Mary W. M. Falconer and Agnes S. Falconer
Mary W. M. Falconer (1867-1944) and Agnes S. Falconer (1868-1951) were sisters who grew up in Duns, Berwickshire, and lived a comfortable middle-class life. Their father, Allan Falconer, was an ironmonger and merchant, and they kept a servant and sometimes a lodger. Their uncle, James Swan, was a stationer, bookseller, and printer in Duns, and both sisters went on to hold shares in his company. Mary and Agnes were both educated at Duns Public School, but Mary, being the eldest, was educated further. Firstly, she was a pupil at Miss Lithgow’s Academy, Newtoun House, Duns, and then at Miss Crawford's Young Ladies College, Edinburgh, where she studied Latin, arithmetic, English, history and geography. She gained the senior certificate at Edinburgh University in 1883 with honours in English, history and geography, and gained the Government teacher's certificate in 1890 (div. I, second class) and the L.L.A Diploma from St Andrew's University in 1892, with First Class honours in English, comparative philology and history and French. In 1893 she passed the L.L.A examination in education with honours and received a First Class in German. She worked as a governess at Cumledge House, Duns, in 1887, and was governess to the sons of the minister of Edrom, Berwickshire, in 1889, before being appointed an assistant teacher at Swinton Public School from 1889 to 1892. Later, she taught at Kinghorn Public School, Fife, and at Bellevue House School, a girls’ boarding and day school in Yorkshire.
Both sisters published in the Scottish and English periodical press between 1880 and the early 1910s. They contributed poetry and short fiction to papers like the People’s Journal, the Weekly Scotsman, the Weekly News (Dundee), and the Berwickshire News, as well as literary magazines such as Chambers’s Journal, the People’s Friend, the Pall Mall Magazine, Scottish Reader, Scottish Nights, and The Scottish People, and children’s periodicals including The Rosebud, Our Little Dots, the Young Folks’ Paper, Mothers and Daughters, and Sunday Reading For The Young. They mainly published in papers that offered monetary prizes and earned a variety of values, from £1 in 1883 to £1,000 in 1931.
Research of their scrapbooks which are housed at the Scottish Borders Local History Centre and Archive, Hawick, suggests that the sisters used a variety of pseudonyms – Agnes published as “A. S. F.” as well as “Allan F. Percy”, and Mary used a combination of her initials to sign her poems. Interestingly, it appears that Agnes and Mary collaborated on or shared the creation of a character names ‘Alexander [Sandy] Skirving’ who features in Agnes’s short fiction in the People’s Friend and in Mary’s short fiction in The Pall Mall Magazine. As the sisters lived most of their lives together at their family home in Duns, it is possible that they co-authored stories or edited each other’s pieces.
Both women were involved in the Berwickshire Women’s Liberal Association. Between 1892 and 1897, Agnes served as secretary and was also a member of the Executive of the Scottish Women’s Liberal Federation. In the early 1900s, Mary appears to have split from the alignment of the Women’s Liberal Association with the Women’s Social and Political Union by co-founding and serving as the first secretary of the Berwickshire branch of the Anti-Suffrage League in 1909. Agnes was also a member of the British Women's Temperance Association and the Women’s Rural Institute. During the First World War, Agnes published two celebrated war poems – ‘Scottish Nurses in Serbia’ (c.1915) and ‘Territorials’ (1917) – the latter of which was dedicated to soldiers in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers regiment. Outside of their writing in the press, Agnes published two volumes of verse, Whinblossom (1904) and Wishing Wood (1911). Alongside their scrapbooks is an unfinished and undated manuscript novel by Mary, entitled ‘Cousins’, which centres around the summer holiday escapades of six aristocratic children in the fictional town of ‘Shilwood’.
Contributed by Charlotte Lauder.
Books
Whinblossom: A Book of Verses (Duns: James Swan, 1904)
Wishing Wood, and Other Verses (London, 1911)