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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pipe Organ, St. Giles Cathedral” — The pipe organ at the St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh.

Pipe organs are impressive in many ways. The sound is remarkable, especially in appropriate acoustical spaces. (It must be quite an experience for the lone musician to make that much sound, at volumes that can compete with full symphony orchestras.) The visual appearance is compelling and somewhat magical. But there’s another aspect that has long impressed me. Back in my college music teaching days, I used to point out to classes that early versions of the organ were entirely mechanical — and that it is just about impossible to imagine a more complex and sophisticated technology from that era. And it was all for a musical instrument!…continues: https://gdanmitchell.com/2024/09/29/pipe-organ-st-giles-cathedral/

#pipeorgan #stgiles #edinburgh #scotland #unitedkingdom #travel #photography #music

“Light Beam, St. Giles Cathedral”— Light from an upper window forms beams inside St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh.

We concluded our three weeks in Scotland earlier this year with a few days in Edinburgh. This marked one extreme on the continuum of our visit, with the opposite end defined by a week spent walking the quiet trails of the Great Glen Way. Edinburgh, of course, is not just a rather large city, but it is also a place that attracts crowds of tourists, even when we were there before prime tourist season. Since it was our first visit to the city we had to, of course, visit some of the famous sites…continues: https://gdanmitchell.com/2024/09/27/light-beam-st-giles-cathedral/

#stgiles #edinburgh #historical #scotland #cathedral #travel #unitedkingdom #photography

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

This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A statue of an angel in the churchyard of St Giles's church in Codicote in Hertfordshire. #codicote #stgiles #angel #statue #churchyard