From Land to Rail

Co-published with the European Ethnological Research Centre in the Flashbacks series. Andrew Ramage was the son of a farm servant and he himself worked on the land in the Lothians and Berwickshire, in Scotland. Subsequently he became a dock worker, lorry driver and railwayman. Of the diary he kept over many years only three notebooks remain. The first covers Andrew's early life from 1884 until the mid 1870s and the period from November 1888 until April 1889. The last two cover July 1914 to June 1917. In his account the uncertain realities of rural employment and dwelling are revealed and they dispel the bucolic image often attached to descriptions of 19th-century country life. We learn of the travails of a young man making his way in the world at a time of great social and economic change and, later, of the concerns of parenthood and aging at a time of war-time strife.