The Officers of Arms Act 1587 required that a messenger ‘be always furnished with a sufficient reddy horse quhairupon to serve his Hienesse and Lieges’. The history of heraldry (citing Nisbet, Book 4, Chap. XVI, p.166) also shows that the only ‘furniture’ of old that mattered armorially was on the back of a horse: Lyon could ‘give arms to all persons craving the same, if they are able to maintain a horse with furniture for the King’s service’. Of course, tables and chairs – not saddles – are the sort of furnishings more associated with (abolished) ‘warrant sales’. (Please note: we still carry out ‘auctions’, which really are the same – but just not requiring the additional warrant, as introduced in 1838.)
Remembering that Mr Rutherford’s father (sometimes designed ‘cabinetmaker’) was a native of Haddingtonshire (as East Lothian was then called), it seemed appropriate for Rutherford & Macpherson in 1989 to acquire the sheriff officer business of the old Haddington firm of Leslie & Leslie. David Simpson Leslie, a native of Wick, came to Haddington as a messenger-at-arms’ clerk in 1890. His obituary in 1939 mentions his extensive business as auctioneer, antique dealer and sheriff officer. He was recognised as an authority on antique furniture, with the glamour of royal and international patronage. Indeed, the Haddington firm was famous for furniture. The dining room table in use to this day at Bute House, the First Minister of Scotland’s Robert Adam-designed official residence, was commissioned for the building in 1967 from Leslie & Leslie.
Sheriff officers, as I have noticed, were often sons of cabinetmakers. Not so in my family. However, my grandfather’s grandfather, another Alexander Alastair Macpherson, born in 1836 in Strathspey’s united parishes of Abernethy and Kincardine, seems to have been half-grandnephew to one Duncan Fife, born there in 1770. If the new researches for New York’s superb Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of 2011 are correct, this Duncan Fife became the Duncan Phyfe! That older books have been giving Loch Fannich, Ross and Cromarty, as the birthplace of the Scots-born great American cabinetmaker, remains a mystery, still to be elucidated.
My own personal commitment to the Sheriffdom of Lothian and Borders dates from 20 February 1989, when I was admitted an officer of all the sheriff court districts of the sheriffdom.
