#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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today! At last!! Aud in the UK!!!

Buy

Bookshop.org | Amazon UK | Waterstones | WH Smith

Today, for the first time, the Aud trilogy (The Blue Place, Stay, Always) will be published in the UK. It only took 27 years. I know I’m not even remotely an impartial observer but these books kick ass. I love them with a crazy love. And I would dearly like UK readers to go buy a copy—and then tell me what you think.

Do you know any other queer noir/not-noir novels 1 praised by Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid, Dorothy Allison, Lee Child, Manda Scott, Francis Spufford, Laurie King, Ivy Pochoda, Robert Crais, Alex Gray, Elizabeth Hand, James Sallis, and more? No? Then maybe you should go find out what brings together such disparate writers in their love.

You can buy now or borrow from your local library. Enjoy!

Buy

Bookshop.org | Amazon UK | Waterstones | WH Smith

1. They use some of the prose style of noir but they don’t do noir, in the sense that Aud, the protagonist, does not trap herself in an ever-downward spiral. The three books between them describe a hopeful arc—with, y’know, lots of sex, and scams, and seamy cityscapes. Aud, like Hild, has an essential joy in life no matter what tight spot she finds herself in… ↩︎

#always #aud #audTorvingen #books #canongate #crimeFiction #noir #stay #theBluePlace #uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 below 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.

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). 1914 saw them relocate the shope 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 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.

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 © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur

#Antiques #Canongate #Court #Crime #January15 #Jewish #LocalPolitics #Politician #Women #WomenSFootball #Written2025 #WW2

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.

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.

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

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 below 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.

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). 1914 saw them relocate the shope 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 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.

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 © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur

#Antiques #Canongate #Court #Crime #January15 #Jewish #LocalPolitics #Politician #Women #WomenSFootball #Written2025 #WW2

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

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 below 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.

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). 1914 saw them relocate the shope 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 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.

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 © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur

#Antiques #Canongate #Court #Crime #January15 #Jewish #LocalPolitics #Politician #Women #WomenSFootball #Written2025 #WW2

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.

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

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

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

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

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

#Relief at #Canongate #Tolbooth in #Edinburgh, #Scotland

#Relief at #Canongate #Tolbooth in #Edinburgh, #Scotland

#Relief at #Canongate #Tolbooth in #Edinburgh, #Scotland

#Relief at #Canongate #Tolbooth in #Edinburgh, #Scotland

#CoatOfArms on the #Canongate #Kirk in #Edinburgh #Scotland

#CoatOfArms on the #Canongate #Kirk in #Edinburgh #Scotland

#CoatOfArms on the #Canongate #Kirk in #Edinburgh #Scotland

#CoatOfArms on the #Canongate #Kirk in #Edinburgh #Scotland

#Canongate #Tolbooth #Edinburgh #Scotland

#Canongate #Tolbooth #Edinburgh #Scotland

#Canongate #Tolbooth #Edinburgh #Scotland

#Canongate #Tolbooth #Edinburgh #Scotland

#Canongate #Tolbooth #Edinburgh #Scotland

#Canongate #Kirk, #Edinburgh, #Scotland

#Canongate #Kirk, #Edinburgh, #Scotland

#Canongate #Kirk, #Edinburgh, #Scotland

#Canongate #Kirk, #Edinburgh, #Scotland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Memorial to #Clarinda in #Canongate #Kirkyard 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

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

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

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