Mac was born on the fringe of Glasgow at the end of the nineteenth century, but his parents separated when he was very young. He had an older brother David. Mac’s father was protestant (possibly N Irish) and mother R Catholic. The father objected to the mother’s religious infuence on the boys and so took them away to Romanno Bridge, near Edinburgh. The father established himself as a shoemaker in Edinburgh. The local school taught the boys good English even though they spoke broad Scots at home. Mac left school at age 14 and became a gardener to a posh family. At age 17 he was conscripted to the killing fields of France. After a German sniper put a bullet through Mac’s shoulder he was shipped back to Britain in October 1918, just in time to organise his father’s funeral. (John McConnell was certified as dying from Influenza.) At the funeral, Mac saw his mother for the first time since the separation. He said that his mother looked like a painted hussy.

Mac, Winifred, Jennifer and Davis family in Lane Cove.

In 1921 Mac married a young woman who subsequently died in January 1922 from blood loss after the birth of their daughter Ethel. The grandparents were keen to keep Ethel for themselves, so Mac left Scotland forever. (The grandparents and Ethel subsequently emigrated to USA.) Mac took a £10 emigration to Australia and worked in rural areas of Vic and NSW. He went to Sydney for a holiday and sought out a Christian meeting like the one he knew in Scotland. The people he found directed him to the EB Bible and Tract Depot which was run by Jessie Kraushaar. From there he entered the world of the Kraushaars. Mac had long suffered from peptic ulcers, and in about 1925 he underwent an operation at RPAH. This left him with digestive problems for life. In 1928 he married Winifred Kraushaar. Their daughter Jennifer was born in 1933 and in 1942 Winifred was 8 months pregnant with a son when she died of eclampsia. After that, Mac, Jennifer, Alfred Kraushaar and Hazel all ended up living at Ferns Hollow in Lane Cove. Mac married Hazel in December 1943 and Alfred K went to live with his daughter Jessie.

Mac, Jennifer and Hazel, 1943.

Mac had been scratching a living delivering butter and eggs around Sydney, but wartime fuel rationing made that work impossible, so he took a delivery job with Kennard Bros. Possibly as a result of the carbon monoxide from the producer gas that was used as wartime fuel, Mac suffered a heart attack in 1945.

In 1954 Mac flew to the USA to visit his daughter Ethel and stayed there for 3 months. He died in Sydney in 1960, possibly of liver cirrhosis.

Mac, Jennifer and Topsy go camping in the 1928 Chev Roadster.