A Short Engagement

By 1907 I had been hard at work in our Hepburn Patent enterprise. Dan Wright told me I was in need of a holiday and invited me to come with him to Ireland to visit cousins of his in Fermanagh for Christmas week. Sloan said he would take a week when I came back. Dan and I took the train to Ardrosan and a steamer from there to Belfast. Another train from Belfast to Armagh, Clones and then to a little village called Lisnaskea near Upper Loch Erne. Then we had a drive of a few miles to Mr. Wright’s farm estate. Dan’s uncle was known as Provost Wright for he had been provost of Renfrew for some years. He bought the farm in Ireland to retire to yet still had a house in Renfrew near Paisley. The Wright family gave us a grand welcome. They had us out nearly every evening at some dance or gathering at neighbouring farms. Also, there was an evening at their own house with about twenty guests there besides Dan and I. I liked the Irish men and girls we met. They were freer than the Scotch of the same class and the young ladies were good at laughing and flirting with any newcomers like ourselves.

There were two Wright daughters, Annie was the elder , a woman of about thirty-five and a very sharp lady with a tongue that didn’t care who it lashed. Nellie was much younger and had a more pleasant disposition. I liked Nellie and we got on nicely. In fact, we got on too well, for on the last day of our holiday I found that Nellie and I had become engaged to be married. Looking back on that lively holiday in Ireland I had difficulty in understanding how this had come about. It wasn’t until the last day of the week that I had any idea of making Nellie more than a pleasant acquaintance. I think we both saw more in each other than was actually there and I found out later that Dan, the old rascal, had praised me to her as an up-and-coming man in an engineering firm in Paisley to them. The engagement lasted for six months and we wrote every week to each other. I sent Nellie an engagement ring. She and her father came to their house in Renfrew for a fortnight in the spring. I visited her two evenings a week and took her out in the Hepburn car once or twice. Then in the summer I took a holiday to Enniskillen in August for a week staying at a hotel there and hired a bike to visit the Wrights farm in the afternoons. Nellie and I took a few cycle runs together but we did not seem to be getting on as well as usual. One day at their dinner table Annie was quite rude to me and gave the impression that she objected to my presence.  I asked Nellie what the matter was when we were together again. She said that Annie didn’t like me. So, we had a few angry words and then she took off her engagement ring handed it to me and said, “I think we better call it off, Tom.” Maybe they had found that I wasn’t as good a match as they had expected. A brother had called on me once at the Abbot Engineering Co. and asked to be shown over the place. His report had not been very favourable I suppose. It was a sad blow to my pride and I felt let down completely. I wrote to my mother that night from the Enniskillen Hotel. She had not been much in favour of the match to begin with although she had not met Nellie. I had a wire from home next day saying, “Your mother and sister still love you, Tom.” That was all it said but I felt much better immediately. My black, despondent mood left me and I decided to enjoy the rest of the holiday. I wired my mother that I would be home in four days and was determined to enjoy the rest of my time in Ireland. I took a train to Bundoran on the West coast to have a look at the Atlantic. The next day I went to see the town of Londonderry and saw the place that had defeated the Stuart kings and the Catholics. Then I spent a day in Belfast on the way home. I got back to Lochwinnoch a sadder yet wiser man.

I had a rough passage in the steamer from Belfast to Ardrossan. An Atlantic gale was roaring in past the Mull of Kintyre. I was a sick man and perhaps I had a lot of bile to release. I couldn’t stand the smell from the sick people in the state room so I wandered the deck and found my way to a small cabin full of mail bags. I was out of the salt spray there and I didn’t improve the Irish mail but the bile did splatter well. As far as I know neither Annie nor Nellie Wright ever married. I think they still live in Renfrew in their old age. The brother went to South Africa and died there. He was a bad lot I heard later. My mother had the idea that I had escaped from getting tangled in an unfortunate marriage. Nellie had her good points in my estimation. It was her sister Annie who was the cause of the problem.

Dan Wright had other cousins at the Knock Farm. This was a big farm midway between Paisley and Renfrew. He and I often went there to spend an evening. There were five or six daughters there in that family. We spent many pleasant evenings with them.