I compiled something for your website when my mother, Catherine Crosbie, reached her 100th birthday. Sadly have to tell you that she died on 19th April this year 2004. Quite peacefully, in reasonable health and still in her sound mind. Best wishes Lin Thomas

This is a photo of my mother, Catherine Crosbie, taken on the day of her 100th birthday, 19 October 2000. As you can see she is holding the card from the Queen, which now replaces the redundant telegram!

Mum was born in Maybole, as were her two brothers Peter and William Tweedily and her sister Elizabeth (Lizzie) who married Maybole businessman George Mulvein in the early 1930s. Uncle Peter, the eldest, died in August 1979 aged 81. My uncle Bill, who was a stalwart member of the British Legion and the bowling club in Maybole died in Ayr aged 97 in 1995. Her sister, who will be 95 in February, lives near Bristol, so there is longevity in the family!

As Miss Tweedily my mother taught at Dalrymple Primary School from 1920 to 1928, when she left to marry Tom Crosbie. She has recently been able to get in touch with several of her former pupils and their siblings, which gives her a great deal of pleasure. One particularly nice story is from Violet Templeton (nee Watt, sister of Robert "Bertie" Watt) who remembers walking from Dalrymple to Minishant to see her teacher on her wedding day!

My father was born in Kilmarnock but having started work in the British Linen Bank during the First World War, moved to London in 1926 to join Barclays Bank. He and my mother set up home in Surrey, then just on the outskirts of London. However, the Second World War touched their lives as Tom continued to work in the city throughout the Blitz and eventually their house was destroyed completely by a landmine on a parachute in 1941. Neighbours on both sides were killed but Cathy, Tom and their daughter, Lin, were mercifully spared.

Tom died in 1972 but Cathy managed her own home until 1996 when she joined her daughter and son-in-law, Dick Thomas, in their move to Perthshire, where she now lives with them near Aberfeldy. While she does not see the rolling fields of Ayrshire from her picture window, she is able to enjoy a view of the "silvery Tay" together with the hills and snow-capped mountains of her new home.

Lin Thomas