There’s another Carluke –11,000 miles from us!

Phramacist Alan Rogerson lived in the village from 1960 and 1986 and worked, as a student, at the former McPhail’s the Chemist. Since then he has travelled widely and lived in five different countries!

He writes from New Zealand: “There’s another place called Carluke. This other one is in the upper part of New Zealand’s South Island and it’s just about as far from Lanarkshire as you could possibly hope to travel. Situated between Havelock and Nelson, near the village of Rai Valley, there’s a collection of about half a dozen houses. That’s Carluke. The population is significantly less than 50. There’s a Carluke Scenic Reserve. There’s a Carluke Cottage

(inhabited for many years by a man from Aberdeen who once spent a year living in Nemphlar!). There’s also a lot of empty space.

“Carluke, New Zealand, was founded by a man from Carluke, Lanarkshire, called William Ross Brownlee, who left Scotland in 1863. The next year, by which time he had landed in the South Island of New Zealand, Brownlee heard of a gold rush in Wakamarina and became much more interested in the fact

that the Wakamarina area was surrounded by native forest, and he successfully secured the cutting rights to a 1,000 acre plot and immediately set about establishing a mill and built a very successful business which reached its peak between 1907 and 1912 when the ‘other’ Carluke had over 100 employees working at the mill.

“Exhaustion of timber led to its closure in 1915.

“Brownlee died short afterwards.”

Back near the ‘original’ Carluke in Law Alan still keeps in close touch with his brother Kenny, a well-kent retired policeman in the Carluke and Lanark area and his wife Karen (from Carluke’s Ramage Road). They visited the ‘other’ Carluke two years ago with Alan.