Barrowsgate

Tag: Travels

  • Rolling Stone

    —

    in ,

    This is an unusual “story” consisting of a number of anecdotes based on Barrowsgate’s experiences as a “rolling stone”. ​ He recounts various adventures, including travelling to see a heavyweight championship fight in Reno, Nevada, by signing up as a railway navvy. ​ He shares anecdotes about seeing a loaf of bread impaled on a…

  • Sacramento River Dredging

    —

    in ,

    This is an account of Barrowsgate’s own experiences as a dredgerman on the Sacramento River in 1911. ​ He found work on a steam dredger in the Lisbon Reclamation District. The dredger was a large vessel used to deepen the navigation channel and raise the riverbank to prevent flooding. ​ Barrowsgate describes the challenging and…

  • Black Bart

    —

    in ,

    In this unpublished story, written around 1950, Barrowsgate shares a table at a Sacramento restaurant with an elderly gentleman who proceeds to tell him about his early life in and around the goldfields of California and Nevada. Barrowsgate asks the old man if he had ever come across the infamous bandit “Black Bart”, famous for…

  • A Link with Drake

    —

    in ,

    In “A Link with Drake”, Barrowsgate describes how (in his travels) he would often wander far off the beaten track and how, in the summer of 1911, he had come across something unusual in a clearing in woodland near Bodega in Sonoma County, California. It was a heavy brass plate at the foot of a…

  • How Long is Minute?

    —

    in ,

    In this tale, broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland, Barrowsgate describes how he nearly met his end, dangling from the tail arm of a windmill. Original typescript can be downloaded below:

  • The Meanest Man in Canada

    —

    in ,

    This apparently unpublished story from around 1938 appears to be based on real event. It tells of Tom Stephenson, an old land owner in Alberta at the time when Jim lived there in 1910. He is forced by the Government to hand over some of his land to incoming homesteaders. One such incomer is Jim…

  • A Fishing Trip in South Australia

    —

    in , ,

    This is a straightforward, apparently factual account of a family holiday around 1923/4 from Adelaide to Cape Jervis. Jim, Janet and the two boys set off from Adelaide in a motor car, towing a boat, packed with camping equipment behind them. The story describes the journey there and how they caught different types of fish,…

  • Cross-Eyed Luck

    —

    in ,

    This was published in the Buchan Observer in March 1937 (under the name “Anzac”) and describes an incident that Barrowsgate was involved in when in California in 1911. He was working as a horseman for an apple grower near Castroville and one of his jobs was to transport migrant Chinese apple pickers from the orchards…

  • The red-haired robber

    —

    in , ,

    “The Red-haired Robber”, broadcast in January 1937 as “Here Awa’ There Awa’” on BBC Scotland, recounts a story Jim that is told by Sam Goldberg in his eponymous saloon bar in a town called Condor. Some years previously a red-haired man had robbed Goldberg’s safe and escaped on horseback over the border to Canada. Many…

  • The Doctor’s Revenge (a.k.a. “Dr Bolton”)

    —

    in ,

    This story of around 350 words was published in Buchan Observer in November 1936 under the name “Anzac”, and a typescript survives with the label “Burnfield, Rothiemay”, which indicates that it was probably typed up later – between 1943 and 1953. This story is likely to be based on events that happened during Barrowsgate’s time…