As we remember the centenary of the early stages of World War One, we can reflect upon how the people of the Largo area played their part.  Many would serve their country overseas - some never to return.  Others would support the war effort from home.  The 'Largo Village Book', published in 1932, gives some insight into home-based activities.  For example, Homelands would become a base for a Red Cross work party (convened by Mrs Paxton).  They met weekly to make clothing such as shirts, socks and pyjamas to pass on to the Red Cross for the troops.  The Grove in Upper Largo was also the base of a sewing party (convened by Miss Baxter), which sent supplies to hospitals, charities and direct to men fighting overseas.

Another well-documented enterprise was moss-picking.  Parties met weekly in both Lundin Links and Upper Largo to collect sphagnum moss to be used for dressings.  Millions of dressings were made from this material during World War One as dried sphagnum can absorb up to twenty times its own volume in liquids and promotes antisepsis.  An Edinburgh surgeon named Charles Walker Cathcart organised collections of the moss throughout Scotland and centres for its cleaning and preparation.  It was to his Edinburgh depot that the moss collected in Largo was sent.  Mrs Gaskill of Lahill was the convener of the moss picking.

When the Largo Parish war memorial was unveiled in 1921 it bore the names of 51 men who fell in the Great War.  The above postcard shows it not long after completion and before a house was built behind it.  After World War Two a further 16 names were added to the memorial, on two panels on a wall behind the original monument.

This unusual view shows the Greenkeeper's/Starter's House at Lundin Ladies Golf Course on the left (partly obscured by a greenhouse), Largo Law in the background and the 'Fir Park' area on the right (once a patch of firs but now superseded by deciduous trees).  This photo was taken in the summer of 1980 when the old garage that stood in the middle ground had been demolished but the new houses that replaced it on Woodielea Road had not yet been built.  

The Greenkeeper's House was built in 1911, the year after the official opening of the Ladies Club. The house has a magnificent view of the course and remains there today, although much altered and improved over the last century. The era when this house was built was a time of great development of the village and huge popularity with summer visitors. How things would change just three years later.

The Lundin Ladies Golf Club moved to its present location late in 1909.  The clubhouse building pictured above moved with the Club, having first been built in 1897 on a site which is now part of the Lundin Golf Club course.  The whole structure was dismantled around November 1909 and rebuilt, as shown above, in time for the official opening of the new course on 15th April 1910.

The taller roof and chimney behind the clubhouse belong to the Greenkeeper's Cottage which was built at a later date. The nine-hole course was built on an area known as Standing Stanes Park and was designed by five-times British Open Champion James Braid.  I recently read an article about Braid's theories of golf course design.  Here are a few of his basic principles:

• All holes should reward good positional play.
  
• Holes should present a variety of length and make various demands of the player.
  
• Bunkers should be fairly large and have every chance of attracting an errant shot.
  
• Putting greens should be well-guarded.
  
• The size of the green is governed by the length of approach (the shorter the approach the smaller the green).
  
• Alternative routes should be provided to each hole.
  
• Alternative tees should be provided to enable playing conditions to be adapted to prevailing or contrary winds, wet or dry weather.
  

Of course, both the course and the club house have been altered a bit over the last century but, were it possible for those involved in the Ladies Club's move to Standing Stanes Park to return and visit it now, I'm certain that they would recognise their Club and feel very much at home.

When George Nicolaus retired to Lundin Links during World War Two, it was after a lifetime of travel and exploration as a mining engineer.  His work had taken him to many of the remotest areas of the world and he had amassed a huge collection of artefacts from his travels.  After over twenty years of retirement in the place that the mother he had lost at a young age had been raised, George died on 11 December 1962 at Norvil.  In October 1963, an auction of the contents of his home was held at Norvil.  The Leven Mail of 16 October gave an account of the large scale of the sale and the variety of items on offer.  It set the scene as follows:

"Dealers and representatives, some acting on behalf of titled families, came from all over Britain, and mingled with them in the rooms of 'Norvil', Victoria Road, were the private buyers and the bargain-hunters.  Over seven hundred items went under the hammer of auctioneer, Mr D. A. Dowie of Leven at this, one of the most extensive and varied auction sales in the district in many years."

The newspaper article noted that the collection had been so extensive that it had taken months to catalogue.  In fact, what was on sale at the auction in the house was only the "residue" - the most valuable pieces of furniture and objets d'art having been sent to Sotheby's in London.  The Sotheby's items had also included a full library of books and a collection of jade.  Such a house sale inevitably drew a large crowd and the apparently "the lawns of his former home thronged with people on Thursday.  Some merely watching, while others bidded".  Among the items sold on that day were oil and water paintings, bronzes, ivories, oriental rugs, silver, porcelain, glass, jewellery, mirrors and linen.  

Great detail was given in the newspaper on the items sold and the prices involved.  Examples ranged from a pair of 18th century French carved ivory figures sold for £250 and a Dutch marquetry bureau sold for £230, to a £50 telescope, right down to a waffler sold for half a crown.  There were also big game trophies from Northern Rhodesia - the heads of a lion and lioness.

As the Leven Mail summed up "at the end of fully eight hours of bidding and buying, scarcely a thing was left that hadn't gone under the hammer for, from a shilling or two, right up to £330 the top price paid for a French Kingwood vitrine." Below are images of items similar to those described in the newspaper report.  I wonder where they all ended up and how many people still recall the high-profile auction that took place in Lundin Links on that day.

At the east end of Victoria Road in Lundin Links is a house named Norvil, built around 1897 for William Watt the Cupar-based seed merchant.  A later owner of the house was a man with an interesting family background who led a very full life which took him all over the world.  He chose to retire to Lundin Links because his mother's family had lived there. George Richard Clement Nicolaus was born in 1876 in Germany. His parents were the unlikely pairing of Janet Thomson (eldest daughter of Largo baker Andrew Thomson) and George Nicolaus (a German who worked in the luxury hotel industry).  

At the time of Janet and George Snr's marriage in 1873, which took place at the British Consulate in Geneva, George Snr was manager of a hotel called 'Des Troes Couronnes' in Vevey, Switzerland - a hotel which opened in 1842 and still exists today, on the shores of Lake Geneva.  To give an idea of the status of the hotel back then, in 1859 Tsar Nicholas I, Emperor of Russia, took all 60 rooms on all four floors for himself and his entourage to spend the entire winter there.

George Snr had also worked at the Langham Hotel in London shortly after its opening in 1865.  At the time this was London's largest building and Europe's first 'Grand Hotel'. It also housed the world's first hydraulic lifts and was hailed at its opening by the Prince of Wales as "everything a man, woman or child could desire under one roof".  Later in his career, George Snr would manage the Queen Anne Residential Mansions in London.  Opened in 1873, these became the tallest building in Britain at fourteen stories (and infamously blocked Queen Victoria's view of the Houses of Parliament from Buckingham Palace).  This "stupendous pile" housed many famous residents.  Below are images of 'Des Troes Couronnes', the Langham and Queen Anne's Mansions. 

I haven't pinpointed how a Largo baker's daughter met and came to marry, in Geneva, a European involved in the management of prestigious and cutting edge hotels, but would hazard a guess that food and catering were factors.  Sadly in 1889 Janet Foster died, aged 41.  At that time her son George would have been just 13. He would eventually become a mining engineer, having studied at the Camborne School of Mines in Cornwall. George Jnr's career as a mining engineer would take him to many far-flung destinations.  One of the first was Western Australia, where he met his first wife - Edith Christiana Atkinson - whom he married in London in 1902.  In the same year, George led a successful expedition to a remote part of Nigeria to locate a source of tin there, encountering "opposition from native warriors" along the way ['Order out of Chaos' by Bridge and Frederiksen, 2012].

George Nicolaus would specialise in the mining of precious metals and stones and would travel extensively all over the world.  During the First World War he served as a Captain in the Royal Engineers.  He had a second marriage to a Diana Frances Rogers.  However, in spite of his cosmopolitan lifestyle, George never forgot his Scottish roots.  He would visit his grandfather, Andrew Thomson, at the Bonnybay House Baker's Shop at the foot of Durham Wynd in Lower Largo (see photo) and later (after James Bruce had taken over the bakery business) at his home on Emsdorf Street Lundin Links. When the time came for George Nicolaus Jnr to retire, he might have chosen anywhere in the world. But he chose to settle in Lundin Links in the early years of the Second World War, at Norvil. More about that last stage of George Nicolaus's life in the next post.