#craiglockhart — Public Fediverse posts

Edinburgh Council could introduce new nature reserves across city

The City of Edinburgh Council is planning to introduce two new nature reserves, with a third which might be expanded. Under new…
#Edinburgh #UnitedKingdom #UK #GB #Scotland #Headlines #News #Europe #EU #Britain #Craiglockhart #Edinburghcouncil #GreatBritain #NatureReserve #Parks
https://www.europesays.com/uk/955500/

https://www.europesays.com/uk/955500/ Edinburgh Council could introduce new nature reserves across city #Britain #Craiglockhart #Edinburgh #EdinburghCouncil #GreatBritain #NatureReserve #Parks #Scotland #UK #UnitedKingdom

A seasonal treat for the urban poor: the thread about Scotland’s New Years steak pie tradition

With the filling for the obligatory Ne’erday steak pie doing its thing in the slow cooker, it inevitably leads to the question of how such a pie should properly be flavoured. Should it have any herbs and spices beyond salt and pepper? A bit red wine or ale perhaps? A few drops of Worcester sauce? And more intriguing for me than the finer points of the recipe, what are the origins of this seasonal pie tradition in Scotland? Let’s try and find out, shall we?

There’s a syndicated short story entitled How Shall I hold New-Year’s Day which was printed across Scottish newspapers on the Boxing Day 1851 which discusses new year traditions and in which a “beef steak pie” features. The story takes the form of a conversation between two working class men – Jock and Bob – on their plans for the season and it’s quite obviously the work of the Temperance movement. Jock, the man with the pie, intends not to drink any whisky and instead to spend his time with his family enjoying the fruits of his abstemiousness. Instead of his usual parritch (porrdige) he is having a feast of ham, eggs, hot rolls, cheese, currant buns and “tea along with the elders” for Hogmanay. Bob’s plans, in contrast, mainly involve whisky. Come the morning of the 1st, Bob will have argued with his family and be left with his hangover. But canny Jock has the benefit of his “rest and sobriety of the previous night” and will take his children out to the toy shop, then come home to his pie, followed by a sing-along with invited friends and the treat of fresh fruit. All very sober! An interesting point noted by Jock is that while his wife has “made” the pie, it was “covered and baked by the baker the previous night“; most people would not have had a home oven that could have baked such a pie, so they would take their filling in a dish to their baker who would cook it in the bread oven. The pie could then be reheated atop the range on the girdle (griddle).

This was the earliest mention of steak pie at New Year that I could find in Scottish newspapers. However the phrase comes up again and again (and again!) over the next 60 or so years of press in one specific context; feeding the poor at new years and (later) Christmas. In January 1863, the Glasgow Herald reported that the inmates of the Paisley Abbey Poorhouse had been treated to an “excellent beef-steak pie” and oranges by the benevolent committee of the parish poor board. In 1876, the Edinburgh Evening News similarly describes the inmates of the City Poorhouse at Craiglockhart had gotten their “usual new year’s treat” of “excellent soup, beef-steak pie and pudding“. Those in St. Cuthbert’s Poorhouse were in contrast served a mutton pie, plum pudding, currant loaf and jugs of beer.

Craiglockhart was still serving New Year steak pie in 1893, but the soup had by this time been downgraded from excellent to mere potato. In 1898, the Evening News reported that an injunction of the Local Government Board had prevented the Parish Board from financing any “special entertainments during the festive season” at the poorhouses from their own funds and these instead had to be met by private benevolence. Fortunately £70 was provided by Alexander Oliver Riddle (or Riddell) of neighbouring Craiglockhart House, a whisky magnate in the distilling firm of Usher & Co. and the inmates of the poorhouses still got their roast beef and mutton “along with a steak pie and fruit“. The men were provided with a treat of an ounce of tobacco, the women got a similar weight in snuff and the children the same but in sweets. A. Oliver Riddle continued to fund the Craiglockhart New Year steak pie dinner thereafter and in 1902 645 mouths were fed. By 1907 times had changed slightly and the women were being provided with sweets instead of snuff. Craigleith seems to have lacked such a sponsor however and the inmates instead were getting a dinner of coffee, bread and butter, soup and mince – all washed down by a visit from local councillors.

It wasn’t just the poorhouses providing New Year steak pie; The Scotsman in 1896 reported that it was the custom in Glasgow for the merchants of the Royal Exchange to fund a steak pie and potato dinner for the poor, held at the City Chambers. This dinner had by 1905 shifted to Christmas Day at which time 3,000 people got their lunch, but had in turn to suffer a lecture from Lord Provost Bilsland about knowing their place and being grateful for philanthropy. It was noted at this time that the tradition was now 36 years old. Similarly in Edinburgh, in 1904 Lord Provost Sir Robert Cranston (noted champion of Temperance) put on a New Year steak pie dinner for 1,000 of the city’s poor at the Grassmarket Corn Exchange; but it had to be held on January 2nd as a bird show had the venue booked on the 1st!

In 1910, the Home for Aged Women in Portobello served a Christmas Day dinner – provided by a Mrs Sellar – of steak pie, plum pudding and fruit, and a New Year’s Day “godly repast” of roast mutton, pudding, jellies, meringues and sweets provided by Mrs Durham and Miss Scott Moncrieff. When Edinburgh wine importer William Crambe Reid died in February 1922, £68,000 of his £184,000 fortune was left to good causes in the city. The interest on one benefaction went to providing an annual Christmas meal for 4-500 of the city’s poor; the “William Crambe Reid Dinner“. The inaugural menu had soup, haggis and mashed potatoes, steak pie, vegetables, more potatoes, plum pudding and fruit. In North Leith Parish, a bequest of property by a Mr Neill paid a £51 annual profit on rents that was still providing such a meal on New Year’s Day as late as 1938.

But what of the actual pies themselves? What were people being actually eating ? We can get an early recipe for a Scottish steak pie from the book “Cookery and Pastry as taught and practised by Mrs Maciver, Teacher of those Arts in Edinburgh“. Susanna Maciver was one of Scotland’s first cookery teachers and published a cookery manual in Edinburgh around 1777. Her steak pie is very different to what we might have today; it was made from alternating strips of lean and fatty beef that had been cut into thin slices and then beaten thinner, much like a schnitzel before it was “seasoned with salt and spices” (she doesn’t say what spices, sadly.) These strips were rolled up into “ollops” (or collops, i.e. like beef olives), packed into a dish with some water, covered in puff pastry and baked.

The Cook and Housewife’s Manual etc. by Margaret Dods (actually a pseudonymous collaboration between Isobel Christian Johnston and Walter Scott) of 1826 gives fundamentally the same collop-style pie but adds gravy instead of water and the optional taste of some onions. What is much more interesting is that the book also suggests you can add a catsup (a preserved mushroom sauce), cut pickles, “other seasonings“, oysters and/or forcemeat balls (balls of minced offal and breadcrumbs). In February 1882, a Lady Correspondent submitted a recipe to the Dundee Evening Telegraph for a steak pie. It was made with 1lb of fillet steak which was cut thin, layered with oysters and flavoured with mace, walnut ketchup, port, lemon peel, gravy, salt and pepper. The same paper provided a different recipe in 1884, which was made with shoulder steak and included two kidneys “to enrich the sauce“. No mention was made of spices or other flavourings. The most unusual aspect of this pier was that it was served along with a side dish of macaroni cheese (which was actually made with spaghetti!). In 1892, the Aberdeen People’s Journal gives a recipe by a correspondent called Wiganer made from 2lb steak, 1/4lb kidney, salt and pepper with the meat diced up into chunks (rather than strips or collops) as would be recognisable now. The filling was cooked in the dish then covered in a lard shortcrust pastry and returned to the oven.

Economy steak pie recipes were published in the papers in WW1; the Dundee People’s Journal has one made from much cheaper meat – 1½lb of beef hough (shin) – which had to be boiled for 90 minutes before mixing with an instant gravy and boiled again with salt and pepper before it could be topped with pastry. And in 1917, as a reflection of how bad the food supply situation was getting, the Arbroath Herald has a recipe where sliced potatoes are used to bulk out the meat (which was itself a 2:1 ratio of beef and kidneys) and which was topped with a pastry that was ¾ mashed potatoes. This recipe used margarine or butter in the pastry – but things were so dire in January 1918 that the Food Control Committee published a recipe in newspapers for “potato butter“. This awful-sounding ersatz butter was fundamentally real butter that was stretched out by mixing it with boiled and sieved potatoes, dying it with butter colouring, preserving it with butter preservatives and setting it again in pats.

There are an infinite number of genuine and authentic and traditional Scottish steak pie recipes that you can find in cookery books and blogs. In the book “A Scottish feast : an anthology of food and eating” published in 1996, the food writer Catherine Brown gives a recipe for such a pie that attempts to meet the steak pie yardstick of Mr Glasgow (writer, broadcaster, bon viveur and foot critic Jack House) – which was the steak pie served in the Boulevard Hotel in Clydebank! This is an intersting hybrid of older pie recipe techniques, with the meat again beaten thin, but wrapped around pieces of kidney and sausage. It was thoroughly modernised however with the addition of ground clove, chopped parsley and marjoram and mushrooms. The addition of mushrooms was not just for flavouring purposes, but to form a barrier to hold the pastry off of the filling and prevent a “soggy bottom” forming on the pastry lid (which is personally my favourite part of the pie!). In reality, there is no one, authentic Scottish New Years steak pie recipe, beyond the one that you choose to enjoy on that day.

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

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The house that pens built: the thread about the many lives of Waverley House

There is a building in Craiglockhart in Edinburgh that frequently comes up in property listings with the romantic and ancient sounding name of Perdrixknowe .

The name is straightforward enough in its etymology, Perdrix- is the French for Partridge, –knowe is the Scots for a hillock or a mound (from the English Knoll), often specifically in the context of a gathering place for fairies. James Steuart, in his history of Colinton Parish, records that the Partridge Knowe, or Patrickes Know (Perdrix frequently became Patrick in Scots placenames) was the rise in the ground to the north of the Craiglockhart and Craighouse hills.

There are a couple of other –knowe place names in the general area, e.g. Broomieknowe just to the south, Kingsknowe to the west. John Thomson helpfully records the name in the maps of his 1830s “Atlas of Scotland“. But I can locate neither Perdrix– nor Partridge– knowes in the Ordnance Survey Name Books for Midlothian of 1852-3 or in any archived newspapers of that period, suggesting it had already fallen out of favour as a local place name by that time.

Certainly Perdrixknowe, as ancient a name as it may be, was only given to the house here as recently as 1990 when it was converted into retirement flats. When it was first built back in 1884, by the genius architect, local politician and quarrymaster that was Sir James Gowans, it was known instead as Waverley House. We should not be troubled by this name in the slightest, it was a very common trend back then to give something a referential name to the works of Sir Walter Scott. Except in this case, all is not quite what it seems.

The house was built for a wealthy local businessman by the name of Duncan Cameron (1825-1901). The Cameron family owned the stationery firm of Macniven & Cameron based on Blair Street in the Old Town. The brothers John and Donald Cameron had joined the stationery wholesaling firm of Nisbet Macniven in the 1840s and soon ended up first running and then taking a share in it, the name changing to Macniven & Cameron in 1845.

Duncan joined his older brothers in the business in 1850 and in 1862 patented a new and improved fountain pen nib which he christened The Waverley. This was featured a fine, upturned point so as to better write on rougher papers; a double efficiency that both sped up the writing speed of clerks and also allowed them to work on cheaper papers.

The name was of course taken from the works of Walter Scott, as just about everything popular in Scotland seemed to be at the time, and the tin in which the nibs came even had his image on it.

The Waverley nib was a smash hit success, it was affordable, it was effective and because it could write on cheaper papers its utility was wide, “a luxury for the million” as the testimonial from the Argus newspaper says on the tin. With an official contract to supply pens to Her Majesty’s Government Offices, it was with good cause that they proudly boated that “Macniven & Cameron’s Pens Are the Best” on the box. Their nibs were much in demand in India amongst the Imperial civil service, indeed their Hindoo nibs of 1873, designed for caligraphy and sold in a tin with an Indian elephant upon it, may have been deliberately aimed at it.

With famed stable mates The Owl (“Par Excellence the Ladies’ Pen”) and The Pickwick (for “Swift Commercial Writing“) in their portfolio, the company became one of the names in pens and the Camerons became fabulously wealthy. From the names of these best sellers the company took its familiar slogan, “They came as a boon and a blessing to men, The Pickwick, The Owl and the Waverley Pen“.

Macniven & Cameron didn’t make their own pens, they did not have the specialist fine manufacturing base in Edinburgh to do this in the required volumes, and so instead they subcontracted the work out. Such was the demand however that in 1900 they acquired a factory in Birmingham, the epicentre of this specialist manufacturing in Britain, to bring production in house. The city housed eleven of the top twelve manufacturers of pens in the 1930s, producing ten-to-fifteen thousand pens per week.

The company advertised widely in the press and was quite canny, being a prominent adopter of railway advertising and made sure adverts for its wares were prominent in main line stations. A certain generation of rail traveller may still recall the enamelled signs that used to prominently greet the travelling public.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/allybeag/2142739598

Back to Duncan Cameron, like all self respecting Victorian businessmen he expressed his success in life by having built for himself a fabulous villa. For his architect he chose James Gowans, one of the most creative and distinctive local architects and one who had a passion for masonry worked from the nearby Redhall quarries.

The detailing of the house itself heavily referenced the source of Cameron’s wealth; look at the mouldings around the pediments and cornicing and also the chimney pots and you will see that these are pen nibs. James Gowans liked this sort of visual pun, his own house – Rockville – was decorated with daisies, his surname being the Scots term for that flower. The inverted crow-stepped detail around the main window is a feature distinctive in the work of Gowans.

A description of the house is given in a 1902 advertisement for its sale, a “substantially built and commodious two-storey villa, with area flat behind and conservatory in front, sheltered from the east; Containing dining room, drawing room, parlour, five bedrooms, four dressing rooms, bathroom, 2 WCs, kitchen, scullery, pantriea (pantry), servants’ accommodation; Laundry with fixed tubs and boiler; Hot and Cold water throughout; Ample cellerage. There is an Acre of Garden Ground.” The photograph below shows the main front door, flanked by an ornamental stained glass window and one of the conservatories that wrapped around the front of the building.

The grand staircase balusters I have seen being described as based on fountain pens, but I can’t find a photo however but the interior photo below suggests that this similarity may be purely symbolic, unless those are bundles of pen bodies?

Duncan Cameron was well known throughout Edinburgh but kept himself out of public life and municipal affairs. He was however known to the people of Blair Street where his factory was based and his obituary notes that he was kind and generous to “many a poor widow in the neighbourhood“. With plenty of money to spare, Duncan senior bought himself the Oban Times in 1882. His parents both hailed from Glencoe and he maintained a keen interest in and sympathies with the lot of the Highlander, extending to being able to converse in Gàidhlig. The Camerons were well known in the area and were referred to as the Pen Folk. He installed his son (also Duncan) as editor of his newspaper. He held his position as Chairman of the Board of the family business until his very end: he died suddenly in February 1901, aged 76. Duncan junior took over the business but did not keep on Waverley House; it was for sale in 1902 and by 1903 it was being lived in by the “Misses Geikie“.

In 1890, Duncan junior had returned to Edinburgh to join his father in the pen business, which had left a vacancy at the top of the Oban Times. This was filled by the next son, Waverley, who was named after the pen. Sadly Waverley drowned in a tragic yachting accident off nearby Lismore just a year later in June 1891. He had been sailing with friends when their boat was swamped by a sudden squall; Waverley’s hat was all that was recovered of him and his friend, Donald Campbell, later succumbed to his exposure. Only Allan MacDonald survived the accident. His grieving father had a large Celtic cross erected on the Lismore shore as a memorial, close to where the boat had gone down.

After his father’s death, Duncan junior kept the pen side of the business going but massively expanded the manufacturing stationery side of things, with new factories opened in Leith and London. He ran the company from London until he retired to Oban, his son Waverley B. Cameron taking over. He was chairman of the Oban Times, until his death in 1954.

In 1911, the Oban Times editor’s chair was filled by Flora Anne, Duncan senior’s eldest daughter, when she and her husband retired to Oban. By this time she was known as Mrs Macaulay, her second husband being George Macaulay, a Superintendent of the Edinburgh City Police but also a highlander. The Macaulays had a house at Argyll Lodge, but also an apartment above the Oban Times‘ offices on the second floor.

George passed away in 1924, but Flora remained involved in the running of the Oban Times for the final 47 years of her life. She was a supporter of Highland culture and the Gaelic language and in 1947 helped establish the Macaulay Cup for camanachd (shinty), which is still going. She died in Oban in 1958 at the age of 99, still working on the paper despite having been invalided in an accident and confined to her home since 1952. She was returned to the Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh to be buried alongside her first husband and near the Cameron family plot, a vast Celtic cross with Pictish details marking the spot.

Duncan senior’s younger daughter Mary, who painted the portrait of him earlier in this post, was a renowned artist and sister to Duncan junior, Waverley and Flora. She travelled to Spain in 1900 to study art and fell in love with the country, becoming known for her Spanish scenes. She had a particular skill for painting animals, having practised using the family dogs and her own horse as models and by taking classes at the Edinburgh Veterinary College to better understand animal anatomy.

In the late 1939 Waverley House was taken over by the Scottish Wayfarer’s Welfare Society as a boys home, it having been evicted from its own premises in Stockbridge by wartime Civil Defence. It took in boys from broken homes or off the street – usually turned over by sympathisers in the authorities as an alternative to the punishment of a reformatory – who found themselves in the city “penniless, tattered, despondent and hungry“. The organisation could house around 25 to 30 boys at a time, they typically stayed for six months before moving on to employment such as agricultural labour or the armed forces. The Society had only been established in 1935, starting off with the donation of £10 and use of an abandoned police station on Hamilton Place by Miss Dorothea Maitland.

It was a very progressive place for the time and while it was initially set up just to be a night shelter, it soon took on a wider purpose as a reactionary response to the ill effects of institutionalisation at the time. It sought to provide its boys with the caring, family atmosphere that was missing from their lives, with each resident being assigned a “Housemother” and a “Housefather” from amongst the staff. It had a rule of never turning a boy away, and never holding someone’s past against them and sought to re-integrate wayward youths back into society with a sense of purpose and self-worth. It was reported as having had a good success rate, with 51 out of 55 boys cared for in 1957 passing successfully on from the house into work.

The house parents rose at 430AM to ready the first boys for their work or training, and all boys had to return by 10PM, later on Friday and Saturday evenings. Even after they left the boys were encouraged to treat Waverley House as their family home. The Wayfarer’s Society were still there as late as 1983 when they advertised for staff for the establishment to help care for its nine residents. The trustees of the society sold the building to Ogilivie Homes in 1989, who converted it to the retirement complex of Perdrixknowe and started it on the next chapter of its life.

Thank you to John Grant who has allowed me to include some of the research of his late father-in-law, Derek Prime, who was a resident of Perdrixknowe and took a keen interest in research its history, as well as that of the Cameron family and Sir James Gowans.

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.