See an image of the letter from Sissy Weinberg, https://doi.org/10.17613/h4xx-dx26
Printed letterhead
LOYAL[1]
ALYTH, NB.[2]
2nd September
My dear Jack.
So you are back in the old country. I thought I would write you a line to welcome you back. I hope we will soon have the pleasure of seeing you over here. I was just saying yesterday that the last time I had seen you was on the evening of the wedding day a year ago.[3] By the way did you get the letter I wrote you about a month ago or had you left B.A. already? I wasn’t quite sure whether you would get it or not. I suppose you had a very pleasant time on the voyage over, you generally do have a good time I think. Are you going to stay in Auld Irland for a bit now, I should think you have had enough wandering to last you for the rest of your life. My love to all your people.
Ever affect. yours
Sissy Weinberg[4]
- This is a property Sissy's father Isaac Julius Weinberg rented for the family to spend the summer at. From his memoir (privately published in 1909): “After my sons had more or less grown up, for several years I took places in the country with some shooting and fishing. . . . The next year I took Loyal, near Alyth, which belonged then to Prof. Ramsay. It is a very nice place, with excellent gardens. . . It was not exactly a holiday for my wife as we had the house full of visitors all the time, but she enjoyed it and so did we all. [a couple of years] after I again took Loyal; Prof. Ramsay had sold the place in the interval to Mr.Grieve of the Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh, a very different man from our former landlord, which made the stay not as pleasant as it had been before, owing greatly to the interference of Mrs. Grieve, who wanted us to feed her pigs and asked my keeper to supply her with hares and rabbits, but as he mentioned the matter to me, Mrs. Grieve had to supply herself elsewhere.” "The house had originally been built for Commander William Ogilvy in the 1850s who after a triumphant time on the battlefields of Waterloo returned to the area of his birth. As son of the Earl of Airlie from Cortachy Castle near Kirriemuir, Ogilvy was fortunate to be a man of means and enlisted the local architects A & A Heiton to design Loyal House complete with adjacent stables and coach house, and there he lived out his days, unfortunately alone. Loyal House remained in the Ogilvy family until the 1870s when it was sold to George Gilbert Ramsay of Bamff, a Professor of Humanities at Glasgow University. During the Ramsays' time the footprint of the house more than doubled in size, when with the help of Andrew Heiton Jr a large extension was built in 1877 - 1878. Leslie’s directory for Perth and Perthshire lists George Gilbert Ramsay, Professor of Humanity at the University of Glasgow, as proprietor in 1895-1896: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gilbert_Ramsay ↵
- Alyth, a town in East Perthshire, was famous for the manufacture of brown and other linens with two mills, one of which, Smith & Sons (1873), spun jute and flax. There was also a woollen factory: https://www.scottish-places.info/towns/townhistory141.html ↵
- This must have been the marriage of Frederick Simon Weinberg (her brother b 5th August 1865) and Grace Keiller. They married on the 14th August 1894 in London. See Index to People. ↵
- Sissy Weinberg (see Index to People). Zerline Adele Weinberg (b 1872) nicknamed "Sissy", the daughter of Isaac Julius and Agnes Weinberg, the fourth of their seven children, and the elder of their 2 daughters – closest in age to JMcC. This could have been a perfect match! Two of her brothers were part of JMcC’s South American travels: Julian Weinberg (b 12th August 1871 Dundee, d 1936 London) and Bertie (Herbert James) Weinberg (b 1868 Belfast, d Perth, Scotland 1896). JMcC and Sissy did not marry each other however. JMcC married Elsa Iklé in Hamburg on the 21st April 1903. It is from this marriage that all the editors and textual contributors to this book descend. ↵
