The Lives of Robert and Mary Moffat

Robert Moffat was born on the twenty-first of December, 1795, at Ormiston, in East Lothian. Of his father’s origin and family little is known, but his mother, Ann Gardiner, came of ancestors who had lived for several generations at Ormiston in a lowly walk of life, their only distinction having been a steady and unobtrusive piety. It is uncertain what was the occupation of the elder Moffat at Ormiston for some years after his marriage, but in 1797, when the subject of this memoir was two years old, his father received an appointment in the custom-house at Portsoy, near Banff, and removed thither with his wife and young family. In those days the voyage was long and venturesome, not without serious risks, as would appear from some of the letters written at this time. A visit which had been promised by some of the family is deferred till a more convenient season on account of a fear of being “captured by the French;” and that this fear was not altogether groundless appears from another item in the same letters, to the effect that a French privateer had chased an armed brig into Leith roads. An account is also given of the raising of volunteer forces to repel an expected invasion, towards which force the quiet landward parish of Ormiston furnished its quota of sixty-nine men.

The Moffats remained only a few years at Portsoy, In 1806 we find them established at Carronshore, on the southern side of the Firth of Forth, and a short distance from Falkirk. The cottage in which they lived still stands, a small and unpretending abode, surrounded by others of the same class. It was visited and recognized by Robert Moffat when in his old age he re-visited some of the scenes of his youth. The family which found a home here consisted of four sons and two daughters, besides

Robert himself. These have all passed away; only one of them left children, and of these scarcely any remain.

In a letter written nearly fifty years later to one of his sons, Robert Moffat tells the story of this period:

“When I think of the advantages you have possessed, I am reminded by way of contrast of my infant years. Well do I remember, as if it were but yesterday, being sent to William — or, as he was called, Wully — Mitchell, a parish schoolmaster, to learn to read. The shorter catechism was my first book, the title-page of which contained the A, B, C, &c. That acquired, I went plump into the first question, ‘What is the chief end of man?’ I tugged away at this till I got to the Amen, but not without having my hands sometimes well warmed with the taa’s, for Wully was stern when he sat in judgment. This was my first step at school. You would be surprised to hear how little I knew. I might have received a better education. My dear father and mother were not to blame, but I wanted to be a man before the time. I lived among shipping, and ran off to sea; and the captain becoming exceedingly attached to me, constrained my parents to allow me to go many voyages with him in the coasting trade, and many hairbreadth escapes I had. I got disgusted with a sailor’s life, to the no small joy of my parents; and I shall always feel grateful that I was afterwards, about the age of eleven, sent with my elder brother Alexander to Mr. Paton’s school at Falkirk. It was properly only a school for writing and book-keeping, and those who chose to pay, or could afford to pay, received lessons in astronomy and geography after school hours. My brother was one of the class of young men, who were nearly all the sons of the better sort of folks. Having some distance to walk home I was allowed to remain in the large room. I felt queer to know what the master was doing within the circle, and used to look very attentively through any little slit of an opening under an elbow, while I eagerly listened to the illustrations given, the master all the while never suspecting that I was capable of understanding the wonders of the planetary system. What I could not understand my brother explained on our way home. I was only six months at this school, the last I ever attended.”

At this time he was a regular attendant on the ministry of the Rev. Mr. Caldwell. Judging from later allusions, even at an early age deep and serious impressions must have been made. All his life through, Mr. Caldwell’s earnest teaching left recollections never to be effaced. These were confirmed by a mother’s influence. Robert was blessed with a mother of a type not uncommon in those days in Scotland. In the opinion of more than one of her grandchildren who have had the oyiportunity of judging, she might have sat to George Mac Donald for his portrait of Robert Falconer’s grandmother. She united a sternness of religious belief bordering on gloomy vindicliveness with one of the tenderest and c/)

z
o

OS

<:
o

O

a; most loving hearts that ever beat. Her handsome features and dark eyes usually wore an expression of melancholy, but when a smile came it lit up her beautiful face in a way that could not be forgotten.

Nor was her sombre theology incompatible with a lively interest in the movements which were even then on foot for the preaching of the gospel to the heathen, and tidings of which reached even the sequestered villages of Scotland. On the long winter evenings the lads were gathered by the fireside, and while their mother taught them — not without remonstrance against employment which they thought more fit for their sisters — to knit and to sew, she would read aloud, in such missionary publications as were then to be had, the story of the dauntless pioneers of the gospel; and more especially of the work of the Moravians in Greenland and in the East Indies.

About 1809 Robert was apprenticed to the trade of a gardener, under a certain John Robertson of Parkhill, Polmont. This John is described as having been a hard man, though withal a just one. Often, even in the bitter cold of a Scottish winter, the lads were required to be on foot in the dense darkness at four o’clock in the morning, and had to hammer their knuckles against the handles of their spades to try and bring some feeling into them. They had just enough to eat, but not a whit more than was absolutely necessary.

Notwithstanding the severe regime under which he lived, Robert seems to have found time to attend an evening class occasionally, and to make an attempt at learning Latin and mensuration; and it would appear that in his intercourse with the family of a neighbour — of which one member, a Mrs. Home, still lives near Liverpool — he took his first lessons at the anvil, and also learned to play a little on the violin. He had a craving, which clung to him through life, to learn something of whatever he came in contact with, and many of the accomplishments of which he thus gained a smattering proved of unlooked-for value to him afterwards.

Keep reading