and representatives of the local authority. Their task was to maintain Pittencrieff Park and the baths and to promote other social amenities. For half a century they have been actively adding to the public life of Dunfermline. From the funds administered by the Trust comes an income of £50,000 a year to be spent in the public good. The Trust has provided institutes for indoor recreation and study throughout the town, bowling-greens, playing-fields, a music institute, a concert-hall, a youth centre, and a crafts school. The College of Hygiene and Physical Education it founded has become a national Training Centre; the flower-shows it promoted have become noted as among the finest in the country. Those offices then are a living active memorial to the man Carnegie. But in other ways the town keeps before it the memory of its great benefactor. To commemorate the centenary of his birth, Dunfermline citizens gifted a chime of bells to the abbey, and a new range of bells was installed in memory of Mrs Carnegie, who died in 1946. Annually at the close of the school year all the children of Dunfermline are entertained in Pittencrieff Park by the Carnegie Dunfermline Trustees on the Children's Gala Day.

Carved in stone on a lintel in Maygate we see a couplet with which Sir Walter Scott headed one of the chapters of The Fair Maid of Perth. It was in 1821 that Sir Walter received the freedom of Dunfermline. He was at that time writing this novel, and he used the lines he had seen carved on the lintel of Dunfermline's Abbot's House.

Sen word is thrall and thocht is fre
Keep veill thy tonge I coinsell the.

At one time the Abbot's House was a detached building standing in the grounds of the abbey. It is a fine example of Scottish domestic architecture of the 16th century, and was the mansion of Robert Pitcairn, titular Abbot of Dunfermline at the time of the Reformation.

The City Chambers, rebuilt in 1879, stand at the corner of Bridge Street and Kirkgate, their heavy baronial-type tower crowding the narrow skyline of the steep converging streets. The chambers are worth visiting for their collection of portraits, including works by Raeburn and Lawrence, and also paintings of scenes in history by Sir Noel Paton, native of Dunfermline. One of the "gargoyles" on the exterior wall is a head of Baillie Erskine.

The name of Ralph Erskine, one of the ministers of Dunfermline Abbey who was deposed in 1740, is preserved in Erskine church opposite the post office, and a statue to this one of the founders of the Secession Church stands outside the church. In the Session House of the church is the Solemn League and Covenant signed at Dunfermline in 1638. The Gillespie Memorial Church also preserves the name of another prominent churchman, Thomas Gillespie, minister ofCarnock, who, deposed by the General Assembly in 1752, founded in Dunfermline the forerunner of the Relief Church.

For many centuries Dunfermline has grown in industrial importance. Not only damask made its name famous in the markets of the world, but also coal. In fact, one of the first mentions of coal in Scottish records is that in a lease granted by William de Oberwill owner of Pittencrieff in 1291, "to the religious men, the abbot and convent of Dunfermline, a coalpit in the land of Pittencrieff wherever they may wish, excluding the arable land, that they may get a sufficiency for their own use, but not to sell. Moreover, one failing, they may make another according to their free will as often as they may see expedient."

In the seven centuries since then Dunfermline grew, as this visit has shown us, into a great town, with its abbey, its palace, its royal sepulchre; and as it grew in ecclesiastical and royal dignity it grew also in industrial importance. The abbey and the palace gave great names to Dunfermline; the narrow, steep streets around these mighty buildings carried on the long tradition of industrious has created the burgh we see today. Since the war the burgh has drawn up a plan for the new Dunfermline it is hoped to build. Its narrow streets are to be widened, for the burgh needs elbow room. So those steep and narrow streets must one day make room for wider and more spacious approaches. But we now know sufficient of the spirit of Dunfermline to feel that in the building of the future there should be reflected-as in the building of the past-the courage and dignity which created this "town of the crooked linn".

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