It’s official: Stonemason Douglas Swan & Sons is the best family business in Dumfries & Galloway. It has been awarded the accolade this year by the Chamber of Commerce. And it is especially sweet as it coincides with the company’s 150th anniversary.

Douglas Swan & Sons is the Family Business of the Year 2014. It is an Award that has been presented to the company by Dumfries & Galloway Chamber of Commerce. According to the citation, it is in recognition of how the business has developed its succession plan, how it copes with new family members joining, its clear long-term vision for the business and its use of family values to grow.

The Award has a special poignancy to it because this is the firm’s 150th anniversary – a century-and-a-half that has taken it through five generations of the Swan family.

It is not concidental that it is also 150 years since the railway reached the harbour port of Kirkcudbright, where Douglas Swan & Sons has it workshop. Until 1864, goods of any size and substance, including most stone, had to be shipped into the port on the south-west of Scotland from other local coastal ports such as Annan, Kingholm Quay (Dumfries) and from as far afield as Liverpool, the Isle of Man and ports on the north-west coast of England.

Stone transported in this slow and expensive way came mainly from quarries at Coarsehill, Annan and Locharbriggs and these red sandstones were widely used on all sorts of buildings in the area – and continue to be used today.

James Swan was born and raised in Kirkton village near Dumfries and served his time as a stone hewer at the nearby Locharbriggs quarry before moving 28 miles south to Kirkcudbright in 1860 to work on the construction of a new bank.

With the arrival of the railway, James spotted the opportunity to source stone more quickly and cheaply and he decided to establish a stone masonry business of his own in the town the same year that the railway opened.

James was joined in the business by his brother, John, and the firm flourished under their stewardship.

John died within a few years, leaving James to carry on until eventually his son, also John, was old enough to learn the craft. John learnt the skills of a monumental mason and as part of his broader training was dispatched by railway to Glasgow to work on building and architectural projects in the City.

The business has come through the generations, with occasional name changes reflecting the Christian name of the person in charge. The current name, Douglas Swan & Sons, refers not to the current generation, but to the father of one of the current partners of the same name.

The main business of the company is still the supply, renovation and restoration of memorials across south-west Scotland. The Douglas Swan who gave his name to the current company died in 1982, but his sons – Douglas and Ian – and Ian’s sons Jamie and Gary look after the memorial masonry side of the business, with Douglas and Ian still hand cutting inscriptions.

Both Douglas and Ian trained as monumental sculptors, Douglas also working for other local masonry firms in the area to expand his skills and knowledge base while Ian concentrated on developing his hand-cut lettering skills. Both of them had been encouraged to develop masonry skills as they showed an interest in what was happening in the family firm as they grew up. It has left them with an innate affinity with stonemasonry.

Douglas and Ian were young when their father died – Douglas, the eldest, was just 26. It was a time when many of the memorial masons in the south-west of Scotland (and, indeed, throughout the UK) were retiring from the trade, with few younger people showing much interest in continuing the businesses.

As some of these businesses disappeared, the Swan brothers took on their work and in 1987 they opened a branch office in Dalbeattie and also secured memorial supply contracts with many local funeral directors, from the port of Stranraer in the west of Scotland to Langholm in the Central Borders, an area covering 2,649 square miles.

The evolution of computer-aided lettering and design machinery led to investment in more equipment and in 2003, new purpose built workshops, display area, studio and offices were built on the site of the company’s yard in St Cuthbert Street, which had been purchased by Douglas senior in 1957 for the princely sum of £12.

These new premises have seen the business diversify into signmaking and more recently workwear supply and embroidery, which has a shop in the town staffed by two part-time sales people.

Ian’s son, Jamie, joined his father and uncle in the business in 1998 and today is in charge of the memorial section, with his brother Gary assisting him. Douglas’s daughter, Carrie, works in the sign section of the firm and Douglas’s partner, Sara, heads the embroidery and workwear business.

Douglas says: “I devolved responsibility for the new memorial section to my nephew Jamie three years ago and he became a partner two years ago. This, I believe, is the future of the business – get them involved and give them responsibility so they can see the business is really theirs and can be their future.”

The company has also expanded into repairing, supplying and carving replacement stone parts and architectural features on buildings, as well as the refurbishment of existing memorials in cemeteries both local and further away, while still manufacturing bespoke memorials from a range of materials including Scottish granite, sandstone and Welsh slate.

Three years ago the company had 47 memorials to repair from its local cemetery after they were damaged during a spate of vandalism. Most have been restored, often so successfully that you would not know they had been damaged. Only two were beyond repair.

The nature of memorial masonry has changed a lot over the years, with improved communications leading to more imports from France, Italy and Germany in the first part of the 20th century, and, more recently, with memorials coming from China and India. The changes have added to the toll on the number of memorial masons in the UK and only the fittest have survived.

Douglas Swan, the Senior Partner in the business today, says: “We are a very small business working from compact premises. We have an Anderson Grice beam saw which my father bought from Galloway Granite in 1979 for £100. It was refurbished in 2003 and allows us to cut stone up to 7in thick. It is still going strong today, although we think it may be 70 years old.

“We have a vertical borer for drilling holes in stone to accommodate vases. It was bought new from Bramley Engineering in Leeds for £750 in 1981 and is still working away. We use a Flextol hand polisher for edges and smaller surfaces and buy in polished scants if we are to make up a memorial. I still use my great grandfather’s mel [mallet] when working on sandstone. We have a portable sandblaster and use Odlings sandblast equipment.”

The IT and computer needs of the business are looked after by a second-cousin of Douglas Swan – “his great great grandfather was my great grandfather and Ritchie’s father, James, is my father’s cousin. He was one of the builders of our new workshop”, explains Douglas.

Douglas Swan & Sons carries out contract work across Scotland for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), lately completing work in Edinburgh and Glasgow. It has also carried out work in South Queensferry, near Edinburgh, where nearly 30 memorials were restored and renovated for CWGC, including the Jutland memorial. The war memorial at Dalbeattie was another project carried out in preparation for this year’s commemorations of World War I.

Last year, Douglas Swan & Sons came all the way south to London to carry out a contract for Hackney Borough Council to make safe and refurbish memorials in Abbney Park Cemetery. That was a job that came about through Douglas Swan’s association with this magazine’s columnist, David Francis, who acts as a consultant to the Scottish company and assists with the delivery of memorial masonry training and courses across the UK… because Douglas Swan & Son’s stonemasonry workshops at Kirkcudbright are now also used as a stonemasonry training centre. Douglas is a fully qualified assessor for the SQA (Scottish Qualifications Authority), working for Tomasson Consultants of Glasgow, which offers stonemasonry SVQs and NVQs up to level three. David Francis assists with the delivery of the training, running courses across the UK.

The sandstone from Locharbriggs quarry is still used by Douglas Swan & Sons, both for memorials and the architectural masonry the firm produces. The quarry is operated by Stancliffe Stone these days but it is the same quarry where James Swan served his apprenticeship more than 150 years ago.

Douglas Swan & Sons also uses Scottish granite from Craignair Quarry at Dalbeattie, which is processed for it by Galloway Stone Products (formerly Galloway Granite) at Newton Stewart.

A recent request for a Dalbeattie granite memorial came from New Zealand. An

ex-pat who had been born in Dalbeattie and worked at Craignair Quarry before emigrating had lost his wife. He wanted a Dalbeattie granite memorial and commissioned Douglas Swan & Sons to make it and fly it out to New Zealand for him.

As well as the workshops at Kirkcudbright, there is a reception area and showroom with more than 30 memorials on display. There is a sandblast room on the ground floor, with more offices as well as the sign and embroidery studios and production equipment on the first floor.

The diversity of the company helps smooth out the worst of the peaks and troughs of the economy and certainly impressed the judges in Dumfries & Galloway Chamber of Commerce when they deliberated on their choice of their business awards this year. And with the continuing enthusiasm of the next generation of the Swan family, Douglas has no reason to doubt the firm will continue to prosper for another 150 years.