1845-1916
Church of England minister, landowner
David was born and died at Broomholm, just outside Langholm. He spent most of his life south of the border as a Church of England minister, although in his later years he was an elder in the Church of Scotland’s Langholm Parish Church. He began his working life by joining his father as an East Indies merchant.
Broomholm house, built in 1749 for John Maxwell (see below)
He came from a major landowning family in Dumfriesshire, stretching back to the Maxwells of Caerlaverock Castle. He owned two farms and a number of town properties in Langholm.
His ancestor John Maxwell, 1st of Broomholm* (1726-1806), instigated a legal case in 1757 about the ownership of some land in the Langholm area. The land in question was divided in 1759 between John Maxwell, the Duke of Buccleuch and John Little, with specified areas being adjudicated as belonging to the people of Langholm, with rights to pasture, stone and peat. This ‘common’ ownership by Langholm townsfolk is the basis of the ongoing annual Common Riding.
* This is a form of title based on an ‘entail’ which is a restriction on the sale of an estate outside a specified line of heirs. Rev David Maxwell was ‘9th of Broomholm’.
John Maxwell, 1st of Broomholm, was married to Wilhelmina Malcolm (1725-1832), aunt of the ‘Four Knights of Eskdale‘, joining two notable families in the area.
Rev David Maxwell, 9th of Broomholm, was married to Amy Woosnam (1855-1931), born in India to Colonel (later Major General) James Woosnam of the Royal Artillery. Amy’s nephew Max Woosnam* (1892-1965) has been described as the greatest ever British all-rounder sportsman, excelling in tennis, football, cricket, golf and snooker.
* Unrelated to the Welsh golfer Ian Woosnam.
David’s sister Elizabeth (1842-1919) married Arthur Connell (1830-1918), owner of the Langholm Distillery, and lived at St Thorwald’s.
Two of David and Amy’s seven children became doctors and their eldest was studying medicine in Cambridge but died in 1895 at age 19 in a train crash in Cheshire. Their daughter Winifred was president of the Langholm branch of the British Women’s Temperance Association, so she may have found it somewhat awkward having a distiller as an uncle.
David and Amy’s seventh child Aymer (1889-1947) inherited his name from a family history of Aymers and was a captain with the 1st/9th Royal Scots. He is mentioned eleven times in Lawson Cairns‘s 1915 diary, usually stopping by for a quick chat with Lawson near the front line. He was later a medical officer in the Seychelles and then a doctor in London.
In later life, Rev David Maxwell was a trustee and chairman of the Thomas Hope Hospital, an honorary vice-president of the Eskdale and Liddesdale Archaeological Society, a parish church Sunday school superintendent and an official at various functions, including mission meetings.
His family’s Broomholm Trust paid for some of the expenses of the Langholm Academy, continuing its support for local education begun by the foundation of the Broomholm School in Langholm by George Maxwell, 8th of Broomholm, in the mid-1850s.