#written2024 — Public Fediverse posts

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.

The illuminated Christmas Tree on the Mound in Edinburgh, December 2024. Photo © Self

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.

A Scottish Christmas tree, 1853; all the rage amongst the Victorian upper class. Sketch by Jemima Wedderburn showing her husband (with shovel) Hugh Blackburn, the Dowager Countess of Selkirk (Jemima’s aunt) in the centre with her son Dunbar Douglas, 6th Earl of Selkirk (Jemima’s 2nd cousin) and “Mr Carnegie” with the poker. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

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.

Advert, The Scotsman, 22nd December 1849. 27 Princes Street would later become the site of R. W. Forsyth’s department store and, after that, Topshop.

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.

“West end of Princes Street in the snow”. Unknown photographer, 1900, credit Edinburgh City Libraries. St. John’s Episcopal Church fills the left 1/3 of the frame.

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.

News photo from Evening News, 17th December 1937, showing carrying the Christmas Tree through the gates of the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh. The 2nd and 3rd men wear the dog collars of Kirk ministers, one is described as the Reverend Selby Wright, minister of Canongate – he is the one wearing glasses.

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.

News photo, Evening News, 21st December 1937. The two illuminated Christmas trees at St. Giles make a dramatic photo

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 department store, Edinburgh, Christmas tree in the Great Hall, December 2015. CC-by-SA 4.0, Grousebeater2, via Wikimedia.

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.

Jenners Christmas Tree mentioned in a newspaper advert for the store. Southern Reporter, December 15th 1938

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.

Newspaper photo of the unveiling of the Waverley Christmas tree, Evening News, 18th December 1945. Present is Bailie West Russell as representative of the Lord Provost, he is pressing the switch to turn on the lights. There are many nurses in the crowd as the tree was a collection point for presents for children in hospital over the festive period

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.

Newsprint photo, Evening News, 15th December 1950, of the Christmas Tree display at Princes Street Station. There appears to be a collection box attached to the railing on the left of the reindeer

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.

Newspaper photo, Evening News, 15th December 1949, showing the Christmas Tree snapped in half. A classic of the “the Council are looking into it” genre.

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.

Newspaper photo, December 17th 1949, showing the lighting up of the Christmas Tree on The Mound.

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.

Newspaper photo, The Scotsman, 17 December 1962. The tree can be made out beneath the collapsed pile of scaffolding that was being used by the Lighting Department to decorate it.

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.

Newspaper photo, December 4th 1987. Cllr Lesley Hinds and Santa with children of Graysmill School light up the Christmas tree

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.

The illuminated Christmas Tree on the Mound in Edinburgh, December 2024. Photo © Self

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.

A Scottish Christmas tree, 1853; all the rage amongst the Victorian upper class. Sketch by Jemima Wedderburn showing her husband (with shovel) Hugh Blackburn, the Dowager Countess of Selkirk (Jemima’s aunt) in the centre with her son Dunbar Douglas, 6th Earl of Selkirk (Jemima’s 2nd cousin) and “Mr Carnegie” with the poker. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

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.

Advert, The Scotsman, 22nd December 1849. 27 Princes Street would later become the site of R. W. Forsyth’s department store and, after that, Topshop.

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.

“West end of Princes Street in the snow”. Unknown photographer, 1900, credit Edinburgh City Libraries. St. John’s Episcopal Church fills the left 1/3 of the frame.

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.

News photo from Evening News, 17th December 1937, showing carrying the Christmas Tree through the gates of the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh. The 2nd and 3rd men wear the dog collars of Kirk ministers, one is described as the Reverend Selby Wright, minister of Canongate – he is the one wearing glasses.

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.

News photo, Evening News, 21st December 1937. The two illuminated Christmas trees at St. Giles make a dramatic photo

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 department store, Edinburgh, Christmas tree in the Great Hall, December 2015. CC-by-SA 4.0, Grousebeater2, via Wikimedia.

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.

Jenners Christmas Tree mentioned in a newspaper advert for the store. Southern Reporter, December 15th 1938

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.

Newspaper photo of the unveiling of the Waverley Christmas tree, Evening News, 18th December 1945. Present is Bailie West Russell as representative of the Lord Provost, he is pressing the switch to turn on the lights. There are many nurses in the crowd as the tree was a collection point for presents for children in hospital over the festive period

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.

Newsprint photo, Evening News, 15th December 1950, of the Christmas Tree display at Princes Street Station. There appears to be a collection box attached to the railing on the left of the reindeer

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.

Newspaper photo, Evening News, 15th December 1949, showing the Christmas Tree snapped in half. A classic of the “the Council are looking into it” genre.

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.

Newspaper photo, December 17th 1949, showing the lighting up of the Christmas Tree on The Mound.

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.

Newspaper photo, The Scotsman, 17 December 1962. The tree can be made out beneath the collapsed pile of scaffolding that was being used by the Lighting Department to decorate it.

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.

Newspaper photo, December 4th 1987. Cllr Lesley Hinds and Santa with children of Graysmill School light up the Christmas tree

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.

The illuminated Christmas Tree on the Mound in Edinburgh, December 2024. Photo © Self

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.

A Scottish Christmas tree, 1853; all the rage amongst the Victorian upper class. Sketch by Jemima Wedderburn showing her husband (with shovel) Hugh Blackburn, the Dowager Countess of Selkirk (Jemima’s aunt) in the centre with her son Dunbar Douglas, 6th Earl of Selkirk (Jemima’s 2nd cousin) and “Mr Carnegie” with the poker. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

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.

Advert, The Scotsman, 22nd December 1849. 27 Princes Street would later become the site of R. W. Forsyth’s department store and, after that, Topshop.

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.

“West end of Princes Street in the snow”. Unknown photographer, 1900, credit Edinburgh City Libraries. St. John’s Episcopal Church fills the left 1/3 of the frame.

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.

News photo from Evening News, 17th December 1937, showing carrying the Christmas Tree through the gates of the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh. The 2nd and 3rd men wear the dog collars of Kirk ministers, one is described as the Reverend Selby Wright, minister of Canongate – he is the one wearing glasses.

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.

News photo, Evening News, 21st December 1937. The two illuminated Christmas trees at St. Giles make a dramatic photo

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 department store, Edinburgh, Christmas tree in the Great Hall, December 2015. CC-by-SA 4.0, Grousebeater2, via Wikimedia.

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.

Jenners Christmas Tree mentioned in a newspaper advert for the store. Southern Reporter, December 15th 1938

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.

Newspaper photo of the unveiling of the Waverley Christmas tree, Evening News, 18th December 1945. Present is Bailie West Russell as representative of the Lord Provost, he is pressing the switch to turn on the lights. There are many nurses in the crowd as the tree was a collection point for presents for children in hospital over the festive period

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.

Newsprint photo, Evening News, 15th December 1950, of the Christmas Tree display at Princes Street Station. There appears to be a collection box attached to the railing on the left of the reindeer

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.

Newspaper photo, Evening News, 15th December 1949, showing the Christmas Tree snapped in half. A classic of the “the Council are looking into it” genre.

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.

Newspaper photo, December 17th 1949, showing the lighting up of the Christmas Tree on The Mound.

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.

Newspaper photo, The Scotsman, 17 December 1962. The tree can be made out beneath the collapsed pile of scaffolding that was being used by the Lighting Department to decorate it.

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.

Newspaper photo, December 4th 1987. Cllr Lesley Hinds and Santa with children of Graysmill School light up the Christmas tree

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.

The illuminated Christmas Tree on the Mound in Edinburgh, December 2024. Photo © Self

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.

A Scottish Christmas tree, 1853; all the rage amongst the Victorian upper class. Sketch by Jemima Wedderburn showing her husband (with shovel) Hugh Blackburn, the Dowager Countess of Selkirk (Jemima’s aunt) in the centre with her son Dunbar Douglas, 6th Earl of Selkirk (Jemima’s 2nd cousin) and “Mr Carnegie” with the poker. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

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.

Advert, The Scotsman, 22nd December 1849. 27 Princes Street would later become the site of R. W. Forsyth’s department store and, after that, Topshop.

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.

“West end of Princes Street in the snow”. Unknown photographer, 1900, credit Edinburgh City Libraries. St. John’s Episcopal Church fills the left 1/3 of the frame.

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.

News photo from Evening News, 17th December 1937, showing carrying the Christmas Tree through the gates of the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh. The 2nd and 3rd men wear the dog collars of Kirk ministers, one is described as the Reverend Selby Wright, minister of Canongate – he is the one wearing glasses.

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.

News photo, Evening News, 21st December 1937. The two illuminated Christmas trees at St. Giles make a dramatic photo

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 department store, Edinburgh, Christmas tree in the Great Hall, December 2015. CC-by-SA 4.0, Grousebeater2, via Wikimedia.

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.

Jenners Christmas Tree mentioned in a newspaper advert for the store. Southern Reporter, December 15th 1938

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.

Newspaper photo of the unveiling of the Waverley Christmas tree, Evening News, 18th December 1945. Present is Bailie West Russell as representative of the Lord Provost, he is pressing the switch to turn on the lights. There are many nurses in the crowd as the tree was a collection point for presents for children in hospital over the festive period

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.

Newsprint photo, Evening News, 15th December 1950, of the Christmas Tree display at Princes Street Station. There appears to be a collection box attached to the railing on the left of the reindeer

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.

Newspaper photo, Evening News, 15th December 1949, showing the Christmas Tree snapped in half. A classic of the “the Council are looking into it” genre.

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.

Newspaper photo, December 17th 1949, showing the lighting up of the Christmas Tree on The Mound.

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.

Newspaper photo, The Scotsman, 17 December 1962. The tree can be made out beneath the collapsed pile of scaffolding that was being used by the Lighting Department to decorate it.

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.

Newspaper photo, December 4th 1987. Cllr Lesley Hinds and Santa with children of Graysmill School light up the Christmas tree

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

This thread was originally written and published in March 2024.

For no good reason, I decided to make a chart that shows the changing political make-up of Edinburgh’s municipal government in the last 124 years. It’s a graph whose changing colours and gradients tell lots of different political and historical stories about municipal government in that time, so let’s pick apart 124 years of Edinburgh’s political local history and find out what was going on and why, shall we?

Seat make-up of Edinburgh Town / District / City Council after Municipal Elections, 1920-present

First things first, we need to get a few things out of the way. In doing so it helps to avoid coming to the wrong conclusions about the graph and helps to understand what’s going on in the background and how the local electoral system has changed over time.

Until 1974, people voted for the Town Council, which was the elected1 component of what was known formally as the Lord Provost, Magistrates and Council of the City and Royal Burgh of Edinburgh but almost universally as just the Corporation. The city was divided up into wards, as it is now, and each ward had three councillors, one of whom was elected each year on rotation. Each councillor served a three year term after which they retired but could stand again for re-election. This meant that voters were expected to vote annually for one councillor, the ballots of which were always held in the first week of November until in 1948 they were shifted to May. If a councillor stepped down or died during their term of office there would either be a by-election or if it was close to the next election then two seats would be up for grabs. Very occasionally, the entire Town Council was up for vote, e.g. after the amalgamation of Edinburgh and Leith in 1920 and when the date of ballots moved from November to May in 1948.

The Town Council in April 1961, the Lord Provost (John Greig Dunbar) and Bailies (senior Magistrates) sit at the head of the meeting. The Labour members are on the left, the Progressives on the right © Edinburgh City Libraries

In 1974, voters went to the polls to vote for members of the new District Council. The District was the lower tier of municipal government established by the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973. Edinburgh, Mid-, East and West Lothian Districts together formed the upper tier; Lothian Regional Council. This new system came into effect on May 16th 1975 and had votes every three (later four) years for the entire council, with a single councillor elected per ward on a first-past-the-post system. In 1995, voters went to the polls for the unitary authority of the City (of Edinburgh) Council as a result of the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994 which abolished the Regional Councils and devolved their powers to new unitary authorities based roughly on the Districts (or closely, in the case of Edinburgh). City Council elections followed the same electoral system as the District until 2007, when the Local Governance (Scotland) Act 2004 changed this to a multi-member ward system, with three or four councillors elected every five years by proportional representation.

n.b. The graphs do not show the results of any intermediate by-elections, or the proportion of votes cast, it only shows the proportion of seats on the council that were held by each political grouping after the election of that year.

1920s. Moderates and Socialists

Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1920-30

Our graph starts at 1920, when a full Town Council election was held on account of Leith having just been incorporated in to the City under the terms of the Edinburgh Boundaries Extension and Tramways Act 1920. The city was completely dominated at this time by the purple of the Moderates – not a formal party, but a political bloc of small-c conservatives, Liberals, Unionists, Liberal-Unionists and Independents who were strongly aligned to the Church of Scotland and whose purpose was largely to keep the right sort of people running the city and keep the red Socialists2 of Labour out.

Central Edinburgh Constituency Labour Party banner, 1925. © Edinburgh City Libraries

The Moderates were effective in the latter purpose but inevitably Edinburgh’s first Labour councillor was elected on November 2nd 1909 when dentist John Alexander Young was returned for the Dalry ward. Although by 1930 Labour had crept slowly up to sixteen councillors – after a jump from 6 to 14 in 1926, (just shy of 1/4 of the Council – there was still no sign of the city “going red” as was threatening in Glasgow. Just peeping in at the top in 1930 is the thin grey line of a single independent councillor, Alexander Thomson, who would shift his allegiance to the Moderates in 1933.

1930s. Progressives and Protestants

Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1930-44

Between 1930 and 1940 there were two big changes in the Town Council – none of which actually affected who actually ran the City. In 1936 the loose, purple assemblage of the Moderates re-constituted themselves as the dark blue band of the Progressives, a more formally constituted party to counter the threat posed by Labour. On the formation of the Glasgow Progressives, where by now Labour was in control of the Town Council, the Scotsman described them as “an organisation which would effectively combat the Socialist menace, break down the apathy of many citizens, and co-ordinate all Moderate opinion in the city.” The other big change during this time was the brief but rapid rise and fall of the black band of John Cormack’s Protestant Action Society.

The banner of Loyal Orange Lodge no. 188, who style themselves “Cormack’s Protestant Defenders” on parade in Edinburgh, Lodge photo from public facebook group.

Protestant Action were an extreme, anti-Catholic organisation whose basic platform was “No Popery“. Cormack made a habit of causing trouble wherever he could, stoking sectarian tensions in overcrowded and underprivileged wards, whipping up his supporters into violence and occasional riots, but always careful to be able to absolve himself of the blame. He formed his party in 1933 and in 1934’s election it got one councillor on 6% of the popular vote. By 1935 it got 21% and three seats, peaking in 1936 with a worrying 31% of the vote and nine seats. But not even Cormack’s force of oratory could hold his unruly grouping together; the established Protestant power of the Orange Order would have little to do with them. They picked fights with the fascists and the communists and then they picked fights amongst themselves. Support for Protestant Action soon waned and in the last pre-war municipal election of 1938 they had dropped back to 12% and 6 seats. John Cormack however would cling on to his seat in South Leith, becoming the “Father of the Council” in 1956 as its longest serving member. This seniority entitled him to the office of Bailie, one that conferred significant authority. He retired in 1961.

Post-war. Labour Rising

Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1944-55

On the outbreak of war in 1939, the Government suspended municipal elections for the duration and so the Town Council sat, as it was, for the duration. Its representation did change however in 1940 when Dalry Labour councillors David Stephen (1938 election intake) and George Boath (1939 by-election) resigned their party and changed allegiance to the dark red band of the Communists. With no by-elections possible, they continued to serve under this particular banner until elections re-started in 1945 when they were duly voted out at the first opportunity.

Except from “Old Street, Edinburgh” by William Wilson, 1935. A scene looking up the old Elder Street to St. James Square and showing canvassers for the forthcoming general election. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

In line with the national trend, Labour saw an upsurge in post-war popularity, with its share of 40% of the popular vote translating to an increase to 27 seats, or 40% of the Town Council. This position was reversed in 1949 when they went back to 15 seats and 22% of the popular vote. Again this mirrored popular, national discontent with the Labour government and a recovery in Conservative fortunes. It was not until 1955 that Labour had managed to regain the ground it had lost to the Progressives six years previous, so the political status quo in the city was maintained throughout the decade. Protestant Action lost their seats coming up for re-election in 1945 and 1946, with only John Cormack able to cling on, as the thin black line at the bottom of the graph, from 1947 onwards.

1955-65. Progressive Decline

Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1955-65

The story of the next ten years was one of a long, slow waning in the fortunes of the Progressives. Throughout the decade Labour was able to make ground against them, until by the 1962 election both parties polled 38.5% of the popular vote, and in 1963 for the first time ever in Edinburgh Labour briefly surpassed the Progressives by this measure, 39.6% vs. 36.0%. But the three year system meant it was a long, slow process to effect political change although Labour had narrowed the gap between them and the Progressives to a single seat (32 vs. 33) by 1964, they were never quite able to bridge it. It cannot be seen in this chart, but in 1965 the Labour local vote collapsed to 27.9%, their worst since 1949, and the Progressives recovered to 58% after a run of five bad years. A new entrant onto the political scene in 1957 was Lady Morton (Hilda Sherwood Morton), who was elected for the orange strip of the Liberals in Merchiston ward. She was the first of her party to do so after it began to stand a few candidates in the city in 1955; by 1963 they had picked up four more for a total of five.

1965-74. End of the Old Order

Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1965-74

The next ten years following 1965 saw the first big shake-ups on the Edinburgh local political scene beyond the glacially slow 50 year rise of Labour. Most importantly, it was the decade in which party political politics, which had been more or less kept out of Municipal Government for the last 50 years, finally took over. Firstly, in 1962 the Unionist party started standing candidates. This was a centre-right political party that stood for Westminster elections in Scotland and that was aligned to the (English) Conservatives. In other parts of Scotland the National Liberal Party stood; both they and the Unionists took the Conservative whip in the House of Commons. In 1965 the Unionists formally merged with the Conservatives to form the Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party, joined in 1968 by the National Liberals. Just as the Moderates had given way to the Progressives, so to did the Progressives give way to the Conservatives, but over a much longer timescale. Note that the press had long called both the Progressives and the Unionists “Tories“. Most of the Progressive old guard continued to stand as such, but new candidates stood instead as Conservatives. The result was that after their first candidates were elected in 1962, the light blue band of the Conservatives gradually and seamlessly usurped the old party, which finally died out alongside the long-established Town Council in 1974.

During this period, the Labour party found its position for a while squeezed between the strengthened Tory bloc and the insurgent yellow blob of the Scottish National Party, which enjoyed a brief flurry of popularity after Winnie Ewing’s breakthrough victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election. In 1968 they swelled to 35% of the popular local vote in Edinburgh and by 1969 had ten councillors, before rapdily collapsing back to local indifference by 1972 with just 2.9% of the vote. The first Scottish nationalist candidate had stood for the Town Council way back in 1932 but no more stood until 1956-59 when their handful of candidates polled less than 1% of the popular vote.

Jack Kane, Lord Provost of Edinburgh 1972-75; official portrait by Alexander Goudie. True to his down-to-earth form, he has eschewed donning his official robes. He was the first Lord Provost to decline the honorary knighthood that his position conferred. © Museums & Galleries Edinburgh

By 1972, the SNP threat had gone, the Progressives were in terminal decline and Labour was recovering, and as a result it finally managed to become the largest party on the council, with 33 seats to the opposition’s 30. It had only taken them 63 years since their first councillor was sworn in! Their leader, Jack Kane, was elected Lord Provost that year, the first Labour holder of that post. With the final elections to the old Town Council in 1973, Labour had 34 seats and finally had a majority!

1974-95. District Days

Edinburgh District Council make-up 1974-95

In 1974, the residents of Edinburgh went to the polls to vote for their new District Council, which replaced a system of local Government that had been going in one form or another for the past 700 years or more. Interestingly, although archaic titles such as Lord Provost and Bailie were meant to be swept away, they were kept on as honorific positions. The District Council performed many of the functions of the old Edinburgh Corporation, but strategic issues such as Transport, Education, Regional Planning, Police and Fire were run by the upper tier of Regional Councils.

Lothian Regional Council ghost sign, 20 plus years after that authority ceased to be. Photo © Self

The results of the first election saw the Conservatives come out as the largest party, with one more seat than Labour. They lacked an overall majority but got it at the next ballot in 1977, with 34 of 67 seats. This marked the high point of the Conservative party in Edinburgh’s local government, and they have been in decline ever since. After the election of 1984, Labour increasingly dominated local politics. At the final District Council election in 1992, they took 30 of 62 seats, with the (by now) Liberal Democrats holding the balance of power. But by now there were more than two big parties in local politics and the single member wards with first-past-the-post electoral system did not function fairly. The Liberal Democrats in 1992 got 15% of the popular vote but only 3% of the seats. The SNP got 14% of the vote and no seats! Labour were flattered by the system, getting 48% of the seats on 29% of the vote.

1995-. The Rainbow Council

City of Edinburgh Council make-up 1995-2022

It was all change again in 1995, when voters at the local elections now went to choose their City Council, a unitary authority based largely on the boundaries and functions of the old District but with the additional responsibilities of the Regions, which would disappear the following year, also. There was no fundamental changes however; Labour continued to dominate, the Conservatives continued their decline and the Liberal Democrats filled the void for the sort of voter who would once have been religiously Moderate or Progressive but who found they couldn’t bring themselves to vote Conservative due to national issues. By 2003, Labour retained a slim majority (31 of 59 seats), with the Liberal Democrats the next largest bloc on 15.

The SNP had a real problem however – they were reliably getting 15-30% of the popular vote in the Council elections but rarely picked up seats; they gone 1.7% of the seats on 21.5% of the vote in 1999. Labour in contrast had more than 50% of the seats on less than one third of the vote. This democratic deficit was remedied in 2007 when a new system of multi-member wars elected by Single Transferable Vote (proportional representation) was brought in. This had the immediate effect of giving the long-suppressed SNP a huge boost, with one fifth of the popular vote and council seats gained that year. The change was disastrous for Labour however, whose commanding position was built on the shaky foundations of an unrepresentative electoral system and their number of seats more than halved, to one much more in line with their overall popularity. The changes also let in the Scottish Green Party, who after standing candidates in one form or another in the city since 1980 finally picked up 3 seats. Rainbow politics had finally arrived!

The story of the rest of the period covered by our graph is largely now the story of Scottish and British national politics. The Conservatives continued to decline in popularity, but got a post-2014 Independence Referendum boost; the Liberal Democrats were punished heavily in 2012 after their coalition government at Westminster with the former party, and their recovery has been slow and largely concentrated in their traditional base of the west of the city. Labour have been largely unable to capitalise on these changes however – caught between any number of local and national issues – as the SNP and Green popular vote has held up and continued to creep upwards, with a combined 40% in 2017 and 2022.

Portobello political window in 2014. National politics has now come to dominate local politics. © Edinburgh City Libraries

The last local election in 2022 was one fought heavily on manifestos of national issues, despite these not being something that any local Council has any jurisdiction in. As a result, it saw the Conservative turn in their worst ever result for the Moderate-Progressive-Conservative bloc in the 122 years of our graph, with just 18% of the vote and 14% (nine) seats. Labour managed only 19% of the vote and 20% of the seats, their second-worst result in 100 years and yet somehow managed to pull various political strings and favours to run a minority administration; something the SNP failed to have sufficient support from their opposition to do, despite remaining the largest party by both seats and popular vote.

Who knows what 2027 might bring!

1. There was an honorary seat on the Town Council for each of the Deacon Conveners (senior office holders) of the Merchant Company and the Incorporated Trades, meaning two members of the Town Council were unelected ↩︎
2. The Scotsman perceived the Socialists as an extreme threat to the established order of the city and was strongly and persistently hostile to them in the 1920s through to the 1940s. In its reporting it almost always referred to them as just “the Socialists” ↩︎

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

https://threadinburgh.scot/2024/03/07/the-thread-about-122-years-of-local-political-change-in-edinburgh-from-moderates-and-progressives-to-communists-and-protestants/

#Edinburgh #LocalPolitics #May16 #politics #Written2024

This thread was originally written and published in March 2024.

For no good reason, I decided to make a chart that shows the changing political make-up of Edinburgh’s municipal government in the last 124 years. It’s a graph whose changing colours and gradients tell lots of different political and historical stories about municipal government in that time, so let’s pick apart 124 years of Edinburgh’s political local history and find out what was going on and why, shall we?

Seat make-up of Edinburgh Town / District / City Council after Municipal Elections, 1920-present

First things first, we need to get a few things out of the way. In doing so it helps to avoid coming to the wrong conclusions about the graph and helps to understand what’s going on in the background and how the local electoral system has changed over time.

Until 1974, people voted for the Town Council, which was the elected1 component of what was known formally as the Lord Provost, Magistrates and Council of the City and Royal Burgh of Edinburgh but almost universally as just the Corporation. The city was divided up into wards, as it is now, and each ward had three councillors, one of whom was elected each year on rotation. Each councillor served a three year term after which they retired but could stand again for re-election. This meant that voters were expected to vote annually for one councillor, the ballots of which were always held in the first week of November until in 1948 they were shifted to May. If a councillor stepped down or died during their term of office there would either be a by-election or if it was close to the next election then two seats would be up for grabs. Very occasionally, the entire Town Council was up for vote, e.g. after the amalgamation of Edinburgh and Leith in 1920 and when the date of ballots moved from November to May in 1948.

The Town Council in April 1961, the Lord Provost (John Greig Dunbar) and Bailies (senior Magistrates) sit at the head of the meeting. The Labour members are on the left, the Progressives on the right © Edinburgh City Libraries

In 1974, voters went to the polls to vote for members of the new District Council. The District was the lower tier of municipal government established by the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973. Edinburgh, Mid-, East and West Lothian Districts together formed the upper tier; Lothian Regional Council. This new system came into effect on May 16th 1975 and had votes every three (later four) years for the entire council, with a single councillor elected per ward on a first-past-the-post system. In 1995, voters went to the polls for the unitary authority of the City (of Edinburgh) Council as a result of the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994 which abolished the Regional Councils and devolved their powers to new unitary authorities based roughly on the Districts (or closely, in the case of Edinburgh). City Council elections followed the same electoral system as the District until 2007, when the Local Governance (Scotland) Act 2004 changed this to a multi-member ward system, with three or four councillors elected every five years by proportional representation.

n.b. The graphs do not show the results of any intermediate by-elections, or the proportion of votes cast, it only shows the proportion of seats on the council that were held by each political grouping after the election of that year.

1920s. Moderates and Socialists

Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1920-30

Our graph starts at 1920, when a full Town Council election was held on account of Leith having just been incorporated in to the City under the terms of the Edinburgh Boundaries Extension and Tramways Act 1920. The city was completely dominated at this time by the purple of the Moderates – not a formal party, but a political bloc of small-c conservatives, Liberals, Unionists, Liberal-Unionists and Independents who were strongly aligned to the Church of Scotland and whose purpose was largely to keep the right sort of people running the city and keep the red Socialists2 of Labour out.

Central Edinburgh Constituency Labour Party banner, 1925. © Edinburgh City Libraries

The Moderates were effective in the latter purpose but inevitably Edinburgh’s first Labour councillor was elected on November 2nd 1909 when dentist John Alexander Young was returned for the Dalry ward. Although by 1930 Labour had crept slowly up to sixteen councillors – after a jump from 6 to 14 in 1926, (just shy of 1/4 of the Council – there was still no sign of the city “going red” as was threatening in Glasgow. Just peeping in at the top in 1930 is the thin grey line of a single independent councillor, Alexander Thomson, who would shift his allegiance to the Moderates in 1933.

1930s. Progressives and Protestants

Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1930-44

Between 1930 and 1940 there were two big changes in the Town Council – none of which actually affected who actually ran the City. In 1936 the loose, purple assemblage of the Moderates re-constituted themselves as the dark blue band of the Progressives, a more formally constituted party to counter the threat posed by Labour. On the formation of the Glasgow Progressives, where by now Labour was in control of the Town Council, the Scotsman described them as “an organisation which would effectively combat the Socialist menace, break down the apathy of many citizens, and co-ordinate all Moderate opinion in the city.” The other big change during this time was the brief but rapid rise and fall of the black band of John Cormack’s Protestant Action Society.

The banner of Loyal Orange Lodge no. 188, who style themselves “Cormack’s Protestant Defenders” on parade in Edinburgh, Lodge photo from public facebook group.

Protestant Action were an extreme, anti-Catholic organisation whose basic platform was “No Popery“. Cormack made a habit of causing trouble wherever he could, stoking sectarian tensions in overcrowded and underprivileged wards, whipping up his supporters into violence and occasional riots, but always careful to be able to absolve himself of the blame. He formed his party in 1933 and in 1934’s election it got one councillor on 6% of the popular vote. By 1935 it got 21% and three seats, peaking in 1936 with a worrying 31% of the vote and nine seats. But not even Cormack’s force of oratory could hold his unruly grouping together; the established Protestant power of the Orange Order would have little to do with them. They picked fights with the fascists and the communists and then they picked fights amongst themselves. Support for Protestant Action soon waned and in the last pre-war municipal election of 1938 they had dropped back to 12% and 6 seats. John Cormack however would cling on to his seat in South Leith, becoming the “Father of the Council” in 1956 as its longest serving member. This seniority entitled him to the office of Bailie, one that conferred significant authority. He retired in 1961.

Post-war. Labour Rising

Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1944-55

On the outbreak of war in 1939, the Government suspended municipal elections for the duration and so the Town Council sat, as it was, for the duration. Its representation did change however in 1940 when Dalry Labour councillors David Stephen (1938 election intake) and George Boath (1939 by-election) resigned their party and changed allegiance to the dark red band of the Communists. With no by-elections possible, they continued to serve under this particular banner until elections re-started in 1945 when they were duly voted out at the first opportunity.

Except from “Old Street, Edinburgh” by William Wilson, 1935. A scene looking up the old Elder Street to St. James Square and showing canvassers for the forthcoming general election. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

In line with the national trend, Labour saw an upsurge in post-war popularity, with its share of 40% of the popular vote translating to an increase to 27 seats, or 40% of the Town Council. This position was reversed in 1949 when they went back to 15 seats and 22% of the popular vote. Again this mirrored popular, national discontent with the Labour government and a recovery in Conservative fortunes. It was not until 1955 that Labour had managed to regain the ground it had lost to the Progressives six years previous, so the political status quo in the city was maintained throughout the decade. Protestant Action lost their seats coming up for re-election in 1945 and 1946, with only John Cormack able to cling on, as the thin black line at the bottom of the graph, from 1947 onwards.

1955-65. Progressive Decline

Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1955-65

The story of the next ten years was one of a long, slow waning in the fortunes of the Progressives. Throughout the decade Labour was able to make ground against them, until by the 1962 election both parties polled 38.5% of the popular vote, and in 1963 for the first time ever in Edinburgh Labour briefly surpassed the Progressives by this measure, 39.6% vs. 36.0%. But the three year system meant it was a long, slow process to effect political change although Labour had narrowed the gap between them and the Progressives to a single seat (32 vs. 33) by 1964, they were never quite able to bridge it. It cannot be seen in this chart, but in 1965 the Labour local vote collapsed to 27.9%, their worst since 1949, and the Progressives recovered to 58% after a run of five bad years. A new entrant onto the political scene in 1957 was Lady Morton (Hilda Sherwood Morton), who was elected for the orange strip of the Liberals in Merchiston ward. She was the first of her party to do so after it began to stand a few candidates in the city in 1955; by 1963 they had picked up four more for a total of five.

1965-74. End of the Old Order

Edinburgh Town Council make-up 1965-74

The next ten years following 1965 saw the first big shake-ups on the Edinburgh local political scene beyond the glacially slow 50 year rise of Labour. Most importantly, it was the decade in which party political politics, which had been more or less kept out of Municipal Government for the last 50 years, finally took over. Firstly, in 1962 the Unionist party started standing candidates. This was a centre-right political party that stood for Westminster elections in Scotland and that was aligned to the (English) Conservatives. In other parts of Scotland the National Liberal Party stood; both they and the Unionists took the Conservative whip in the House of Commons. In 1965 the Unionists formally merged with the Conservatives to form the Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party, joined in 1968 by the National Liberals. Just as the Moderates had given way to the Progressives, so to did the Progressives give way to the Conservatives, but over a much longer timescale. Note that the press had long called both the Progressives and the Unionists “Tories“. Most of the Progressive old guard continued to stand as such, but new candidates stood instead as Conservatives. The result was that after their first candidates were elected in 1962, the light blue band of the Conservatives gradually and seamlessly usurped the old party, which finally died out alongside the long-established Town Council in 1974.

During this period, the Labour party found its position for a while squeezed between the strengthened Tory bloc and the insurgent yellow blob of the Scottish National Party, which enjoyed a brief flurry of popularity after Winnie Ewing’s breakthrough victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election. In 1968 they swelled to 35% of the popular local vote in Edinburgh and by 1969 had ten councillors, before rapdily collapsing back to local indifference by 1972 with just 2.9% of the vote. The first Scottish nationalist candidate had stood for the Town Council way back in 1932 but no more stood until 1956-59 when their handful of candidates polled less than 1% of the popular vote.

Jack Kane, Lord Provost of Edinburgh 1972-75; official portrait by Alexander Goudie. True to his down-to-earth form, he has eschewed donning his official robes. He was the first Lord Provost to decline the honorary knighthood that his position conferred. © Museums & Galleries Edinburgh

By 1972, the SNP threat had gone, the Progressives were in terminal decline and Labour was recovering, and as a result it finally managed to become the largest party on the council, with 33 seats to the opposition’s 30. It had only taken them 63 years since their first councillor was sworn in! Their leader, Jack Kane, was elected Lord Provost that year, the first Labour holder of that post. With the final elections to the old Town Council in 1973, Labour had 34 seats and finally had a majority!

1974-95. District Days

Edinburgh District Council make-up 1974-95

In 1974, the residents of Edinburgh went to the polls to vote for their new District Council, which replaced a system of local Government that had been going in one form or another for the past 700 years or more. Interestingly, although archaic titles such as Lord Provost and Bailie were meant to be swept away, they were kept on as honorific positions. The District Council performed many of the functions of the old Edinburgh Corporation, but strategic issues such as Transport, Education, Regional Planning, Police and Fire were run by the upper tier of Regional Councils.

Lothian Regional Council ghost sign, 20 plus years after that authority ceased to be. Photo © Self

The results of the first election saw the Conservatives come out as the largest party, with one more seat than Labour. They lacked an overall majority but got it at the next ballot in 1977, with 34 of 67 seats. This marked the high point of the Conservative party in Edinburgh’s local government, and they have been in decline ever since. After the election of 1984, Labour increasingly dominated local politics. At the final District Council election in 1992, they took 30 of 62 seats, with the (by now) Liberal Democrats holding the balance of power. But by now there were more than two big parties in local politics and the single member wards with first-past-the-post electoral system did not function fairly. The Liberal Democrats in 1992 got 15% of the popular vote but only 3% of the seats. The SNP got 14% of the vote and no seats! Labour were flattered by the system, getting 48% of the seats on 29% of the vote.

1995-. The Rainbow Council

City of Edinburgh Council make-up 1995-2022

It was all change again in 1995, when voters at the local elections now went to choose their City Council, a unitary authority based largely on the boundaries and functions of the old District but with the additional responsibilities of the Regions, which would disappear the following year, also. There was no fundamental changes however; Labour continued to dominate, the Conservatives continued their decline and the Liberal Democrats filled the void for the sort of voter who would once have been religiously Moderate or Progressive but who found they couldn’t bring themselves to vote Conservative due to national issues. By 2003, Labour retained a slim majority (31 of 59 seats), with the Liberal Democrats the next largest bloc on 15.

The SNP had a real problem however – they were reliably getting 15-30% of the popular vote in the Council elections but rarely picked up seats; they gone 1.7% of the seats on 21.5% of the vote in 1999. Labour in contrast had more than 50% of the seats on less than one third of the vote. This democratic deficit was remedied in 2007 when a new system of multi-member wars elected by Single Transferable Vote (proportional representation) was brought in. This had the immediate effect of giving the long-suppressed SNP a huge boost, with one fifth of the popular vote and council seats gained that year. The change was disastrous for Labour however, whose commanding position was built on the shaky foundations of an unrepresentative electoral system and their number of seats more than halved, to one much more in line with their overall popularity. The changes also let in the Scottish Green Party, who after standing candidates in one form or another in the city since 1980 finally picked up 3 seats. Rainbow politics had finally arrived!

The story of the rest of the period covered by our graph is largely now the story of Scottish and British national politics. The Conservatives continued to decline in popularity, but got a post-2014 Independence Referendum boost; the Liberal Democrats were punished heavily in 2012 after their coalition government at Westminster with the former party, and their recovery has been slow and largely concentrated in their traditional base of the west of the city. Labour have been largely unable to capitalise on these changes however – caught between any number of local and national issues – as the SNP and Green popular vote has held up and continued to creep upwards, with a combined 40% in 2017 and 2022.

Portobello political window in 2014. National politics has now come to dominate local politics. © Edinburgh City Libraries

The last local election in 2022 was one fought heavily on manifestos of national issues, despite these not being something that any local Council has any jurisdiction in. As a result, it saw the Conservative turn in their worst ever result for the Moderate-Progressive-Conservative bloc in the 122 years of our graph, with just 18% of the vote and 14% (nine) seats. Labour managed only 19% of the vote and 20% of the seats, their second-worst result in 100 years and yet somehow managed to pull various political strings and favours to run a minority administration; something the SNP failed to have sufficient support from their opposition to do, despite remaining the largest party by both seats and popular vote.

Who knows what 2027 might bring!

1. There was an honorary seat on the Town Council for each of the Deacon Conveners (senior office holders) of the Merchant Company and the Incorporated Trades, meaning two members of the Town Council were unelected ↩︎
2. The Scotsman perceived the Socialists as an extreme threat to the established order of the city and was strongly and persistently hostile to them in the 1920s through to the 1940s. In its reporting it almost always referred to them as just “the Socialists” ↩︎

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

https://threadinburgh.scot/2024/03/07/the-thread-about-122-years-of-local-political-change-in-edinburgh-from-moderates-and-progressives-to-communists-and-protestants/

#Edinburgh #LocalPolitics #May16 #politics #Written2024

This thread was originally written and published in January 2024.

The pub in the picture below has been in the news for the wrong reasons recently but, despite its rather forbidding appearance these days, it’s a very important pub. It is a surviving example, serving its original purpose, of only a handful of such inter-war hostelries that were built in Edinburgh; the roadhouse. But these nine public houses didn’t just appear for no reason, they were the culmination of and response to a long political and social struggle around public drinking in the first half of the 20th century. Shall we unravel their story?

The Anchor Inn on West Granton Road.

The short version of the roadhouse story is this: they are a blend of 1930s architecture and design glamour that were used by the licensed trade to entice a new generation of sophisticated, Holywood-inspired, upmarket, car-driving drinkers. That’s partly true, but is by no means the full story.

1934 Dunlop Tyres advert showing cars arriving at an Art Deco roadhouse. © Illustrated London News

To understand how Edinburgh got its roadhouses we have to go back to 1913 when the Temperance movement was at the peak of its power and the Temperance (Scotland) Act was passed. This was also known as the Local Veto Act as it allowed localities to force referendums on going dry – although this only applied to public houses, not restaurants or hotels. The veto ballots could be called by 10% of registered electors in a burgh, parish or ward petitioning for it. There were 3 options on the bill:

• No Change, i.e. the area would stay wet
• Limitation – there would be a 25% reduction in licences in the area
• No Licence, i.e. prohibition

The No Licence option required a supermajority of 55% to pass, representing at least 35% of all electors in the area. If that hurdle failed to be passed, these votes were then counted towards Limitation.

British Women’s Temperance Association banner of the Scottish Christian Union, 1900. © Edinburgh City Libraries

The Act had unforeseen consequences though: the brewers and licensed trade circled their wagons and got organised, forming defence committees to coordinate their response. They also put off investment in their estates in case of an unfavourable ballot; why spend money with the threat of a loss of licence hanging over you? As a result the quality of pubs got worse, not better. But the Temperance Movement had to wait until the conclusion of WW1 before making their next move. This came in 1920 to coincide with local elections and they launched their Pussyfoot Campaign to coordinate mass petitioning for local veto ballots across Scotland. This was named after an American prohibition campaigner who arrived in the UK in 1919, who had a tactic of pussyfooting around pubs incognito to gather evidence against them. And so in December 1920, Edinburgh (amongst many other Scottish localities) held its first Local Veto ballot. The terms of the act meant that public houses had to shut during polling hours. The Evening News reported record trade in Musselburgh as the city’s drinkers fled to the sanctuary of the Honest Toun for the day. 

“Edinburgh Drouths Annex Musselburgh”. Edinburgh Evening News – 6th December 1920

But after the last pint glasses had been emptied, the last drams downed and the ballot papers counted, the Temperance Movement were in for a disappointment: Edinburgh voted firmly for No Change in every ward – 68% overall. No Licence got 29%, less than half of what was needed, with a small minority voting for Limitation. The city would stayed wet. The Movement tried again in 1923 and although the polls shifted a few percent, once again every ward voted for a majority of No Change. Things were closest in Morningside where it was 51:46% between status quo and prohibition. You can spot something of a definite inner city / suburban and social order based split in the numbers.

Edinburgh 1920 & 1923 Local Veto Act, results for “No Change” by Ward.

So it was now 1923, 10 years since the Temperance Act was passed, and neither the Movement or the more moderate Reformers were any further forward in the city and the trade still refused to invest in their estates. And so the quality of pubs continued to deteriorate. Many in the trade did recognise the need to improve, however they wanted the threat of the 1913 Act pulling the rug from under their feet to be gone before they put their money where their mouths were. They were supported politically in this by reformers, led by Lord Novar in the House of Lords and Lord Salvesen of the Scottish Public House Reform League. The Reformers took as their template the New Model Inn developed by Harry Redfern for the Government in the Carlisle district after WW1 which aimed to use better design and an improved service offering to reduce drunkenness.

The Redfern Inn at Etterby, Carlisle

Despite the deliberately anachronistic appearance, these were a modern ideal of a public house, full of design innovations that we now take for granted. These included the practice of seated drinking around tables in open saloons where all corners and entries and exits could be viewed from the bar line; traditionally most pubs indulged in drinking standing around a small service bar, or in small rooms where what happened in the room stayed in the room. Public bars were accompanied by relaxed lounge bars, where women were tolerated in the company of their husbands, hot food was served and other wholesome diversions such as reading, writing and games rooms were included. The Scottish Reformers called these the Improved Public House on the Carlisle Model. Interestingly, they declined to follow a different but more local and established form of reformed public house; the Gothenburg. The Goth movement grew out of that city and had been established cooperatively across Scottish mining communities, but particularly in the Lothians and Fife. It is likely that the Goth principles were too Temperate and too verging on Socialism for the trade to accept.

The Prestongrange Goth, Prestonpans. CC-by-SA 2.0 Richard Webb

Reform was all well and good in practice, however the trade still had to get through the Licensing Courts, which were stuffed with conservatively-minded councillors who were frequently aligned with the Church and were heavily lobbied by well organised Temperance campaigners and their lawyers. The Courts were able to make it very difficult for new licenses to be obtained and all too easy for old ones to be lost. Over time they managed to reduce the overall numbers of licences in the City by granting fewer than were removed or expired.

The end result of all this was that there was a period of almost 20 years when no new pubs were built in Edinburgh. Things came to a head in 1933 when the President of the Edinburgh Local Veto Defence Association petitioned for a licence for a new inn in the new district of Balgreen. Robert Russell Hogg had kept a pub next to the City Chambers for 21 years, which the Corporation now wanted him to give up to allow them to extend that building. He pushed a test case to allow an Improved Tavern in an otherwise dry district as a direct challenge to Temperance – stipulating he wanted to be out of the city centre and in an area where he would not have to compete with established trade. Hogg was a keen reformer and stated he wanted “an inn after the English type, something the trade would be proud to have in Edinburgh“.

The Temperance Movement had thus far managed to keep all of Edinburgh’s new peripheral council housing schemes effectively “dry” by preventing licenses for pubs and off-licence grocers. They had a lot to lose here and rallied their troops; a petition of 181 owners and occupiers in the district against Hogg’s application was organised. The ministers of Saughtonhall Congregational Church, the Cairns Memorial Church and Stenhouse Church of Scotland all lodged protests. But lose lose they did, by 9-1 votes at the licensing court. And so on December 24th 1934, Edinburgh’s first newly built pub in at least 20 years opened; The Wheatsheaf Inn on Balgreen Road. It was in an Scottish interpretation of the Arts & Crafts style by architects Lorimer & Matthew. Hogg took out adverts calling it “Auld Reekie’s New Modern Inn“.

Promotional postcard for the Wheatsheef, showing interior of the establishment. Reproduced with kind permission of Sarah M (@sazz_mck).

When it opened it was almost 1/3 mile from the nearest house. It was spacious, with a large, open “tap room” with no corners that could not be observed from the bar line, a kitchen and dining room, a garden, car park and a flat for the landlord upstairs. To cock a snoot at the Temperance Movement, Hogg had an ornamental sculpture added with a legend taken from Omar Khayyam installed above the front door: “AND AS THE COCK CREW THOSE WHO STOOD BEFORE THE TAVERN SHOUTED OPEN THEN THE DOOR“.

Wheatsheaf, the main door was on the right, below the chimney and carving over the lintel. Picture by Fiona Coutts, via British Listed Buildings.

The Lord Provost was supportive of the new initiative, and hoped it would help put an end to the scourge of Vertical Drinking (or Perpendicular Drinking as he particularly called it). This was the practice of drinking standing around a serving hatch or bar (which many howffs at the time basically were), rather than seated politely around tables. The Improved Public House genie was now out of the bottle, but others in the trade held back a bit to see how Hogg got on. When it was clear he wad a success on his hands, others decided to join in on the action. The Licensing Courts sat twice a year and so the next two applications had to wait until April 1935.

First up was a widow, Mrs Johan Thom, who kept the Stenhouse Inn by Liberton. She wanted an Improved Pub to replace this old country tavern which she had run with her late husband and her application was successful. The Arts & Craft style Greenend Inn opened on Gilmerton Road on March 23rd 1936, but it has always almost been known by the nickname of its predecessor, The Robin’s Nest. You can see that particular bird on the prominent external sign. These elaborate, painted tavern signs were an import from England where the brewery trade had been trying to revive their ancient art. Mrs Thom had gone all out on the latest facilities, with lounge and public bars, a tea room, restaurant, “parking and accommodation for cars” and a skittle alley! The skittle alley (or space devoted to such other such traditional, wholesome games) would become something of a feature of the roadhouses.

The Greenend Inn, Edinburgh Evening News- 30 June 1936

The other application made at this time was something altogether different from these Arts & Crafts reinterpretations of the traditional Olde English country tavern, something instead inspired by the glamour of Hollywood and the ocean liner. This was the Maybury Roadhouse; “Scotland’s premier commercial establishment of the 1930s“.

Artist’s Impression of the Maybury Roadhouse. Edinburgh Evening News- 01 May 1935

Gone here were old world comforts of wood and the fireplace and in were sleek Streamline Moderne architecture (by Paterson & Broom) and the glitz of neon lights and jazz bands, the cocktail bar, the grill restaurant, the ballroom, balconies, a mezzanine gallery and rooftop garden. The Maybury opened on 19th November 1936, despite 260 objections by the Temperance Movement and the usual protests of local ministers. Its licensees were Messrs P. McDougall, who had been in the trade for over 40 years, and it cost them £10,000 to build (c. £584k in 2023). Although sometimes referred to as a “roadhouse hotel“, actually a defining feature of the roadhouse was that they were not hotels, the Dundee Licensing Court defined them in 1937 as “a house which supplied all the services of the hotel without sleeping accommodation“. Certainly it was the ultimate expression of the roadhouse concept in Scotland, and endures (as a casino) as one of the finest monuments to Art Deco in the country.

Maybury Gala Casino, CC-by-SA 2.0 Thomas Nugent

The scale and ostentatious glamour of the Maybury was a one-off, but it influenced subsequent applications in the city. Six months after its licence was granted, in October 1935, Mrs Jemima Hood Gair petitioned for a new roadhouse on Niddrie Mains Road to serve the housing estates there with all the latest features, including a billiards room. She had been in the trade herself for 11 years after the death of her husband and kept a licensed grocer at West Adam Street and a pub on Couper Street in Leith. The Temperance Movement were furious – this was a blatant attempt to introduce the public house to a housing scheme they considered to be dry (even though men who wanted to just went into town to drink) and sent in their lawyer, Duncan Maclennan SSC, to lead the objections. By 8 votes to 1, she prevailed, on the condition she relinquished her two existing premises, a compromise position that resulted in a net reduction in licences of one in the city. She was also obliged to serve hot meals as had been proposed. The White House opened on 18th October 1936, in an Art Deco style by Leith architects W. N. Thomson. It featured two public bars, a saloon, cocktail bar, a lounge bar, a skittle alley and billiards and darts rooms, as well as a cafe-cum-restaurant.

Opening announcement for the White House, Evening News, 22 October 1936. Mrs Gair is in the centre of the lower image, in the coat with dark fur lapels.

The April 1936 licensing committee takes us back where we started, the Anchor Inn on West Granton Road. This application, by James Birrell Rintoul, was approved that year to an Art Deco design by Thomas Bowhill Gibson, better known as a cinema architect (including The Dominion in Morningside). The Anchor is probably the furthest from the model of the Roadhouse of the lot; in reality it was just a modern and vaguely upmarket public house decorated with contemporary architectural details. The Temperance Movement were probably right to see it as merely a way to get a public house into an otherwise dry estate. They managed to make it a close run thing at the Licensing Court, again Duncan Maclennan SSC opposed, as well as all 36 church ministers in Leith. Rintoul relied on the casting vote of Lord Provost Gumley to get it through and was obliged to provide “hot luncheons, high teas, cooked food“.

The year following The Anchor, three roadhouse licenses were granted. The first to open was the Hillburn Roadhouse which was the project of John Maclennan Oman and his wife Nellie who kept a number of pubs across the city and been in the trade over 40 years. Despite it being, then, well away from anything else, they still struggled to get a licence and had to have it granted on appeal.

The Hillburn Roadhouse, a contemporary photograph provided by Colin Dale to a book by Malcolm Cant.

It featured all the usual roadhouse facilities, with three bars, a “first class restaurant” (serving luncheons, snacks, afternoon teas, grills, dinners, suppers etc.), an off-licence shop, car parking and “commanding a fine view of the Pentland Hills“. Latterly run as the Fairmile Inn and suffering the indignity of a Scottish & Newcastle ski chalet-themed 1970s refurbishment, the Hillburn sat empty for a number of years, unloved and unwanted, and was demolished in 2013. It’s the only Edinburgh roadhouse to suffer this fate.

Hillburn Roadhouse skittles alley. RIAS photo, picture from a book by Malcolm Cant

Johnnie Oman died in 1942. Nellie continued to run the Hillburn, living in the flat above, until retiring to the Grange in 1956. One of their other bars, the Duddingston Arms in Craigmillar, has long been known as Oman’s in their honour. It’s proximity to The White House can’t just be a coincidence, the Omans can’t have missed this new establishment along the road from them and were undoubtedly inspired by it.

Oman’s bar on Peffer Place. The finest glass brick pub facade in Edinburgh.

The following month after the Hillburn opened, James Daly opened the Abercorn Inn on the Portobello Road, near the Northfield and Piershill housing schemes. He too had to go to appeal to get permission for it. His establishment was back to the Arts & Crafts Style of the Robin’s Nest (and although I can’t find an architect name for either, I’d put money on them being one and the same)

The (former) Abercorn Inn. Photo © Self

It opened “in the Old English Style” on September 16th 1938 and had almost exactly the same facilities as its lookalike. The opening announcement proudly concluded that “Only First-Class Ales and Finest Whiskies and Wines Stocked“.

Opening announcement for the Abercorn Inn, 16th September 1938

The last of the trio of 1937 roadhouses opened on 11th October 1938, the House O’ Hill on the Queensferry Road at Blackhall. The licensee was Edward Cranston, a wine and spirit merchant whose premises included that now known as The King’s Wark on the Shore in Leith. Again it followed the Arts & Crafts style, but contrary to some sources was a new building and not converted from an older tavern or coaching house.

The House O’ Hill on the right, with the English-style pub sign outside. From an old postcard.

It too proved controversial, not because it was in a dry scheme this time, but because of its genteel surroundings. Lord Provost Gumley struggled to be heard over cries of “No!” and “Shame!” when announcing the granting of its licence. The 238 objectors claimed it was not Temperance that was their objection, but that the Queensferry Road was too busy during the day and too quiet at night to be acceptable for the motor car traffic “of the young and gay” that such an establishment would undoubtedly attract. But once again they failed to block it, and it opened with a mock-Tudor main bar with an “Old English style brick fireplace” and equipped with “small tables and comfortable modern chairs“. The “high-class restaurant” could seat 100, there was a games room with its own bar and a cocktail bar with feature lighting. Outside there were decorative gardens with fir trees and Japanese shrubs, and a car park for 25 vehicles. For as many years as I can remember, the place has been used as offices, but still retains its Olde English style pub signboard out front

The House O’ Hill these days, as offices for the Scottish Grocers Federation

Not all roadhouses got through the Licensing Court however, and the objectors were able to stop a few. One on East Milton Road was declined due to its proximity to two boarding houses for girls. Another at Stenhouse Road was knocked back, as was one on Northfield Broadway. The latter would eventually be built post-war, with the curious name of the Right Wing. This came from its landlord, Hibs’ legendary “Famous Five” right winger, Gordon Smith. It was demolished in 2018 for a speculative development which has yet to be built five years later.

The Right Wing in 2008.

But that’s a postwar roadhouse, and we’re here to talk about inter-war roadhouses. The last of these was approved at the licensing court of April 1938 and was one of two competing schemes on opposite corners of Parkhead Gardens at Sighthill, then a new and somewhat upmarket estate of privately rented houses and flats. Messrs. Mitchell, caterers, were successful in their application, but the opening was delayed until February 1st 1940 owing to the outbreak of war. The named it the Silver Wing in connection with the glamour of aviation. The green-tiled pagoda tower over the entrance is distinctive, but it’s not an early prototype for an all-you-can-eat Chinese Buffet! No, one of the directors of Messrs Mitchell & Co. had a pilots licence, and wanted the place to have an aeronautical theme. That pagoda is actually a control tower! The main bar floor was laid out as an aviators compass, the cocktail bar was called “The Cockpit” and painted panels and engraved mirrors around the bars represented flight-themed scenes, including of the Luftwaffe bombing raids over the Firth of Forth in October 1939. As well as a skittle alley it had a ballroom with capacity for 200 dancers.

The Silver Wing at Sightill

The Silver Wing was a forces favourite for dances during WW2 – being conveniently close to the RAF at Turnhouse (the officers preferred the Maybury) and also a prisoner of war camp a bit along the Calder Road.

A Company, Edinburgh Home Guard, dance at the Silver Wing, Evening News, January 11th 1941

Although only nine roadhouses were built in Edinburgh in the inter-war period, they did a fairly comprehensive job at positioning themselves on the principal approach roads from the city; staying true to the roadhouse ideal, even if some were really just glorified local pubs.

Map of Edinburgh’s inter-war roadhouse inns. Purple pins are establishments.

The Temperance Movement and the Local Veto polls never went away despite these reformist pubs, indeed it may have galvanised some in the movment. The last such referendum in Edinburgh was in Corstorphine & Cramond ward in 1938 where 76% voted for No Change. Polls continued in Scotland into the 1970s, before final abolition in 1976. You can still drink in the Anchor Inn, Robin’s Nest, Silver Wing and the Maybury (although the latter is a Casino, so you need to join first). The White House is looking good, but is a (dry) community facility. The Abercorn, House O’ Hill and Wheatsheaf are commercial premises.

The White House after 2011 refurbishment – pic by Smith Scott Mullan Associates

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 © 2017-2023, Andy Arthur

https://threadinburgh.scot/2024/01/25/the-thread-about-edinburghs-roadhouses-when-the-glamour-of-art-deco-hostelries-took-on-the-temperance-movement-and-won/

#architecture #ArtDeco #Balgreen #Blackhall #Edinburgh #Liberton #LocalPolitics #Niddrie #publicHouses #pubs #temperance #Written2024