It has taken me a long time to write this, simply because it means so much. Two years or so ago, Nancy Conway, one of my Trustees and volunteers at the Mill, and I were invited to give a talk and demonstration to a group in Trinity Church in Dalry. I chose Paisley shawls, of which the Museum at the Mill has a wonderful collection, and with Nancy’s help I had been unfurling and showing some wonderful examples, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a man, whom I knew slightly, simply open door of the hall and sit quietly in a vacant chair. We continued for about forty minutes, answered some questions, and began to fold and pack away the shawls, when the man strolled across and said ‘I really enjoyed that, are you still looking for volunteers?‘. His name was Tom Findlay, and I realised that I already knew something of him, as my wife had worked with his recently deceased wife Gillian in the Library Services. So, looking fit and knowing that he had had a long and varied career, I immediately said ‘yes of course we are looking for volunteers and would be delighted if you would be one‘.
He soon became the go-to for almost everything we needed done, and if you ever wanted an example of team work, Tommy, Richard, Bryan, Nancy and Veronika were a shining one.
Despite what the photographs might suggest, a huge amount of repair and restoration was carried out, as the one day at the Mill became at least for Tommy, all day, every day, in his workshop at home! At some point, he spied what was a mere suggestion of what had once been a wonderful rocking horse. I explained that I had acquired it from an itinerant caller who had bought it at auction: he first tried to sell it, and when that didn’t work, he asked if he could store it in our big shed. At some point, I asked him to move it and having nowhere and no means of doing that, he accepted the £20 offer that I made.
Tommy enquired about it and said that he had already made a rocking horse for his grand daughters. When I called at his home one day, he showed me the beautifully hand-carved horse head that he had made as part of that piece of work. I gave him a little book on rocking horses and said ‘If you would like to, why don’t you have a shot at restoring it? And then we could display it in the Museum’.
Being Tommy, he read, researched, combed the internet, and I let him remove the skeleton that I had, and as his family and friends will know, it became his continuous project for more than a year. It was at this point that when I enquired how the horse was doing, he said to me ‘do you mean “Wee Jimmy”?’ And if you come to the Museum now, you can see his beautifully restored rocking horse with its proud name plate.
Although we knew he needed a new knee, nothing held him back! And as the supposed supervisor, I ended up worrying about what I would say needed doing next because he literally threw himself into any job or project, helped of course by his companions.
Tommy passed away in June after a very short and courageously-borne illness. I have a tree in our woodland which I pass every day: it is my memory tree, the dog and I stop, and I put my hand round a branch of this little oak and I say hello to Magnus the ten year old grandson of some friends who died suddenly, I say hi brother to John Eric who passed away recently in Canada, and to Tommy – and of course Wee Jimmy, neither of whom will ever be forgotten.
