From Scotland to New York: The President's Mother's Legacy | Nurture |Real Families

aye Donald John Trump do solemnly swear that I will Faithfully execute that I will Faithfully execute the office of President of the United States the office of President of the United States [Applause] foreign [Music] I think Trump is so identified with the Trump part of his story that it's been a little bit of a revelation to Americans to find out that oh wait a minute his mother was from Scotland that's a great American story it is the American story of pure immigrants arriving working really hard making America great as the president sees himself up and establishing himself in the new world to go from there to where the Trump family ended up on the top of Trump Tower seems quite quite the moonshot [Music] [Applause] when one of my friends said that one of her friends had pictures of a young Mary Trump or Marianne McLeod as she was then I first asked well what's our connection to the Village it turned out none whatsoever her grandmother had been the teenage pen pal of million McLeod and that exchanged letters of course but they'd also swapped photos of each other which gave us this incredible insight to to the life of a young merita Marianne McLeod gave us a window into that world and gave us photos that not even the president himself might have seen [Music] foreign [Music] my dad voted for Trump and we have a disagreement there um so you know we you know we we went through that Christmas so you know we're over that now you know uh we just don't talk about it um but a lot of people I know in the states don't like them of course as well so yeah we could be here all day kind of talking about this right yeah he's a horrible creep and um well um he's he's anti-immigrant and Thai you know helping refugees and I myself came to the United States as a refugee so it's kind of personal for me so if you're just like going on about immigrants Etc that you know there are terrorists their criminals then of course they don't feel at home then they don't contribute if they can be [Applause] America safe as we say in Scholars ity [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] lo and behold the flight was canceled so I didn't fly in until the Tuesday and the Tuesday when we landed in New York Donald Trump announced that he was running for presidency no it takes about three to six weeks to write a good few gags I had a 10 minute slot in my Infinite Wisdom I decided to change my material because you know it's a you know who can stand up on stage in New York and say by the way I'm from the same Village as Donald Trump's mother and um so lo and behold I changed the the set that night and luckily fingers crossed a little bit I did change worked could have been a disaster but it wasn't [Music] I thought this is so I'll open my Gunk and see you know from the symbol it's just Donald Trump's mother but I said um I'm sure there's nobody else in this room that can see they've eaten a piece of cake made by the cousin of the president of the United States of America on the night of their Auntie's week and it gave them the shits so I always try to get the audience to talk that normally nobody can [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] Village that was one or two she had a slightly elevated status her dad was a counselor he was a fisherman he was slightly wealthier than the Crafters around him and he ran the post office he was the postmaster which would have been a kind of a trickle of an income as well still although it was a family of 10 they would have been slightly better off perhaps than than other people so although she was born in a black house that storm thatched Cottage that you see on in these traditional photos the highlands and Islands she grew up in what we call a White House ironically enough which was the modern Department Of Agricultural Stone built windowed slate roofed house foreign [Music] [Music] was the the postmaster as well she had this other window on the world her telegrams would have come and gone news would have been broken the post office lettuce would have come from Australia New Zealand Canada America from the colonies so it was a kind of a Crossroads her house or her father's house would have been a Crossroads on the world she'd have had not just a village respective a kind of little parochial perspective basically the world came to her doorstep so she was well prepared by all these kind of factors to go abroad herself to to to move to the status app which is what you did [Music] tongue Village to this day you would describe as a garlic speaking Village I guess it's it's only three miles outside the main town of storm in Hebrides which an English-speaking town but the rural areas are garlic and certainly wear garlic at the beginning of the 20th century the the language of of the church the language of the home on the Hearth would have been garlic but the language of the school room would have definitely been English you know garlic was not was not promoted or or even condoned with an educational sphere in fact people are educated out of garlic to improve themselves so they thought and in fact had a role in school or father was almost you would say the School Janitor he was what they called The Whipper Inn which was a kind of a stipend somebody got to go out and collect the kids who were truanting for example if they were fluenting digging potatoes in the Autumn or if they were threatening cutting peat or turf at the beginning of the summer his job would have been to whip them in get them into school so yeah she'd have lived in a gallic-speaking world and had a window on the world through through letters and news Community post office and obviously an English perspective on the world through through her education foreign [Music] [Music] s think it's a tremendous moon but it wasn't so many ways but otherwise it wasn't because the old the end of Victorian times you may be 10 children you raise four with luck and suddenly you're having 10 children raising 10. and the question is to him how are you going to feed them and when they grow up where are they going to live well that's the craft is small enough you could perhaps share it with one son with 10 of a family most of them are going to have to leave [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] there was a huge wave of immigration from the islands and from across Europe after the first world war the island of Lewis had suffered particularly harshly in the first world war there was a great loss of Maine there was great a tragic loss of men at the end of the war compounded with huge demand for land it was an overpopulated Island no work and literally no food [Music] foreign but there is a shortage of eligible men so many have been lost in the war so many had gone off in the Morlock and they met the government kneeships that for a young woman the chances were stay at home if you want find a job in stormy if you can or leave and goes to the left there's nothing else they could do [Music] between 1922 and 1924 150 people left that Village nearly would have all walked out past Marianne's front door she would have seen that migration Generations I call them leave on that particle wasn't a unique experience to Lewis or or Scotland you know Italians Irish Germans all left Europe to go to the new world at that time foreign [Music] [Music] when Miriam was 14 years old she must have seen in a newspaper uh this Competition winner in the Dundee Courier uh this other young girl he was 15 Agnes Steven had won an art prize in the Dundee Courier and Agnes recalls in later life how she received a letter from a young Miriam McLeod all writing to her from the lonely Isle of Lewis as she put it all her brothers and sisters had gone abroad to to Canada and New Zealand and uh and the states and she wondered if she could be a pen pal and they began corresponding and they began writing to each other and that was a correspondent and a deep friendship that that lasted that whole all night long [Music] foreign [Music] foreign Agnes was my grandmother and she was born in Carnoustie in Scotland and then she grew up in Dundee uh in a tenement and she was an only child she learned the piano at a very early age and they had a piano in there in the flat um and she entered lots of different uh festivals and competitions and won quite a lot of them um her father would um would take her sort of into our growth or Edinburgh sometimes and over to Glasgow for various festivals and she would often win medals but she was also academically very bright so I think her parents persuaded her to move towards the academic rather than the musical my first year at Dundee high was not really a happy one in contrast to my early school years I was one of five scholarship pupils none from my part of Dundee most of my classmates belong to wealthy families and had also attended the junior part of the school with high fees before coming to class five where I started my mother had sewn my school uniform at home even my coat and I think I felt myself to be a sort of second-class pupil which seems silly nowadays but there was certainly a lot of snobbery at Dundee High foreign [Music] the very first one that she sent in fact with the first letter is of Marianne she appears to be on a Cliff top with a friend or one for sisters Picking Wildflowers it's a lovely photograph thank you [Music] Agnes and Mary developed this pen pal relationship for a couple of years and so when Marianne left Lewis for the first time to head to New York where two of her Elder sisters already were stopped off in Glasgow and Agnes and she met up for the first time and as Agnes recalls in in her Memoir which which we've read and read it seems to be a kind of an instant kind of Attraction you can tell that two young girls who just kind of loved being with each other they just seemed to have a so much fun together and we're very very close the you know they were both um from Modest backgrounds um both ambitious to to get away from that um I think my grandmother um sort of academically she wanted to get away from Dundee in the tenements and obviously Mary um she wanted you know she had our missions to to follow her brothers and sisters [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] shows the well-known immigration station at Ellis Island New York during the busy period of a few years ago more prospective citizens of this country arriving abroad entered through this world renowned station and through any other Port of the country foreign [Music] is that Marianne McLeod went to New York on holiday to see her sister now very few people went on holiday from the art of Lewis in the 1920s and Agonist Stephen reveals in her own Memoir of our correspondence of Marianne that she actually went to work as a domestic her sister was working as a domestic servant in her house in New York Marianne McLeod she may well have gone on holiday to New York but was quickly found work as a domestic servant in Upstate New York foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] of hers who went across it's kind of the first problem and arranged the seats and married there then like most people are doing all right she go home to visit with her opinion system already there she came back with a child to visit and she took me down back with her and glad she the whole family moved across stays Prestige as he went [Music] she would have been part of a large number of people employed as domestics in the U.S at that time that was a very significant part of the workforce I've seen it reported and I have to I'm not quite sure if it's something like a third a very significant portion because this was an industrialized country but that was just nothing like it would be even a decade later everything got ramped up in World War II and then really took off foreign [Music] appearance and presentation of Carnegie's Widow and certainly in her later years Mary Trump had a kind of a grand Dom look with her mink coat and her very um elegant and ladylike presentation [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign it's a little early to call him a magnet but he's he was a a real estate developer his father had been at the very established the family in Queens after having come to the U.S from Germany gotten together the kind of first Nest Egg by being a hotel manager and owner in the Northwest and Yukon during the Gold Rush that grub steak comes back to New York City and is the beginning of the trumps in real estate [Music] he and his mother were sort of real estate Travelers I guess you could say they he would build a house they would live in it they would sell it they'd move then he'd build another house they'd move to that house so they changed addresses a number of times as he would build these spec houses and then sell them as he was getting going in the course of the 1920s in Queens foreign on the make guy who realized Bankruptcy Court foreclosed properties that would be a really good place to be looking for areas that he could develop and he had just gotten going in that when he meets Mary McLeod [Music] foreign [Music] my grandmother um got a scholarship um Carnegie scholarship to go and study somewhere in Europe she was given the option of various universities and she chose Marburg University in Germany and went there in 1933 which obviously was a very significant year [Music] thank you foreign [Music] 1934 she meets Agnes Steven again they meet up in Glasgow when you read Agnes as a memoir they had a wild time they went shopping on Sohail Street on the big Main Street Marianne buys fur line gauntlets for her boyfriend and Agnes is really like them and Miriam says he better you know so she's quite you know she's quite firm about it they went to see the Queen Mary the great passenger liner that was being constructed on the climb and the Clyde shipyards at the time and then she sails off Marianne sails off in the SS Transylvania to New York for the last time as a McLeod [Music] thank you [Music] the legend is that they met at a party certainly plausible and she would describe him as the most eligible bachelor in New York I think that was absolutely how she saw him I'm not sure that this was an official title but he was eligible he was a bachelor and he was a handsome guy he supposedly went home and said to his mother I've met the woman I'm going to marry these kinds of sentiments are lovely to hear and whether they happened on that night we don't know [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] there's a photo of her in Upstate New York in the Hamptons and she's sitting by a swimming pool once again it's a black and white photo but you know that here is platinum blonde she looks like Hollywood she's wearing a bathing costume she just looks incredibly glamorous she has completely transformed and a final photo of her in the driveway of the new home her husband had built for her in Queens in the up-and-coming borough of Queens in New York and she's sitting on that driveway holding her fresh born child also called mirian and she's made it hasn't she she's just gone from the old world which was born into dirt pure family of 10 and she here she is in the richest country in the world in the richest city in the world married to one of the men he's going to become the richest man in the world [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign my grandmother married a fellow student who was German obviously and um you know she was a German living in Germany when war broke out so um you know her home country was at war with her husband's country and must have been very difficult predicament the war changed everything uh Agnes was a German student a very talented University student she studied in Germany she had a German fiance and in that window of hope they must have thought hope when Chamberlain and Hitler made peace in 1938 they got married and she moved to Germany merian of course was the other side of the Atlantic in America married to a second generation German as it happened they both married German men but their fate was very different Marianne's life became one of opulence and wealth in the butt of Queens in New York Agnes's life turned out very differently men of the Gallant British first and eighth armies are welcomed with open arms foreign [Music] just released German signs are torn down and smashed Frog's long fight has not yet won it was the Americans who sort of drove in and started sort of liberating the different towns and my grandmother being very pragmatic leapt out of the cellar as the American troops arrived and uh yelling that she was Scottish um so sort of taming her home nationality again and offered her Services as a translator [Music] foreign epic journey across Europe with hundreds of other perhaps thousands of other refugees all returning home and she returned um first you know across the channel to London and then took the train home to Dundee and um she writes about how you know the White Cliffs of Dover were very poignant but nothing compared to crossing the Tay that was that was real homecoming Friday was a wearisome day we were too tired to want to look at London we had something to eat again before boarding the night express to Edinburgh at 7pm we had to carry to ourselves and the children stretched out on the seats but none of us slept much Edinburgh was the end of the line it was just after Dawn and bitterly cold the first train to Dundee was at 7am we spent two hours in a deserted Bleak waiting room on Waverly station and finished off our last biscuits Bought With US Dollars on the ferry it was about 9am when the train rumbled over the Tay Bridge the children were all struck by the huge bridge and it literally expanse of the river the city and the imposing bulk of the law came into sight I hugged the children and burst into tears this was home at last [Music] yes please [Music] foreign was famous for a deal is closing everybody's got their pens out and his father insists on renegotiating a guy very very frugal a very hard bargainer and very hard on his children in at least within the workplace and the older brother seems didn't was not able to stand up to that and was sort of shunted aside and Donald very early on became the most aggressive one it became The Heir Apparent and that seemed by the time he left high school that that was pretty well established who would enter West Point from civilian life normally seek an appointment from their Congressman or Senators other appointments go to enlisted men of the regular armed forces the National Guard and the reserves foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] and will to the best of my ability and will to the best of my ability preserve protect and defend Reserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States the Constitution of the United States so help me God so help me God congratulations Mr President [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Music] Escape in later life we know for sure she'd come home she'd come home to see her cousins she'd come home to the Old Country often accompanied by a by her elder daughter Marianne she certainly didn't dress down in older age she seemed to like her carfarge and her kind of fancy here you know why she kind of very very groomed lady and she'd have been seen around town uh you know looking dressed as she was walking down the sidewalks of Manhattan but actually walking down the Pavements of a Harbor Town astronomy so I guess you'd have stood out and she was known but she came and went and her family you know had kept maintained the family connections uh right up to the to the time of her day [Music] thank you you would be able to tell that Miriam Trump left the country to tell you the honest truth well anyway I remember my mother and father came up one day and they had asked her up for dinner one night Marianne's sister and the husband and you would never say listening to the three of them but Marianne and her sister had ever left the equations [Music] America yak I don't know what they might have been like when they were over there that could have been different but certainly when they would come home they didn't have any accent no they were lovely they were beautiful that's the honest truth at that time the Trump name wasn't so famous anyway although many in the village did know that she had married a very wealthy man but after that there was no mention of Donald at the time and with that people didn't have much reason to take interest in the family people would know a little about him not much they were left alone here none of them and none of the sisters either they never turned never looked down on the people of tongue village ever and that's as honest as I can be no they were pleased at how she did after she left the island and the circumstances of poverty they were very proud that she had done well that she had enough of worldly things anyway and that she kept up the relationship she had with this place with her home with that she taught the family in the ways of the island in the ways of the community and I would hear that about them foreign I wouldn't say they wouldn't I'm proud I'm not sure if that is because they're related to me or not I don't know but certainly they were a lovely couple [Music] thank you [Applause] mirian and her mother they give a lot of money to tongue for the whole they gave a lot of money to Bethesda Donald never give a penny [Music] foreign [Music] eligible the most eligible bachelor in New York so there the next morning she wrote a letter to the 66th floor Trump Taj address to to Mary Trump and closing photocopies of the photos she had received 60 years earlier to prove that she wasn't just just somebody trying to Conor she sent off this letter and that very weekend she got a reply back from Mary Trump explaining how she'd been looking for her childhood friend all these years and had lost her and they were reunited Marianne and her daughter were visiting London and she telephoned my grandmother and said come and have lunch with us at the Dorchester and so of course my friend you know always won for a bit of Glamor said absolutely and rushed it into London on the train um and entered the Dorchester and they had their their poignant reunion and I think one of the nicest things about it was that my grandmother said she's still sounded exactly the same she still had the same lovely accent and my grandmother obviously still sounded like she was from Dundee and you know they were still the best of friends and it was just like they were teenagers again and they kept in touch after that as well I think Marianne sort of would send photographs of her family she sent videos of anniversaries and birthdays and lots of glamorous parties in New York and and in Florida [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] to go from there to where the Trump family ended up on the top of Trump Tower seems quite quite the moonshot and literally unimaginable that's a great American story it is the American story of pure religions arriving working really hard making America great as the President says himself

Channel: Real Families

Views: 13,621

Keywords: American history, New York elite, Scottish heritage, childhood influences, controversial figures, cultural exchange, family culture, family dynamics, family legacy, family relationships, female empowerment, global families, immigrant success, influential women, inspiring documentaries, personal development, personal growth, powerful storytelling., powerful women, property development

Id: I3JJaqOV7Ak

Length: 54min 11sec (3251 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2022