#abbeyhill — Public Fediverse posts

Cockles & Mussels: the thread about the origins of a most Irish cultural anthem in Victorian Abbeyhill

Question. What links the house with the blue door, a Victorian gas meter collector and an Irish cultural legend? Your answer will probably be “well, I never knew that!“

The house with the blue door

The Irish legend to which I am referring is none other than Molly Malone, that most Irish of folk ballads, sometimes also called Cockles and Mussels.

Molly Malone can be found in any number of collections of Irish music, or pop culture, history and children’s books about Dublin

While there are actually quite a few earlier songs and ditties featuring an Irish lass called Molly Malone, the tune and words that are now recognised the world over can be traced back no further than James Yorkston (no relation), who almost probably was its original composer. James was a gas meter collector and part time music teacher from Edinburgh who would have been living at what was 24 Maryfield Place in the Abbeyhill Colonies at the time it was written.

“Meet Me, Miss Molly Malone”, from a collection of 8 Popular Songs published in Glasgow in 1836

From what I have read, most Irish musical historians will agree that the tune of Molly Malone is neither musically or lyrically related to Irish street tunes and isn’t recorded anywhere in 19th century Irish music. It is however closely related to the music hall style of the time and the tragicomic themes that were popular, such as “Oh My Darling, Clementine“. It first appears in print in 1876 in Boston, Massachusetts, in a collection of Student Songs of the English and German Universities . The earliest printed credit for it goes to James Yorkston, in an 1884 London publication by Francis, Brothers & Day, where it is by courtesy of Ernst Köhler & Son – despite the name, a very Edinburgh company. By reference to reprints, the earliest publication by Yorkston is thought to be in a copy of Köhler’s Musical Treasury which is now lost to even the National Library of Scotland. The oldest surviving Scottish copy is from 1891 in the Scottish Student’s Songbook.

The 1891 publication by Köhler & Son, the oldest surviving Scottish version

James Yorkston is one of the most widely credited writers of the music and words in contemporary sheet music and is also the earliest credit for it; so who was he? James Yorkston was born in 1839 to Alexander Yorkston (a “practical engineer”) and Catherine Phair in the Greenside district of Edinburgh, a fairly humble place which would later degenerate into slums. Yorkston is an old Midlothian name.

The dark and towering warren that was the bustling but deprived community of Greenside in 1958, towered over by the tenements of Greenside Row. © Edinburgh City Libraries

The Yorkstons have seven children, 5 boys and 2 girls, five of whom survive infancy; James is the 3rd son. His father dies when he is 10 of consumption (TB), in Stead’s Place off Leith Walk. This leaves Catherine Phair to raise the family. They moved to the area known as Maryfield, now the top of Easter Road in tenementland, but in the 1860s a mixture of villas and farm and quarry cottages on the edge of the city, clinging on to a rural setting. In 1867, the Edinburgh Cooperative Building Company started putting in their “colonies”-style terraced housing to the east.

Maryfield, from the 1876 OS Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

If you don’t know what “colonies” refer to, it’s a peculiarly Edinburgh type of model workers housing, built by a workers cooperative. They look at first hand rather like English terraces in that they are long, two-storey rows of workers housing, but they are actually upper and lower flats, accessed from separate sides of the block by characteristic external staircases. Their finish of dressed stone was also characteristically Scottish and was as a result of them not being cheap, mass-housing thrown up by factory owners, but high-quality workers housing, built by skilled workers themselves, for themselves and others of their class.

Conservation Area booklet for the Edinburgh Colonies

Some of, if not the first residents of what was then number 24 Maryfield Place (now called just Maryfield and with all the doors since renumbered, if you’re looking for it) was Catherine Phair, her son James and two of her daughters – one a young widow. The 20 year old James Yorkston is a “Gas meter company collector”; he would have gone door-to-door to collect the money you were due for your domestic lighting gas. Initially this was a fixed rate per gas light jet you had, it later became metered and after that coin-operated and the collector would check the meeter and empty the coin box.

It is likely that James had been apprenticed to become an engineer, like his father was, but perhaps the latter’s early death prevented that. He is recorded in official documentation as a “gas collector” for the rest of his life. But he was quite clearly a man of some musical talent, and for many decades he is also listed as a teacher of music and singing. This is both from the family colony at 24 Maryfield, a flat in Montgomery Street nearby, and also in commercial premises in the New Town.

An 1874 advert for James Yorkston as a singing teacher (the “old notation” refers to sheet music)

But this still doesn’t explain how a part-time Edinburgh music teacher comes to write Molly Malone. This is where Ernest Köhler comes in. Frederik Ernst emigrates from Germany to Edinburgh around 1800 and marries in the city in 1817. He is a maker of violin strings. Ernst’s sons Ernest and Philip become involved in the family business and throughout the first half of the 1850s it slowly but surely grows in size and renown. Frederik Ernst and Ernest die in 1857 and 1859, leaving Philip to continue the business, which he does in their name.

An advert for Ernest Köhler & Son in an Edinburgh Post Office Directory

By the 1870s the business had outgrown a succession of premises and was not just importing and repairing violins, but making their own. Apparently they were rather good too; an 1871 model went for £1,200 at Bonham’s recently. But where the Köhler’s really come into our story is with their sheet music business. They amassed a massive library of sheet music to serve the burgeoning Victorian market for musical entertainment; both professional, social and hobbyist. Their advert states they have over 10,000 compositions available – Victorian Spotify. They dealt in both traditional (stave) music notation and the then recent craze for “Sol-fa” notation.

“Sol-fa” notation is what you might also call doh-ray-me and is used to teach singing to people who don’t read music. It was all the rage and people couldn’t get enough of it. Indeed, Köhlers published a monthly magazine of it called Musical Star; basically the Smash Hits magazine of its day, a blend of the latest pop music and news. And just who was editing Musical Star and helping Köhler bring popular music to the masses? None other than a certain Sol-fa teacher, James Yorkston. In amongst collecting the gas rates, teaching singing and editing Musical Star, he somehow also managed to fit in writing and arranging music to be published by his employer.

Köhlers really were quite important in the Victorian popular music scene – serving the British market by mail order – and would have given the aspiring James Yorkston a ready outlet for his talents. He would have been intimately familiar with a wide range of popular tunes and ditties (probably including the earlier tunes featuring Molly Malone) and although it’s not exactly clear how he came about it, at some point in the early 1870s he wrote the definitive Molly Malone and it was published by Köhler, quickly finding its way to the London and Boston music scenes.

James Yorkston married Elizabeth Henry in 1872 and they moved in together at 53 Montgomery Street. Note that if you go looking you will not find a flat at 53 Montgomery Street; much of this part of the street was demolished and rebuilt in the late 1880s as tenements, and parts had to be renumbered in the process, with some gaps appearing in the sequence as a result. Appropriately however, if you look on Google Streetview there is a Scottish Gas van approximately where the old number 53 was.

Location of 53 Montgomery Street

Elizabeth sadly died just 6 years later and James returned to Maryfield Place and his mother. He married again in 1883, to Agnes Hunter, a widow. They must have been relatively comfortably off and moved to 17 West Preston Street, a flat far removed from where he was born in Greenside. In 1889, the 50 year old James was still teaching singing from his house. He was also the precentor (the leader of congregational singing) and choirmaster at South College Street United Presbyterian Church, a position of some standing in his community, and was praised in The Scotsman for his contributions to the church’s music during the unveiling of the its new organ .

17 West Preston Street

About 1894, the James and Agnes retired to a flat at 3 Grange Road, although for a while he was still offering singing lessons. He died from complications after kidney surgery in the Chalmers Hospital in April 1906, aged 66. Agnes lived out her days at number 3, passing away in 1923.

3 Grange Road

James Yorkston probably never had any idea quite how popular and renowned the song he wrote was, and he probably never made much or any royalties from it. He didn’t even come up with the name Molly Malone but his music hall hit had a sufficiently powerful and memorable story contained within its three short verses that an entire back story and cult would be built around it and the tragic titular figure. People have embarked on Holy Grail-like quests to try and find the “real Molly Malone;” some have claimed she was a mistress of Charles II and you can guess what the Cockles and Mussels refer to…

The song has been adopted by the Irish across the globe as a song of their own which is surely the greatest compliment that it could be paid? For better or worse, the City of Dublin officially claimed the figure of Molly Malone as its own and erected an inappropriately busty statue of her in 1988 as part of its millennium celebrations.

The Molly Malone statue in Dublin, with her wheelbarrow of cockles and muscles. CC-BY-SA Rajeev Aloysius

So there you go. That is the story of how one of the worlds most famous Irish songs was written by a Scottish gas meter reader from Abbeyhill and was brought to the attention of the world by its German immigrant publisher.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret

City of Brewing: the thread about 150 years of brewery opening and closure in Edinburgh

In December 2019, the Edinburgh Evening News ran an article about a new brewery planned for the city which it claimed “will be the first major brewery to be built in Edinburgh for 150 years.” (and also the biggest).

Edinburgh Evening News headline, 17th December 2019

By my count (luckily, I keep a handy spreadsheet of such things for such counting eventualities) there were actually fifteen major breweries built in Edinburgh in the last 150 years and a good number of these were larger. So let’s take a closer look at them.

Starting us off at number 15 is the Caledonian Brewery – universally known as The Caley – it was opened by Lorimer & Clark 150 years ago (at the time of first writing) in 1869 in Shandon. This was one of the first Edinburgh brewers taken over by an English firm, Vaux, in 1947, who closed it in 1985. It reopened soon after in a management buyout and was one of the pioneers of the real ale revival locally. It was still going strong currently under threat of closure closed by then owners Heineken in 2022 and will likely be sold off for housing.

At number 14, G. & J. Machlachlan’s Castle Brewery opened in the Grassmarket in 1875, some 144 years ago. It relocated out to Craigmillar in 1901 as the New Castle Brewery (not to be confused with the Newcastle Brewery!). The Grassmarket site was sold in 1913 and was used as a mines rescue and research station by a consortium of Lothians mining companies. It is now part of the site of George Heriot’s School.

A non-mover at number 13, Jeffrey’s opened the New Heriot Brewery at Roseburn in 1880. This replaced a facility in the Grassmarket along from the Castle which was known, unsurprisingly, as the Heriot Brewery and took its name from that nearby school (see picture). Brewing took place at Roseburn until 1992, by which time it was an outpost of Glaswegian lager manufacturer Tennent Caledonian. Coincidentally the Grassmarket brewery was built on top of the Crawley Pipe which brought water into the town. That little brown wooden door you can see to the left of the gateway gives access to the conduit in which the pipe runs.

Holding steady at number 12, brothers Thomas & James Bernard opened the New Edinburgh Brewery on Robertson Avenue in Gorgie in 1888. For obvious reasons the firm used a St. Bernard dog as its mascot and logo (a Saint that has a local connection too), except with a bottle of their beer around its neck instead of a flask of brandy. They were bought up by the industry giant Scottish Brewers in 1960 who shut them down in order to reduce the competition and industry over-capacity.

At 11, the Edinburgh United Breweries of 1889. This company consolidated the existing smaller brewers of David Nicolsons; Robin, McMillans; Dishers and George Ritchies. The Robin, McMillans site at the Summerhall was demolished to make way for the new buildings of the Royal Dick Veterinary School, Dishers’ facilities were sold to rivals Aitchisons, and brewing was consolidated at Nicolson’s Palace Brewery at Abbeyhill and Ritchie’s Bell’s Brewery at the Pleasance. EUB’s remaining assets were acquired by Jeffrey’s in 1935 after what was (at that point) the UK’s largest tax duty scandal; the firm had been brewing off the record out of hours for years and avoiding taxation.

Sneaking in at number 10, the Craigmillar No. 1 Brewery was opened in 1891 by the firm of William Murray & Co. Murrays were an old, established brewer in the town of Jedburgh at the Caledonian Brewery but Mr Murray and his Wife died on the same evening on Wednesday 6th January 1886 leaving no living partner to take the firm on. The business was sold and its new owners relocated it to just outside the (then) city boundary at Craigmillar in 1890, where transport links were good, as was the water, and land was plentiful. This was the first brewer to locate to what would become a hotspot of this industry in this district. This operation was bought by United Breweries in 1960 and closed in 1963 by which time they were United Caledonian.

Holding steady at number 9, Drybrough’s were one of the bigger Edinburgh brewers. They were long established on the North Back of the Canongate but followed the lead of Murrays and joined them in the Craigmillar suburb in 1892 at the Duddingston Brewery. They were bought out by the firm of Watney Mann in 1965 as the big English brewers moved north of the border to expand into the Scottish market and were closed by Allied Lyons in 1987. Most of the brewery buildings remain here, in various uses as workshops, storage and offices .

A new entrant at 8, Daniel Bernard was a son of the T. & J. Bernard family, but fell out with the other partners in that business in 1889 in an acrimonious dispute that ended up in him leaving the firm and taking them to court. He set himself up in business in the Canongate as Bernards Ltd, and moved to a site in the Damhead area of Gorgie in 1893 where there were some good wells, just down the road from the family’s New Edinburgh site. When Daniel died in 1901, there was nobody to take it over. It was used for a while as a distillery before pharmaceutical company T. & H. Smith of Canonmills moved there in stages between 1904-1908. It is still in use for those purposes by their successor company.

At number 7, Pattisons were a big new name in the Leith whisky distilling, blending and bottling industry. Formed from the dairy of Pattison, Elder & Co., they were also the sole Scottish agent for St. Anne’s Well beer from Barnstable in Exeter and decided to enter the brewing market for themselves. This they did in 1896 at Craigmillar, the third such operation in the district. They were known for lavish spending on facilities, advertising and their directors personal lives. But their empire was built too quickly and built on sand; sand sitting atop a huge financial bubble which collapsed in spectacular stile 1899, bringing down much of the Scotch whisky industry with it. The Pattison brothers ended up in court for mixing cheap grain whisky with malt and passing it off as mature malt to increase their profits and ended up in jail. Their brewery assets were taken over by Robert Deuchar, a name now associated with Edinburgh brewing but actually from the northeast of England. Deuchars were closed by Scottish & Newcastle in 1961.

Up one at 6, Somerville’s joined the growing brewing suburb at Craigmillar in 1897 when they opened the North British Brewery. Messrs. John Somerville & Co. were an established wine and spirits merchant on Quality Street in Leith who amalgamated with Blyth & Cameron, a company formed that same year by business partners of Somerville to build the new brewery at Craigmillar. The consolidated firm was known as John Somerville & Co. Ltd. Neighbouring Murray’s took it over as the Craigmillar No. 2 in 1922 and when United Breweries took over Murrays in 1960 they quickly shut it down.

We’re in the top 5 territory now. Robert Deuchar (whose name would later be given to that pioneer India Pale Ale of the 1980s real ale revival in Edinburgh) built their own premises at Craigmillar in 1899 to complement those they had recently taken over from Pattisons. Deuchar is an old Scottish family name from Lauderdale in the Borders, but their brewery was established in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1888. They made the move up the railway to Edinburgh when they bought Pattisons and would transfer all their brewing operations north in 1920, but kept their tied public houses in the northeast of England. They were bought by Newcastle Brewery in 1954 and closed by that firm’s successor, Scottish & Newcastle, in 1961.

Straight in at number 4; T. Y. Paterson & Co. opened the Pentland Brewery, the smallest of the Craigmillar breweries, in 1898. Thomas Yule Paterson was a brewer and maltster established in Glasgow’s Bridgeton in 1884 who decided to move to Edinburgh when the advantages of the Craigmillar location became obvious. They were bought out by Edinburgh brewer Aitkens in 1936 and the site was used for other purposes thereafter. Only the gates remain now.

Another entry for Maclachlans in at 3. They moved from the Grassmarket to Duddingston (a bigger site, a more modern brewery and a rail connection beckoned) in 1901 at the New Castle Brewery. In 1960 the company were bought by Glasgow’s Tennent’s, a move which made sense as Maclachlan’s main market was in that city (as was their head office). But this was a period of rapid industry consolidation and Tennent’s in turn was in turn taken over by London’s Charrington United in 1963. A further reorganisation took place, with Charrington merging their Scottish subsidiaries – United Caledonian – with Tennent’s to form Tennent Caledonian. But it did not end there; in 1967 Charrington merged with Bass of Burton-upon-Trent to form Bass Charrington, under whose ownership the New Castle was shut down, Edinburgh operations of Tennent Caledonian were instead concentrated at Jeffrey’s former New Heriot Brewery in Roseburn

At number 2, W. & J. Raeburn were the last to open a brewery at Craigmillar, in 1901. Raeburn’s Brewery relocated from Merchant Street off the Cowgate in the Old Town where they had brewed since 1863. They were bought over by Robert (not William!) Youngers in 1913. They in turn sold it to the Brewer’s Food Supply Company of Fountainbridge in 1919, formed by a syndicate of Edinburgh brewers. They turned it over to dry waste brewers malt, enriched with surplus yeast, for use as cattle and poultry feed. The Inland Revenue took exception to the missed tax potential of turning a waste product into a commodity and took them to court, but lost. The War Office requisitioned the site over in 1939 to produce industrial yeast. It was returned to the BFSC and later found its way into the Scotish & Newcastle empire and the site seems to have closed around 1975.

And no surprises and still at no. 1, for the umpteenth year in a row since 1973, Scottish & Newcastle built the then ultra-modern Fountain Brewery in that year to replace the older William McEwan brewery of the same name on the other side of the road. S&N dominated the Scottish brewing scene and, along with the big English brewer, bought it up bit by bit then slowly tried to kill it. They very nearly almost did.

The graph below charts the rise and fall of the brewing industry in Edinburgh – note there would have been many more brewers operating prior to 1800, but small concerns rather than on an industrial scale. Treat the earlier end of the timeline with caution therefore. It can be seen that by numbers alone, the 1890s were the peak but there was a long, slow decline thereafter, with things falling off a cliff after the 1950s.

A graph of the number of commercial breweries operating in Edinburgh & Leith since the late 18th century

It’s worth noting too that many of these were, even by the standard of the day, relatively small concerns and overall production would actually have increased into the 1960s even though numbers were dropping due to modernisation of the larger breweries on the periphery of the city and closure of older, smaller, less-efficient city-centre sites.

If you look in the right places, it’s not hard to find the evidence of many of those old breweries not already covered in this post. Alexander Melvin’s at the Boroughloch Brewery has surviving outer walls and buildings, with tenement flats long ago built within its courtyard. If you get a chance to see it, the former brewery office off of Boroughloch Lane has a cracking Melvin’s frosted glass window still in place.

Robert Younger , one of the three Youngers of Scottish brewing, brewed at St. Ann’s in Abbeyhill. Their brewery site was converted into sheltered housing, with some of the original buildings preserved. Look out for the RY monogram above the former office door on Abbeyhill.

Archibald Campbell, Hope & King were an ancient name in brewing and distilling, they brewed at the Argyle Brewery off of Chambers Street, but which was at one time Argyle Square. They were one of the last old surviving city centre brewers when they were closed in 1970 by their new English owners, Whitebread. Many of the buildings have now been incorporated into the University of Edinburgh.

Someone later built the King’s Theatre on top of it, but Taylor, Macleod & Co. brewed on the old site of Drumdryan House at the Drumdryan Brewery, an old placename that you can still find in a neighbouring street. Drumdryan comes from the Gaelic – Druim drioghion – a ridge covered in thorn bushes, describing the local topography at one time. Interestingly the nearby street Thorniebauk comes from Scots and means exactly the same, also called Brierybauk at one time.

Steel, Coulson & Co. brewed at the Croft-an-Righ Brewery at Abbeyhill, next door to Robert Younger’s at St. Ann’s. Croft-an-Righ, named for the adjacent old house, at first glance seems an ovbvious Gaelic name meaning “King’s field” but is actually romantic corruption of an older Scots name, Croft Angry – with a possible German root. Some of the buildings were preserved and are in use by Historic Environment Scotland as workshops. These are called St. Ann’s, despite note being on the St. Ann’s brewery site, as St. Ann’s Yards is an even older placename for this area.

Charles Blair started brewing in the Canongate around 1886 at a site known as the Craigwell and within a few years it was rebuilt and expanded into a model Victorian brewery; the Craigend Brewery. In 1898, Blair combined with his relatives James and Charles Blair who brewerd in Parkhead in Glasgow and with James Gordon, a wine merchant in that city, to form Gordon & Blair Ltd. The firm was taken over by local firm Mackay’s in 1955 and closed before 1963 when the latter were bought by Watney Mann. It was used as a cash & carry warehouse before being sympathtically convereted into flats in 1986.

Thomas Carmichael’s Balmoral Brewery was on what is now Calton Road but was then the North Back of Canongate. This place appears to have always struggled financially (apparently due to water supply problems) and the site was used principally for its maltings or sublet to other brewers before being bought by Charles Blair in 1895 for use as the maltings for the Craigwell over the road.

And lastly, until recently you could still see the ground storey of the Calton Hill Brewery on Calton Road in use as a rental car garage. The brewery went through a variety of ownerships, apparently founded in the first half of the 19th century by John Muir & sons before it too was taken over by Charles Blair in around 1890 to be incorporated with the Craigwell. The remains were demolished around 2019 to be replaced by student flats.

In terms of numbers and production, Edinburgh was second only to Burton-on-Trent as the Empire’s second city of brewing. Most cities had breweries but to serve their local market, Edinburgh was notable as serving not just the whole country but also world. The McEwan’s logo, before the recognisable Laughing Cavalier, was a self-confident declaration of the Globe being supported by the strong hand of the Union Flag and the Royal Standard. This was as a result of the importance to McEwan’s business of export and military sales.

Long story short. Don’t let your local paper fool you into believing things about the history of brewing in Edinburgh!

Footnote. My personal ambivalence towards S&N is sincere; I believe they were a good company who lost their way and lost sight of what they did, and tried to grow fat by eating themselves; in the end nothing much was left worth mourning. I also have absolutely nothing against Innis & Gunn. Personally I think their beers taste of a mix of soap and marshmallows, but I also really like Tennent’s lager so I’m no authority on the matter of what “good beer” tastes like.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret