#canongate — Public Fediverse posts

The fascinating People's Story Museum in the Canongate Tolbooth on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, looking at the lives of the ordinary residents of Edinburgh from the late 1700s until the present day. More pics and info: https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/edinburgh/peoplesstory/index.html

#Scotland #PeoplesStoryMuseum #Canongate #Edinburgh

Well, this is nice…

A lovely, perceptive overview of the Aud trilogy. A gratifying set-up before I begin my events for She Is Here tonight at Third Place Books, Ravenna.

https://ellethinks.wordpress.com/2026/02/16/readindies-2-the-aud-trilogy-by-nicola-griffith-canongate/

Well, this is nice…

A lovely, perceptive overview of the Aud trilogy. A gratifying set-up before I begin my events for She Is Here tonight at Third Place Books, Ravenna.

https://ellethinks.wordpress.com/2026/02/16/readindies-2-the-aud-trilogy-by-nicola-griffith-canongate/

In Scotland: The £25,000 Trivedi Science Book Prize 2025 Shortlist

From a pool of 254 initial submissions, the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize jury names six 2025 shortlistees in Edinburgh.
https://publishingperspectives.com/2025/08/in-scotland-the-25000-trivedi-science-book-prize-2025-shortlist/

#Awards #Canongate #Faber #HachetteUK #Nonfiction
@indieauthors

The fascinating People's Story Museum in the Canongate Tolbooth on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, looking at the lives of the ordinary residents of Edinburgh from the late 1700s until the present day. More pics and info: https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/edinburgh/peoplesstory/index.html

#Scotland #PeoplesStoryMuseum #Canongate #Edinburgh

Queen of the High Street: the thread about the life and times of Esta Henry

On this day (January 15th) in 1963, a small silver airliner with 45 people on board took off from Sao Paulo in Brazil en route for Rio de Janeiro. Moments later it plunged into the ground in the city’s suburbs, taking with it 13 lives. The last victim to be identified was that of Esta Henry, a renowned and somewhat eccentric Edinburgh antiques dealer; her husband Paul was at her side and perished too. Thus ended the final chapter in the colourful life of the lady the papers called the Queen of the High Street. Her surprising story now follows.

She was born Esther Louis on July 3rd 1882 in Sunderland, County Durham, to Louie Louis and his wife Eveline (née Jackson). Her parents were Jewish, her father a 1st generation Prussian immigrant and her mother 2nd generation to Dutch and German parents. Like many Jews in Britain at this time, to integrate and protect themselves somewhat from anti-Semitism, they altered their names; Louie and Evelina were thus better known as John and Eva. He worked variously as a cobbler, a clothier and an auctioneer and the family moved frequently with his work between Sunderland and Scotland. The family moved to 2 Jane Street in Leith in 1884 where Louie opened an auction room in the Kirkgate. Alas tragedy was to strike the following year. When Esta was just 2 her father died from fever and pneumonia leaving his wife with 7 hungry mouths to feed and another on the way.

Evelina and her entourage of children gravitated back to Wearside where she remarried in 1889 to Charles Goldman, a pawnbroker. Four half-siblings to Esta would follow and at the time of the 1891 census the enlarged family stayed in a small but prim end-terraced house at 4 Sorley Street in Sunderland. In her own telling of her story at this age the 9 year old Esta ran off to variously Edinburgh or Leith and sold door-to-door by barrow or bicycle to eke out a living, but we should take this with a very large pinch of salt as the records contradict the story and she made a habit of tweaking and embellishing tales of her life to suit circumstances. In 1901 they were at 12 Rutland Street in Sunderland, living above the family pawnbrokers. The 18 year old Esta was described as a General Dealer in the census; she was running a corner shop.

But Esta did not stay put for much longer, by the next year we find her living at 156 Canongate in Edinburgh. Shortly thereafter she married a 25 year old jeweller, Jack H. Henry of 30 Milton Street. But like her Father, Esta’s new husband was using an alias; he was actually born Joseph Henry Abrovich in Łódź, Poland. It suited him to keep details of his past deliberately obscure; he spent his life giving different dates (between 1869-79) and places of birth in official documents and was most frequently recorded as John but sometimes also Jacob. But he married Esta as Jack. His mysteriousness was necessary as he was leading a double life; he was actually a talented concert violinist, a member of the touring orchestra of Polish piano impresario Ignacy Paderewski (who would rise to become Prime Minister of his country). Jack had skipped town in Dublin when on tour in the 1890s in order to avoid returning home to compulsory military service for the Russian Empire. It was also a difficult time for the Polish Jews in general as they faced the Russian Pogroms and waves were emigrating west. Thus he ended up in Scotland; possibly via Glasgow where there were already Abrovichs resident.

Esta and Jack settled at the tenement at 170 Canongate and soon opened a jewellery shop at number 168. They moved into the back of the shop and began to raise a family together. Louis (Lou) was born in 1903, Philip (Philly) in 1904, Herbert (Bertie) in 1906 and Rosa (Rose) in 1908. While the Canongate was a down at heel neighbourhood at the time, one with much slum housing and a largely itinerant population that included many of the city’s poor and immigrants, they were doing well for themselves and advertised for a servant – “apply Mrs Henry” – in the newspapers.

After 1910, the shop moved over the road to 183 Canongate, where a photo shows Jack standing proudly in the doorway amongst his door.

As they prospered, raising 3 children in the back of a shop ceased to be a necessity and they moved to a smart new, end-of-terrace, middle class villa at 1 Lismore Avenue in Willowbrae. It was here in 1918 that their ranks were joined by the birth of Henrietta (Bunty). By 1915 the shop had relocated up the Royal Mile to number 51 High Street, next to the well know building known as John Knox’s House. This was the ground floor of Moubray House, one of the oldest surviving residential buildings in the city, where Daniel Defoe had once lodged. It had recently been restored by the Cockburn Association and placed in the hands of a trust. Despite raising 4 children, Esta was clearly becoming more involved in the affairs of business as classified adverts are in the name of both her and Jack. By 1920 she is styling herself “Mrs Henry, Antique Dealer” in these.

The Henrys began to put money into property as shown in the 1915 and 1920 valuation rolls; a shop at 54 Hanover Street that would later be run by their son Louis, and the entire frontage of the High Street from 83 to 95. Two of these shop units they would use for themselves to hold more stock and others were let out. The 1921 census finds the family have moved on and up in the housing world again, now at a very large villa at 15 Mayfield Terrace in Newington. Louis Henry was following his father into the jewellery trade and Philip was training to become a dentist. Life was good but it was about to get better. In 1923 the Scottish newspapers reported the surprise visit of Queen Mary to the Henrys’ shop, where she spent an hour and bought many items, particularly Chinese curios. She was “greatly interested with both the collection and the premises” and shook hands with Esta and Jack as she left, promising to return. Her Majesty was true to her word and returned exactly one year later, buying “a score of articles” including a Louis XIV fan that had once belonged to Queen Victoria. She signed the visitors’ book and said that her purchases the previous year had been gifted to the West Kensington Museum.

The Queen was back again a year later, with over a dozen items bought, including a portrait believed to have been the property of Napoleon. The Henrys were invited to deliver the items in person to Holyroodhouse that afternoon and join the Queen for tea. They learned that some of the purchases were to stay there at the palace as part of its collection. The Queen thereafter returned almost every year on her visits to Holyrood, the newspapers reporting the purchase of items in 1927 and 1930 for Buckingham Palace and her personal collection. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Princes Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) and her sister Queen Margaret would carry on this royal tradition in later years and a whole section of wall in the shop was reserved for the display of their proudly framed cheques.

As the Roaring Twenties came to a close, Esta’s public profile was ascendant but Jack seems to have begun to step back somewhat from the limelight and into the shadows of the shop. In 1928 she stood for election to the Parish Council in the Canongate ward. Although she came second, there were two seats up for grabs and she was duly returned. Her election notices are the first time in print I could find where she is referring to herself as Esta, rather than just Mrs Henry. Her election was notable as she was the first Jewish woman to be elected to a public office in Scotland and also the press referred to her as Councillor Mrs Esta Henry, other married female councillors were referred to by their husband’s name, e.g Councillor Mrs Adam Millar. This is a public demonstration that she was very much her own woman.

The following year civic Parish Councils in Scotland – which existed largely for the purposes of poor relief – were abolished and merged into the Town Councils. Esta stood as an independent for this latter body in 1929 but came 4th behind two Socialists and a Moderate candidate. She would stand again for the Town Council in 1931, 1933 and 1935. She made very clear in her election speeches, which were reported in the press, that her priorities were housing, housewives, child welfare and the treatment of the sick and poor. Women and children were always central to her campaigns and she was known to mobilise squads of them in the Canongate to carry her election materials and to parade around the polling stations. But despite her strenuous campaign efforts on a sensible platform, her public profile and her local popularity, as an independent female candidate she stood little realistic chance of election. Edinburgh was run by the very pale, male and stale Moderates who largely owned the Council’s seats – many of which they didn’t even need to contest – and it was only in a handful of wards where the Socialists could challenge them (to find out more about the political groupings of 20th century Edinburgh and how the election system worked, you can bookmark this thread to read later).

In between election campaigns and royal visits, in 1933 the Henrys commissioned a magnificent L-plan house in a Dutch Cape Colonial style that also incorporated the latest in Moderne tastes. This was Marchdyke at 50 Pentland Terrace on the outskirts of the city’s growing suburbs and it totally eclipsed the monotonous rows of middle class bungalows that were much in favour all around it. Completed in 1935 this 4,000 square foot, 5 bedroom residence featured a Tudorbethan dining room, copious lounge and parlour, a terrazzo bathroom in a Roman style and in the basement a large garage for Jack’s cars, a wine cellar and antiques store. While many of the windows were in an ultra-fashionable fish scale style, the stained glass of the master staircase incorporated original 16th century Swiss and German panes from their collection.

In the 1935 Town Council election, Esta had come third behind the Socialist Party candidate and another from the Protestant Action Society (PA). This party were extreme anti-Catholics who stood on a platform of “No Popery”. Their leader was the rabble-rouser John Cormack and his political stock was rising at the time. In 1934 his party got just 6% of the popular vote in the Edinburgh municipal elections and 1 seat; in 1935 they got 21% and 3 seats. The exact order of following events are not clear but at the 1936 election Esta was already intending to stand once again on her usual independent platform. John Cormack made it be known in the press that he was inclined to lend his support to her in the Canongate (where many Catholic Irish and Italians lived). Perhaps it was a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them“, but with just a week to go before polling, Esta Henry made the shock announcement that she was now standing as a Protestant Action candidate – “the Only Party who do Not Want R. C. Votes“. So late was this change that even on the eve of election some of the papers still reported her as an independent. She topped the ballot, beating PA’s primary candidate, and was duly elected as a Town Councillor at the 5th attempt. It was a good year for PA, they got 31% of the popular vote and won 6 seats. Indeed it was their apogee and they soon slumped into bitter infighting and electoral obscurity, leaving just John Cormack to solider on for decades as their only councillor.

It’s never been clear just how committed Esta was to her new found political home – she certainly threw herself into public meetings on its behalf for a while, it being reported that she would stroll up and down the aisle, brandishing her umbrella at the audience. Realistically she may just have been desperate to get elected and chose the only other party than the Progressives (as the Moderates had re-branded) or Socialists with any chance of winning a seat. John Cormack was strongly criticised from within his own ranks for allowing a Jewish woman to stand on his platform – indeed much later in 1952 he organised pickets against her for suggesting public entertainments on Sundays at public meetings. She did not linger too long under his party whip and had resigned before the 1938 elections. She may have been made very uneasy with the association after a tumultuous public meeting in October 1937 in the Canongate Tolbooth. At this, her male PA colleague refused to answer questions directly and instead railed against Catholics to the boos and heckles of the crowd. Esta tried to make clear that she was there to fight the Socialists in politics but the audience deemed her guilty by association and turned on her too. Thereafter, she dedicated herself thereafter to public service for the Canongate in her own name. She would rise to become Convenor of the Baths and Washhouses Committee, a member of the Cleansing and Lighting Committee, the Streets and Buildings Committee and in 1941 was made JP (a Justice of the Peace, a lay magistrate in the lowest level of municipal courts).

Esta found that her official role as a councillor fitted well alongside her personal philanthropic activities and she long described herself publicly as a Social Worker in the Canongate (although she frequently embellished the timescales somewhat). In 1931 she had formed the Edinburgh United Independent Association in the Canongate to run youth projects and raise money for the city’s Royal Infirmary hospital. Her attitudes were quite progressive and she recognised the need and value for activities and exercise for her district’s youth to keep them from being led astray and getting into trouble and for their general health. She was heavily involved in the Canon Club for Boys and Girls and formed an amateur dramatic society there.

The youth of the Canongate ward is my special care… I want to mother the young people – I have done it all my days – and to impress them with the same spirit that I have myself… Never to let go, to hold on to the good things of life, because they will be rewarded in the end, the same as I have been.

Esta Henry, 1936

She also put her money where her mouth was and provided trophies for local clubs. In 1936 she presented the first of many Esta Henry Cups to the men of the Trinity College and Moray Knox Club on Cranston Street, an organisation formed for unemployed men. It was for the man who scored highest in their games league of dominoes, billiards, draughts and other pastimes with which they occupied their enforced idleness. Another such cup was presented to the local Caledonian Football Club. In November 1937, the Lord Provost gave her a leave of absence from her duties to travel officially to South Africa, where she was to spend two and a half months investigating working class housing and town planning on behalf of the city. He provided her with letters of introduction but they probably weren’t necessary, she apparently owned a fruit farm in the country and her son Phillie had settled there as a dentist! On her return she reported back that she had “travelled many hundreds of miles by air” but that it turned out things in Scotland were far more advanced and better organised for the poor than they were in South Africa! At this time she was also becoming increasingly involved with the Scottish Old Age Pensioners Association, becoming a local committee member, and in 1939 she and the Lady Provost threw a Christmas dinner for its members in the Canongate Tolbooth.

The year 1939 also brought the clouds of war to the High Street and municipal elections were suspended for the duration. As an incumbent councillor at the end of her 3 year term, Esta would have faced re-election in November that year. She now found herself with an extra six uncontested years added to her term of office and intended to make the most of this chance. She applied her single-minded determination, boundless energy and never-ending appetite for meetings and committees to the task at hand. And so it was that Councillor Esta Henry went to war. Interviewed shortly after the outbreak, she told the People’s Journal that there was no need to conscript women to the war effort as she had not met a woman in Edinburgh “who is not prepared to do whatsoever she is called upon to do“.

One of her first acts, on behalf of the Scottish Old Age Pensioners Association, was to campaign for government allowances for women dependent on the wages of their sons where these men had now been called up. In the Canongate she joined the local ARP (Air Raid Precautions civil defence force), turned her shop basement into an air raid shelter (her name is against it in the Valuation Rolls) and established a corps of 40 local women to act as fire pickets. Later, the Esta Henry Ambulance Section first aiders were also formed. She was soon putting on social events to help finance these activities and found herself placed in charge of the Entertainments Committee of the Lady Provost’s Comforts Fund. This latter organisation started out with the simple of aim of knitting kilt socks for soldiers of the Highland Regiments, as had been done in the 1914-18 conflict. Esta organised bridge parties to raise funds for buying the wool and offered up her house of Marchdyke as a suitable venue. In the Canongate she formed the local women in to work parties in the Tolbooth meeting hall, and arranged free entertainments to keep them amused as they knitted the socks. Soon she was organising mass balls; in February 1940 some 600 dancers packed out the Plaza dancehall in Morningside in a charity gala. At the Eldorado dancehall in Leith though it wasn’t dancing that she put on but boxing, a sport new to her but one that she had fallen in love with. There was nothing that she would not turn her attention to in the name of raising funds; charity auctions, raising pigs and Warship Week where she matched every £1 bond bought at a public rally with £1 of her own.

Increasingly in the city centre on her ceaseless war work, getting to and from Marchdyke must have been proving an inconvenience as in 1941 she took possession of the flat in Moubray House above the shop and fitted it out as her own residence. She was also keen to demonstrate that old houses in the High Street could be rehabilitated for use without demolishing them. At the end of that year she paid for 800 local children to go to the cinema as a Hogmanay treat, a special programme being put on for them at the New Palace on the High Street. At the end of this screening she had new years resolutions projected onto the screen and had her audience promise en masse to be good children while their fathers were away and to help contribute to the war effort. 1942 saw the institution of the city Corporation’s Holidays at Home programme; municipal entertainments to keep people and children occupied over the summer holidays and try and reduce the temptation to travel. Esta organised outdoor public dances at the Ross Bandstand in Princes Street Gardens which were put on for 2 hours every Monday to Friday afternoon, admission 6d on the gate. She herself led off the first dance with the Lord Provost and was a regular attendee, encouraging and cajoling shy young men to get themselves a partner and join in.

There was more dancing organised by Esta Henry in 1943, as well as cycle racing at Meadowbank, mass picnics for mothers and children and – as Baths & Washhouses Committee Convenor – she arranged for Portobello outdoor swimming pool to be re-opened (some of its machinery had been removed for war use and the rest had fallen into disrepair) so that charity swimming and water polo galas could be held (the awards being more Esta Henry Cups). This also meant children and youths could go swimming in the holidays again – she was well aware that with many fathers away on service and mothers occupied with war work at home, juvenile delinquency as a result of bored children being left to their own devices was a real problem. At the end of that year she spoke at a meeting to form the East Edinburgh Anti-Fascist Committe when it was announced that British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Moseley had been released from jail.

In 1944 she instituted a scheme whereby service personnel in the city and groups of school children were invited to the City Chambers to attend meetings of the Town Councils as her guest. They watched the proceedings and afterwards could question her and other members about the mechanics of local government; she wanted to show how the Home Front was functioning, to connect people with the municipal authorities and to raise awareness of the acute difficulties faced by it at this time. That summer she pressed the Corporation to make the city’s now unnecessary civil defence resources available to house evacuee children from London in the face of the new V1 and later V2 terror bombing. Although the idea garnered wide support it ultimately came to nothing and she would latter press the city to instead give away its accumulated surplus of bunk beds, mattresses and blankets for free to those in need.

With the end of the war finally coming into sight she now turned her attention to the post war prospects. With the Rev. Selby Weight of Canongate Kirk she held public meetings for the Canongate Welcome Home Service Fund to plan for the reintegration of demobbed service personnel and provide comforts and necessities for them and their families. She joined the local Women for Westminster branch to try and get a woman MP elected for the city and repeatedly went on the record that providing for youths and children had to be central to the city’s postwar planning and foresaw the coming housing crisis in the Old Town (it had of course always been there to an extent, but it was about to get very acute). “My slogan is houses and more houses – housing priority!” she said, but she was also clear that it had to be done by reconstruction of existing communities, not by swinging the wrecking ball and scattering them to all the corners of the city. She also took a great interest in Portobello and joined a local campaign to improve the district after the war. Always one to put her money where her mouth was, at her own expense she commissioned plans and artists’ impressions for a scheme to turn “Edinburgh’s ugly sister” into a fashionable new sea-side resort and Garden City. This wasn’t just pie-in-the-sky thinking, she successfully proposed it to the city authorities who had it approved by the Lord Provost’s Committee and included in Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s 1949 “Plan for the City and Royal Burgh of Edinburgh” (you will find it on page 69 in glorious technicolour but with little additional detail). The realities of postwar economics and political priorities meant however that it would never get beyond the pages of that work.

As the war drew to its close Esta found time to join yet one more committee, that of the League of Angry Wives. These were Scottish women who had married American servicemen and as “G.I. brides” wanted the right to join their husbands in that country. A resolution was passed and representations were sent directly to President Truman – by letter – and the First Lady – by telegram. A week later, Esta henry defended her seat, which she had now held for 9 years, at the ballot box but the winds of political change blew hard and she was comprehensively defeated by Labour candidates. This was despite her being presented with a pair of boxing gloves by her supporters and urged to “go on fighting“. After further defeats at the 1946 and 1947 elections she stepped back finally from politics, but not from life!

In 1946 and 1947 she was a key organiser with the Scottish Housewives Association in an Edinburgh and Fife-based campaign against bread rationing. This culminated in her and Janet Neish of Kirkcaldy chasing the Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Trade out of the North British Hotel and across the street to his car as he sought to avoid the combined fury of their sharp tongues! Never one to turn down a committee, she was also elected as the President of the Edinburgh branch of that organisation. 1947 had however started on a sad note for her as Jack Henry finally succumbed to long-term heart disease, leaving her a widow. It was around this time that the house at Marchdyke was sold. But Esta showed no signs of retiring from life to mourn and threw herself instead to yet another new activity; women’s football. She became the director of the Edinburgh Lady Dynamos, a team formed from core members of successful pre-war teams when the women’s game had enjoyed a brief spell of public popularity. Donating another Esta Henry Trophy to the cause it was likely that she paid for their kits too and she could be relied upon to turn her formidable oratory power at the authorities when they refused to allow the women to play in public grounds.

She had long been a local celebrity but in the year 1953, Esta Henry’s reputation went national on two accounts. Around the 27th of December 1952, a well dressed man entered her shop on the High Street and introduced himself as a Belgian art dealer, Paul Eugene Dillin. The pair quickly struck up a rapport and he soon confided in her that his identity was a front; he was actually a stateless Romanian Jew by the name of Pinchas Haimovici and had spent two and a half years in hiding in the Netherlands during the war. As he refused to sign a national oath pledging himself to Communism he was exiled from his country of birth and had no papers. It was at the recommendation of the renowned sculptor Benno Schotz, a prominent member of the Scottish Jewish community and whose wife came from the same village as him, that he had come to Edinburgh seeking art. Esta fell in love with the man then and there, despite an age gap of 21 years between them, and proposed to him on the condition that he took the name Henry. When he accepted she threw his fake passport on the fire and urged him to turn himself in and seek asylum so that they could be legally wed.

Esta perhaps imagined naïvely that her reputation and connections would make it a mere formality and booked the couple a honeymoon trip to Madeira. However when the police were invited to the shop they instead charged Pinchas with offences for landing illegally in the country on false papers under the Aliens Act 1920 and he was sent to Saughton Prison. On December 31st he pled guilty at the Sheriff Court in Edinburgh and was remanded for sentencing, which was deferred to give his solicitor a chance to arrange an application for Israeli papers and asylum so that he could travel there instead of being deported. After the hearing, Esta told the waiting reporters that she still intended to marry her “Prince Paul” (Paul Haemovitz was another alias he had used) but that she was going to go on the Honeymoon trip to Maderia anyway by herself as the stress of events would otherwise give her a stroke; the reporter noted that she was smoking at the time and confided she had smoked 100 already that day. The case rumbled on and on, the Israelis were being slow with the papers as apparently there was another Pinchas Haimovici on an Interpol watch-list, despite this being a common name in Romania, and he had to prove it was not him. The Sheriff in Edinburgh grew tired of the repeated delays and on March 13th 1953 he ordered Pinchas’ release. But no sooner had he left the courtroom than he found himself re-arrested; the Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe had finally signed a deportation order for him and he was sent straight back to Saughton. Esta told a waiting reporter from the Daily Mirror that if he was to be deported to Romania then she would join him there; “I’m only seventy, and fit enough to crash any of Stalin’s curtains”.

Pinchas petitioned the High Court in Edinburgh to avoid deportation and his case was heard on April 10th. As a declared anti-communist he told the court that he faced “torture and death” if returned to Romania. He also asked leave from court to marry Esta (who waved the papers she had ready to the court), but this request and his protests over his captivity fell on deaf ears and the case was adjourned. Back to Saughton Prison he went were Esta, with her lawyer Lionel Daiches, continued to visit him and made a habit of finding her way uninvited into the Governor’s office to protest more directly. The case was now being reported across the national and regional British newspapers and had become quite embarrassing for the Government. And so it was that the Home Secretary cancelled his previous order and on Friday 24th April 1953 Pinchas Haimovici was released and met by Esta with a pony and trap to drive him home and a brass band she had hired to serenade his freedom. The couple announced that they were to be married on the Monday morning and after a brief registry office ceremony, so they were. Esta insisted that they returned immediately to the shop to re-open for business but outside they were met by an immense crowd of well-wishers who lifted her into the air as they cheered for her and her husband. She lost her shoes in the process and the police had to attend to find the couple a path through the throng.

The crowd followed them all the way back to the shop where they posed for the press and thanked their well-wishers while Esta fumbled through the 20 different keys she kept for the various locks on the premises. They were back behind the counter and at work within an hour of their ceremony starting. The next day they took a taxi out to Saughton Prison and thanked the warders with wedding cake and champagne, Pinchas let the press know that they had treated him very kindly. A few days later he formally changed his name to Paul Henry in line with Esta’s prenuptial wishes.

To celebrate their union and to thank Benno Schotz for helping bring them together they commissioned him to produce a brass bust of them. Schotz insisted that Pinchas should be holding something in his hand and, knowing that Esta was immensely fond of rings, designed an Adam & Eve ring for the purpose. The finished work was unveiled to mark their first wedding anniversary as the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy on Princes Street.

Returning to the events of 1953, it was while her Prince Paul was still incarcerated that the other event took place that garnered national reporting for Esta; she was robbed! Perhaps she had been distracted by the events surrounding Paul’s case, but she allowed herself to be taken in by a group of well-organised confidence tricksters posing as American buyers. Having taken the time and effort to establish her routines and build up a rapport with her, they arranged a distraction and took their chance to steal jewellery that she valued at £20,000 from a lock box, £320 and $600 in cash and the pass books for her life savings. Esta told the press that amongst the items stolen was an amethyst fob which had once been part of the Hungarian crown jewels. Bits and pieces of the loot turned up in sale rooms afterwards and she was forced to buy them back at half of what the other dealer had paid for them; she was not impressed. The police eventually caught up with her trio of robbers due to their amateurish attempts to pass her stolen valuables off to on an antique dealer for far less than their actual worth. Roy Fontaine got 4 years for theft, Arthur Wooton 3 years for reset and George Ross-Wham had already been jailed on a separate offence by the time his sentencing came up. Fontaine was a career jewel thief, confidence trickster and blackmailer but Esta had found him charming and visited him in jail. She left money for him to try and start up a better life after he was released. This he tried, but it was not to be. It turned out that she may have gotten off lightly from Fontaine’s gang; he was actually the Glaswegian Archibald Hall who gained notoriety some 20 years later as a serial killer who the press dubbed the Monster Butler. His modus operandi was robbing and killing wealthy elderly and high-profile clients that he had worked his charm on to gain work as a butler. He was sentenced to life without parole in 1978.

Esta Henry would have one last high-profile adventure before settling down to a quieter married life keeping shop with Paul. In 1954 the Egyptian Junta let it be known that they were auctioning off part of the personal collection of art and objets accumulated by the now deposed King Farouk at the state’s expense. She told the press she was determined to bag herself a bargain and flew to Cairo to the auction at the Koubbeh Palace; they were there at Turnhouse Airport to wave her off. In Egypt, when the Sotheby’s auctioneer initially announced the lots only in French and Arabic she interrupted to protest – “English was good enough for Shakespeare, it should be good enough for these people”. He yielded to her request and began to also announce the lots in English. She next stopped proceedings to ask an Egyptian army major to bring her some tea; tea was brought. When asked not to smoke she refused and instead asked for one of King Farouk’s diamond-studded, gold ashtrays – an auction lot – be brought to her.

She eventually brought the proceedings into complete farce by repeatedly protesting when, at the behest of the Egyptian organisers, multiple auction lots were withdrawn, joint lots were split up and opening bids were significantly above the catalogue reserve price. The other bidders, and indeed the Sotheby’s auctioneers, were actually on her side – they too were less than impressed with how the sale was being conducted. When she eventually walked out, labelling the Egyptians “a bunch of twisters”, a number of fellow dealers followed her out. She was chased into the car park by the auctioneer and a senior Egyptian officer who begged her to return. Realising she had made her point, she acquiesced, and went back into the sale room where she publicly hugged and kissed the astonished auctioneer. She now stopped making a nuisance of herself and got down to the business of buying, eventually spending some £15,000 (c. £360,000 in 2025). She allowed herself one last moment of pantomime when, outbid on a 16th century Scottish clock, did jump up, grab the item from the auctioneer’s desk and announce to all that it was Scottish, she was Scottish and “I am going to have it!”. Her delighted fellow buyers let her have it. When she returned home, the gossip columnists and society magazines were waiting and she told them she was left with only the 2/6d in her pocket having spent the rest in Egypt. Her treasures arrived at the end of the following month, and she was met by both the press and by Customs to assess the haul.

Esta and Paul Henry spent a happy decade together behind the counter at 51 High Street surrounded by the antiques and art that had brought them together. Esta through numerous exhibitions at Moubray House and contributed rare pieces to others. She began to form plans to perhaps leave the house and the best parts of her collection to the nation. In 1960 a fellow Edinburgh antique dealer told the press that they probably had the best collection in the country inside their shop. For their 10th wedding anniversary the couple decided to take a long overdue honeymoon and booked a round the world trip, perhaps to acquire yet more pieces or perhaps with a view to scouting out somewhere warm to retire to.

It was for this reason that they were in Sao Paulo, en route to Rio de Janiero on January 15th when Serviços Aéreos Cruzeiro do Sul Flight 144 came down shortly after takeoff, killing them both. The long reign of the Queen of the High Street was over and the Brazilian authorities had her buried together with her Prince in Sao Paulo. Back home her vast collection of treasure that formed the bulk of her estate was split up and sold off. Her shop became home to a succession of trinket and tourist businesses but her flat above fared better, remaining in the care of the Cockburn association before being restored by a wealthy American benefactor and in 2012 gifted to the nation under the care of Historic Environment Scotland.

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.

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The thread about Edinburgh’s public Christmas trees; from Victorian commercialism to symbols of international friendship

The Christmas tree on the Mound is one of those annual Edinburgh institutions you kind of take for granted. It always seems to have appeared there each year and you expect that it always shall. But as I passed it by the other week it inevitably got me thinking about just how the tree on the Mound came to be and just how far back the tradition of public Christmas trees goes in Edinburgh. Inevitably this led me straight down a rabbit hole or two in the old newspapers and the clippings that I found down there have threaded themselves into a festive story for your amusement.

Christmas trees in Edinburgh pre-date considerably their public display. It was likely Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, who introduced the German tradition of the Christmas fir tree into British society but it’s generally accepted that it was Prince Albert who helped popularise them and lead to their widespread introduction into the homes of the Victorian upper classes in the 1840s. In the sketch below by Jemima Wedderburn, we see a posed scene of an upper class Scottish family around their Christmas tree in 1853. It is remarkably like those in popular Christmas prints of the Royal Family at that time.

The earliest advert I can find for the sale of a Christmas Tree in Edinburgh is in 1849, when they were for sale alongside “Chinese Sweetmeats and Fancy Boxes of Tea” in Maclean & Son’s French and Italian Warehouse at 27 Princes Street. Adverts for the sale of this “favourite German amusement” are increasingly common in throughout the 1850s and its clear many higher end shops and department stores were making them a public attraction to draw in customers. In 1856, Knox, Samuel & Dickson’s establishment at 15 Hanover Street was advertising a “Grand Spectacle to be seen during the Christmas holidays” which included “The Model Christmas Tree“. They were also selling trees with prices ranging from 5s (about £25 in 2024) through to £65 (around £7,000 these days!) if you wanted one complete with “many hundreds” of ornaments.

It’s clear from the newspaper coverage and advertising of Christmas Trees that Edinburgh’s retail proprietors were vying with each other throughout the middle Victorian period to have the biggest and most elaborately decorated tree displays in order to get the customers through the doors. The trees and their decorations would have been unaffordable to most, but they and Christmas were clearly a profitable commercial enterprise. But it would take over 80 years from their introduction to get these trees out of the department stores or New Town parlours and on to public display. It seems to have been St. John’s Episcopal Church on Princes Street which was first to do this, when in 1936 they got permission from the Cleansing & Lighting Committee of the City Corporation to erect a 25ft high tree at the end of Princes Street on the proviso that it had no flashing lights on its decoration.

The introduction of this tree may have been in direct response to the public display of a pair of large trees outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London which were the gift of the King and Queen from their Sandringham Estate. This was already an established tradition but was quite widely reported in 1936 owing to the death of King George V and the brief accession of Edward VIII. The pair of trees he sent arrived at St. Paul’s on December 12th, two days after he had abdicated… Perhaps as something of a public charm offensive following the intense public embarrassment of the abdication, in 1937 the new King and Queen extended the tree donation to Edinburgh, with two trees being sent down from the Balmoral Estate. The newspapers reported that one tree was for display outside St. Giles High Kirk, long a Royal place of worship in Scotland, and the other was for the Canongate Kirk, in which parish the Palace of Holyroodhouse is located. Their arrival in town on December 17th got the attention of the Evening News’ cameraman.

Confusingly though, the newspaper photos on December 21st show two trees at St. Giles and described the King as having send two for display there. So maybe he actually sent three trees in total? The St. Giles pair were floodlit each night during the festive season.

The other great “public” Christmas tree in Edinburgh was that of Jenners department store, one which undoubtedly has a lot of nostalgia values for multiple generations of the city’s residents.

Jenners had long run a “Christmas Bazaar”, the original Kennington & Jenner store was advertising this back in the 1870s, stating it contained “a hundred thousand toys and trifles” and “gifts of slight cost” (mass market Christmas was a thing back then too), but their tree tradition only seems to have begun in the late 1930s, with adverts in 1938 being the earliest I can find. It’s no coincidence that large public Christmas trees began to be a thing in the UK during this period. Punitive tariffs on post-WW1 Germany included 2d per lb on cut Christmas trees. Far-sighted English landowners started commercial planting of them in 1922 and by the mid-30s large, home-grown trees had reached maturity and were widely available. It made commercial sense to raise Christmas trees to maturity in the south and west of England, closer to the London market, but many, if not most, were reported by the late the 1920s as having started life in Scotland on Forestry Commission plantations, before being transplanted south when old enough to move. In 1932 the Great Western Railway transported 60,000 trees from Herefordshire alone to London. That year the Scotsman reported that at Covent Garden a 1ft tall domestic tree would cost you 6d (c. £1.50 in 2024), a 25ft tree was £15 (~£885) and the average 3-4ft tree was £1 (~£59). The home producers dominance of the market was assured completely the next year due to the Importation of Elm Trees and Conifers (Prohibition) Order 1933 by the Ministry of Agriculture. This banned elm and all pine-type tree imports into the country to slow the spread of diseases.

This new industry and tradition did not last long however, World War 2 largely cancelled Christmas trees as there were obviously no European imports and domestic plantations were earmarked for more important purposes than mere festive ornamentation. A tree sent to the Canongate from Balmoral in December 1941 seems to have been the last. There are occasional reports of trees in Churches and Hospitals in Edinburgh during wartime, one imagines they must have been locally sourced from gardens before being turned over to the war effort. A public tree did not return to the city until 1945 when the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) erected a 20ft high specimen in Waverley Station. It was this company that had instituted the idea of railway Christmas trees back in 1933 at Newcastle Central and before the war they had become a feature south of the border at mainline stations, but this was the first example north of the border.

In 1946, Waverley had two such trees and these were collection points for presents for children who were stuck in hospitals over the Christmas period. It wasn’t until 1950 that Edinburgh’s other mainline station, at Princes Street, got a tree, by which time the railways were nationalised.

All Christmas trees at this time were still domestically sourced, a wartime ban on imports was ongoing. The nation could hardly afford to import timber for construction, yet alone for disposable ornaments. The Forestry Commission granted a special licence to import a single 48ft tree from Norway to Trafalgar Square in London in 1947 as a gift from nation to nation. It was not until 1949 that this privilege was extended to other towns and cities. That year, as a symbol of wartime solidarity and postwar friendship, the St. Andrew Society of Denmark sent a 63ft tree over the North Sea to Edinburgh and it was erected in the now traditional spot on the Mound. But disaster struck on December 15th when despite (or perhaps because of?) the combined efforts of the men of four different Corporation Departments, the tree snapped in two under the weight of the lighting display. It took two Burgh Engineers to come up with a solution to stick it back together again.

Fortunately the tree was grafted back together in time for the official lighting-up ceremony the next day. The Lord Provost, Sir Andrew Arbuthnot Murray, gave an address which was broadcast over telephone link to a concurrent ceremony in Copenhagen. In his speech he quipped:

Everyone knows that Edinburgh is renowned for its surgery, but I did not know it also applied to tree surgery. Now the tree is stronger than ever and I am sure the same can now be said about the friendship between Denmark and Scotland.

The Royal Danish Consul attended and had Santa Claus hand out Christmas crackers presented to the children’s choir who had serenaded the tree with carols.

Each year after this, a tree would cross the sea from Denmark to Edinburgh, destined for the Mound. Disaster struck again in 1962 when the tree blew down in gales before Christmas while still being decorated. On the night of Sunday December 16th a storm hit Scotland and 100mph gusts in Dumbarton destroyed a distillery under construction. The tree was fortunately saved and re-erected in time for the lighting up ceremony on the 19th.

While its commonly held locally that the Mound tree has always been a gift from the people of Norway, it actually came from Denmark until the 1970s. The ceremony of 1973 is the last time it reported in the newspapers, when its lights were switched on by Miss Ellen Larsen of Copenhagen who was long associated with the St. Andrew’s Society of Denmark’s annual gift. An additional dynamic that year was the political and economic situation in the UK at the time; because of the Oil Crisis and Three-Day Week, the Government had decreed that public trees and Christmas light displays could only be illuminated for three evenings; Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and either the Saturday or Sunday beforehand and for three hours during the lighting up ceremony. After that year, the Danish tree was replaced by a locally grown one from the Duke of Buccleuch’s estate at Bowhill.

The confusion over the tree’s origins may have occurred because the species has always been a Norway Spruce. The Scandinavian connection was re-established again in 1986 when the tree was gifted to the city by the county of Hordaland and city of Bergen in Norway; although it was still sourced locally to cut down on transport costs. The Norwegian friendship tree was first lit on Monday 1st December by councillor Lesley Hinds, Santa Claus and children from Graysmill School. The Mound tree is still gifted by Hordaland and Bergen to this day, and the tradition will be 40 years old in 2026. You can see photos of the 2024 tree being decorated in this article at the Edinburgh Reporter.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

#Canongate #Christmas #PrincesStreet #Royalty #StGiles #Victorian #Written2024

The thread about Edinburgh’s public Christmas trees; from Victorian commercialism to symbols of international friendship

The Christmas tree on the Mound is one of those annual Edinburgh institutions you kind of take for granted. It always seems to have appeared there each year and you expect that it always shall. But as I passed it by the other week it inevitably got me thinking about just how the tree on the Mound came to be and just how far back the tradition of public Christmas trees goes in Edinburgh. Inevitably this led me straight down a rabbit hole or two in the old newspapers and the clippings that I found down there have threaded themselves into a festive story for your amusement.

Christmas trees in Edinburgh pre-date considerably their public display. It was likely Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, who introduced the German tradition of the Christmas fir tree into British society but it’s generally accepted that it was Prince Albert who helped popularise them and lead to their widespread introduction into the homes of the Victorian upper classes in the 1840s. In the sketch below by Jemima Wedderburn, we see a posed scene of an upper class Scottish family around their Christmas tree in 1853. It is remarkably like those in popular Christmas prints of the Royal Family at that time.

The earliest advert I can find for the sale of a Christmas Tree in Edinburgh is in 1849, when they were for sale alongside “Chinese Sweetmeats and Fancy Boxes of Tea” in Maclean & Son’s French and Italian Warehouse at 27 Princes Street. Adverts for the sale of this “favourite German amusement” are increasingly common in throughout the 1850s and its clear many higher end shops and department stores were making them a public attraction to draw in customers. In 1856, Knox, Samuel & Dickson’s establishment at 15 Hanover Street was advertising a “Grand Spectacle to be seen during the Christmas holidays” which included “The Model Christmas Tree“. They were also selling trees with prices ranging from 5s (about £25 in 2024) through to £65 (around £7,000 these days!) if you wanted one complete with “many hundreds” of ornaments.

It’s clear from the newspaper coverage and advertising of Christmas Trees that Edinburgh’s retail proprietors were vying with each other throughout the middle Victorian period to have the biggest and most elaborately decorated tree displays in order to get the customers through the doors. The trees and their decorations would have been unaffordable to most, but they and Christmas were clearly a profitable commercial enterprise. But it would take over 80 years from their introduction to get these trees out of the department stores or New Town parlours and on to public display. It seems to have been St. John’s Episcopal Church on Princes Street which was first to do this, when in 1936 they got permission from the Cleansing & Lighting Committee of the City Corporation to erect a 25ft high tree at the end of Princes Street on the proviso that it had no flashing lights on its decoration.

The introduction of this tree may have been in direct response to the public display of a pair of large trees outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London which were the gift of the King and Queen from their Sandringham Estate. This was already an established tradition but was quite widely reported in 1936 owing to the death of King George V and the brief accession of Edward VIII. The pair of trees he sent arrived at St. Paul’s on December 12th, two days after he had abdicated… Perhaps as something of a public charm offensive following the intense public embarrassment of the abdication, in 1937 the new King and Queen extended the tree donation to Edinburgh, with two trees being sent down from the Balmoral Estate. The newspapers reported that one tree was for display outside St. Giles High Kirk, long a Royal place of worship in Scotland, and the other was for the Canongate Kirk, in which parish the Palace of Holyroodhouse is located. Their arrival in town on December 17th got the attention of the Evening News’ cameraman.

Confusingly though, the newspaper photos on December 21st show two trees at St. Giles and described the King as having send two for display there. So maybe he actually sent three trees in total? The St. Giles pair were floodlit each night during the festive season.

The other great “public” Christmas tree in Edinburgh was that of Jenners department store, one which undoubtedly has a lot of nostalgia values for multiple generations of the city’s residents.

Jenners had long run a “Christmas Bazaar”, the original Kennington & Jenner store was advertising this back in the 1870s, stating it contained “a hundred thousand toys and trifles” and “gifts of slight cost” (mass market Christmas was a thing back then too), but their tree tradition only seems to have begun in the late 1930s, with adverts in 1938 being the earliest I can find. It’s no coincidence that large public Christmas trees began to be a thing in the UK during this period. Punitive tariffs on post-WW1 Germany included 2d per lb on cut Christmas trees. Far-sighted English landowners started commercial planting of them in 1922 and by the mid-30s large, home-grown trees had reached maturity and were widely available. It made commercial sense to raise Christmas trees to maturity in the south and west of England, closer to the London market, but many, if not most, were reported by the late the 1920s as having started life in Scotland on Forestry Commission plantations, before being transplanted south when old enough to move. In 1932 the Great Western Railway transported 60,000 trees from Herefordshire alone to London. That year the Scotsman reported that at Covent Garden a 1ft tall domestic tree would cost you 6d (c. £1.50 in 2024), a 25ft tree was £15 (~£885) and the average 3-4ft tree was £1 (~£59). The home producers dominance of the market was assured completely the next year due to the Importation of Elm Trees and Conifers (Prohibition) Order 1933 by the Ministry of Agriculture. This banned elm and all pine-type tree imports into the country to slow the spread of diseases.

This new industry and tradition did not last long however, World War 2 largely cancelled Christmas trees as there were obviously no European imports and domestic plantations were earmarked for more important purposes than mere festive ornamentation. A tree sent to the Canongate from Balmoral in December 1941 seems to have been the last. There are occasional reports of trees in Churches and Hospitals in Edinburgh during wartime, one imagines they must have been locally sourced from gardens before being turned over to the war effort. A public tree did not return to the city until 1945 when the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) erected a 20ft high specimen in Waverley Station. It was this company that had instituted the idea of railway Christmas trees back in 1933 at Newcastle Central and before the war they had become a feature south of the border at mainline stations, but this was the first example north of the border.

In 1946, Waverley had two such trees and these were collection points for presents for children who were stuck in hospitals over the Christmas period. It wasn’t until 1950 that Edinburgh’s other mainline station, at Princes Street, got a tree, by which time the railways were nationalised.

All Christmas trees at this time were still domestically sourced, a wartime ban on imports was ongoing. The nation could hardly afford to import timber for construction, yet alone for disposable ornaments. The Forestry Commission granted a special licence to import a single 48ft tree from Norway to Trafalgar Square in London in 1947 as a gift from nation to nation. It was not until 1949 that this privilege was extended to other towns and cities. That year, as a symbol of wartime solidarity and postwar friendship, the St. Andrew Society of Denmark sent a 63ft tree over the North Sea to Edinburgh and it was erected in the now traditional spot on the Mound. But disaster struck on December 15th when despite (or perhaps because of?) the combined efforts of the men of four different Corporation Departments, the tree snapped in two under the weight of the lighting display. It took two Burgh Engineers to come up with a solution to stick it back together again.

Fortunately the tree was grafted back together in time for the official lighting-up ceremony the next day. The Lord Provost, Sir Andrew Arbuthnot Murray, gave an address which was broadcast over telephone link to a concurrent ceremony in Copenhagen. In his speech he quipped:

Everyone knows that Edinburgh is renowned for its surgery, but I did not know it also applied to tree surgery. Now the tree is stronger than ever and I am sure the same can now be said about the friendship between Denmark and Scotland.

The Royal Danish Consul attended and had Santa Claus hand out Christmas crackers presented to the children’s choir who had serenaded the tree with carols.

Each year after this, a tree would cross the sea from Denmark to Edinburgh, destined for the Mound. Disaster struck again in 1962 when the tree blew down in gales before Christmas while still being decorated. On the night of Sunday December 16th a storm hit Scotland and 100mph gusts in Dumbarton destroyed a distillery under construction. The tree was fortunately saved and re-erected in time for the lighting up ceremony on the 19th.

While its commonly held locally that the Mound tree has always been a gift from the people of Norway, it actually came from Denmark until the 1970s. The ceremony of 1973 is the last time it reported in the newspapers, when its lights were switched on by Miss Ellen Larsen of Copenhagen who was long associated with the St. Andrew’s Society of Denmark’s annual gift. An additional dynamic that year was the political and economic situation in the UK at the time; because of the Oil Crisis and Three-Day Week, the Government had decreed that public trees and Christmas light displays could only be illuminated for three evenings; Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and either the Saturday or Sunday beforehand and for three hours during the lighting up ceremony. After that year, the Danish tree was replaced by a locally grown one from the Duke of Buccleuch’s estate at Bowhill.

The confusion over the tree’s origins may have occurred because the species has always been a Norway Spruce. The Scandinavian connection was re-established again in 1986 when the tree was gifted to the city by the county of Hordaland and city of Bergen in Norway; although it was still sourced locally to cut down on transport costs. The Norwegian friendship tree was first lit on Monday 1st December by councillor Lesley Hinds, Santa Claus and children from Graysmill School. The Mound tree is still gifted by Hordaland and Bergen to this day, and the tradition will be 40 years old in 2026. You can see photos of the 2024 tree being decorated in this article at the Edinburgh Reporter.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

#Canongate #Christmas #PrincesStreet #Royalty #StGiles #Victorian #Written2024

The thread about Edinburgh’s public Christmas trees; from Victorian commercialism to symbols of international friendship

The Christmas tree on the Mound is one of those annual Edinburgh institutions you kind of take for granted. It always seems to have appeared there each year and you expect that it always shall. But as I passed it by the other week it inevitably got me thinking about just how the tree on the Mound came to be and just how far back the tradition of public Christmas trees goes in Edinburgh. Inevitably this led me straight down a rabbit hole or two in the old newspapers and the clippings that I found down there have threaded themselves into a festive story for your amusement.

Christmas trees in Edinburgh pre-date considerably their public display. It was likely Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, who introduced the German tradition of the Christmas fir tree into British society but it’s generally accepted that it was Prince Albert who helped popularise them and lead to their widespread introduction into the homes of the Victorian upper classes in the 1840s. In the sketch below by Jemima Wedderburn, we see a posed scene of an upper class Scottish family around their Christmas tree in 1853. It is remarkably like those in popular Christmas prints of the Royal Family at that time.

The earliest advert I can find for the sale of a Christmas Tree in Edinburgh is in 1849, when they were for sale alongside “Chinese Sweetmeats and Fancy Boxes of Tea” in Maclean & Son’s French and Italian Warehouse at 27 Princes Street. Adverts for the sale of this “favourite German amusement” are increasingly common in throughout the 1850s and its clear many higher end shops and department stores were making them a public attraction to draw in customers. In 1856, Knox, Samuel & Dickson’s establishment at 15 Hanover Street was advertising a “Grand Spectacle to be seen during the Christmas holidays” which included “The Model Christmas Tree“. They were also selling trees with prices ranging from 5s (about £25 in 2024) through to £65 (around £7,000 these days!) if you wanted one complete with “many hundreds” of ornaments.

It’s clear from the newspaper coverage and advertising of Christmas Trees that Edinburgh’s retail proprietors were vying with each other throughout the middle Victorian period to have the biggest and most elaborately decorated tree displays in order to get the customers through the doors. The trees and their decorations would have been unaffordable to most, but they and Christmas were clearly a profitable commercial enterprise. But it would take over 80 years from their introduction to get these trees out of the department stores or New Town parlours and on to public display. It seems to have been St. John’s Episcopal Church on Princes Street which was first to do this, when in 1936 they got permission from the Cleansing & Lighting Committee of the City Corporation to erect a 25ft high tree at the end of Princes Street on the proviso that it had no flashing lights on its decoration.

The introduction of this tree may have been in direct response to the public display of a pair of large trees outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London which were the gift of the King and Queen from their Sandringham Estate. This was already an established tradition but was quite widely reported in 1936 owing to the death of King George V and the brief accession of Edward VIII. The pair of trees he sent arrived at St. Paul’s on December 12th, two days after he had abdicated… Perhaps as something of a public charm offensive following the intense public embarrassment of the abdication, in 1937 the new King and Queen extended the tree donation to Edinburgh, with two trees being sent down from the Balmoral Estate. The newspapers reported that one tree was for display outside St. Giles High Kirk, long a Royal place of worship in Scotland, and the other was for the Canongate Kirk, in which parish the Palace of Holyroodhouse is located. Their arrival in town on December 17th got the attention of the Evening News’ cameraman.

Confusingly though, the newspaper photos on December 21st show two trees at St. Giles and described the King as having send two for display there. So maybe he actually sent three trees in total? The St. Giles pair were floodlit each night during the festive season.

The other great “public” Christmas tree in Edinburgh was that of Jenners department store, one which undoubtedly has a lot of nostalgia values for multiple generations of the city’s residents.

Jenners had long run a “Christmas Bazaar”, the original Kennington & Jenner store was advertising this back in the 1870s, stating it contained “a hundred thousand toys and trifles” and “gifts of slight cost” (mass market Christmas was a thing back then too), but their tree tradition only seems to have begun in the late 1930s, with adverts in 1938 being the earliest I can find. It’s no coincidence that large public Christmas trees began to be a thing in the UK during this period. Punitive tariffs on post-WW1 Germany included 2d per lb on cut Christmas trees. Far-sighted English landowners started commercial planting of them in 1922 and by the mid-30s large, home-grown trees had reached maturity and were widely available. It made commercial sense to raise Christmas trees to maturity in the south and west of England, closer to the London market, but many, if not most, were reported by the late the 1920s as having started life in Scotland on Forestry Commission plantations, before being transplanted south when old enough to move. In 1932 the Great Western Railway transported 60,000 trees from Herefordshire alone to London. That year the Scotsman reported that at Covent Garden a 1ft tall domestic tree would cost you 6d (c. £1.50 in 2024), a 25ft tree was £15 (~£885) and the average 3-4ft tree was £1 (~£59). The home producers dominance of the market was assured completely the next year due to the Importation of Elm Trees and Conifers (Prohibition) Order 1933 by the Ministry of Agriculture. This banned elm and all pine-type tree imports into the country to slow the spread of diseases.

This new industry and tradition did not last long however, World War 2 largely cancelled Christmas trees as there were obviously no European imports and domestic plantations were earmarked for more important purposes than mere festive ornamentation. A tree sent to the Canongate from Balmoral in December 1941 seems to have been the last. There are occasional reports of trees in Churches and Hospitals in Edinburgh during wartime, one imagines they must have been locally sourced from gardens before being turned over to the war effort. A public tree did not return to the city until 1945 when the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) erected a 20ft high specimen in Waverley Station. It was this company that had instituted the idea of railway Christmas trees back in 1933 at Newcastle Central and before the war they had become a feature south of the border at mainline stations, but this was the first example north of the border.

In 1946, Waverley had two such trees and these were collection points for presents for children who were stuck in hospitals over the Christmas period. It wasn’t until 1950 that Edinburgh’s other mainline station, at Princes Street, got a tree, by which time the railways were nationalised.

All Christmas trees at this time were still domestically sourced, a wartime ban on imports was ongoing. The nation could hardly afford to import timber for construction, yet alone for disposable ornaments. The Forestry Commission granted a special licence to import a single 48ft tree from Norway to Trafalgar Square in London in 1947 as a gift from nation to nation. It was not until 1949 that this privilege was extended to other towns and cities. That year, as a symbol of wartime solidarity and postwar friendship, the St. Andrew Society of Denmark sent a 63ft tree over the North Sea to Edinburgh and it was erected in the now traditional spot on the Mound. But disaster struck on December 15th when despite (or perhaps because of?) the combined efforts of the men of four different Corporation Departments, the tree snapped in two under the weight of the lighting display. It took two Burgh Engineers to come up with a solution to stick it back together again.

Fortunately the tree was grafted back together in time for the official lighting-up ceremony the next day. The Lord Provost, Sir Andrew Arbuthnot Murray, gave an address which was broadcast over telephone link to a concurrent ceremony in Copenhagen. In his speech he quipped:

Everyone knows that Edinburgh is renowned for its surgery, but I did not know it also applied to tree surgery. Now the tree is stronger than ever and I am sure the same can now be said about the friendship between Denmark and Scotland.

The Royal Danish Consul attended and had Santa Claus hand out Christmas crackers presented to the children’s choir who had serenaded the tree with carols.

Each year after this, a tree would cross the sea from Denmark to Edinburgh, destined for the Mound. Disaster struck again in 1962 when the tree blew down in gales before Christmas while still being decorated. On the night of Sunday December 16th a storm hit Scotland and 100mph gusts in Dumbarton destroyed a distillery under construction. The tree was fortunately saved and re-erected in time for the lighting up ceremony on the 19th.

While its commonly held locally that the Mound tree has always been a gift from the people of Norway, it actually came from Denmark until the 1970s. The ceremony of 1973 is the last time it reported in the newspapers, when its lights were switched on by Miss Ellen Larsen of Copenhagen who was long associated with the St. Andrew’s Society of Denmark’s annual gift. An additional dynamic that year was the political and economic situation in the UK at the time; because of the Oil Crisis and Three-Day Week, the Government had decreed that public trees and Christmas light displays could only be illuminated for three evenings; Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and either the Saturday or Sunday beforehand and for three hours during the lighting up ceremony. After that year, the Danish tree was replaced by a locally grown one from the Duke of Buccleuch’s estate at Bowhill.

The confusion over the tree’s origins may have occurred because the species has always been a Norway Spruce. The Scandinavian connection was re-established again in 1986 when the tree was gifted to the city by the county of Hordaland and city of Bergen in Norway; although it was still sourced locally to cut down on transport costs. The Norwegian friendship tree was first lit on Monday 1st December by councillor Lesley Hinds, Santa Claus and children from Graysmill School. The Mound tree is still gifted by Hordaland and Bergen to this day, and the tradition will be 40 years old in 2026. You can see photos of the 2024 tree being decorated in this article at the Edinburgh Reporter.

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The thread about Edinburgh’s public Christmas trees; from Victorian commercialism to symbols of international friendship

The Christmas tree on the Mound is one of those annual Edinburgh institutions you kind of take for granted. It always seems to have appeared there each year and you expect that it always shall. But as I passed it by the other week it inevitably got me thinking about just how the tree on the Mound came to be and just how far back the tradition of public Christmas trees goes in Edinburgh. Inevitably this led me straight down a rabbit hole or two in the old newspapers and the clippings that I found down there have threaded themselves into a festive story for your amusement.

Christmas trees in Edinburgh pre-date considerably their public display. It was likely Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, who introduced the German tradition of the Christmas fir tree into British society but it’s generally accepted that it was Prince Albert who helped popularise them and lead to their widespread introduction into the homes of the Victorian upper classes in the 1840s. In the sketch below by Jemima Wedderburn, we see a posed scene of an upper class Scottish family around their Christmas tree in 1853. It is remarkably like those in popular Christmas prints of the Royal Family at that time.

The earliest advert I can find for the sale of a Christmas Tree in Edinburgh is in 1849, when they were for sale alongside “Chinese Sweetmeats and Fancy Boxes of Tea” in Maclean & Son’s French and Italian Warehouse at 27 Princes Street. Adverts for the sale of this “favourite German amusement” are increasingly common in throughout the 1850s and its clear many higher end shops and department stores were making them a public attraction to draw in customers. In 1856, Knox, Samuel & Dickson’s establishment at 15 Hanover Street was advertising a “Grand Spectacle to be seen during the Christmas holidays” which included “The Model Christmas Tree“. They were also selling trees with prices ranging from 5s (about £25 in 2024) through to £65 (around £7,000 these days!) if you wanted one complete with “many hundreds” of ornaments.

It’s clear from the newspaper coverage and advertising of Christmas Trees that Edinburgh’s retail proprietors were vying with each other throughout the middle Victorian period to have the biggest and most elaborately decorated tree displays in order to get the customers through the doors. The trees and their decorations would have been unaffordable to most, but they and Christmas were clearly a profitable commercial enterprise. But it would take over 80 years from their introduction to get these trees out of the department stores or New Town parlours and on to public display. It seems to have been St. John’s Episcopal Church on Princes Street which was first to do this, when in 1936 they got permission from the Cleansing & Lighting Committee of the City Corporation to erect a 25ft high tree at the end of Princes Street on the proviso that it had no flashing lights on its decoration.

The introduction of this tree may have been in direct response to the public display of a pair of large trees outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London which were the gift of the King and Queen from their Sandringham Estate. This was already an established tradition but was quite widely reported in 1936 owing to the death of King George V and the brief accession of Edward VIII. The pair of trees he sent arrived at St. Paul’s on December 12th, two days after he had abdicated… Perhaps as something of a public charm offensive following the intense public embarrassment of the abdication, in 1937 the new King and Queen extended the tree donation to Edinburgh, with two trees being sent down from the Balmoral Estate. The newspapers reported that one tree was for display outside St. Giles High Kirk, long a Royal place of worship in Scotland, and the other was for the Canongate Kirk, in which parish the Palace of Holyroodhouse is located. Their arrival in town on December 17th got the attention of the Evening News’ cameraman.

Confusingly though, the newspaper photos on December 21st show two trees at St. Giles and described the King as having send two for display there. So maybe he actually sent three trees in total? The St. Giles pair were floodlit each night during the festive season.

The other great “public” Christmas tree in Edinburgh was that of Jenners department store, one which undoubtedly has a lot of nostalgia values for multiple generations of the city’s residents.

Jenners had long run a “Christmas Bazaar”, the original Kennington & Jenner store was advertising this back in the 1870s, stating it contained “a hundred thousand toys and trifles” and “gifts of slight cost” (mass market Christmas was a thing back then too), but their tree tradition only seems to have begun in the late 1930s, with adverts in 1938 being the earliest I can find. It’s no coincidence that large public Christmas trees began to be a thing in the UK during this period. Punitive tariffs on post-WW1 Germany included 2d per lb on cut Christmas trees. Far-sighted English landowners started commercial planting of them in 1922 and by the mid-30s large, home-grown trees had reached maturity and were widely available. It made commercial sense to raise Christmas trees to maturity in the south and west of England, closer to the London market, but many, if not most, were reported by the late the 1920s as having started life in Scotland on Forestry Commission plantations, before being transplanted south when old enough to move. In 1932 the Great Western Railway transported 60,000 trees from Herefordshire alone to London. That year the Scotsman reported that at Covent Garden a 1ft tall domestic tree would cost you 6d (c. £1.50 in 2024), a 25ft tree was £15 (~£885) and the average 3-4ft tree was £1 (~£59). The home producers dominance of the market was assured completely the next year due to the Importation of Elm Trees and Conifers (Prohibition) Order 1933 by the Ministry of Agriculture. This banned elm and all pine-type tree imports into the country to slow the spread of diseases.

This new industry and tradition did not last long however, World War 2 largely cancelled Christmas trees as there were obviously no European imports and domestic plantations were earmarked for more important purposes than mere festive ornamentation. A tree sent to the Canongate from Balmoral in December 1941 seems to have been the last. There are occasional reports of trees in Churches and Hospitals in Edinburgh during wartime, one imagines they must have been locally sourced from gardens before being turned over to the war effort. A public tree did not return to the city until 1945 when the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) erected a 20ft high specimen in Waverley Station. It was this company that had instituted the idea of railway Christmas trees back in 1933 at Newcastle Central and before the war they had become a feature south of the border at mainline stations, but this was the first example north of the border.

In 1946, Waverley had two such trees and these were collection points for presents for children who were stuck in hospitals over the Christmas period. It wasn’t until 1950 that Edinburgh’s other mainline station, at Princes Street, got a tree, by which time the railways were nationalised.

All Christmas trees at this time were still domestically sourced, a wartime ban on imports was ongoing. The nation could hardly afford to import timber for construction, yet alone for disposable ornaments. The Forestry Commission granted a special licence to import a single 48ft tree from Norway to Trafalgar Square in London in 1947 as a gift from nation to nation. It was not until 1949 that this privilege was extended to other towns and cities. That year, as a symbol of wartime solidarity and postwar friendship, the St. Andrew Society of Denmark sent a 63ft tree over the North Sea to Edinburgh and it was erected in the now traditional spot on the Mound. But disaster struck on December 15th when despite (or perhaps because of?) the combined efforts of the men of four different Corporation Departments, the tree snapped in two under the weight of the lighting display. It took two Burgh Engineers to come up with a solution to stick it back together again.

Fortunately the tree was grafted back together in time for the official lighting-up ceremony the next day. The Lord Provost, Sir Andrew Arbuthnot Murray, gave an address which was broadcast over telephone link to a concurrent ceremony in Copenhagen. In his speech he quipped:

Everyone knows that Edinburgh is renowned for its surgery, but I did not know it also applied to tree surgery. Now the tree is stronger than ever and I am sure the same can now be said about the friendship between Denmark and Scotland.

The Royal Danish Consul attended and had Santa Claus hand out Christmas crackers presented to the children’s choir who had serenaded the tree with carols.

Each year after this, a tree would cross the sea from Denmark to Edinburgh, destined for the Mound. Disaster struck again in 1962 when the tree blew down in gales before Christmas while still being decorated. On the night of Sunday December 16th a storm hit Scotland and 100mph gusts in Dumbarton destroyed a distillery under construction. The tree was fortunately saved and re-erected in time for the lighting up ceremony on the 19th.

While its commonly held locally that the Mound tree has always been a gift from the people of Norway, it actually came from Denmark until the 1970s. The ceremony of 1973 is the last time it reported in the newspapers, when its lights were switched on by Miss Ellen Larsen of Copenhagen who was long associated with the St. Andrew’s Society of Denmark’s annual gift. An additional dynamic that year was the political and economic situation in the UK at the time; because of the Oil Crisis and Three-Day Week, the Government had decreed that public trees and Christmas light displays could only be illuminated for three evenings; Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and either the Saturday or Sunday beforehand and for three hours during the lighting up ceremony. After that year, the Danish tree was replaced by a locally grown one from the Duke of Buccleuch’s estate at Bowhill.

The confusion over the tree’s origins may have occurred because the species has always been a Norway Spruce. The Scandinavian connection was re-established again in 1986 when the tree was gifted to the city by the county of Hordaland and city of Bergen in Norway; although it was still sourced locally to cut down on transport costs. The Norwegian friendship tree was first lit on Monday 1st December by councillor Lesley Hinds, Santa Claus and children from Graysmill School. The Mound tree is still gifted by Hordaland and Bergen to this day, and the tradition will be 40 years old in 2026. You can see photos of the 2024 tree being decorated in this article at the Edinburgh Reporter.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

#Canongate #Christmas #PrincesStreet #Royalty #StGiles #Victorian #Written2024

The #red #Minister's #door on #Canongate #Kirk in #Edinburgh, #Scotland

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The #Stag and #Cross at #Canongate #Kirk in #Edinburgh #Scotland

#Memorial to #Clarinda in #Canongate #Kirkyard in #Edinburgh, #Scotland

The fascinating People's Story Museum in the Canongate Tolbooth on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, looking at the lives of the ordinary residents of Edinburgh from the late 1700s until the present day. More pics and info: https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/edinburgh/peoplesstory/index.html

#Scotland #PeoplesStoryMuseum #Canongate #Edinburgh #Museum #UndiscoveredScotland

#Cross in #Canongate #Kirkyard #Edinburgh, #Scotland

The real Ned Holt: the thread about the darker side of a colourful Victorian street artist

In preparation for writing up some summaries of the caricatures of “Old Edinburgh Worthies” by Ned (Edmund) Holt, I decided to dig a bit deeper into the life of this mysterious Victorian street artist. Not much is known of his life, and much of that is popular legend. Sources will tell you he was a street artist of some talents, a familiar and well loved character of Old Edinburgh and one who was limited in life only by his love of a drink. A “boon companion in the common lodging houses and in public houses.” However, with a little work digging through newspaper clippings and Scotland’s People, I hope that I am able to add a few details to his story, but also find to offer a different, and ultimately less favourable, interpretation of his character.

While he illustrated profusely -usually to earn his beer money – he never seems to have turned his attention on himself, so we known not what he looked like (although a newspaper article of 1922 claims that a likeness was published at the time of his death). Capital Collections (the wonderful online image gallery of the collections of the Edinburgh City Libraries, Museums and Galleries) uses a self portrait of John Kay to represent any artists for which they do not have a likeness. Kay is one of the best known caricaturists of old Edinburgh, leaving behind an amusing and invaluable visual and written record of the worthies of the Georgian city. Collections of his works are still reprinted and are a must-have on any self respecting bookshelf of Edinburgh local history.

At the other end of the social spectrum and 70 or so years later, we have Holt. His work is certainly cruder than Kay’s, but as an observer of the human condition he is an equal. For two good reasons, his ouvre is particularly valuable. Firstly, he painted in bright colours, which pop out when compared with the faded sepia of old photographs or the monochrome of Kay’s engravings, vividly capturing that Victorian life was much brighter than we might imagine. Secondly, where Kay lampooned Lords and Gentlemen, Holt painted almost exclusively the people of the street, men and women, and in a much more sympathetic manner. These were folk who were well known in their time but who would otherwise have slipped from popular memory but for a few sentences in old newspapers (much like the artist himself).

So who was Ned Holt? The National Galleries of Scotland embarrassingly say he was English – he was definitely a son of Edinburgh, probably born in St. Cuthbert’s parish as Edmund Holt, to Jean Mitchell and Robert Holt, a master chimney sweep. He may have been born in 1830 if we believe his entry on the register of deaths, or 1836 if we believe his census entries. Holt also goes by the names Edmond and Edward. Many accounts will tell you he signed his work E. P. Holt – I think if they looked closer they will see it is ED. HOLT, with the D raised above the full stop in the fashion of Victorian typography. His obituary in the Dundee Courier confirms his works bear the “well known signature Ed. Holt“.

It would have been expected for Holt to follow his father’s trade, but perhaps on account of the early death of the latter this did not happen. Apprenticed to a baker, he never settled to that trade and in 1851 is recorded on the census as a “carrier”. He is aged 15, living with his grandmother in Gilmour’s Close off the Grassmarket, probably the property he is described as inheriting. Three years later, still living at the same address, he married a woman from a neighbouring close by the name of Jane Black, the daughter of a coal miner from Ayrshire. At this time his occupation was “artist” and the anecdotes of town Bailie (magistrate) Wilson Mclaren recall that at this time he kept a street booth in the Grassmarket where he exhibited various attractions for a penny-a-view, including a “petrified mummy”, claimed to be 4,000 years old but actually a skeleton he had procured and doctored. Street entertainment and showmanship is a recurring feature of Holt’s life, he was known to act at the “penny gaffs“, cheap theatres where popular, raucous edits of Shakespeare would be performed. By 1855 he had moved to a small shop on Lothian Road where he traded as an artist. Two years later, he took out a newspaper advert in the North Briton that he would teach the “whole art of photography” on application to an address on Haddington Place, Leith Walk. He is reputed to have joined the Edinburgh City Artillery at this time, a volunteer militia regiment raised in the wake of the Crimean wars that included an unusually high proportion of artists in its ranks. He was a favourite of the officers, who would summon him to the mess to amuse them with his antics.

In 1860, Holt announced in the North Briton that he had taken “these large photographic rooms, no. 3 Catherine Street, [part of Leith Street] where he is carrying on a First-Class business“. In the census of the following year he is recorded as a “photographic artist” but is to be found boarding with the Reilly family in Selkirk. His wife Jane is living at the Catherine Street address with their children – Edmond (age 2) and baby Georgina – along with an older relation of Jane’s, a lodger (Holt’s assistant) and his daughter. In 1866 Holt re-appears in Edinburgh, performing as a clown in Price’s Spanish Circus with “considerable success”. But he is back to being a photographer in Selkirk in 1868 when one David Mcdonald is fined £5 (or 30 days prison) for assaulting him with a walking stick. The same year, a spinner by the name of William Jeffrey was found guilty of assaulting him in the Salmon Inn public house in Galashiels by hitting him and biting off the end of one of his fingers. He was sent to prison for 60 days.

Holt, it was said, “was known everywhere; he mixed in all classes of society, high and low“. This included the landscape artist Sam Bough, who lived in Edinburgh from 1855 until his death in 1878. It was because of his connection with Bough that his work survived and found its way into the ownership of the City of Edinburgh. Holt had presented Bough with a bound copy of 22 of his sketches, which was inherited by Bough’s sister on his death. A collector later bought them from her estate, from whom Councillor Gorman acquired them and presented them to the city to prevent them being sold to an American.

At 1870, the story of Holt’s life begins to take a different, darker path. In May that year it is reported in the North Briton that he was convicted at the Sheriff court and sentenced to 60 days hard labour for having assaulted his wife “by seizing violent hold of her by the hair of the head, dragging her from a place upon which she rested, and kicking her when upon the ground to the effusion of blood.” Come the 1871 census, he is aged 36 and living with his son at no. 41 North Richmond Street off of the Pleasance. There is a servant girl, Annie Shields, living with them but of his wife and daughter Georgina, there is no sign. His occupation remains as a photographic artist. One of his obituaries will recount that “he could not rest with his family” and that “in the course of time he took to a wandering life“. This it would seem is a somewhat economical view of the truth. A decade later the census finds him in Glasgow, with a new “wife” – Annie Shields; he has run off with his servant, 16 years his junior. They have a 9 year old daughter Margaret, a 6 year old son Joseph and an 11 month old daughter Selvester. Jane Holt, aged about 36 is living in the City Poor House at Craiglockhart, working as a seamstress.

By 1885, he has returned to Edinburgh and is practising as a photographer from his address at 27 Canongate, White Horse Close. He was convicted in September of that year at the Police Court and sentenced to 30 days imprisonment for “having offered for sale obscene drawings and paintings in Princes Street.” The prosecutor was not specific as to what the depicted, but “said the pictures were very disgusting“. Sadly Jane remains in the Poor House. She was still there 6 years later for the 1891 census, by then working as a laundress.

Holt died on Tuesday 20th September 1892 in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, having been knocked down and fatally injured by a horse cab near Joppa on his way home from the Musselburgh horse racing. His death was mourned across the Scottish regional newspapers. Despite being obviously estranged from his wife on unfavourable terms for decades, his death certificate was witnessed by her. She sadly died of bronchitis and heart disease as an inmate of the Poorhouse just two months later, described simply as a hawker and a widow. Ann (or Annie) Shields (also known as Holt or Spaven) was left to a similar life of poverty by Holt. In 1891 she was a hawker, lodging in Penicuik. She died in 1908 in the Govan Poor House, having spent the final years of her life flitting from poor house to poor house, debilitated by neuralgia and rheumatism.

The implications are clear from newspaper writings that while Holt was publicly convivial, well liked and had certain artistic talents, he was too partial to drinking to ever make a success of himself. Obituaries describe his “great failing was a love for liquor, which in course of time, mastered him so completely that he sunk from one degree to another till he was down in the very gutter of society“. A mark of the popular mourning of his death is the story of the confectioner in Leith, who decorated a cake in his honour with a sugarwork representation of one of his illustrations and placed it in his shop window alongside the following verse:

Poo, old Ned has gone to rest,
We know that he is free
Disturb him not, but let him rest
Way down in Tennessee

Edmund Holt may have lived the life that he chose for himself happily enough, but the same cannot be said of his wife, who never shared in his popularity or any of his occasional financial successes, and quite clearly suffered at his hands. She spent the best part of half her life as an inmate in the poor house for which it would not be unreasonable to blame the actions of Holt. When he died without a penny to his name, friends and admirers raised enough to pay for a respectable burial and the newspapers made sure he did not pass forgotten. A well-curated exhibition of his work at the City Art Centre in 2014 enhanced the favourable, lovable rogue version of his character by commissioning pen poems to accompany his work. We cannot say the same privileges were accorded to Jane, who has been entirely written out of the story – until, hopefully, now.

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.
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Atmospherically misleading: the thread about Louis H. Grimshaw’s paintings of Edinburgh

This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.

Today’s (July 9th 2023) Auction House Artefact was this evocative and eerie late-evening painting of the High Street in Edinburgh, looking towards St. Giles after the rain. Painted by Louis H. Grimshaw in 1895, in the “moonlit cityscape” style he inherited from his father, John Atkinson Grimshaw.

The young Louis Grimshaw started working as an artist as an assistant to his father, helping with the details such as the people on moody and atmospheric late night scenes such as this one, “Glasgow, Saturday Night“, showing the hustle and bustle of the Broomielaw on the Clyde. The Grimshaws talent was one of capturing the ethereal glow of a sunset or moonlight as it reflected through clouds upon a wet cityscape and contrasting that with the bright, artificial lights of modernity. They also chose to deliberately avoid the dirt, grime and squalor of Victorian town life in their paintings, creating evocative but fundamentally sanitised scenes.

Father and son worked together until the former’s death in 1893. At this juncture, Louis continued the style and subject matter himself. In his painting of St. Giles, we see the historic and frequently decrepit Old Town portrayed as a modern and prosperous city, with glowing shop lights, busy shoppers, clean streets, neat rows of gas lamps a horse tram picking up passengers. (This was the brief 12 year period when the Old Town had a tram route up the High Street, which was lost the year after this scene was painted when the horse trams moved over to cable traction and the route was shifted down the Mound instead)

Despite his talents, Louis Grimshaw packed in the unpredictable and insecure life as painter in 1905, swapping it for the steady pay and regular work of a cartographer, for The Guardian, in 1905. As such he left a limited body of work and it commands high prices – £70-100k for the St. Giles painting when it last sold in 2008. He mainly depicted London but seems to have painted 3 Edinburgh scenes in 1895. Below we have the classic view up the High Street from “John Knox’s” House looking towards the Tron Kirk and St. Giles, the moon glowing somewhere above Auld Reekie’s smoggy cloak.

A small troop of Highlanders are marching downhill from the Castle to Holyrood. The gaslamps are lit, the shop windows are bright and on the right is the welcoming lamp and incongruous (for the Old Town) classical columns of Carrubers Close Mission.

Grimshaw’s scene matches *very* closely a photograph from the 1890s by John Patrick one can’t but wonder if it was the inspiration. The photo also shows the reality of the High Street compared to Grimshaw’s stylised, gentrified painting. Mixed in with the bustle and prosperity are the shoeless, malnourished children and obvious signs of the decaying, overcrowded accommodation of the Old Town that made life here so tenuous for so many children

In fact, it’s such a close match, I think that Grimshaw’s scene can only have been a tracing of Patrick’s photograph. See for yourself below:

Grimshaw’s last Edinburgh scene (that I can find) shows Holyroodhouse from the foot of the Canongate. Again the moon behind the cloud and smog casts an eerie glow over the damp road. Again the lights are bright and streets are clean. Again this is very sanitised scene compared to the reality of life in the Canongate at that time.

The reality was that in the 1890s, the Canongate – at one time long ago the suburban retreat of the City’s wealthy classes – was a crumbling, overcrowded and insanitary neighbourhood, where disease, malnourishment and poverty were endemic and child mortality was high.

Don’t get me wrong, I love these paintings and the artist’s skill in conjouring up the atmosphere. But they are a set-dressed fantasy, this thread on the diet of the working class of the Canongate in 1901 gives a window on what life was really like here for many. My Mum’s family lived this reality, at this time- flitting between the slums of the Canongate, High Street, St. Leonards and Stockbridge, constantly on the move; looking for something better or leaving behind something worse. They were Irish immigrant labourers, at the very bottom of the pile, and that reality was of their eleven children, eight predeceased their mother and four never made their 1st birthday. Of the children that survived to adulthood, five died as young adults from TB: even in the better times of the 1930s and 40s, the legacy of a childhood in the slums caught up with them.

Sorry. Ranty reality check over – please don’t get me wrong, these are very nice and evocative paintings. Stick a couple of dancers and a butler in them and they’d be quite like a Jack Vettriano scene. Do enjoy them; but they absolutely need a word of caution about how artificial the world is that they present us with.

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.

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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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The thread about the “Study of the Diet of the Labouring Classes in Edinburgh”; what the poor of Canongate ate in 1901

In 1901, the Public Health Committee of the Town Council of Edinburgh paid £50 to commission a then remarkable and pioneering bit of research: they asked three doctors to go out into the working classes and poor of the city and find out what they actually ate. This study took place in the city’s Canongate and followed the food purchased and eaten over a week by 15 families, totalling 94 mouths. It meticulously catalogued everything that was consumed and discarded in great detail and then analysed it for its equivalent nutritional contents in a laboratory.

The authors were Dr. Diarmid Noël Paton, a pioneer in physiology and its links with nutrition; Dr. James Craufurd Dunlop, a paediatrician, pioneer of combined medical and social research and later Superintendent of Statistics, then Registrar General, of the Registry Office for Scotland and; Dr. Elsie Maud Inglis, one of the first female doctors in Scotland; a specialist and pioneer of the medical care – and medical education – of women; a leading suffragist and later founder of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in WW1.

“A Study of the Diet of the Labouring Classes in Edinburgh” was published the following year (1902). It runs to 104 pages, but I have read it and summarised some of its key findings so that you don’t have to. So lets go find out what people in the city ate 120 years ago

The 15 subject families were categorised into 3 classes:

• A. Workmen’s families with irregular wages under 20s (20 Shillings or £1, approximately £98 in 2023) per week
• B. Families with regular wages from 20-23s per week
• C. Families with men in “good” trades and regular wages from 28-40s per week.

There were 15 adult men, 17 adult women and 62 children in the study. Two of the test households were notable for having no man in the house – as a result these were by far and away the financially worst off of the group. The average income of households in the stufy was just under 25s (£1 5/-) a week, about £122 in 2023.

The make-up of each household was corrected for age and sex of occupants to turn it into a standardised equivalent number of adult men, based on the understanding at the time of the relative dietary requirements of men, women and children of different ages. For instance an adult woman counted as 0.8x an adult man for the purposes of calorie requirements. The weekly spend on food was counted to the nearest farthing (¼d, d being 1 old penny, with 12d to the shilling and 240d to the £). The average spend on food was 15s 9¼d per week (£77.35 in 2023 money), or 79% of household income. Per “equivalent man”, each house spent on average 6¾d per day on food (~£2.74 in 2023).

Standardised equivalent “Number of Men” per test household and weekly expenditures on food

One of the few “advantages” in life that the poor had was just how cheap accommodation was (even if it was in a slum condition) in Edinburgh in 1901. Per household it averaged 37¼d per week, or about £61 per month in 2023. Some families made half or all their rent by their Co-op dividends alone – a measure of both just how cheap the rent was and also how important the Co-ops were to their members.

We come now to what our subjects ate. Let’s just say that their diets were monotonous. 35% by weight of what people ate was bread, a whopping 494g per “man” per day. 80% of everything eaten was one of only 6 food types – bread, potatoes, milk, sugar, beef and veg (mainly cabbage and onion, some carrots and turnips, although the study noted that many of the women didn’t seem to know about any other vegetables than potatoes). For reference, in 2013-15, the average Scottish person consumed just 80g bread (84% less), 64g of potatoes, 22g of beef per day. But milk was almost the same at 201g.

People ate quite so much bread because it was cheap: that 35% of bread by weight gave them 41% of their daily calories but cost only 19% of their daily food budget. You can read more about the Scottish working class’s love affair with the Plain Loaf in this thread. In contrast, the beef consumed gave just 6% of daily calories but was 23% of expenditure. Clearly this was a luxury foodstuff relative to the others, and it was eaten for the protein content – and mainly by the man of the house. The authors pointed out an anomaly in that the traditional Scottish meat of mutton was largely lacking in the diet, even though it was cheaper and offered more protein per unit cost than beef.

People got about 11% of their daily calories from butter, jam, “syrup” (canned golden syrup or treacle) and cheese, eaten on slices of bread as a piece (an open sandwich, they weren’t closed back then!). Cheese consumption in 1901 was almost identical to Scotland’s 2013-15 average. Unsurprisingly, oatmeal was important in the diet, eaten as porridge – giving 6% of daily calories for 2.5% of expenditure. Eggs were commonly eaten, although they were relatively expensive they offered a reasonable amount of protein. The amounts of suet, dripping, sausages and offal are notably low. Small amounts of pulses and barley were eaten (in soups and broths).

The subjects ate almost no fruit, except small amounts of raisins and currants in the slightly better off households or in jam. It was potatoes that stopped them getting scurvy. Some teabreads were eaten (a sweetened bread, with dried fruit in it, usually spread with butter), almost nothing was spent on biscuits or sweets. Seasonally they probably did get access some fruit, when there was a glut of cheap apples etc., but it is not recorded. Confections may have been eaten on special occasions.

Mealtimes were not coordinated or regular, the report called this the old Canongate style. The man usually kept a schedule aligned to his work, with the largest meal in the evening. Children fitted theirs around schooling with lunch the primary meal, topped up with endless bread to keep them full, if not nourished. The women had to fit in between both It has been noted that much of the meat consumption was by the man of the house; in many of the homes, the children and woman made do mainly with porridge, potatoes, broths and soup topped up with and their endless pieces. One house recorded spending 6d a week on lemonade as a luxury, otherwise children drank milk (fresh, canned or buttermilk) but also lots of tea, coffee (from essence) and cocoa. Women seemed to drink a lot of cocoa – they probably needed the sugar content to keep constantly on the go with heavy domestic labour.

Fish, although it was easily accessible from the fishing fleets of Granton, Newhaven and Fisherrow, and long part of the diet of the Scottish lower classes, was not popular or valued. While it was relatively cheap, it was not felt to be a valuable source of daily calories for the money and it was most prevalent with the poorest households. Dried and smoked fish were particularly lowly thought of and very little was consumed.

In many households the women had either part time or “piece work” (usually cleaning, “charladying” and also making bags) to make ends meet. Although they earned much less than men, in many of the households this was the only regular income on account of irregular wages for the man. The two households with no men in them paint a revealing and sorry tale of life for working class women at that time. In the first, a mother (51) and daughter (15) exist on just 8s 4d per week (£41 in 2023). The daughter made a few shillings selling papers, the rest came from a Benevolent Fund as the son/brother was away in the army in the Anglo–Boer War. They existed largely on white fish (3.3kg per week, gotten cheap through the kindness of neighbours), bread (3.3kg/wk), potatoes (3.4kg), cabbage (2kg) and buttermilk (1.1kg), plus 850g sugar and 880g oatmeal.

The other house with no man resident was described as being that of a “poor, small old woman who lived alone, chiefly occupied in sewing“. She was unable to do other work, was “very weak” and her husband was in the lunatic asylum. Her income was unknown, but she spent only 14¼d per week (!) on food (£5.80 in 2023). When standardised, that’s just over 1/3 of average expenditure on food of all the other study subjects. This pittance bought her a meagre diet, per week, of 840g milk, 840g bread (about 1 modern loaf), 310g beef, 300g dried peas, 300g leeks and carrots, 200g barley and 90g butter, and almost nothing else. This was the equivalent of 1123 calories per “equivalent man” day, less than 1/2 of the average of 2900 per day of all the study subjects. The paper noted that 1527 calories per day was the garrison’s emergency diet at the end of the 4 month Siege of Ladysmith from 1899-1900.

This 2,900 per man per day calorific intake measured for Edinburgh in the study was compared to averages for the working classes of other countries. It was:

• 4,170cal in Germany
• 4,080cal in Sweden
• 3,061cal in Russia
• 4,415cal in the US

The working poor of the slums fared better than those in the poorhouses, who in Scotland at that time got 2,380 calories per day, but worse than in the country’s prisons were it was 3,315 calories per day (or 3,717 on hard labour) and in pauper lunatic asylums where 3,435 per day was provided. The Seamen’s Federation at that time had recently secured a diet for men at sea of 4,526 calories per day. This was the sort of intake needed to live comfortably and healthily for a man (or woman) indulging in heavy physical labour.

I do want to keep this thread focussed on food, and I could go on, and on, and on into ever more detail from the study, but this isn’t really the best place for that, so I’ll look at a few more things before wrapping up. Firstly, lets look at relative costs for some foodstuffs when the report was published compared to now. I’ve worked out an approximate inflated cost of the staple food prices to compare and contrast with typical May 2023 UK grocery prices. The differences speak for themselves.

Secondly – apart from rent and food, what else was money spent on? An obvious thing was coal, required for all domestic heating, cooking and hot water. Many got it cheap through their churches or social groups, who had schemes to buy it in bulk and disburse it at a heavily discounted rate to their members. In winter, consumption of coal averaged about 1.5 bags per house per week, costing 1s 9d (about £34 a month in 2023). Some houses had a gas light and paid for that, but the use and cost was small – about £5 per month in 2023 equivalent. Other houses purchased lamp oil. After coal (and sometimes before it), the next biggest expendisture was on subscriptions to societies. Most households paid a few shillings per week towards such societies; these were either to cover sickness or funeral costs, clothing clubs, or even children’s holiday clubs for a week at the sea or in the country for them. The other main noted expenditure was “soap, black lead, etc.”, i.e. household cleaning products, about half a shilling a week (£2.45 in 2023) per household.

Most of the men smoked (women at this time mainly did not); about half a shilling again per week in pipe tobacco. Some were teetotallers, others drank. In only one family was it noted the woman drank and it was implied that both parents in this household were alcoholics. No costs were given for money spent on drink.

In most families the entire wage was turned over by the husband to his wife to manage, with 2s or 3s a week reserved by him for his tobacco, papers and drink. This was most prevalent were wages were reliable and regular. Where the man’s work was irregular, the pattern was different. His wife often had little idea what was in his wage packet from one week to the next. He often turned over just enough for the food and rent but little else, reserving the excess in better weeks for his vices. Very few of the families had enough to keep anything by for a “rainy day” and lived week to week. It was noted some lived day-to-day, buying items of food as and when they were needed throughout the day. This meant they often paid a premium compared to a weekly bulk buy, a problem just as common now for those on limited incomes as then.

I will finish off with two last points. Firstly, the study probably would have failed without Elsie Inglis’ involvement; it was her and her female medical students who convinced reluctant families – usually the housewife – to allow them to intrude on their lives. Misses G. Miller, H. Bell, Isabel Simson, May Simson, Pringle, Cunningham, Robertson, H. Maclaren and Colly and Mrs Shaw Maclaren were the students credited with gathering the actual study data from each family (down to collecting every discarded bit of potato peel to be weighed)

And secondly, one little snippet of insight into the life of these families that really gave a lump to my throat when I read it. It came from family number 14, the mason’s labourer, his wife and their 9 children, who lived in a tiny 2 room house, “clean but bare-looking“. The report goes on, “the eldest girl died of consumption [TB] last year. They still keep little frames and bits of fancy-work she was doing. They gave her a grand funeral that cost £10 13s. Black suits had to be bought for the father and eldest boy“. This family had very little, yet they spent everything and more than they had and could afford to give their daughter a decent and dignified send off – over 10 weeks wages – and on account of paying off their debts could no longer pay into their own funeral society. I feet this really hit home how unpredictable life was for people 120 years ago, people living exactly where my own family was living at the time and in exactly the same circumstances. And it brings home a real sense of human dignity to the lives of people in bitter and crushing circumstances, at the bottom of the pile. Their next eldest daughter, 17 but only 4ft 10in tall, now looked after the house and 8 other children when her mother went out to work to make paper bags for 8s a week. Such were the realities of life in the Canongate at the end of the Victorian age and dawn of the 20th century.

Here’s the link to “A study of the diet of the labouring classes in Edinburgh” on Archive dot org for you to read and think about for yourself. I’ve only scratched the surface of it, and there are many other stories and insights contained within it’s yellowing pages.

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.
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The fascinating People's Story Museum in the Canongate Tolbooth on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, looking at the lives of the ordinary residents of Edinburgh from the late 1700s until the present day. More pics and info: https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/edinburgh/peoplesstory/index.html

#Scotland #PeoplesStoryMuseum #Canongate #Edinburgh #Museum #UndiscoveredScotland

Another early morning, this one by choice, and I spot a blue figure, posed as if climbing a wall in the #OldTown of #Edinburgh

Why? Who knows 🤷‍♂️ Even resorting to Google didn't provide any obvious answers 🙂

#CityLife #Art #EarlyMorning #UrbanPhotography #Canongate

Here's a #booktoot for people who are new to my work. I have 3 new books on the way with @canongatebooks

- A new edition of literary childhood #memoir 'Springfield Road'

- A new #poetry collection titled 'With Love, Grief and Fury'

- A new #novel, the 2nd in the 'Mrs Death Misses Death' world story

I'll share more about each book as they develop. Thanks to publishers #Canongate & agent Crystal at OWN IT!

Read: https://www.thebookseller.com/rights/canongate-bags-three-more-from-godden

#MrsDeathMissesDeath #Poetry #Memoir #BookNews #OWNIT

Enjoying ‘A Ballet Of Lepers - A Novel And Other Stories’ by Leonard Cohen. Before Cohen wrote massive hits like ‘Hallelujah’ ‘So Long Marianne’ and ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ he wrote poetry and fiction. This book is so lively, vivid, gorgeously written, perfect weekend read! Now put your scratchy Cohen vinyl on and read this book out now with #Canongate highly recommend!

#bookchat #booktoots #leonardcohen #mastobooks #weekendreads #saturdayread #booktwitter #bookstagram

Last night ‘The Fire People’ won the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for poetry, love and thanks to the readers who voted for this. So awesome to be part of this trailblazing 1990’s book, this was the first time I saw my work in a real book, a huge moment for so many Black British writers. BIGlove to Lemn and ‘The Fire People’ poets and next generation ‘More Fiya’ poets too! BIGlove! #BooksAreMyBag #BookTwitter #BAMBReadersAwards #PoetryToot #poets #BookToot #Canongate #SalenaGodden #LemnSissay

Shifting boundaries: the thread about six centuries of Edinburgh’s expansion at the neighbours’ expense

It’s late O’ Clock, so what better time for a brief, 600 year whirlwind tour of the boundaries of Edinburgh. By this I mean the civil boundaries (by various definitions), not church parish or electoral ones (although they may overlap and be one and the same at times).In the 15th century, the extent of Edinburgh is a small place, whose civil reach is defined by the King’s Walls. Immediately to its east is the 12th century Burgh of the Canongate (owned by Holyrood Abbey), and to its north the Burghs of Barony of Broughton and the Barony of Restalrig.

After the national calamity at The Battle of Flodden, the town walls are “hurriedly” rebuilt (it takes about 45 years to complete!) due to the imminent threat of English retribution. This “Flodden Wall” encircles the southern suburbs of the city that had grown outside the wall and expands the boundaries significantly in that direction.

As defensive structures, these medieval style walls were not suitable for the realities of 16th century warfare and both English and Scottish armies strolled into the city without too much effort in the 1540s, 50s and 70s. Nevertheless, the walls were useful in defining and regulating the city, particularly as a protective trade barrier, something the city guarded zealously and jealously. In 1618 the walls were reinforced and expanded again by the mason John Taillefer – the Telfer Walls – and in 1636 the superiority of the Burgh of Canongate was purchased by Edinburgh, although it would remain quasi-independent for the next 200 or so years.

In 1649, the city got a new neighbour on its western fringe as the little village of Portsburgh outside the West Port (a port being a gateway in Scots placenames) was raised to a Burgh of Barony. Note, at some point, Portsburgh was extended to include an island to its east outside of the city walls, known as Easter Portsburgh. I am not sure when this occurred but you will find its boundaries in the 1817 image further down.

n.b. a Burgh of Barony was a type of burgh in Scotland, distinct from a Royal Burgh like Edinburgh granted to a feudal landowner. They gave the landowner certain rights and privileges regarding holding markets and/or dispense local justice. They may also have had their own incorporations of trades.

In 1685, the Town Council defined 16 districts in the city, each to be “watched” by a company of the Trained Bands. Effectively these were law enforcement areas, the Trained Bands being a sort of militia force for protecting the city. This extended the civil reach north. In 1673, Restalrig was changed from a barony to a burgh of barony, Restalrig and Calton or Easter and Wester Restalrig under the Master of Balmerino.

The City reiterated these districts in 1736 and in 1785 an Act of Parliament by King George III formalised these boundaries area as defining “The Ancient Royalty of the City”. The 17th century story of the decline of the Barony of Restalrig is a different story, but in 1725 the superiority of the ancient Calton district was bought from it, the west portion by Edinburgh and the east by the Heriot’s Hospital (a far bigger landowner than the City). Calton became a “bailiery” and thus retained some of the trappings of being a burgh of barony, such as some of its own trade incorporations (including cordiners, or shoemakers) and its own burial ground.

In 1767 the city finally squeezes itself beyond its ancient boundaries with the 1767 Police Boundaries Act that defines both the 1st New Town and attached exclaves. At this time Policing was a civic notion concerned with public sanitation, lighting etc., not law enforcement.

These boundaries can be seen to be a complete mess, and resulted in parts of Calton being in the South Leith parish for worship, parts of Edinburgh in Broughton, etc. Nevertheless, things proceeded in a haphazard manner, with individual Acts of Parliament in 1785, 1786, 1809 and 1814 slowly attached bits on to the city, the most contiguous being the incorporation of the Second New Town and later the Moray Feu at the start of the 19th century. The northern exclave shown below was for the Edinburgh Academy.

As noted previously, when I first created these maps I had not found the boundary for Easter Porstburgh, but it is recorded on Kirkwood’s 1817 town plan. I have shown it below and its relationship to the original boundary of the Canongate.

In 1825, the Bailiery of Calton was formally incorporated into the city and ceased to exist. In 1832 there was a huge change, with the Edinburgh Police Act (for “watching, lighting, cleansing and paving”) tidying up and greatly expanding both the civic boundary and the municipal responsibilities.

Much of the new boundary aligned with the new parliamentary boundary defined in the Representation of the People (Scotland) Act 1832 – the Scottish Reform Act. But not totally, as the section north east of Broughton was actually in Leith for electoral purposes (map from NLS).

In 1833 another new neighbour appears, with Portobello being raised to a burgh by Act of Parliament. Note that Broughton, Portsburgh and Canongate still exist for certain civic functions at this time, although Edinburgh had the Police powers over them. In 1854, the Edinburgh Police Amendment Act extends the boundary of the city to include all of the extent of the Queen’s Park, including Duddingston Loch.

In 1856 the Edinburgh Municipality Extension Act swallows up the remaining civic functions of – and thereby abolishes – the old Burghs of Broughton, Canongate and Portsburgh. In return Edinburgh loses a northern slice as Leith realises its 300-odd year campaign for burgh recognition.

At 7.8 square kilometres, the new Burgh of Leith is 60% smaller than Edinburgh by size, but is seen by the City as a huge threat to its prosperity. They hadn’t spent the last 400 or so years in more or less direct control of the port and its two parishes for no good reason. Edinburgh now goes on a growing spree. The 1882 Municipal and Police Extension Act widens the city to the south and west.

The 1885 Edinburgh Extension and Sewerage Act gives it Blackford Hill.

The 1889 Local Government Scotland Act brings in new powers that allow expansion under certain circumstances without recourse to an Act of Parliament each time. In 1890 this gives the city Braid Hill and an extra chunk of Inverleith when this was acquired from the Rocheid family.

Note that the Braid Hill acquisition included the pathway up from the Hermitage of Braid, so this was a contiguous part of the city and not an exclave in the County of Midlothian.

Hearts were broken in the People’s Republic of Portobello and Joppa in 1896 when Edinburgh acquired that particular Burgh. The London and Portobello Road axis between the two was also part of the deal as a connecting corridor and so again this was not an isolated municipal island. The western boundary also pushed further out again at this time.

In 1901, the lands of Craigentinny, once part of the Barony of Restalrig, between South Leith and the London Road were incorporated. This area at the time was largely unpopulated farmland and “irrigated meadows” (intensively-cultivated pasture land fertilised by raw sewage). Granton too, previously part of the Parish of Cramond in Midlothian County, joined the City Burgh in 1901.

A year later in 1902 the remains of the old Parish of Duddingston were also acquired between the London Road in the north and the Niddrie / Brunstane Burns in the south.

In the twentieth century, a huge changed occurred with the Edinburgh Boundaries Extension and Tramways Act 1920. This saw the city get revenge on the Leith Independence movement as it reacquired the entire burgh against widespread popular opposition. This is something which Leith has still not forgiven, over a century later. But this expansion didnt stop at just Leith, the same act gave the city the Barony of Corstorphine and the civil parishes of Cramond, Liberton and Gilmerton from Midlothian. This boundary still defines a lot of what we think of as Edinburgh (and some bits we don’t, like Straiton and Old Pentland). Things would stay more or less as they were for the next 54 years, until the 1974 local government reforms established a two-tier system of local government, with a greatly expanded Lothian Region, with Edinburgh, Mid-, West and East Lothian being District Councils within that. But that’s outwith the scope of this thread and a story for another day.

The City coat of arms of Edinburgh was registered with the Lord Lyon King of Arms in 1732 and has the castle and its rock as the central heraldic symbol, for obvious reasons. The crest is an anchor and cable, symbolising the Lord Provost also being the Admiral of the Forth. The supporters on either side are to the dexter (the shield’s right) a maiden “richly attired with her hair hanging down over her shoulders” – the Castle and its Rock was once known as the Maiden Castle and to the sinister (shield’s left) a doe, a deer, a female deer. This animal represents the life of solitude of St Giles in the forest, the city’s patron saint. Much earlier versions of the Common Seal of the City included a representation of St. Giles himself on the reverse but this depiction of a saint was removed after the Scottish Reformation. The use of the castle as a heraldic symbol of the city dates back to medieval times.

The Latin civic motto of “Nisi Dominus Frustra” is an abbreviation of Psalm 127. Roughly speaking it translates to English as “Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” Appropriate for a God-fearing and staunchly Presbyterian 1640s Edinburgh.

The Canongate Burgh Coat of Arms features the white stag and cross that give rise to the popular story of the Holyrood placename – recall that Canongate once belonged to the Holyrood Abbey. The motto “Sic Itur Ad Astra” translates to “Thus one goes to the stars“

The Coat of Arms of the Burgh of Leith was altered from the old seals of the Burgh of Barony, which dated back to 1630. And represents the Virgin Mary (for whom South Leith’s Kirk was dedicated) and baby Jesus in a ship beneath a cloud.

The version on the seal shows them beneath an ornate canopy. The date of 1563 is sometimes shown on the seal, this being when Mary Queen of Scots gave written permission for Leith to raise its own Tolbooth, one of the civic institutions required for the old Scottish burgh.

The motto “Persevere” is well kenned but has relatively modern (Victorian) origins and was not formally adopted until the arms were matriculated in 1889. Its exact origin is obscure but at this time it already had an association with Leith – and formally was probably first used with the formation of the 1st Midlothian Rifle Volunteers in Leith in 1859, who adopted the old Burgh Seal and the motto “Persevere” on their badges. It had also been in use by other local institutions such as the Perseverance Lodge of the Independent United Order of Scottish Mechanics – one of the various fraternal societies that flourished in Victorian Scotland – and the Junction Street Young Men’s Society. It should be noted however that when the Grand Lodge of Free Gardners in Scotland (yet another fraternal society) established a lodge in Leith in 1864, they picked the motto “Persevere” on the basis that it was the motto of the Town. So it’s very much a case of chicken and eggs where the origins truly lie. The older Latin sometimes seen – “Siccilum Oppidi De Leith” – means nothing more than “Seal of the Town of Leith“.

The Portobello arms were granted in 1886. “the ships represent the port (Porto) and the cannons, war (Bello)” The castle refers not to Edinburgh but apparently to that of Puerto Bello and the battle thereof, from where the name of the Burgh is derived. The Latin motto “Ope et Consilio” translates as “With help and counsel” and refers apparently to “the skillful manner in which Admiral Vernon and his colleagues cap­tured [Puerto Bello].”

As far as I’m aware Portsburgh never had a coat of arms, but its seal survives in the collections of the National Museum of Scotland. Appropriately it shows a town under a clifftop castle, a city wall and two gates (ports). And a heap of doves. This has been used in lieu of the arms in the stained glass of the Edinburgh City Chambers, the symbols around the edges represent the independent incorporated trades of the Portsburgh.

I am unaware of arms for Broughton or Restalrig, I assume that instead the Baron used their own to seal municipal documents. For much of their time for Broughton this would have been the Bellendens (no sniggering at the back, it’s the old form of Ballantyne) and for Restalrig this was the de Lestalrics and then the Logans. Likewise for the Calton, Edinburgh had the superiority after it was detached from South Leith so it likely used the Edinburgh seal for official documents, the incorporated trades using their own.

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:

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.

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).

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.

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.

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The Royal Mile: the thread about a street with no addresses

This thread was originally written and published in September 2022.

Apropos current events (at the time of writing), I thought it might be interesting, relevant or a bit of both to delve a little into the name of a certain street and dispel a few myths or misapprehensions about it.

The Royal Mile of course is well known as that ancient main street of Edinburgh’s Old Town, named for the mile long route between Edinburgh Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse. This is a route steeped in history and long trodden by monarchs of Scotland, yes? The history books (or some of them) actually will tell you this, so it must be true, yes? Well, not really, no.

OK, the bit about it being a mile long between the castle and the palace is correct, it almost exactly is – give or take a foot, yard or metre. But that’s a statute mile not the Scots mile which some sources claim (which is ~200m longer) so that should raise a slight suspicion as to how ancient a term it really is. Feel free to measure it if you don’t believe me! You also won’t find any property with a street address of Royal Mile and you won’t find it in any old Post Office directory listing.

No. The Royal Mile is a collective term for four distinct streets, which in days of yore were in two completely separate burghs. From the top of the hill at the castle to the bottom, which is from west to east, we have the Castle Hill, Lawnmarket and High Street of Edinburgh and the Canongate which was in the Burgh of Canongate. These are shown below with their separate names on Kincaid’s street map of 1784.

Stuart Harris, who wrote the book on Edinburgh street names, takes particular exception to the Royal Mile name: “to use this label for the combined length of the separate historic market streets [Edinburgh and the Canongate] it is at cost of blurring the distinction between the two“. He continues “it is not only meaningless historically, but unhappily gives an impression that this was a route created to link castle and palace, whereas the truth is that it came into being hundreds of years before the kings of Scots had anything to go with the fortress or the palace“. Harris notes that in medieval references it is given as “via Regia“, the King’s Way, but then that was given to any public highway, with the adjoining streets and closes all being in private ownership in their respective burghs. Using the “nickname” of Royal Mile, he bemoaned, was causing the erosion of the historic and distinct individual street names, “with a regrettable loss of civic dignity“.

The route is undoubtedly ancient, a track will have existed along the spine of the Castle Rock since as long as people scratched out a living on its summit as a defensible place to survive. But how old are the street names and how old is the objectionable term Royal Mile? The earliest medieval references to the High Street describe a vicus foralis or market street, because that’s what it was and why it was much wider than it is now. By the 16th century it’s the magnus vicus or great street and by the start of the 17th it’s the High Street (or Hie Gate in Scots). The below sketch reconstructs the 15th century birds’ eye view of the city on its ridge below the castle, with the prominent one-mile route from castle to Holyrood.

The name Castle Hill, now partly buried beneath the 18th and 19th c. Esplanade, dates to at least 1484. It refers to the hill you climb to reach the castle, the castle itself sits on the Castle Rock. There’s evidence to suggest that the Castle Hill predates the High Street as the main centre of populace of Edinburgh.

The Lawnmarket is nothing to do with lawns or selling fodder. Lawn is a corruption of the Scots Laund or Laun; in English – Land; it was the Landmercatt, where people from the lands outwith the burgh could trade. The main city markets were restricted to only being for the traders of the burgh. In the 1765 town plan by Edgar (below) it’s even spelled as Land Market.

And the Canongate, the principle thoroughfare of the burgh of that name dates to not long after the foundation of the Holyrood Abbey in 1128, first being recorded in 1363 as the vicus canonicorum or “Canoungait“, the way of the Canons (of the Abbey). The Burgh of Canongate, whose superiority was held by the Abbey until the Scottish Reformation, post-dated the street name and was established at some time in the 15th century.

And so what of The Royal Mile? Well, it’s a term that first appears in newspapers in the late 19th century. There are a couple of references to it in articles in The Scotsman in the 1880 and 1890s, written in a manner that implies it was clearly a term already understood locally. But crucially, it’s not given as a proper noun, it’s in quotation marks as the “royal mile“, it’s being used as a descriptive nickname. It first appears in book print that I can find in 1901, in “Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century” by W. M. Gilbert. Again, with the quote marks and no capital on mile, again it’s clearly a nickname.

From here on, use of the term grows. A burgh councillor, C. J. Mcarthy, gave a talk illustrated by magic lantern slides of the title to the Edinburgh Architectural Association in 1905. By 1920, it’s the title of a historical guidebook published locally, by Robert T. Skinner

And by the 1930s, the name and its mythical genesis is firmly embedded in the popular history books.

So there you have it. Yes, the Royal Mile or royal mile is a well accepted and established local name for the area between the Castle and the Palace, but as is sometimes the case the accepted history is a relatively modern invention to fit the facts and is divorced from the historical reality.

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:

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.