John Currie
Plumber
Plumber John Currie (born c. 1875), like many individual tradesmen in small provincial towns in the 19th century, has left little documentary record. Originally from Musselburgh, he was the son of an Irish commercial traveller, and as all his siblings worked from a young age, the family was obviously of modest means. 1 Currie was an apprentice plumber at 16, and by 1901 was living as a boarder in Kilmacolm, with two other young tradesmen. He soon moved into a tenement flat next door to his lodgings, and stayed there for the next 30 years. Currie worked from home, and had adopted the telephone by 1910, when he called himself a 'sanitary engineer'. 2
