Uncle Lachie
Lachlan McKinnon Montgomery was born January 13th, 1859. Janet (Montgomery) Munro was his youngest sister. Lachie (“Law-key”) was the sixth child of John and Mary (MacCallum) Montgomery. He grew up on the Morvern Peninsula of Scotland, where his father was a shepherd on the Ardtornish Estate. His mother was born on the tiny island of Ulva, northwest of the Isle of Mull, near the beautiful and holy Island of Iona. Most of the people who lived on Ulva were forced out during the Clearances. For unknown reasons, Mary and her family were not. Mary’s mother was a McKinnon and in the 1400’s Lachlan MacKinnon was a Clan Chieftain who controlled the waterways near the Isle of Mull.
By the time the census-taker came around in 1881 Lachlan was a journeyman “joiner” or carpenter. In about 1896 he left Scotland and “went to sea” as a ship’s carpenter. In the days of wooden ships, the carpenter and his mates were essential members of the crew. Ships were now made of steel and powered by steam, but they still needed a carpenter to maintain the decking, hatches, wheelhouse and all the structures “below deck”.
Lachlan travelled the world and eventually landed in Seattle. At Bainbridge he found his dear sister and her growing family. He and Alexander thought alike and worked well together. They were both skilled tradesmen who appreciated quality work.
Soon, the family home at Crystal Springs became his home base. He took care of the little farm while Alexander and Janet were in Victoria and elsewhere, and he was a beloved uncle to the Munro kids. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States at Seattle in 1901 and he spent the next few years alternating between working as a shipwright and going to sea as a merchant seaman.
At some point, he joined the crew of the S.S. Garonne. The Garonne was built at Glasgow in 1877, and once served as a royal yacht for Prince Albert Edward of Wales (later King Edward of England). She was a three-mast passenger and cargo steamship, and during the Gold Rush she ran between Seattle and Alaska.
The Russo-Japanese War ended in 1905, and the Garonne was hired to transport Russian prisoners from Japan to Odessa on the Black Sea.
She left Seattle in April of 1905. Uncle Lachie (“Lock-ee”) sent postcards home to the Munro kids from ports along the way. In about May, the ship was in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) off the southern tip of India. By July it had travelled through the Mediterranean Sea and was in Theodosie (now Feodosia) in the Crimea. Then cards arrived from Constantinople and Gibraltar. In November of 1905 nephew John Munro received a card from Naples, Italy. A small note penciled on the front said, “I’m Coming Home”.
Newspaper articles show that the voyage was eventful.
PUT RUSSIANS IN IRONS.
Commander of Garonne Has Trouble on Way to Russia.
Seattle, July 10, Russians being taken from Shanghai to Odessa on the Seattle steamship Garonne, became so riotous between the Chinese port and Singapore that Capt. Robert Lawe, master of the ship, was forced to place the ringleaders in irons. Upon arriving at Singapore, Capt. Lawe appealed to the Russian consul to have the more turbulent of his passengers taken from the ship. His request was refused and he promptly purchased enough rifles and ammunition to arm his crew. Then he clapped more of the disturbers in irons and subduing the rest with a show of force continued on his voyage.
Reaching Odessa, the Garonne found the town in a state of siege and accordingly went to Theodosia, where she arrived in safety, according to a dispatch received from Capt. Lawe by Frank Waterhouse, owner of the Garonne. Mr. Waterhouse is also in receipt of a letter from Capt. Lawe in which some of the experiences of the voyage are recounted.
Yakima Herald – July, 1905
The Garonne was sold for scrap and broken up at Genoa in 1905. After being discharged from the ship on October 25th, 1905, Lachie travelled to France and was planning a visit to his parents in Scotland; but a chance came along to catch a ship headed for Seattle, and he took it instead.
It’s likely that Lachlan worked at the shipyards close to home for the next few years. Then in 1919 he joined the Cable Ship Restorer. He stayed attached to the Restorer until he retired in about 1935.
In the first few years of the 1900s, companies like the Commercial Pacific Cable Company were rapidly laying communications cables across the floor of the Pacific Ocean. In 1903 they completed 5,856 knots of cable from San Francisco to Honolulu, and they were in the process of laying cable from Honolulu to Manila, and on to Shanghai. When the cable went into service, communications across the ocean became almost instantaneous. It was a new and vibrant age. However, damage was inevitable, and so the cable companies built a small fleet of ships to maintain the lines. The Cable Ship Restorer was built near London in 1902 and came into service in 1903 with twenty-five officers and about seventy-five crew members. Initially it was based out of Honolulu and it primarily made repairs from San Francisco to Guam. In 1908 the Restorer moved its home base to Esquimalt just west of Victoria, British Columbia.
As World War I heated up, international waters became perilous for British ships. In 1914 the United States was still neutral, and in September the Restorer moved to Seattle and changed her registry to New York. In 1915, she converted her engines from coal to oil. Then, from 1916 through 1918, she spent most of her time in Bremerton, serving as a naval training vessel.
The cables running across the Pacific Ocean were neglected during the war years. By 1919 only seven out of twenty-one cables were serviceable. The Restorer launched into some of her busiest years, and Lachlan Montgomery joined the crew.
Early in 1919 the Restorer was off to make repairs on the line near Midway, where they ran into a typhoon. The ship’s owners were so alarmed by the reports from other ships that they feared the Restorer was lost in the storm.
The crew of the Restorer also took part in an ancient naval tradition – the equatorial line crossing ceremony or inauguration of new sailors.

In March on 1919 Lachlan caught a shark off of Midway Island and he brought the eight-inch-tall dorsal fin back to Bainbridge.
The Restorer also spent a great deal of time around San Francisco Bay where there were chronic problems with rum runners and pleasure boaters dropping their anchors on the cable. Sometimes, a job had to be redone only a few hours after it was completed. On January 24, 1924, she left Victoria for the Golden Gate and didn’t return until March 20th.
Over the next ten or so years, Lachlan and the Restorer made multiple trips to Guam, Midway and Honolulu, with long stretches of shore time between repair jobs.
On a trip to Midway, the ship suffered major storm damage. On February 23rd, 1928, they left Victoria. Outside Cape Flattery, the ship was pounded by extremely heavy seas for two days. The aft part of the wheel quadrant was smashed, the searchlight was unshipped, woodwork suffered, a 600 pound anvil bolted to one of the deck houses was moved, telegraph leads were knocked off, the Quartermaster suffered a broken leg, and engine speed had to be reduced to 60 rpm. With a highly skilled crew and an excellent carpenter, the damage was repaired in four days and the Restorer continued on to Midway.
Uncle Lachie often came home with gifts. Once he came home with both a parrot and a monkey. Polly the parrot was a beloved family pet for many years, but Janet wouldn’t let the monkey in the house. It went back to the ship.
In Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1905, Lachlan was walking through a street market when he saw a tattered, rail thin man carving figures from a dense black wood. They were stunning and Lachlan traded the old jacket he was wearing for two gorgeous elephants, about five or six inches tall. A day or two later the man came down to the ship asking for “Chips”. When he saw Lachlan, he bowed and held out a piece of paper that he’d found in the pocket of the jacket. He was returning this important document. Lachlan made a great point of thanking him and gave him fifty cents, a huge sum on money at that time and place. The man went away knowing he had done a good and valuable deed. The slip of paper was a laundry ticket. The elephants came home to Bainbridge, and for many years stood on the fireplace mantel beside the “wedding” clock.
His great-nephew, Duncan Munro, Jr. recalled:
Lachlan was a character. He would come up to see us at Tracyton and stay overnight. One time he took me back to Bainbridge with him. He had to argue with the boat captain to drop us at Pleasant Beach. The Captain didn’t want to stop there until he came back with people from Seattle, the boat was on its way to Seattle. He finally agreed to drop us at Pleasant Beach and we walked up to Lindquist’s store, but Lachlan was still worked up. When we got to the store, Lachlan disappeared into the back with Lindquist and came back feeling much better. He phoned Uncle John and John came and picked us up.
There was a running joke in the family that Uncle Lachie only wore long underwear. In Scotland a man always wore long underwear in the winter, and it took Lachlan a few years to acclimate to Washington. On bitter cold mornings, he would start out fully dressed, and as soon as he started working on a project he’d be stripped down to his long johns – again. His nephew, George Munro, told this story about visiting the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard when he was a boy:
…You see there was one dry dock in the naval shipyard at that time and it was made out of big timbers, stepped down, ya know like this… And they were building number two dry dock out of granite rock and they were great big chunks of granite about as big as half of this table and just about that thick too. No, they were only about that thick because they were stepped down. They quarried the granite up at Index, back of Everett, in the mountains up there and they put it on flat cars and railroad down around Marysville, and then they hauled it down through Agate Pass and down into Bremerton right alongside. They put these big flat cars on barges and the tugboat would haul them down to Bremerton where they had a sidetrack and they hauled them up through the stone yards where the stone cutters were cutting stone. And my father and a bunch of other stone cutters, granite cutters mostly, were working there cutting and setting stone in the dry dock. My father had written home to my mother. The post office was up there at Crystal Springs, ya know, and we got the letter and he said in the letter: When John (that was my older brother John, he was about ten years older than me), when John comes up to bring him home for the weekend, to have me and my sister Mary and my sister Ann Janett come along, because he wanted us to see the biggest Army Transport in the world that was in Number One dry dock. I think the name of it was the Ohio. Well, my uncle who lived with us had also worked for the shipyard as a shipwright, but he didn’t like the rat race, waiting for materials and waiting for blueprints and all that stuff and he got another job. He was a little bit opposed to all that red tape. But anyhow, when we went into Bremerton and went into the shipyard and our father met us at the gate and took us in, and this big ship was in drydock… We went over along to the side of the boat and down to the stern end. And along the side of the boat there was a great big door opened there, on the side of the boat. This was the big Army transport. Great big doors opened there and there was a ramp going over to the boat from the sidewalk there. All the farmers around there were down there with their horses and wagons and they were hauling out. You see Roosevelt’s Rough Riders rode horseback and mule back, and they had been shipping horses and mules out to the Philippine Islands and it kinda surprised me a little bit because what they were hauling out on wagons out of this ship was horse manure. I recognized that, because we had plenty at home. We saw the ship and my father took us around in the stern of the ship to show us the big gate that opened and closed to let the water in and let the water out and let the ship out and in. Well, when we got home, my uncle was making a sled, I think it was, out by the back yard. I was still questioning my father about how did they get that ship in there and how will they get that ship out of there, and so forth, and my father was still telling me a little bit about it. I got all the information about what I wanted, and I turned and I was starting off toward the kitchen door. Pretty soon I heard my old Scotch uncle say to my Scotch father (he didn’t like, ya know, the director of the shipyard) “They’ll get the ship out all right, but I fear the horse manure is going to be there for a while.”
As the Munro kids grew, Uncle Lachie helped each one of them in big and small ways. During the Depression, he helped James pay his way through college and law school. It could not have happened without him. His great niece, AnnaBelle (Dunn) Robert-Smith recalled:
This is what my mother (Isabelle Munro Dunn) told me: When I was little, probably 3 or 4-years-old, I would go up the hill to visit Grandma. When they got tired of dealing with me, Lachie would put money in my shoe and tell me to go home and give it to my mother. At that time, I wore high-top shoes, so he unfastened and refastened my shoes to place the coins. They were uncomfortable; so, they knew I would be leaving soon after he put the money in my shoes. A sure-fire way to get me to go home.
When I was about 6 or 7 years old, Lachie gave me a necklace that was made of Ivory. Each ball-shaped bead was intricately carved, and each ball was painted a different color. When I wore the necklace, over the years, some of the paint chipped off. When it started doing that, Mother wouldn’t let me wear it anymore. So, I don’t know what happened to the necklace after that.
I remember that Uncle Lachie gave Mother and Euphemia $500 each (a large sum of money). I have a feeling that Mother put the money in the bank. I remember Mother and Dad referencing $500 and talking about how they lost the $500 when the banks folded during the Great Depression.
I remember hearing a story that when Lachie’s ship made its first return to Scotland, having been out for about a year, they would not allow him to get off the ship. They thought, if he went home, he wouldn’t return to the ship. I recall hearing how he had made seven trips around the world.
Uncle Lachie died on January 20th, 1938 at the family home at Crystal Springs.