Sheila with Fluffy, Hazel, and Ian with Mackie. Rose Cottage 1944

From Highlands and Midlands

On our father’s side, the Macnees came from the Highlands of Scotland, the maternal line were Harleys from the English Midlands.

The parents of the three siblings were Douglas Hamilton Macnee and Joan Mary Harley. I knew almost nothing about our parents’ families, and we never met three of our grandparents.  Granny Harley, on the other hand (Elizabeth Joy Gilvray) was a regular presence throughout our childhood, and she is the source of the Harley family myth.  On the paternal, Macnee, side we had another myth embedded in Scottish clan history.  Neither tale stood up to deep examination, but they provided direction and I am grateful for them.

Dad (Douglas) was an engineer, employed by Standard Telephones and Cables (STC), a communications equipment manufacturer. Mum (Joan) was a lifelong volunteer and community activist.

They met in London and were married in 1935, just as Dad was about to leave the country for Australia, where he had been asked by STC to join a new branch of the company.  After 2 years in Sydney they returned to London just before Ian was born in 1937. When World War 2 broke out Dad’s work was considered essential to the war effort and the family moved out of London, to settle in Somerset where I was born in 1941 and Hazel in 1944.

Dad was born in New Jersey in 1903, but had grown up in England and Scotland.  His father, from Scotland (Falkirk and Glasgow) was a chartered accountant (CPA in US terminology) with his own company in New York - just off Wall Street.  He and Dad’s mother, Emma Carr, who was from Birmingham, England, were married in Brooklyn, New York, in 1901. She left him and returned to England when Douglas was seven.  Douglas never returned to the USA, though he remained a US citizen for the rest of his life.  Douglas’s ancestry, then, was from the Scottish Highlands on his father’s side - tracing back to Port of Menteith, at the base of the Trossachs - and English on his mother’s side, from the English Midlands.

Mum was born in London. She left school young, after winning a full scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at the age of 13, but did not pursue a stage career. She said it was her mother’s ambition for her rather than her own.  She was an extraordinarily voracious learner and keenly interested in local, national and international affairs.  She was a parish and then district councillor, and a peace activist her entire adult life.  In her later years she might well have been called a pamphleteer.  We knew her family as living in London – though our grandfather had absconded to New Zealand in the 1930s – but the paternal family was from the Midlands and the maternal line from the northeast.  

We are a pretty small family.  Douglas had no siblings (though see: A New First Cousin for a recent discovery on his side) while Joan had three: John, Tony and Ronnie Harley.  They provided us with four cousins, Margaret, Michael, Philip and David, for a grand total of seven in our generation.  We seven in our turn have nine daughters, two of them adopted, and one son.  I hope there is enough here to interest children of our Harley cousins as well as those of the Macnee clan.  

In the interests of privacy, the identities of all living persons, is protected on the family tree which is accessible from this website.