The proprietor of the Buccleuch Hotel was John Connell, owner and operator of Langholm Distillery. Although he died in 1876, his executors still held the hotel in 1915.

The keepers were James and Christina Connon, both from Stirlingshire. James is second from left in the photo below, taken when Lodge Eskdale Kilwinning No. 107 won the Dumfriesshire Masonic Bowling Tournament.

According to a local tradition, one of the hotel’s walls used to be part of an Armstrong tower. The Armstrongs were notable ‘reivers’ (raiders) in the border area.

The hotel provided a room for the Free Church to start a school, with Alex Giles as the teacher, until it moved to the church’s new premises in Charles Street (Old) in 1846.

James’s son Alexander, a barman, enlisted in the KOSB on 4th March 1914, five months before the war began, at age 16. He served in the 1st/5th Battalion until December 1917 when he was appointed as a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps (‘RFC’), the army’s air arm. The RFC merged with the Royal Naval Air Service on 1st April 1918 to form the Royal Air Force.

Alexander was assigned to 144 Squadron, based in Port Said, Egypt, which initially conducted reconnaissance flights, then used Airco DH.9 light bombers against the Ottomans in Palestine.

Alexander flew various aircraft types and became an instructor, initially on Royal Aircraft Factory R.E.8 aircraft (‘R.E.’ being the abbreviation for ‘Reconnaissance Experimental’). He remained in the Middle East until May 1919.

The Buccleuch Hotel closed in May 1921, together with the Commercial Hotel, as the result of a local poll under the Temperance (Scotland) Act 1913, which allowed the number of licences to sell alcohol to be reduced by 25% in the voting locality.

James and family moved to Dumfries where he ran the Queensberry Hotel in English Street. Alexander died in Dumfries in 1931, aged 34.

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