Classical Edinburgh: A City Divided

By Alan H Balfour

This work is both a family history and a social history of Scotland seen against a city, Edinburgh, acity that to this day is soured by class divisions. In tracing the family back several centuries, the book embeds their lives into the larger forces shaping the Scottish culture, climaxing in the creation of the New Town of Edinburgh – one of the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s extravagant romantic fantasies. The New Town produced a reality, shaped by the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment, which gave identity to a capital of a nation in name only, after the closing of the Scottish parliament with the Union of the Crowns in 1707.

• Language: English
• Publisher: First Hill Books
• Release date: Mar 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839987908

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Classical Edinburgh

Classical Edinburgh

A City Divided

Alan Balfour

FIRST HILL BOOKS

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2023

by FIRST HILL BOOKS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2023 Alan Balfour

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022921006

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-789-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-789-8 (Hbk)

Cover Credit: Regent Bridge from Calton Road image (1895), photographer unknown. With permission from CANMORE, National Record of Historic Environment, HES Collection.

This title is also available as an e-book.

Thus, the broad and comely approach to Prince’s Street from the east, lined with hotels and public offices, makes a leap over the gorge of the Low Calton; if you cast a glance over the parapet, you look direct into that sunless and disreputable confluent of Leith Street; and the same tall houses open upon both thoroughfares. This is only the New Town passing overhead above its own cellars; walking, so to speak, over its own children, as is the way of cities and the human race.

Robert Louis. Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes

[1] Overleaf and cover. Looking up at Regent Bridge from the Low Calton.

To my mother and father whose lives were shaped in large measure by all that follows.

Contents

Prologue

I

Poverty, Filth and Bondage

II

Ambition

III

The New Town of Edinburgh

IV

The New Society

V

Building Status

VI

The Other New Town

VII

Into The Twentieth Century

VIII

Reflections

Methods and Sources

Bibliography

Prologue

As I looked through my sister’s papers after her funeral in 2013, my ignorance of the family’s history became startlingly clear. There on a death certificate I saw for the first time my paternal grandfather’s name and learned that he had married twice and that my father had one half-brother and three half-sisters of whom I knew nothing. I then realized I could not name either of my grandmothers. It was at that moment that I decided to write this history of our two families, the Finlays and Balfours.

The only grandparent who had any presence in my childhood was my mother’s father James Finlay. He was killed in action in Flanders in 1918. I have no memory of my mother ever mentioning her mother. Inexplicably, neither my father nor his sister ever mentioned or discussed their parents. So, with scant evidence to go and with the help of the extraordinary Scottish government website Scotlands People, and one formative memory from childhood, I devoted myself to the task, and one fact quickly became increasingly clear, the histories of my two families could not be more different, one, my mother’s sometimes affluent, the other, my father’s always in poverty.

This work is both a family history and a social history of Scotland with a particular focus on Edinburgh. The families are mine, traced from their roots in seventeenth century into the twentieth. However, all their wandering and failures, and births and marriages, are in themselves of no importance; they are merely the actions of helpless actors (one not so helpless) caught in the midst of changing worlds and realities. I have embedded their lives into the larger forces in a changing Scottish culture, climaxing in the creation of the New Town of Edinburgh, one of the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s most extravagant romantic fantasies. It was a reality shaped by the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment to give identity to a capital of a nation in name only, after the closing of the Scottish parliament with the Union of the Crowns in 1707.

This New Town became a vast idealized reality, which could only have been achieved in a Scotland that was and remains essentially feudal. All the lands surrounding the walls of the old city were the inherited properties of a few aristocratic families who were able, free of constraint, to sustain a succession of developments for over eighty years creating a continual stream of wealth for the landowners and their successors, and in the process producing extreme poverty for those left behind.

By the mid-nineteenth century, a very different reality emerged out of the need to accommodate the poor and the rising workforce in the city’s new industries. This resulted in street after street of monotonous, identical tenements, a joyless demeaning world in stark contrast to the lively grandeur of the housing in the new town. The medieval tenements of city’s old High Street were once called ‘slums built to last a thousand years’, and in many ways the extensive tenements of the industrial city from the nineteenth and twentieth century can equally be said to represent the prospect of people divided for a thousand years. It will be argued that such divisions are unavoidable and can be found in many cities, but it is the extent and the willfulness of the planning that make the Edinburgh example so potent.

I

Poverty, Filth and Bondage

‘How long can it be suffered’, wrote John Wesley in his Journal in 1770: ‘that all manner of filth should be flung into the streets? How long shall the capital city of Scotland and the chief street of it stink worse than a common sewer’?¹

From the Journal of John Wesley

Paul Sandby, In the Grassmarket 1758: Drag Cart and Horse

Edinburgh is fortunate to have a series of drawings of the people on the streets of the city by Paul Sandby. They were made in the 1750s. Sandby had come to Scotland in 1747 to join his brother in Edinburgh as a military cartographer. The drawings were done for his own pleasure, recording moments that he found of interest as he strolled the streets of the city – a drag cart and horse in the Grassmarket, the crowd at an execution, a horse fair on Bruntsfield Links and what appears to be several men relieving themselves against a wall while their lady companions stand by. It is believed that he learnt printmaking in the city and was sufficiently respected to be employed to teach drawing to the architect Robert Adam before he set out on a grand tour of Europe.² The drawings show lively animated groups in colourful and elaborate dress – many plaid shawls round the shoulders. These were the people who every day lived with and tolerated the muck in the city. (The drawings were published as part of larger collection in 1765, and in 1768 he became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy.)

Paul Sandby: ‘Drawn at the Execution of John Young in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh’ 1751.

Paul Sandby: Horse Fair on Bruntsfield Links, 1750.

Paul Sandby: Finding Relief 1750.

Filth: In an extensive correspondence Letters from Edinburgh in 1774³ (published in 1776) the young English journalist Edward Topham wrote:

This town has long been reproached with many uncleanly customs. A gentleman, who lately published his travels through Spain, says that Madrid, some years ago, might ‘have vied with Edinburgh in filthiness’. But if a stranger may be allowed to complain, it would be, that in these wynds, which are very numerous, the dirt is sometimes suffered to remain two or three days without removal and becomes offensive to more senses than one. The magistrates, by imposing fines and other punishments, have long put a stop to the throwing anything from the windows into the open street: but as these allies are un- lighted, narrow, and removed from public view, they still continue these practices with impunity. Many an elegant suit of clothes has been spoiled; many a powdered, well-dressed maccaroni⁴ sent home for the evening: and to conclude this period in Dr. Johnson’s own simple words, ‘Many a full-flowing periwig moistened into flaccidity’.

This is the world of my father’s family, the Jamiesons; it could be him standing next to Sandby’s horse and cart. My father was given two surnames, Jamieson and Balfour, and the Jamieson⁵ are the first in my family to be recorded in Edinburgh, living for almost a century in the filthiest parts of the city. The earliest confirmable record is the birth certificate of one Alex. Jamieson born in Edinburgh on 25 July 1739:⁶

The Alexander Jamieson Indweller & Elspeth Dawson his spouses, a son Alexander W[it.]. James Jamieson, Baxter [Baker?] & Richard Johnstone, Soldier in the Castle born Inst. (25 July 1739).⁷

There is no address and no occupation given, ‘Indweller’ simply means someone from the city. The first substantial family document is the birth record of his son, a third Alexander Jamieson, in March 1767:

Alex. Jamieson, Carter at Wyndmylne & sp. Janet Thornton a son Alex. born 26th last. Witt. Andr. Henderson, Wright, Adam Hall Carter

The birth took place in Edinburgh, and he was baptized within St Cuthbert’s Parish, presumably in the recently built Chapel of Ease which had opened in 1754 to serve the poor on the South side of the city. St. Cuthbert’s is the oldest religious foundation in the city, dating from the eighth century. This short entry in the church records is surprisingly informative on the senior Alexander Jamieson. He was a carter of goods, either with a barrow or with a horse and cart, a lowly but necessary occupation, living and plying his trade on Wynd Mylne, a street referred to in a seventeenth-century Derivation of Edinburgh Street Names⁸ as the calsav leid and fra the Societie port to the Wynd mylne, which translates as: ‘the causeway led to and from the Society Port to Mylne’s Wynd’.⁹ The Society Port was the old Bristow gate into the city from the south, leading on to Candlemaker Row and Cowgate. Mylne’s Wynd or Mill Wynd was a passage from the Cowgate to the High Street – a few openings down from St Giles. It was deep into the filthiest part of the old city.

The younger Alex next appears in the 1785 record announcing the birth of his son, George Jamieson, from Old Parish Registers dated 16 February 1785:

Alex. Jamieson, Shoemaker and Helen Brown his spouse, High Kirk parish a son Born 16 February last, named George – Bapt. in Church

High Kirk of Edinburgh, also misleadingly called St Giles Cathedral, is the principal place of worship of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh. In the eighteenth century, as elsewhere in Edinburgh, there would have been a chapel for the poor nearby. Mention of the High Kirk parish is evidence that the family was still living in the streets around the old High Street, the poorest part of the medieval city, which became ever poorer as the New Town evolved.

A view of the High Street in the 1870s showing the Cannongate home of the last leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland Cardinal Beaton, now demolished, in the sixteenth century briefly housed the High School.

Henry Graham’s The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century¹⁰ is a brilliant evocation of life in Edinburgh or Auld Reekie,¹¹ in all its distinct qualities:

The height of Edinburgh’s glory was before the Union of 1707, in the days when meetings of the Scots Parliament drew to the capital nobles and persons of quality from every county, when periodically the city was full of the richest, most notable, and best-bred people in the land, and the dingy High Street and Canongate were brightened by gentlemen in their brave attire, by ladies rustling in their hoops, brocade dresses, and brilliant coloured plaids, by big coaches gorgeous in their gilding, and lackeys splendid in their livery.

For the capital of a miserably poor country, Edinburgh Had…

Edinburgh had then a wonderful display of wealth and fashion. After 1707 all this was sadly changed. ‘There is the end of an auld sang’, said Lord Chancellor Seafield in jest, whether light or bitter, when the Treaty of Union was concluded; but it was a ‘song’ that lingered long in many regretful memories behind it. No more was the full concourse of men and ladies of high degree to make society brilliant with the chatter of right honourable voices, the glint of bright eyes from behind the masks, the jostling of innumerable sedan-chairs in the busy thoroughfare, where nobles and caddies, judges and beggars, forced their way with equal persistency. Instead of the throng of 145 nobles and 160 commoners, who often with their families and attendants filled the town with life and business, [the town was empty] they went to Westminster.

No wonder the Union was especially unpopular in Edinburgh, for it deprived the city of national dignity carried from citizens their fashions and spoiled their trade. A gloom fell over the Scots capital: society was dull, business was duller still, the lodgings once filled with persons of quality were left empty – many decayed for want of tenants, some fell almost into ruin. For many a year there was little social life, scanty intellectual culture, and few traces of business enterprise. Gaiety and amusement were indulged in only under the censure of the Church and the depressing air of that gloomy piety which held undisputed and fuller sway when the influence of rank and fashion no longer existed to counteract it.

But the few visitors from England were impressed far more by its dirt and dinginess than by its quaint beauty, by the streets which were filthy, the causeways rugged and broken, the big gurgling gutters in which ran the refuse of a crowded population, and among which the pigs poked their snouts in grunting satisfaction for garbage. By ten o’clock each night the filth collected in each household was poured from the high windows, and fell in malodorous plash upon the pavement, and not seldom on unwary passers-by. At the warning call of ‘gardyloo’ [Gardez I’eau] from servants preparing to outpour the contents of stoups, pots, and cans, the passengers beneath would agonisingly cry out ‘Hud yer hand’ but too often the shout was unheard or too late, and a drenched periwig and besmirched three-cornered hat were borne dripping and ill-scented home. At the dreaded hour when the domestic abominations were flung out, when the smells (known as the ‘flowers of Edinburgh’) filled the air, the citizens burnt their sheets of brown paper-to neutralise the odours of the outside, which penetrated their rooms within. On the ground all night the dirt and ordure lay awaiting the few and leisurely scavengers, who came nominally at seven o’clock next morning with wheel-barrows to remove it.

In the flats of the lofty houses in wynds or facing the High Street the populace dwelt, who reached their various lodgings by the steep and narrow ‘scale’ staircases, which were upright streets. On the same building lived families of all grades and classes, each in its flat in the same stair – the sweep and caddie in the cellars, poor mechanics in the garrets, while in the intermediate stories might live a noble, a lord of session, a doctor, or city minister, a dowager countess, or writer; higher up, over their heads, lived shopkeepers, dancing masters, or clerks […]

The long precipitous stairs were crowded all day long with men, women, and children belonging to the various flats passing up and down – masons, judges, dancing masters, countesses, barbers, and advocates, all encountered each other in the narrow passage. Besides the residents there was the stream of porters carrying coals, the Musselburgh fishwives with their creels, the sweeps, the men and women conveying the daily supply of water for each flat, barbers’ boys with re-trimmed wigs, the various people bent on business or on pleasure, on errands and visits for the several landings, all jostling unceremoniously as they squeezed past one another. It was no easy task for brilliantly dressed ladies to crush their hoops, four or five yards in circumference, up the scale-stairs, or to keep them uncontaminated by the dirt abounding on the steps. So confined were some of the stairs that it was sometimes impossible, when death came, to get the coffin down; and when a passage was too narrow for the tenant of a house so situated to get entry through the adjacent house and bring the coffin down its more commodious stair. Nor was the cleanliness of those un- salubrious abodes above suspicion, and it was not uncommon for lodgings to be advertised as possessing the special virtue of being ‘free from bugs’.

Eight o’clock was the breakfast hour, with its substantial meal of mutton, collops, and fowl, with libations of ale, and sometimes sack, claret, or brandy – tea not being used at that meal till about 1730. The citizen shut his shop, or left his wife to tend it, when the St. Giles’ bells rang at half-past eleven – a well-known sound which was known as the ‘gill-bells’, because each went to his favourite tavern to take his ‘meridian’, consisting of a gill of brandy, or a tin of ale. Little did these citizens heeded the music-bells, which meanwhile overhead were playing the bright charming tunes lo which wiser folk were all listening. The dinner hour was at one o’clock till 1745, when it was being changed to two, though the humbler shopkeepers dined at twelve. The wonted fare in winter was broth, salt beef, boiled fowls; for only the wealthy could afford to get fresh beef at high prices until the summer, when the arrival of any supply of beef for sale was announced in the streets by the bellman.

By two o’clock all citizens wended their way down their respective stairs to their places of business, reopened the doors, and hung up the key on a nail on the lintel – a practice which afforded the notorious burglar. Deacon Brodie, in 1780, opportunities of taking impressions of the keys on putty. By the early afternoon the streets were crowded, for into the main thoroughfare the inhabitants of the city poured. Later in the century an Englishman describes the scene: ‘So great a crowd of people are nowhere else confined in so small a space, which makes their streets as much crowded every day as others are at a fair’. There were few coaches, fortunately, in the narrow steep streets; but there were sedan-chairs swaying in all directions, borne by Highland porters, spluttering Gaelic execrations on those who impeded their progress. There were ladies in gigantic hoops sweeping the sides of the causeway, their head and shoulders covered with their gay silken plaids, scarlet and green, their faces with complexions heightened by patches, and concealed by black velvet masks which were held close by a string, whose buttoned end was held by the teeth. In their hands they bore huge green paper fans to ward off the sun; by their side hung the little bags which held the snuff they freely used their feet shod in red shoes, with heels three inches high, with which they tripped nimbly on the steep decline and over filthy places. There were stately old ladies, with their pattens on feet and canes in hand, walking with precision and dignity; judges with their wigs on head and hats under their arm; advocates in their gowns on way to the courts in Parliament House; ministers in their blue or gray coats, bands, wigs, and three-cornered hats. At the Cross (near St. Giles’) the merchants assembled to transact business, and to exchange news and snuff-boxes; while physicians, lawyers, and men about town met them as at an open-air club and joined citizens in the gossip of the city.

Edinburgh, Procession up the High Street 1793, David Allen (National Gallery of Scotland).

In the town there was a fine camaraderie – the friendliness and familiarity of a place where everyone knew everybody. There existed a special neighbourliness among them all. In the several ‘landings’, descending in dignity as they ascended in height, dwelt on the same stair peers, lords of session, clergy, doctors, shopkeepers, dancing-masters, artisans, while in the cellar lodged the water-caddy, the sweep, and the chairman. The distress of the poor neighbour on the stair became the concern of all, and poverty in the ‘close’ was relieved in common friendliness. The very beggars were old friends and exchanged jokes with his lordship going to the Parliament House.

From early morning, when they awoke on the doorsteps on which they had slept, till night, when they lighted the way in the dark streets with paper lanterns, the caddies were to be seen – impudent, ragged, alert, and swift – carrying messages