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Alan Douglas Maclean

Born in 1888 in West Hartlepool, the youngest child of William Maclean. In around 1910 he married Elizabeth Braithwaite Grainger, known as Lizzie or Kitty. There were two daughters, Kitty Pera Maclean (b 1910) and Clara (or Clare) Maclean (b 1912). Lizzie was the daughter of Elizabeth Jane Braithwaite and Barton Grainger, a prominent and rather colourful Hartlepool citizen. A butcher by trade, he was also involved in local property and politics. He and Thomas English Pyman II were on Hartlepool's first town council. Granger married three times, and outlived each of his wives. (By odd coincidence, his third wife Jane Clark was also a relative on the other side of my family, and as a result has the distinction of being great-great-aunt to both my grandfather and my grandmother!)

Alan Douglas Maclean was an engineer in a petroleum company. Certainly, he and Lizzie appear to have been frequent travellers. In June 1926, Mr & Mrs Alan Douglas Maclean were First Class passengers on the Johan De Witt steamship bound for Genoa. The following July they were accompanied, again in First Class, by their daughters on the steamship Highland Laddie, bound for Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. In the ship's register their address was listed as The Bungalow, Marsh Lane, Fawley, Hants. The following year, Alan & Kitty were en route for Gibraltar. By 1936 they were resident at 71 Latymer Court, Hammersmith in London. But in May of that year, they and daughter Clare boarded the steamship Costa Rica bound for Trinidad, with the intention of settling there. They returned at a later date. 

Apparently Lizzie's nieces in West Hartlepool always looked forward to her visits, because she came swathed in expensive furs and in a large car, although this was usually parked well away from the house. Alan died in Kilburn, West London in 1955. Lizzie in Bexhill On Sea in 1977. Their daughter Kitty Pera Maclean married David Luke Vernon Hanson in 1932. (Thanks to Vicky Tomlinson for these details).

Alan obviously had other interests as well. In November 1927, he filed a patent for the invention of improvements to the apparatus used to pull the artificial hare traditionally used as a lure in dog racing. Perhaps it was Alan's familiarity with dog racing rather than his career in the oil industry that paid for Lizzie's expensive furs and large car...