My Grandpa, Robert Duncan, was born in 1893 at Old Montrose, the youngest child of Andrew Duncan and Isabella Nicoll. By the time he arrived, his older brothers and sisters were already growing up and beginning their own lives, and he was the baby of the family, born twelve years after his sister Bella.
Like the generations before him, Grandpa’s life was closely connected with the land. His father worked as a gardener on the Old Montrose estate, and in time Grandpa followed him into the same work. Gardening ran deep in the Duncan family and many of the men before him had been gardeners or agricultural labourers.
In 1923 Grandpa married my Granny, Mona Clyne, and they made their home at Old Montrose where he worked in the estate gardens. It was there that their family began. My Dad, Andrew Nicoll Duncan, was born in 1927, followed by his brother Robert in 1931. Dad’s memories of growing up at Old Montrose — beside the Montrose Basin and the gardens where Grandpa worked — appear throughout the memoir he later wrote about his life.
Read Grandpa Duncan’s war story here.
Craigachan 