46 Albany Street

1901 – 1904 John and Mary (neé Henderson) Whitelaw

John Whitelaw, an architect and civil engineer, moved here from Number 31 with his wife and family. He was in his late seventies and he died in 1902. He began as a mining engineer, and was manager of the Fordell Colliery before working as an architect. Among the small number of buildings he is known to have designed are Cowdenbeath Parish Church and Mossgreen Manse in Dalgety. In 1892, he was awarded a silver medal by the Royal Scottish Society for the Arts for his paper on miners’ safety cages. Whitelaw was concerned that there was no Government regulation insisting on miners’ cages having safety devices, and presented a design that ensured a cage could not fall. His design was successfully tested at Preston Grange Colliery. He received another silver medal in 1901 for another paper related to coalfields.

In 1897, Whitelaw surveyed the Townhill Colliery near Dunfermline to assess its remaining coal reserves. His eldest son was also called John, and a Civil Engineer, so it likely that it was he who published the book, Surveying as Practised by Civil Engineers and Surveyors in 1902. The other son, Alexander, became a Mechanical Engineer.

the house was vacant for a few years.

1907 -1908 Hugh Makinson

Hugh Makinson was a law clerk, but clearly not very successful, as he was declared bankrupt in 1908.

Again the house was vacant.

1915 – 1923 James and Margaret Martin

Nothing traced for John and Margaret. Their eldest son, Peter, was a Private with the Royal Army Medical Corps Battalion 3rd Field Ambulance Unit, and, in 1917, was killed in the First World War.

1925 – 1938 William and Margaret Napier

William Napier, who described his profession as a ‘Paper Ruler’, was an operator of a printing machine. These machines performed a variety of functions, such as converting, sawing, corrugating, banding, wrapping, boxing, stitching, forming, or sealing paper or paperboard sheets into products. It is possible he was part of the company M.A. Napier & Co.

Margaret was a mathematics teacher. In 1932, she wrote a letter to The Scotsman concerning the differences in education in Britain and America: ‘I myself teach mathematics, and from day to day am confronted with the hopelessness of much of my work. Let anyone attempt to teach the abstractions of geometry to a low class and then change over to something connected with living – for example, the metric system and shopping in a French shop say – and the difference in attitude of the pupils is remarkable. We teach chemical reactions and physical properties of matter. America tries to teach “living” science, and in this we fail.’

Around 1935 the Napiers had a lodger, William Blair, a sculptor.

1939 – 1960 Robert and P M Riddell