Glenbuchat Heritage

176 Candacraig Cars - Hector Simon

Hector Simon,
The Candacraig Chauffeur
By Evelyn Davies

I am grateful to Evelyn Davies for permission to display the above photographs and the following text.

Click for page 2 of car photos

Click for page 3 of car photos


In the garage at Evelyn’s home at Glenkindie was a board full of photos of the cars driven by her father, Hector Simon when he was the Chauffeur for the Wallace family at Candacraig.

The photos above shoe the photo board and a selection of the cars. Others are shown in the following two pages.

The text blow is written by Evelyn and describes her father’s life.

From Times Past -
MY DAD

Hector Simon, was born at Tomacher, Logie Coldstone on the 23rd of March 1904, the ninth child of William and Ann Simon. His father was the Blacksmith and rented the croft at Townhead and was well known in the district for being very good with horses' ailments because his father and brother were both veterinarians.

Hector had four older brothers and four older sisters, then one younger brother and one younger sister and he attended Logie Coldstone school. When he was a pupil there, he was sometimes called on to take the dominee to meetings or Bonspiels with his father’s pony and trap. When he was older, at the grouse shooting time he used to take the pannier pony on to the hills to collect the grouse and one time, while he was waiting for the drive to finish, he fell asleep on the heather and woke up staring up into the underside of his pony who was standing astride over him, he peeked out and looked skyward and saw an eagle circling over him. Another time; when he was on the hills, the mist and fog came down and he was lost, his pony led him home safely.

His family attended Kincardine o' Neil church by pony and trap before St. Thomas’s was built and he and younger brother, Leslie, were two of the first communicants when it was completed. When he left school, he went to work with his uncle who was at that time head chauffeur to Mr. Falconer Wallace of Candacraig and after a time he was sent to the Rolls Royce School of Motoring to learn about the cars and take their driving test which included a hill start with a raw egg being placed behind the rear wheel! He passed first time and we still have his cap and lapel badges. Many years later he received a certificate from Rolls Royce for so many miles accident-free driving.

Dad was the same age as his boss's son and was sent with him over to France and other European countries driving a Rolls Royce on many occasions. One of Mr. A.L.P.F. Wallace's tricks, was to get Dad to stop a good distance away from the hotel so he could bargain a good price with the hotel owner before allowing Dad to drive up with the car. No flies on him then!

He met my Mum at a dance in Logie Coldstone hall one summer, when she was up at Balnastraid being nanny to the Ogston family, but it was six years later before they tied the knot, Dad being in London and Mum in Surbiton Surrey. However along came my oldest sister, Sheila, then myself, but our youngest sister Heather did not arrive until 10 years later. Dad had just been promoted to Head Chauffeur and we had moved into a lovely flat in Polygon Mews, off Oxford Square, the cars being housed beneath us in the huge garage where the horses and carriages had been kept. Our daily walk was always into Hyde Park to feed the ducks, then it was the shooting season and up we were in Strathdon again and the war started so we never returned to London.

Now Dad tried to enlist in the RAF, but failed the medical so he then tried working in the lumber corps but his health suffered so he eventually got the job of driving the Pool van for the grocers of the community, taking their orders out for them and collecting the farmers’ wives’ eggs. I remember counting out the pennies into shillings when he came home. In the early forties he suffered from a burst duodenal ulcer and landed in ARI being operated on, his stomach being made much smaller, but he shouldered on nevertheless. Then Mr. Wallace purchased a wee Austin van to take hampers of vegetables to the station at Dinnet and employed Dad again. I used to love going with him during the school holidays. Dad used to look after the ponies at Candacraig and used them and a gig to go down to the post office at Bellabeg with mail to save petrol when it was rationed and if we were lucky on the way home from school, we got a lift in the trap. Dad was a member of the Royal Observer Corp and took his turn of sitting all night on the Doune at Invernoughty listening for foreign aeroplanes. One night in the dead of winter they could hear a plane, but couldn’t make out what make it was. It wasn't getting any nearer or going away and the men were all having a guess as to what it was. However, in the morning on their way home they discovered that as it was very frosty, the bus driver had kept the Bluebird bus running all night in its garage so the diesel wouldn’t freeze and it could be started for the eight o'clock run. We do now have his ribbon and war medal.

Eileen Davies





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