Dr Trevor Vernon Jennings's Page

Re:   Grandmother Scott's family operated The Boat of Caputh from the 1600s until a bridge was built in the Victorian era.
I can find no trace of Scotts operating the Caputh Ferry, the impication they were boatmen rather than owners/operators.

I note Douglasfield jst to the south of the ferry

I am working to verify your family details, but in the emantime have prepared the folowing:

A Douglas Line: Along the Waterways of Scotland and Beyond

Constructed from notes supplied by Dr Trevor Vernon Jennings

For centuries my ancestors kept close to the running waters of the River Tay. On its middle reaches, Grandmother Scott’s people operated the Boat of Caputh, the old ferry that linked the banks long before engineers cast a bridge across the river in the Victorian age. From the 1600s onward, their livelihood depended on the current, the seasons, and the steady passage of travellers who trusted the boatmen of Caputh to carry them safely over.

Into this landscape came my third great‑grandfather, William Douglas (1777–1837), a shoemaker by trade. By 1800 he had left rural Scotland behind and travelled south with the Army, finding himself in London at the turn of the century. He married a woman from Berkshire, settled in Shoreditch, and raised a family in the crowded streets of the capital. Two of their children were buried there, but six survived, and when William’s wife died in 1824 he gathered those children and returned north, carrying them back to the country of their birthright.

The Douglas sons scattered across Scotland, each carving out a life shaped by work and movement. James Dyer Douglas, the eldest, became a carrier. His routes first centred on Montrose, then stretched to Aberdeen, Perth, and finally Dundee, where he settled. William, my second great‑grandfather, remained closer to the soil, working as a shoemaker in Kirriemuir. Charles lived out his days in Dunkeld, first as a tanner and later as a farmer, rooted in the quiet folds of Perthshire until his death in 1897. Thomas took to the sea, serving as a lighthouse keeper in the Western Isles, tending the lamps that guided mariners through dangerous waters. Their sisters, Charlotte and Martha, married Montrose men and remained in that coastal town, anchoring the family line along the east coast.

The next generation kept to the rhythm of work and movement. My great‑grandfather William Douglas and his elder brother David ran a bakery in Kirriemuir before shifting their enterprise to Edinburgh in the early 1860s. My grandfather David, and later my father Cornelius, drove vans for the bakery, carrying bread through the streets of the capital.

By the 1930s, Cornelius and his brother David had moved once more, this time to London. Cornelius drove for a butcher, while David found work at Ford’s great industrial works in Dagenham. Then war intervened. During the Second World War, Cornelius served with the Royal Artillery, driving a Light Anti‑Aircraft truck across the Western Desert, through Italy, and finally into Greece. When he returned to Britain, arriving first in Liverpool, he was sent to South Wales to help deliver food from Welsh farms to the ports. These shipments were bound for the Netherlands, where civilians were starving in the final months of the war. It was there, among the farms and valleys of Wales, that he met the woman who would become my mother — the daughter of a Welsh farmer.

Across four centuries, the Douglas story traces a line of ferrymen, shoemakers, carriers, bakers, lighthouse keepers, soldiers, and farmers. It is a story of movement — from Tay to Thames, from Kirriemuir to Edinburgh, from London to the desert — yet always returning to the steadying pull of work, family, and the landscapes that shaped them.