| Home | Editor's Forward | Keabog | Common Ground | Maps | Mackie Academy | Sitemap |
The eighth son Charles was born in 1888 and reputedly was very good looking. He was always called Charlie and indeed was entered for school as such. Tragically, his life was cut short when he died at the hands of an assassin at the age of 25. He had not married but was semi-officially engaged to an Inverurie girl at the time of his death.
He was another of the brothers who undertook the apprenticeship at the railway works at Inverurie after attending the village school and Mackie Academy. He then went out to Sumatra in the then Dutch East Indies (now part of Indonesia) as a rubber planter where in 1913 he was murdered by one of the native workers who killed him with a knife, presumably because of some dispute or grievance.
His younger brother Douglas who followed him to Sumatra had only recently arrived in the island when the murder took place and he was asked to go to the estate where it occurred to deal with Charles' outstanding affairs. Curiously, many years later, Douglas ended his service in Sumatra on the same estate.
Contributed by Mrs Douglas Gray and Ian Gray.