Jessie and Gordon Ross: their later lives
At some point during the year or two following the eviction of Jessie Ross and her girls from Ascoilemore, Jessie, Gordon and their surviving children moved to Helmsdale where (for reasons that are unclear) the SSPCK school-mastership Gordon had hoped to obtain had not, after all, materialised. This created an opening for Gordon who, on his eventual recovery, succeeded in opening a school of his own. This school attracted about 100 pupils. But the ‘poverty of . . . people’ in and around Helmsdale, Gordon Ross commented, was such that many parents could not pay even the minimal fees he requested. It must thus have come as a relief to Gordon – ‘now restored’, he stressed, ‘to soundness of mind and health of body’ – when the SSPCK agreed to incorporate his school into its network. This school’s founder and sole teacher, one of the society’s inspectors reported in 1827, ‘seems to be a zealous, active, diligent man . . . He was laid aside by bad health arising from an accumulation of family misfortunes which . . . reduced him to great poverty and involved him in debt from which he has little prospect of being relieved unless the society can do something for him.’ Something was duly done: Gordon’s newly restored SSPCK salary was backdated, in effect, for three years.1
His having been rehabilitated in this way was doubtless aided both by Gordon Ross’s now respectful – not to say submissive – approach to the Staffords and by the death (in 1824) of Francis Suther whom Gordon, in the aftermath of his daughter’s death, had so roundly accused of bad faith. There was to be no repetition of Gordon’s 1821 condemnations of Sutherland Estate policy. But neither was his SSPCK position to last: his employers dismissed their Helmsdale schoolmaster in 1834 as a result of his having abandoned the Church of Scotland (with which the SSPCK was closely associated) for an altogether more fervent brand of Christianity. From that point forward, Gordon – one of the lay preachers who laid the groundwork for the Free Church’s 1843 success in Sutherland – appears to have combined ecclesiastical activity (and eventual Free Church membership) with continued teaching on his own account. Neither Gordon nor Jessie was to leave Helmsdale. Gordon died there in 1868, Jessie in 1873. The couple’s grave in Helmsdale’s cemetery is marked by a granite obelisk provided, its inscription states, by Gordon’s friends.