David Prain, 1857 - 1944

Sir David Prain’s parents were David Prain, a native of Inchture in eastern Perthshire, and Mary Thomson, of Alford, in the Don valley, Aberdeenshire. He was the elder of two children by this marriage, born 11 July 1857; the second son, William, was born 23 December 1861. The family preserved a tradition that their surname had been brought into Scotland by three brothers, Huguenot weavers; but papers in Sir David’s handwriting, which Mr William Prain has kindly allowed the writer to see, show that this tradition is not quite accurate: importation of the surname by weavers is accepted, either by one with three children who followed their father’s calling, or by these three when already grown up; but, as the surname was already in Scotland nearly thirty years before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the immigrants would not be Huguenots; and, moreover, Huguenot weavers did not settle at any time in the part of Perthshire whence the surname Prain radiated. The weavers could have been, and probably were, fugitives via Holland from religious persecution at the time of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Dundee had its weavers from more than a century earlier; and the newcomers were welcome among them because they brought as a new technique the weaving of a coarse linen in demand on the plantations in America; but circumstances scattered them through the villages; and it is from the slopes of the Sidlaw Hills that the first records of the name Prain come. The family papers from which the above data are taken, show another circumstance of greater interest than the origin of the name, hidden in the maiden names of the wives of these Prains, names which demonstrate how completely the Prains became absorbed in the Lowland Scotch population of the Carse of Gowrie and the hills rising over it. One line of the family appears in parish records from Fife, but died out. The line that interests us was always in eastern Perthshire up to a migration by Sir David’s father northwards to Fettercairn in Kincardineshire.