Timber merchant Melville Ross (Stump) the oldest resident of Forgandenny, has died aged 93.
He began his career driving for the haulage business of his father, Melville senior, before setting up the timber business when his father moved to farm at Huntly.
Melville’s family came to the village in 1918 after his grandmother, Jessie Ross, was widowed.
Together with her five children, they moved into Craigbank but Jessie had always had an ambition to live in a house called Drumfin.
She never did but 67 years later in 1985, Melville bought the house and moved from Kinnaird Road.
Melville Rainey Ross was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in September 1930 to Melville and Euphemia Ross and had siblings Jack and Sheila.
His father had been a carpenter and builder in Forgandenny and moved to New Zealand in 1928 to build houses.
In 1932, the family returned to Perthshire and Melville senior began his haulage business, based at that time at Boatloan, Forgandenny.
Young Melville was educated at Forgandenny Primary School and Bridge of Earn Secondary School before starting work on his father’s coal lorries.
For two years from 1948, Melville did his national service with The Black Watch based at Fort George, Inverness, and then Dusseldorf in West Germany.
He then spent many years driving for his father, taking turnips and potatoes around the UK and collecting goods from docks and railways stations.
In 1950, when the expanding business was now known as M Ross and Sons, Melville and his brother Jack, together with their father, built a house, workshop and storage sheds for his fleet of lorries at Eastfield, Forgandenny.
The premises are now occupied by Bonthrone Security and an HGV company.
It was at a dance in the village hall that he met his future wife, Katie, who had come to Forgandenny with her twin sister, Peggy, to work at Strathallan School.
They married in 1960 and had one daughter, Heather, who went on to have four children; Ross, Greig, Freya and Victoria.
In 1961, when his father moved to farm in Aberdeenshire, Melville established his timber business.
Often with his Clydesdale horse he worked on estates including Moncrieffe, Duplin and Murthly, clearing forestry and removing larger trees that needed more expert cutting.
His daughter, Heather, said: “He was known as Stump, he also bought and sold timber from the estates and sold it for furniture or paper depending on the quality of the wood. He used Nelson of Kelty to transport the timber.”
In later years he used an ex-army-AEC Matador 4×4 for forestry work and only retired from the timber business when he was 75.
Honoured by community
Last Christmas, as the village’s oldest resident, he was invited by the hall committee to switch on Forgandenny’s Christmas tree lights.
Towards the end of the First World War, Melville’s grandmother, Jessie Ross, who had been a teacher at Kinnoull School in Perth, moved to Forgandenny.
Her family had owned the William Brown fruit merchants in Perth and she had been widowed when husband Rainey Ross of Strathpeffer died, leaving her to bring up five children.
Heather said: “There have been members of the Ross family in the village for more than 100 years. My great-grandmother lived here until she was 96 with her daughter, Grace.
“Although my father retired aged 75 he still turned out to do a job now and again if someone called him.”
Melville’s funeral will take place on Friday February 23 in Forgandenny Church at 1pm.
You can read the family’s announcement here.
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