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Walking through the Dean Cemetery the other day, we stopped at a particular family memorial. It was one that we’d visited many times before, for reasons that we’ll come to, but it also seemed a suitable jumping off point for a blog post about a once great British institution that had its roots here in the city. A small product of Edinburgh on which, for more than 150 years, the sun never set – Blackwood’s Magazine.

Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century was a major centre of printing and publishing. Thus, when William Blackwood first published his new magazine in 1817, he was entering a thriving market. There was already the Edinburgh Review, a broadly Whig supporting paper, and the weighty and firmly establishment Quarterly Review. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine took the side of the Scottish Tories, and even a modern reader would recognise its mix of pro-union and pro-empire tales of military and colonial life to be more than a little partisan.

William had been born in Edinburgh in 1776, and, at the age of 14, became apprentice to a bookseller in the city. In 1804, he opened his own shop on South Bridge selling ‘Old, Rare and Curious Books’. Business was good and in 1816 he moved his premises to Princes Street; it was from here that Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (for the first six editions entitled the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine) was published.

The first edition set out what a new reader might expect. Blackwell intended to publish extracts of memoirs, original verse, travelogues, antiquarian writings, reviews, synopses of parliamentary speeches, history (particularly Scottish history), and foreign affairs. At this stage he had not considered including original fiction. The cover featured a portrait of George Buchanan, a sixteenth century Scottish historian (which many no doubt took to be the likeness of William Blackwood). As a dealer in old books, Blackwood would no doubt have come across the works of Buchanan and, by choosing his face for the cover, he was linking this new publication to an old tradition – one that was firmly Scottish and staunchly Presbyterian. 

The Scottish writer Thomas Pringle, (who would later emigrate and gain fame as the first English language poet of South Africa) was initially employed as editor but Blackwell quickly fell out with him and took over the job himself.

Despite its Tory leanings, Blackwood’s considered work from a wide variety of sources. Maga, as it liked to style itself, published works by Coleridge and Shelley at a time when both were considered very radical. The magazine also championed James Hogg, known as the Ettrick Shepherd, and published some of his early work, though Blackwood would later turn on him and publish vicious and thinly disguised parodies of his prose.

Blackwood recognised that he had tapped into a growing desire for intellectual reading matter among the growing middle and professional classes, and pioneered a certain form of short story in the English language. This style would become a major influence on later Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters.   

The magazine was also one of the earliest exponents of Terror Fiction, such as the tale Buried Alive published in 1821. Edgar Allen Poe was particularly influenced by these sensationalist stories and Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick in their 1995 collection Tales of Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine describe these tales as the missing link between the Gothic tradition of the late eighteenth century and Poe’s short horror fiction.

In 1830, William moved from Princes Street – which he considered had gone downmarket (where have we heard that before?) – to the more prestigious George Street. By now, copies of Blackwell’s Edinburgh Magazine could be found in every corner of the British Empire from the wardrooms of Royal Navy ships on the China station, through the houses of tea planters in the hills of India to the Officers Messes of Army barracks sweltering in the African sun.

William had seven sons, five of whom played a part in running both the magazine and the wider publishing business. His sixth son, John, became editor in 1845 after working in Blackwell’s London office for some years. John had an eye for good writing and when one day an anonymous manuscript crossed his desk eagerly he accepted the offer to publish. The work was Scenes of Clerical Life by Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name of George Eliot.

To his credit, when John discovered the piece had been written by a woman it made no difference to his decision. George Eliot was so grateful she went on to publish all but one of her novels, in serial form, through the magazine. Other authors whose early works found a home in the pages of Maga would include John Buchan and Joseph Conrad.

In 1905, the magazine moved to London and dropped ‘Edinburgh’ from the title, becoming simply, Blackwood’s Magazine. It would continue in popularity for some years but was increasingly seen as a bit old-fashioned and staid. In his essay, The Lion and The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, George Orwell would write, “If you were a patriot you read Blackwood’s Magazine and publicly thanked God that you were ‘not brainy’”.

In 1940, the London offices of Blackwood’s Magazine were burned out during a Luftwaffe air raid – a sight seen from 25,00 feet by Douglas Blackwood, an RAF fighter pilot and great-great-grandson of William Blackwood. The firm never really recovered, though it continued to publish until the last edition was printed in 1980.

The memorial in the Dean Cemetery that we mentioned at the start of this blog, is the resting place of John Blackwood, the man who recognised the genius of George Elliot. It is modest, by Victorian standards, and devoid of the fulsome praise of the life, manners and conduct of the deceased, so favoured by other gravestones of the period.

We have returned to it many times and shown it to visitors because, in a small way, it marks the change from the optimism and expansion of the 19th century to the brutal realism and decline of empire through the 20th. A movement that was mirrored by the rise and fall of Blackwood’s Magazine. To the right, as you look at the memorial, you can see a simple wooden cross set into an unadorned stone slab. It’s looking worse today than it did when we first saw it 25 years ago, though that’s not surprising as it is now over 100 years old. The inscription around it is difficult to read but we’ve transcribed it, and it tells its own story.

AUBREY BLACKWOOD PORTER

Grandson of John Blackwood, Lieutenant 4^th Battalion 2^nd Highland Light Infantry

Killed in action at Loos France 3 October 1915 Aged 24

This wooden cross was sent from France where it stood on his grave in the British Military Cemetery at Vernelle previous to the placing there of the headstone which now marks the grave of British soldiers killed in France in The Great War 1914 – 1918

Placed there in honoured and loving memory by his mother

At the east end of George Street, stands the Palladian mansion of Dundas House. It is best known today as the registered office of the Royal Bank of Scotland and its position dominates one side of St Andrew Square. However, despite seeming to be in perfect harmony with the setting of the first New Town, the house was not in the original James Craig design, indeed, it was built in contradiction to that plan. The man who ‘disrupted harmony’ even before the first stone of the New Town had been laid, was Sir Lawrence Dundas.

Plain Lawrence Dundas was born in Edinburgh in either 1710 or 1712 – sources vary on this – and was the second son of Thomas Dundas of Fingask, a draper in the Luckenbooths near the High Kirk.

His family claimed noble ancestry but by the time that Lawrence was born they had become what would have been described as ‘the middling sort’, not rich enough to be considered gentry but comfortable enough not to be thought poor. Lawrence attended Edinburgh High School and then set himself up as a merchant contractor.

He had a good head for business and was on the winning side in that great game of the early Hanoverian period, speculating in stocks and shares. However, his rise to great wealth started in 1745 during the Jacobite Rebellion.

James Masterson was an old school friend, and son of another Edinburgh merchant. In 1745 he was a Lieutenant of Foot in the army and aide-de-camp to Prince William, the Duke of Cumberland, son of King George II and commander of the government forces sent to put down the Jacobites. These troops needed supplies, and Masterson recommended his old friend Lawrence Dundas. He was duly appointed Commissary for Bread and Forage in Scotland.

When British troops were sent to Europe in 1746 to fight in the War of the Austrian Succession, Dundas was appointed Commissary for Stores and Provisions in Flanders. Over the next twenty years, further government contracts would follow and by the end of the seven years war in 1763 Dundas was estimated to have made a personal fortune of around £800,000.

Like many rich men, Lawrence Dundas was not content with just wealth, he also desired power and set about a political career. In 1745 he contested the Linlithgow Burghs and, according to one of his opponents, was soon busy about ‘his work of treating and bribing.’ Unfortunately for Dundas, this had the opposite effect to that intended. Almost everyone mistrusted him and he failed to win the seat.

For his next attempt, he was a little more circumspect. He spoke to an old army connection, William Petty, a well-connected, aristocratic but slightly impoverished Member of Parliament, and made him a substantial loan. Petty spoke to Lord Bute, the favourite of the Prince of Wales and Dundas duly received a baronetcy and the gift of the seat for Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire. He had wanted a richer, Scottish seat but had to wait for that. Both Lord Bute and William Petty (as the Earl of Shelburne) would later go on to be Prime Minister.

Dundas built up property holdings in London and Yorkshire but his real ambition was to become the most powerful man in Scotland. In 1766 he purchased Orkney and Shetland from the Earl of Morton for £63,000. This gave him control of the county representation and a leading interest in Tain Burghs. Lavish expenditure would help secure Stirling Burghs for his associate Robert Haldane and Stirlingshire for his son Thomas. He still maintained an interest in Linlithgow Burghs and Linlithgowshire. In Fife, he had considerable influence which he gave to James Wemyss of Wemyss. For himself, he reserved what he considered to be the jewel in the crown: the representation of the city of Edinburgh.

Having achieved so much, Dundas now set his sights on the next set of targets. He wanted to become a government minister (preferably with power over Scotland) and then be elevated to the peerage. However, in this he was to be thwarted. He had made enemies during his rise to power and despite always loyally voting with the government (and getting his followers to do likewise) these prizes would never come to him.

He was though, a man of great influence and perhaps his most enduring legacy is to be found a few miles upriver from Edinburgh in the Forth. In 1752 he had purchased land on the south bank of the river. When the Forth and Clyde Canal was being planned in the 1760s he was able to persuade the canal company that its eastern terminus should be created on this land, at a point where the Grange Burn flows into the River Carron, close to where it in turn joins the Forth. The original plan had been for the canal to emerge on the Forth at the existing port of Bo’ness, a few miles further east. Having got an agreement, Dundas set about building a new port on his land, to allow trans-shipment of goods between sea-going ships and canal boats. This would grow into the modern port of Grangemouth, Scotland’s largest container port, and the only one in the UK to export more than it imports.  

Back in Edinburgh, Dundas wanted a house that would match his status. The plans for the New Town were being drawn up and it was obvious that this would become the fashionable place to live. Somehow, Dundas saw an early copy of the James Craig design. In this, the central street, George Street, ended in two squares, St Andrew Square and St George Square (later to be renamed Charlotte Square). Each of these squares was to be finished with a church, dedicated to the eponymous saint. Dundas quietly bought up the piece of land that on the plan was allocated to the church of St Andrew, somehow keeping his name off the legal documents until the deal was done.

The building was designed by Sir William Chambers (best known for Somerset House in London) and construction started in 1772 taking two years to complete.

Sir Lawrence was always a gambling man and one night, in a high stakes game of cards, he bet the house. He lost, and the winner, General Sir John Scott, was only persuaded not to take possession after Dundas promised to build him another house, of equal grandeur elsewhere in the New Town.

Sadly for Dundas, he only enjoyed his house for nine years before he died, crippled with gout, on 21 September, 1781. He left an estate worth £16,000 a year and £900,000 in personal and landed property. The political influence he had sought at huge expense for himself and his family evaporated soon after his demise.

The Government bought Dundas House and made it the Excise Office for Scotland.

It was then purchased by the Royal Bank in 1825. It remained their headquarters until 2004, when a new building was opened at Gogarburn, near Edinburgh Airport.

Dundas House remains a branch of the Royal Bank and is open during office hours. The upstairs is private, but the lower floor with its magnificent dome, pierced with six-point stars is well worth seeing and we certainly recommend a visit.

The name of Daniel Defoe is probably known to most people today through his authorship of Robinson Crusoe. However, that book was published when Defoe was fifty-nine, and by then he’d already tried his hand at one or two other professions, not the least of which was as an English spy in Edinburgh in the months leading up to the Acts of Union in 1707.

Defoe isn’t the only writer to be seduced by the cloak and dagger lifestyle – Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth and Graham Greene are notable modern novelists who’ve practised the dark art of espionage – but Defoe seems to be particularly suited to the job. He was born in London in 1660 as plain Daniel Foe, and later added the ‘de’ to make himself seem more aristocratic and glamourous. Not content with that, he is known to have used at least 198 different pen names in his writings. These included Solomon Waryman, William Bond, Harry Freeman and the splendid, Miranda Meanwell (which has a touch of the James Bond femme fatale about it). Clearly, he was a man who liked to hide in the shadows.

After a good education in London, Defoe set up his own business in the city as an independent trader, which sounds a little ‘Del Boy’ to modern ears and may not be too wide of the mark. By 1692, he was bankrupt, pursued by his creditors and just one step away from imprisonment in debtors prison. He turned his hand to writing and quickly discovered he had a talent for telling stories. Unfortunately for him, he also had a taste for polemics and in 1702 published The Shortest Way with the Dissenters a satirical pamphlet aimed at High Church Tories. The establishment quickly showed him that it did indeed know a short way to deal with dissent. He was arrested, tried and convicted, being fined and sentenced to three days in the pillory, followed by imprisonment at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

From Newgate Prison, Defoe wrote to a business acquaintance, William Paterson – the Scotsman who founded the Bank of England – begging him to intervene with Robert Harley, the Speaker of the House of Commons promising that he would do literally anything to get back in favour. Harley was well aware of Defoe; it was he who had started the prosecution over The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. He had a use for a man with talents such as Defoe but first let him stew in prison for six months, so that when he came out he would be really keen.

By the time he was ordered to Edinburgh in September 1706, Harley had risen to Secretary of State, the de facto Prime Minister of England, and Defoe was an experienced agent, with two years of work spying on English dissenters behind him. The instructions Harley gave to Defoe make it clear that his role was to be not just passive spy but an active undercover propagandist for the Union.

1. You are to use the utmost caution that it may not be supposed you are employed by any person in England: but that you came there upon your own business, & out of love to the Country.
2. You are to write constantly the true State how you find things, at least once a week, & you need not subscribe any name, but direct to me under Cover to Mrs Collins at the Posthouse, Middle Temple Gate, London. For variety you may direct under Cover to Michael Read in York Buildings.
3. You may confidently assure those you converse with, that the Queen & all those who have Credit with her, are sincere & hearty for the Union.
4. You must shew them this is such an opportunity that being once lost or neglected is not again to be recovered. England never was before in so good a disposition to make large Concessions or so heartily to unite with Scotland, & should their kindness now be slighted.

Defoe took lodgings at the house of John Munro, at the sign of the Half Moon by the Netherbow. From here, he wrote back to tell Harley that Edinburgh was in a state of uproar, with mobs on the street giving voice to their clear opposition to the Union.

“I… Saw a Terrible Multitude Come up the High Street with A Drum at the head of Them shouting and swearing and Crying out all Scotland would stand together, No Union, No Union, English Dogs, and the like.”

Defoe claimed that a rock was thrown at him as he looked out of the window and that his life was in danger (something his masters in London doubted) but could not help himself in boasting about how good he was at deception.

“I am Perfectly Unsuspected as Corresponding with anybody in England… To the Merchants I am about to Settle here in Trade, Building ships etc. With the lawyers I Want to purchase a House and Land to bring my family & live Upon it (God knows where the money is to pay for it).

“With the Glasgow Mutineers I am a fish Merchant, with the Aberdeen Men a woollen and with the Perth and Western men a Linen Manufacturer, and still at the End of all Discourse the Union is the Essentiall and I am all to Every one that I may Gain some.”

He told other men he was a glass-maker, to some he claimed he was a salt-maker and even styled himself a gentleman of property. To have got away with this, in the tight packed community of Edinburgh at the time, is a testament to Defoe’s power of imagination and ability to get on well in company.

By mixing with the people of the city, Defoe was able to pass back to London, comments that would not make it back through more formal channels. When he heard talk that the Union would lead to increases in the cost of beer, he advised that something be placed in the Explanation of the Acts about the Union bringing down the cost of malt. He was also able to tell London that the majority of the 1500 Scottish soldiers the government thought they could rely on were disaffected and suggested that English troops be brought up to the border, ready to invade at a moment’s notice. Happily for all, this advice was not heeded.

Defoe also carried out the second part of his remit and began publishing leaflets. These were distributed in both London and Edinburgh. However, the arguments made in these were far from consistent. Those in England stated that the Union was wholly to the advantage of the English. It would remove the ever-present threat from the north, while gaining Scotland’s manpower and resources and boosting England’s prestige on the world stage. The Scots were relatively few in number compared to the English, he wrote, and the latter would soon come to dominate them in matters of church and state.

Those published in Edinburgh took the opposite view. Scotland’s church and state would be forever guaranteed by the Union. England’s firm parliamentary roots would ensure that Scotland would never be dominated by its larger neighbour and that the markets of the world would now be open to Scottish merchants with great benefits to trade. Never again would countries such as France drag Scotland unwilling into costly wars with England. It would be peace and prosperity for all time. Both sets of leaflets were purported to be written by loyal Englishmen or true-hearted Scots as the case may be. In reality, they all came from the pen of Daniel Defoe. Fake news is nothing new.

Defoe was not the only pro-Union spy in Edinburgh, or Scotland, and the fact that the powers in London thought it worthwhile to try and persuade men and women who had no vote and could not therefore influence the outcome of the negotiations shows how much they feared a rebellion among the common people. Such an insurrection could throw up leaders that were not so open to persuasion through titles and honours as were the Scottish nobles they were currently dealing with; the men that Robert Burns would later characterise as ‘A parcel of rogues’.

The treaty of Union passed through the Scottish Parliament in early January 1707 as the bells of St Giles rang out the tune “Why should I be so sad on this my wedding day?” Defoe stayed on in the city, hoping that his services would be rewarded with a plum job in the new administration. He did not get his wish. Harley in London was ill and too busy fighting with rivals over control of the new, joint parliament. Besides, as he had shown earlier in keeping Defoe in prison, he knew how to manipulate the man. He thought it better to have Defoe relying on the uncertain and inconsistent payment for spying, rather than in the safety and comfort that a regular salary would bring. He simply ignored all the correspondence arriving almost daily from Edinburgh.

For Defoe, the funding from London was a lifeline (though he worried that Harley might not approve of the way he was spending it and demand repayment). In April 1707, he joined the Edinburgh branch of the Society for Reformation of Manners, a group that gave him access to the city’s merchants. He traded in salt, linen, horses, wine and brandy. He also announced that he was writing the History of the Union. This was all a cover for what he was really about: the life of a secret agent.

Defoe made no money in his various ventures and by November 1707 he was in debt and the letters to London were getting increasingly hysterical. He feared returning to England without permission and wrote pointing out that Edinburgh was not like London. “Pen and Ink and Printing will Do Nothing here. Men Do Not live here by Their Witts.” As Defoe had little else, he was clearly in the wrong place.

Harley relented and sent him £100 (for which he signed the receipt ‘Claude Guilot’). He left Edinburgh at the beginning of December and arrived home in London on 1 January 1708.

The History of the Union was published the following year, though rather inevitably, it’s now seen as a very one-sided account. Defoe returned to Scotland in 1726 and concluded that the improvement in trade and the economy that he had foretold twenty years earlier had not come about – it was “not the case, but rather the contrary”, he wrote.

Harley was feted with honours. He was created Earl of Oxford and made Lord Treasurer and Knight of the Garter. His political enemies caught up with him when the crown passed from Queen Anne to the Hanoverian George I. He was imprisoned but escaped impeachment by retiring from politics.

Daniel Defoe went on to be a successful writer. Not only was there Robinson Crusoe but also Moll Flanders and Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress among others. These books are among the first true novels in English and a terrific read even today. Despite this, his talent for striking a bad deal never left him and he spent long periods in debtors’ prison. He died in 1731, in hiding from his creditors.

Edinburgh is the greenest city in the UK (check out the image here) and a good part of that open space is made up by Holyrood Park. The main feature of the park is, of course, Arthur’s Seat, a wee piece of the Scottish Highlands transported to the city centre.

Despite its wildness, thousands of residents and visitors climb the mountain every year, something borne out by the fact that it’s ranked the number one thing to do in Edinburgh on Trip Advisor. The way is made easier for many of these walkers by a wide and gently sloping path that runs alongside Salisbury Crags known by the unusual name of the Radical Road.

There’s nothing radical about the road itself; neither its construction nor site are sufficiently out of the ordinary to give it such a name. In fact, it was the men who built it that earned the epithet, ‘radical’ and from them, it was transferred to the road. They were men who had lived through the decades of war, with first revolutionary, and then Napoleonic France. Those wars ended in 1815, following the Battle of Waterloo, but peace did not bring prosperity.

Britain entered a period of economic hardship. Many in Scotland saw this as a consequence of a corrupt political system that favoured the interests of a privileged few over the needs of the majority. They called for reform, and in particular the expansion of voting rights.  

To take Edinburgh as an example, at this time, the Member of Parliament for the city was elected solely by the 25 magistrates of the City Council. The Right Honourable Henry Dundas MP, working with William Ramsay of the Royal Bank, would scrutinise the list of magistrates elect; men hoping to sit on the council. If he found the name of someone whom he thought would oppose him, he would ‘persuade’ the council to substitute a candidate of his own choosing. In this way, Dundas was able to return himself unopposed until he was created Viscount Melville in December 1802. Thereafter, until his death in 1811, he made sure the Edinburgh seat went to close family connections. His memorial in St Andrew Square is arguably the most striking in the city.

The government branded the men who wanted an end to this kind of corrupt practice, ‘Radicals’ and met their requests for reform with threats and violence, arrests and exile. At the end of 1819, Parliament went a step further and passed a law restricting freedom of speech and assembly.

One group of workers who were already well organised were the weavers of Glasgow. They were not only to provide leadership in what happened but also suffer the consequences of their prominence.

On the night of 1 April 1820 a proclamation, supposedly from the ‘Committee of Organisation for forming a Provisional Government’ was posted across central Scotland. It called upon ‘all to desist from their labour from and after this day, the First of April, and attend wholly to the recovery of their Rights’.

There is no certain figure for the number who responded to this call for a general strike but it certainly ran into the tens of thousands. The army was called out, and some among the workers reacted by arming themselves – this was, after all, less than a year since 18 people had been killed by the militia at a peaceful meeting in Manchester, an event known afterwards as the Peterloo Massacre.

There were clashes, people were killed and, inevitably, the army won. Three weavers, who had led the radicals, John Baird, Andrew Hardie, and James Wilson, were executed for the part they played in the events of April 1820. Nineteen others were transported to Botany Bay.

The author, Sir Walter Scott, had other ideas about how the problem should be tackled. As these west-coast weavers said they had no work, then jobs should be found for them. Preferably something hard that gave them little time or energy for political organising and that also removed them from their community. The perfect answer was found in Edinburgh. There was a narrow path skirting Salisbury Crags. This could be widened and improved to make a pleasant walk towards Arthurs Seat. The weavers were brought to Edinburgh and set to work; an event remembered ever after in a local playground chant, “Round and round the Radical Road, the radical rascal ran…”

Sir Walter was well pleased with the result. He describes the view from the road in his novel, Heart of Midlothian, even though the novel is set in 1736.

“The prospect, in its general outline, commands a close-built, high-piled city, stretching out beneath in a form which, to a romantic imagination, may be supposed to represent that of a dragon; now a noble arm of the sea, with its rocks, isles, distant shores and boundary of mountains; and now a fair and fertile campaign country, varied with hill, dale and rock, and skirted by the picturesque ridge of the Pentland mountains. But as the path gently circles around the base of the cliffs, the prospect, composed as it is of these enchanting and sublime  objects, changes at every step, and presents them blended with, or divided from, each other, in every possible variety of shadowy depth, exchanged with partial brilliancy, which gives character even to the tamest of landscapes, the effect approaches near to enchantment.”

It’s not known if the composer Felix Mendelssohn ever read Heart of Midlothian but he too praised the view from the road, in a letter home written in 1829. He was so impressed that he decided he wanted to live in Edinburgh and applied for the post of Professor of Music at the University. They turned him down.

The Radical Road has since featured in plays, paintings, songs and books, and the cause of the men who cut it out of the hard Dolerite stone has served as inspiration to generations of Chartists, Trade Unionists and Scottish Nationalists.

When you next walk up beneath the crags towards Arthur’s Seat, pause for a moment, halfway up, catch your breath, take in the view and remember those men who left their silent looms and came here with picks and shovels and blasting powder to create a path up the mountain. What they were asking for doesn’t seem that much by modern standards and the way they were treated seems harsh and unjust. Then, refreshed, resume your walk and stride out boldly, for you walk upon the Radical Road!

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The first in an occasional series looking at the statuary and memorials along the Royal Mile.

Just outside the west front of St Giles Cathedral, in Parliament Square, just off the High Street of Edinburgh, on the site of the old Tolbooth, there stands today a tall monument, topped with the larger than life figure of a man. The thing is so large and so prominently placed that visitors usually presume that it must be a person of great fame, and thus someone they will probably have heard of. When told, in reply to the inevitable question, that it is Walter Francis Montagu Douglas Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch and 7th Duke of Queensberry, the equally inevitable response is, “Who was he?”

Walter Francis was born at Dalkeith Palace, on 25 November 1808. He was the second son of Charles Montagu-Scott, 4th Duke of Buccleuch, and the Honourable Harriet Katherine Townshend, and as such would not have been expected to inherit the title of Duke of Buccleuch upon his father’s death. However, his elder brother, George Henry, died of measles aged just ten and then, a few years later when Walter Francis was still only thirteen, his father too passed away and he succeeded to the Dukedoms of Buccleuch and Queensberry. The author Sir Walter Scott, his namesake though no relation, was appointed his guardian.

Just three years later, in 1822, Sir Walter was instrumental in bringing King George IV to Scotland for the first royal visit since the 1745 rebellion. As Holyrood Palace was uninhabitable at the time, Sir Walter arranged that the king should stay with the young duke at Dalkeith. It was an introduction by Sir Walter into the part that he believed should be played by a 19^th century peer of the realm, and Walter Francis embraced it wholeheartedly.

He was Lord Lieutenant of Midlothian from 1828 and also of Roxburgh from 1841 till his death. As Captain-General of the Royal Body Guard of Archers, he carried the gold stick at the coronation of Queen Victoria, and later was again the host of the sovereign when she visited Scotland in 1842.

A firm conservative, he served as Lord Privy Seal in the government of Robert Peel (in which role he was described by the Clerk to the Privy Council as “Worse than useless”) but when the Peel government fell he virtually retired from politics. 

He became involved in the Canterbury Association, a group formed to establish a religious colony, sponsored by the Church of England, on the South Island of New Zealand. The area of the colony was named Canterbury, after the Archbishop of that diocese who was on the management committee. It was decided that the main town should be named Christchurch (after the Oxford college) and it was proposed that another town, in the Alford Forest region, be called Buccleuch, in honour of Walter Francis. Though this was planned, the town was never built. 

Closer to home, his impact on Edinburgh was notable, for he established the harbour at Granton. At that time, Leith harbour could not be accessed at all states of the tides, leading to the slow, and often hazardous, transfer of passengers from ships in the Forth into small boats for landing. Granton would give Edinburgh a port that could, in the modern parlance, be used 24/7.

This enormous undertaking was started in 1835 and was sufficiently advanced that by 1842 Queen Victoria could use Granton as her port of arrival. The duke also built a road to the port and ensured that it was connected by rail to the city, via the Scotland Street station. The total cost of these works was some £500,000, a considerable investment in Victorian Edinburgh.

The Fifth Duke died in 1884, and the following year Edinburgh Council approved the design for the memorial and agreed the place in Parliament Square.

The monument is a splendid example of Victorian Gothic. The Duke himself is sculpted wearing the robes of the Order of the Garter. The lower part of the monument is hexagonal, with three tiers of bronze plaques. The top set shows huntsmen and hounds chasing a stag, the second tier has reliefs of scenes from the Duke’s life, while the lowest has larger bronze reliefs of episodes in the Scott family history. Rampant stags holding armorial shields are placed at the corners.

The memorial to the Duke was erected during 1887, and it was only as this was heading towards completion that a glitch was discovered. The statue, by the world renowned artist, Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, was too large for the pedestal upon which it was intended to stand. Luckily, it was possible to remove some bronze decoration from the top, giving the statue a little more ‘leg room’ though he still appears as if he is getting ready to step off at any moment.

It was finally unveiled on 7 February 1888 and handed over to the care of the city council.

Going around the monument, it’s obvious that the plaques depict specific scenes but as there is no explanation of each one they can appear somewhat enigmatic. We’ve created a quick guide, so you can look at this on your mobile device as you go round, or print it off if you prefer.

The bronze reliefs showing scenes from the life of the fifth duke are by Thomas Stuart Burnett. Going on the points of the compass they are:

NW, the coat of arms of the Duke of Buccleuch on a garter plate

W, the Duke receiving Queen Victoria at Dalkeith on the occasion of her first visit to Scotland in 1842

SW, the Duke planning the harbour at Granton

SE, the 70th birthday dinner given by the tenantry of the Duke in Edinburgh in 1878

E, the installation of the Duke as Chancellor of Glasgow University

NE, the Duke as a Colonel of Militia at the head of his regiment

The bronze panels on the third level, above head height, are by Clark Stanton and show scenes from the Scott family history. In order they are:

The death of Sir Walter Scott, fourth Lord of Rankilburn and Murthockston, in 1402, at the Battle of Homildon Hill, near Wooler.

The burning of Catslack Tower in Yarrow by the English in 1548 causing the death of Lady Buccleuch

The attempted rescue, by Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch and Branxholm, of James V from the Earl of Angus in 1526

The burning of Branxholm by the English during a raid in 1532

The rising of the Scott clan under the leadership of Warden Buccleuch, to mount a retaliatory raid on the English

The interview between Sir Walter, first Lord Scott of Buccleuch and Queen Elizabeth I, when Buccleuch went to London to appease Elizabeth, following the rescue of Kinmont Willie from Carlisle Castle in 1596.

As always, thank you for reading and we hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting. If you did, please share on social media.

This is by way of a quick, midweek update to the last post regarding James Tytler. There were a couple of questions that came in, and here are the answers as best we know them.

Q1. What was the balloon made of?

Well, we’re not entirely certain. Tytler would have known about the construction of the Montgolfier balloon in France. This was made of taffeta, coated inside with a varnish of alum, as a fire retardant. The exterior was painted with rich blue and gold decoration. The cash-strapped Tytler could not hope for anything so fancy.

The Great Edinburgh Fire Balloon was made of cloth, and linen is the most likely candidate. Due to earlier problems, a coat of varnish was applied before the first actual flight. The envelope was not enclosed by a net but seemingly an open frame of ropes that met and enclosed the ‘boat’ below. Incidentally, the boat part never made it off the ground. It was destroyed by the unhappy mob on August 6, after Tytler failed to ‘rise to the occasion’. Ever the man of resource, he secured “One of the small baskets in which earthen ware is carried.” So he was probably sitting in something very like a modern wash basket for those first flights.

Q2. Why did he fly in August? As a local, he must have known the Edinburgh weather was notoriously capricious in that month?

Tytler chose August 6, 1784 because it fell in the week of Leith Races. These were the most important sporting event held in Scotland at the time and attracted huge crowds. He must have thought that with the city packed full of pleasure seeking gamblers and sportsmen, he would draw the biggest crowd.

Q3. Is there a painting or illustration of the flight?

Not to our knowledge, and certainly not contemporary to events. Tytler originally planned to carry a stove within the basket that would have kept a ready supply of hot air going into the envelope. He looked at ‘lightweight’ fuels such as sulphur-infused sheep wool (imagine the smell when that burned!) that could be carried on board but ultimately, the volume of hot air inside the envelope was barely sufficient to lift itself and Tytler, so the stove had to go. This meant that the flights were really little more than short hops before the air inside cooled down. Nevertheless,they were remarkable for their day and are recognised as the first true, manned flight in Britain. It’s just that any artist would have had to be very quick on the draw. 

The Edinburgh artist John Kay did do an engraving entitled ‘Fowls of a Feather Flock Together’ showing Tytler meeting the Italian balloonist Lunardi but the balloons illustrated in the background are nothing like all the other descriptions of the Great Edinburgh Fire Balloon and may be discounted.

Remarkably, James Tytler met Robert Burns and it is from Burns that we have the best description of Tytler, the man. On 13 November 1788, Burns wrote to his friend Mrs Dunlop, back in Ayrshire. In a long letter about collecting songs for The Scots Musical Museum, he mentions James Tytler. “A mortal, who though he drudges about Edinburgh as a common printer, with leaky shoes, a sky-lighted hat, and knee-buckles as unlike as George-by-the-grace-of-God and Solomon-the-son-of-David, yet that same unknown drunken mortal is author and compiler of three fourths of Elliot’s pompous Encyclopedia Britannica.” The expressed mixture of pity and astonishment seems to be the near universal view of Tytler by his contemporaries.

Thanks for reading and if there are any more questions about Tytler, or any of the other topics we’ve covered, please do get in touch via the Contact page, and please do share these posts via social media.

Tucked away in a little triangle of land off Milton Street, and bounded on the other sides by the East Coast Railway line and Croft An Righ, is a development of modern apartment buildings called Tytler Gardens. To most people living there, the name probably means little but in fact, it commemorates a moment of aviation history, for it was from this very spot that Britain’s first, manned aerial flight was made. The man who accomplished this remarkable feat, and who is remembered in the street name, was James Tytler.

James was born in 1745, the son of the manse at Fearn in Angus. A bright lad, he did well at school and was then apprenticed to a surgeon in Forfar. In 1764, he came to Edinburgh to study medicine at the university. James was no doubt clever but he seems not to have been wise. Money – or rather, the lack of it – was to trouble James all his life and it seems to have started early, for barely a year later he signed on as ship’s surgeon with a Leith whaling ship, the Royal Bounty. He needed the wages as he had married, somewhat in haste, and had to pay for a wife and child.

After returning to Leith, he set up as an apothecary but the business was not a success and, with debts piling up, he was forced to flit to England.

By the time he returned to Edinburgh, his family had grown. He now had five children and to support them he employed a remarkable skill that he possessed. It was said, that he could edit a piece of prose as fast as other men could read it. Though a prolific writer himself, he was mostly employed by other writers and publishers to prepare texts ahead of printing. However, this work was far from steady and he ended up in the debtors’ sanctuary of Holyrood.

Eventually he found steady work in editing the second edition of that great work of the Scottish Enlightenment, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as it was expanded from the initial three volumes to a more comprehensive twenty volume edition. The work was dreadfully paid – just sixteen shillings a week – and it would take Tytler seven years to complete, working long hours using an upturned washtub as a desk.

It was while he was compiling the section on the newly invented Air Balloons that he had his brilliant idea. The Montgolfier brothers had made the first successful manned flights in Paris in November 1783. The thought of flying enthused James Tytler and though almost entirely without funds, or any public interest, he decided that he would build and fly his own hot air balloon. It would be called, The Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon!

He first built a model, and charged people sixpence to see it. He then set about making the real thing. At the time, June of 1784, Register House at the east end of Princes Street was still under construction and although it had walls, the dome was not yet completed; the empty building was the perfect venue to show off his marvel.

The Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon was not the roughly spherical shape we might think of today but was more like a barrel some 40 feet high and 30 feet in diameter. The hot air was provided by a stove and Tytler proposed to ‘fly’ his creation from a wicker ‘boat’, made to resemble a bird and slung below the envelope.

By August 1784, everything was ready and the balloon was taken to the site of the present day Tytler Gardens, then a pleasure ground known as Comely Garden, and the first flight advertised to take place on the the morning of the sixth. Tytler however, had not taken into account Edinburgh’s notoriously capricious August weather. This, combined with some technical difficulties, prevented the balloon from rising. The crowd reacted in traditional Edinburgh style and attacked Tytler. He escaped, beaten but not downhearted, and determined to try again.

The balloon was next ready on August 25, and this time Tytler wisely decided that only a few people would be there to see the attempt. The fire was lit at an early hour and kept burning until mid-morning. Then Tytler climbed aboard and the tether ropes were released. The Edinburgh Evening Courant was there as a witness and reported, “…the balloon, together with the projector himself, and basket in which he sat, were fairly floated”.

Now that the Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon was a proven success, a great (and paying) crowd turned out to see it fly two days later. This time, the balloon rose to around 350 feet and flew all the way to Restalrig. These flights were the first to take place in British airspace.

Another flight was made on August 31 but subsequent attempts all ended in failure. The press, ever keen to knock down someone they have built up, laughed at him and the public quickly lost interest.

A year later, the flamboyant Italian showman Vincenzo Lunardi would tour Britain with his aerial balloon show, including a flight of 46 miles from George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh to Ceres in Fife in a hydrogen filled balloon.

Lunardi was so popular that he created a craze in women’s fashion for balloon-shaped ‘Lunardi Bonnets’, which were even mentioned in a poem by Robert Burns. Tytler was almost entirely forgotten.

The money James Tytler made from his exploits seems to have vanished very quickly. He was soon back in Holyrood sanctuary, hiding from debt. He divorced, remarried, had more children, wrote more books but in 1792 was forced to flee abroad after being charged with seditious libel for producing an anti-government pamphlet. He went first to Dublin, then Salem in Massachusetts. It was there, one stormy night in January 1804 that he fell in the sea on his way home from an inn. Thus passed James Tytler, Scotland’s aviation pioneer.

Thanks to all who got in touch last week in response to the post on the First Marquis of Montrose. He was a fascinating character, and I feel we will return to him again in the future.

The subject of this post is a man who knew Montrose as a soldier, fighting both alongside and later, against him. He was one of those who blew smoke into poor Montrose’s prison cell and he led the guard that harassed the Marquis all the way to the gallows. However, Major Thomas Weir is not remembered today for his exploits as a Covenanter but for the strange confession he later made. It was a testament of such vile and unnatural deeds that it would take him to his death and lead to him gaining the enduring title of, ‘The Wizard of West Bow’.

Thomas Weir was born in 1599 in Clydeside and moved to Edinburgh around 1649, eventually settling in West Bow with his sister Jean, who was also known as Grizel.

At the time, the present day Victoria Street did not exist and West Bow wound steeply up from the Grassmarket to Lawnmarket. Some of the city’s most pious citizens lived on the street – so much so that they were known as ‘The Bowhead Saints’ and chief among them was Robert Weir.

A devout Calvinist, he had a particular antipathy toward Anglicans, so much so that it was said that he, “…could not so much as endure to look upon an Orthodox Minister; but when he met any of them in the street, he would pull his hat over his eyes in a pharisaical kind of indignation and contempt.”   He was a striking figure, tall, dark, with a grim face and a large nose. He always dressed in black, with a long cloak and he carried a black thornwood staff, carved with a bizarre human head, wherever he went.

Weir would openly preach in the streets, working himself up into a religious ecstasy, during which he would brandish forth the thornwood staff. This would later be seen as significant.

One day, at the age of seventy, Thomas Weir stood up in church and began a detailed confession of the most unspeakable crimes. He announced that for most of his life he had carried out an incestuous relationship with his sister, and had committed fornication with numerous women. He had also been involved with witchcraft and admitted to bestiality with a cow and a mare.

Word of this quickly reached Edinburgh’s Provost, Lord Abbotshall. He assumed, not unnaturally, that Weir had lost his mind and attempted to play the whole thing down. However, Jean Weir now came forward to say that everything in the confession was true. She went even further, saying that not only were the siblings guilty of incest but she too had had a series of bizarre sexual encounters and had met with ‘The Queene of Fairie’ and the Devil.

Jean Weir told them that her brother had arranged a compact with the Devil and that it was he who had given Thomas the black staff. She also claimed that the Devil had taken them for a ride in his coach, pulled by six horses, all on fire. They had visited Musselburgh, where the Devil told them the outcome of a battle a week before it became known in Edinburgh.

Abbotshill still wished to avoid any proceedings and brought in doctors to examine Thomas and make a statement about his mental health. Unfortunately, they concluded that Major Weir was suffering from nothing worse than a guilty conscience and that he wished to be punished to the full extent of the law. Reluctantly, the Provost had Robert Weir arrested and formal charges were laid against him.

His sister told the jailers that the Devil had put great power into the staff and that under no circumstances must Robert be allowed to hold it for, “…if he chanced to get it into his hands he would certainly drive them all out of doors, notwithstanding all the resistance they could make.”    She said he did “…many wonderful things with it, particularly that he used to lean upon it in his hypocritical prayers.”

The trial opened on April 9, 1670. Thomas Weir was charged with Incest, Adultery (various women were named) and Bestiality. Jean was charged with Sorcery, Witchcraft and “conversing with a Familiar spirit.” The only evidence against them was their confessions, though a second sister, Margaret Weir, did tell the court that she had seen them naked in bed together once. Thomas had not been charged with witchcraft but told the court that he had lain with the Devil in the shape of a beautiful woman.

The jury took only a little time to find them both guilty. Thomas was sentenced to death by being “Strangl’d at a Stake between Edinburgh and Leith on Monday following, the 11th of April, and his Body to be Burned to Ashes.” Jean was sentenced to be “Hanged on the Tuesday morning in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh.”

As he was taken to his execution, Thomas Weir was encouraged to repent and pray for his immortal soul. He replied, “Let me alone, I will not. I have lived as a beast, and I must die as a beast.”

After he was strangled, his body was burnt. The black staff was also thrown onto the fire where, according to witnesses, it twisted and turned, burning for a long time before it was finally consumed.

Jean Weir it seems was equally determined to go out unrepentant. At her hanging the next day, she tried to take all her clothes off before being restrained so that the proceedings could be concluded. She was buried with the ashes of her brother at Shrub Hill, off Leith Walk, near where Pilrig Street is today.

After their deaths, the house in West Bow lay empty for many years. No-one wished to live there and rumours and stories of haunting made it an unpopular site.

Sir Walter Scott, a great fan of all things occult wrote in 1830, “It is certain that no story of witchcraft or necromancy, so many of which occurred near and in Edinburgh, made such a lasting impression on the public as that of Major Weir.

“The remains of the house in which he and his sister lived are still shown at the head of the West Bow, which has a gloomy aspect, well suited for a necromancer.” It was demolished shortly afterwards and any trace of it now lies below the Quaker Meeting House.

Which only leaves us with the puzzle of why did Thomas and Jean make such fantastic confessions? In seventeenth century Scotland, witchcraft was a serious offence that would almost certainly lead to an unpleasant death. Most of those convicted only confessed after being tortured, and that played no part in the Weirs’ statements. Unless it was the self-inflicted mental torture of a life lived as a hypocrite. Perhaps Thomas and Jean really had been carrying on an incestuous affair. Perhaps Thomas really was the fornicator he latterly claimed to be and in old age could no longer reconcile this with his public image as a ‘saint’.

It seems that wherever one looks in Auld Reekie, the spirit of Jekyll and Hyde may be found.

We were in St Giles Cathedral this week and noticed this little posy of roses on the tomb of James Graham, First Marquis of Montrose.

We had a dim recollection that he died in the month of May and presumed that the anniversary of that event had just passed. However, later checking showed that we were only half right. The actual date of his passing was 21 May 1650, so we are just coming up to it.

Montrose is one of the most romantic figures in Scottish history. A man of courage and daring, who stuck to his principles when it seemed all around him were changing their beliefs to promote their own personal advantage.

James Graham was born in 1612 into a great family that had played a part in Scottish history for many generations. Grahams had fought alongside William Wallace and Robert the Bruce and had died at the side of James IV at the Battle of Flodden.

In the great religious and political upheavals of the seventeenth century, Montrose had been one of the first signatories to the National Covenant, signed in Greyfriars churchyard on 28 February 1638. When the King Charles I attempted to impose an English prayer book and a form of English Presbyterianism – rule by bishops, rather than members of the church – on the Scottish people, Montrose led an army against him and through clever strategic moves forced Charles to the negotiating table.

Although he had fought against him, Montrose still recognised Charles as the rightful king. He no doubt thought he was a bad king but bad kings could be reformed by good advisors. Montrose saw that other men sought to take previously royal powers for themselves. This he believed was a far greater threat than an ill-counselled king. Chief among these was Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll. Along with seventeen other Scottish nobles he signed the Cumbernauld Bond, a document that affirmed loyalty to both the Covenant and the King and rejected the machinations of Argyll. It was an ill-judged move. Argyll was already too powerful and when the signatories were betrayed to him, he arrested Montrose and had him imprisoned as an enemy of the state.

James Graham spent five months in prison in Edinburgh, time that Argyll used to ransack his houses and terrorise his followers in an effort to find evidence of treason that would have led to his execution. Nothing was found and Montrose was released as part of a general amnesty.

For a few brief months Montrose was able to live in peace with his wife and children. However, it would not last. When civil war broke out in England in 1642 it was inevitable that Scotland would be dragged in as well. Argyll and his followers drew up a new document, the Solemn League and Covenant. When the English Parliament signed it tied Scottish church reform to English republicanism. One could no longer support both King and Kirk.

Montrose left Scotland in November 1643 and went to Oxford to speak with King Charles. Three months later, Charles raised him from an earl to a full marquis and appointed him Lieutenant General of the King’s Forces in Scotland. Montrose would now fight his former Covenanting comrades.

For a year he cut a swath across the Highlands, often inflicting defeats on superior forces but in truth the end was inevitable. The Royalist forces were trapped and beaten and Montrose fled abroad.

On the continent he continued to try and raise forces to return to Scotland and carry on the fight. He toured cities from The Hague to Paris, Krakow, Prague and Brussels. However, Argyll let it be known that he was negotiating with Charles and Montrose found that, despite his commission from the king, he lacked credibility with those who might have helped him.  While he was engaged in this work he heard that King Charles I had been executed by the English Parliament. The shock was so great he fainted and locked himself away for two days.

Back in Edinburgh, the news of Charles’ death had sent similar shockwaves through the Scottish Parliament. Charles had also been King of Scotland and they had not agreed to his beheading. Argyll saw his chance. He wrote to the Prince of Wales in exile in The Netherlands and offered to recognise him as King Charles II if he would return to Edinburgh. However, he would have to agree to the terms of the Solemn League and Covenant, repudiate his father and mother and renounce Montrose. If he accepted these terms he would in effect be a puppet king under the control of Argyll. Montrose advised Charles to reject the offer and to raise a new army that would continue the fight. Charles knew that if he followed this advice and was then beaten, he risked losing everything.

Charles II decided to follow a similar course to his father. He appeared to support Montrose while at the same time talking to Argyll. In May 1650, Montrose set off to return to Scotland. The country was firmly under the control of Argyll who had put a price of £30,000 on his head, so he must surely have known that his chances of success were slim; however, his sense of honour told him it was the right thing to do.

He established a base in Orkney, close enough yet safe from direct assault. In early April 1650 he crossed the Pentland Firth with a force of Danes and Orcadians, intending to make for Inverness. They stopped at Carbisdale, in Strath Oykel where they arranged they would meet with reinforcements from the Monroe and Ross clans. Here they were found by a force of Covenant cavalry who charged the camp. The Orcadians simply fled and the arriving Rosses and Monroes, seeing this, promptly changed sides and attacked Montrose’s remaining troops. Montrose escaped and made his way to the castle of Neil MacLeod at Ardvreck on Loch Assynt.

MacLoed took him in but then sent word that they had arrested him and claimed the £30,000 reward. When Montrose realised what had happened he told MacLeod to kill him on the spot, rather than hand him over to enemies. However, MacLeod wanted the money and handed him over. In the Highlands, the name of Neil MacLeod is thus forever associated with treachery. The poet Iain Lom would write:

You are a stripped branch of the perfumed apple tree

without  fruit or honour or comeliness, ever engaged in

murdering one another you are the leavings of  sword

thrusts and dirks. The death should be about you,

despicable one, for you have sinfully sold the truth for

Leith meal, most of which had gone sour.

Montrose was taken to Edinburgh. There would be no trial, for parliament had already decided what his fate would be. He was brought into the city via the Watergate and then paraded up the Canongate tied to a cart, driven by the hangman. Argyll was at Moray House to see his old enemy brought low but it is said that Montrose looked him straight in the eye and Argyll retreated back into the house. Parliament had hired women whose husbands had been killed in the war to throw stones at him but his quiet dignity made this impossible and instead, they turned away.

He was imprisoned in the Tolbooth where his guards took delight in tormenting him, preventing him from sleeping and blowing tobacco smoke into his cell, as they knew he hated smoking.

On Monday, 20 May he was taken to Parliament House to hear sentence pronounced. He would be hanged, beheaded and quartered with his limbs displayed over the gates of Perth, Aberdeen and Stirling; sentence to be carried out next day.

On the morning of May21, 1650 he walked the short distance to the scaffold. He spoke to the crowd saying, “I shall pray for you all. I leave my soul to God, my service to my prince, my goodwill to my friends, and my name and charity to you all. May Almighty God have mercy on this afflicted country.”

It was the end of Montrose but not the end of his story. In 1660, Charles II was restored to the throne. At last he knew who his friends were, and who his enemies. On Saturday, 11, May 1661 a great state funeral was held in Edinburgh. The reunited body of James Graham, first Marquis of Montrose was laid to rest in the High Kirk of St Giles.

It was this anniversary that the bouquet commemorated. One man who did not attend was Archibald Campbell, Marquis of Argyll. He was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle.  Two weeks later, his head would be displayed on the spike above the Netherbow recently vacated by Montrose.

Edinburgh is rightly famed for the many excellent public houses to be found in the city. Visitors from more abstemious countries sometimes comment on the remarkable number of establishments to be found in Auld Reekie, though an early encounter with the Grassmarket at the weekend may have skewed this assessment, thanks to many guidebooks and on-line sources putting such a trip into the ‘must-do’ category.

It therefore comes as something of a surprise when we tell them that the present number of bars is probably the lowest in many hundreds of years. Indeed, were we to return to the golden age of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, we would be struck by the multiplicity of hotels, taverns, inns, public houses, ale houses, brewseats, change houses, dram shops, tippling houses and shebeens that thrived in the crowded streets and wynds, and astonished at just how much the city’s life was being carried out within them. It’s a matter of some regret that we will never know these places, except from the printed page.

However, if we might indulge a wee moment of fantasy, and imagine that a certain time-traveller came along and offered to transport us to one evening in Edinburgh in say, 1787, and did we have a suggestion of where we might take some refreshment when we got there? Well, then we have the perfect answer: John Dowie’s Tavern.

John Dowie’s was situated in the now long vanished Libberton’s Wynd, a narrow street that ran from the Lawnmarket (roughly opposite where the statue of David Hume is today) down to the Cowgate. It was thus both in the midst of the busiest part of town and yet slightly withdrawn from it.

The tavern was hugely popular, not least because ’Dainty’ John Dowie was noted as a genial and attentive host, who always managed to find some sustenance for his clientele. This would have encompassed the full range of Edinburgh folk, from the labouring poor through housemaids and valets to skilled artisans, as well as lawyers, doctors, politicians, academics, merchants, farmers and shopkeepers.

To modern eyes, the interior of the tavern would have looked cramped and somewhat unappealing. One entered into the largest room, which faced onto the wynd but was only big enough to hold fourteen people. Beyond this there were other rooms, that were really little more than windowless chambers, that required to be candlelit even during daytime, and had space for only four or six people together.

Fixed to the wall of each of these rooms was a shelf, and upon this Dowie would place the bottles as each was emptied. When it came to reckoning up the bill, he would count the bottles and charge accordingly. Inevitably, some customers would attempt to ‘play a trick’ by hiding some of the bottles but this seems never to have dented John Dowie’s good humour.

Now, all this is surely enough to recommend the place to any temporal wanderer but we have to confess to an additional interest. The tavern had been a favourite haunt of the poet Robert Furgusson, and when Robert Burns arrived in the city in the winter of 1786, he too adopted the place as his ‘local’.

Burns would meet many people at John Dowie’s but he had two special drinking companions, William Nicol and Allan Masterton, respectively the Latin master and Writing master at the High School. These three had a favoured room, one that was so small that it gained the nickname, The Coffin. They must have had some good nights there together, for Burns would later incorporate them into his song, Wullie Brew’d A Peck O’ Maut, which contains the verse:

Here are we met, three merry boys, 
Three merry boys I trow are we; 
And mony a night we’ve merry been, 
And mony mae we hope to be!

The merriment was no doubt helped along by the local beer, Alexander Younger’s Ale, described by the writer Robert Chambers as, “a potent fluid which almost glued the lips of the drinker together, and of which few, therefore, could dispatch more than a bottle.” That bottle would have cost Burns three pennies, making it a slightly more expensive drink than the usual ‘ordinary’ ale.

Burns would remain in Edinburgh for only a short while before returning to Ayrshire but his reputation as a poet grew and grew. John Dowie was not slow to pick up on this and freely circulated a poem that he said was written by Burns, in praise of the tavern. The whole thing is some eleven verses long but just three should suffice here to give you a flavour:

“O, Dowie’s ale! thou art the thing, 
That gars us crack, and gars us sing, 
Cast by our cares, our wants a’ fling
Frae us wi’ anger; 
Thou e’en mak’st passion tak the wing,
Or thou wilt bang ‘er.

“How blest is he wha has a groat, 
To spare upon the cheering pot; 
He may look blythe as ony Scot
That e’er was boru: 
Gie’s a’ the like, but wi’ a coat,
And guide frae scorn.

“But thinkna that strong ale alone 
Is a’ that’s kept by dainty John; 
Na, na; for in the place there’s none,
Frae end to end, 
For meat can set ye better on,
Than can your friend.”

John Dowie lived until 1817 and left six thousand pounds in his will – quite a small fortune for the time – so the tavern had been kind to him. His successor renamed the public house, ‘Burn’s Tavern’ and played to the growing tourist trade. Libberton’s Wynd was demolished in 1881 and if any trace of it survives, it is now below the Lothian Chambers building.

But in our imagination, there’s still an evening to be had, tucked away in a dimly-lit corner, listening to Rabbie Burns composing and carousing. If you’re reading this Doctor, we’re waiting for your call.

This week we were out with a group, not of visitors, but residents; folk who have lived in and around Edinburgh for decades. Walks of this kind are always interesting because we can be certain that at some point, someone will say, “I must have walked past that hundreds of times and never noticed it.”

On this occasion, we were going along the Canongate and stopped briefly opposite 267, at present the home of the splendid Wedgewood restaurant. The building was originally a seventeenth century tenement but was reconstructed in 1956 by Robert Hurd, the architect to whom the Canongate owes so much of its present appearance. Among the features of the original building that Hurd preserved was a statue, the figure of a man, wearing a turban and bedecked with earrings, necklace, armlets and bracelets. The figure is holding a cloth, upon which is a blank heraldic shield. With time pressing, we could only give the briefest of explanation as to why it should be there. Now, with a little more leisure, we can expand upon that short tale, both for our walkers that day and others.

The story starts in 1633, following the coronation of Charles I as King of Scotland. As so often in that period, politics and religion were closely bound together in a sometimes volatile mix. The obvious venue for the ceremony seemed to be St Giles Cathedral but Charles had already expressed his intention that the coronation to be carried out with full Anglican rites, rather than the Scottish ceremony that had seen his father, James VI, made king. This put him in conflict with the church and the people here in Edinburgh. In the end, the king got his way about the ceremony but the venue was switched to Holyrood palace.

As was always the way when the populace of the city felt that their rights and customs were being trampled on, they rioted. The Lord Provost, Sir Alexander Clerk of Pittencrieff, was assaulted, his house broken into and set ablaze. The authorities moved quickly to identify and punish the ringleaders of the mob. One man who came to their notice was Andrew Gray.

Gray was the young son of a family of good repute, well known within the city but such was the anger of the Provost and the magistrates that these connections could not help him. Witnesses came forward who said that he was at the head of the mob that had fired the Provost’s house. He was swiftly found guilty and sentenced to death.

His friends had been unable to save him at the trial but they acted at once when he was imprisoned in the Tolbooth. A file and a rope were smuggled in to him and drugged drink was sent to the guards. Once they were asleep, he cut through the bars, climbed down the rope and escaped into the night. The city gates were manned and impassable so he slipped down a darkened close to the Nor’ Loch, where a servant was waiting in a row boat. He then rode north and boarded a ship waiting for him in the Firth of Forth. Even as the alarm was being raised in the city, it hauled anchor, set sail on the morning tide and Andrew Gray said farewell to Scotland.

Twelve years passed in the unhappy reign of Charles I. War and pestilence ravaged the land. By 1645, the city of Edinburgh was in a poor state. Parliament had fled to Stirling, plague had cut the population in half and most of the fit and able-bodied were away fighting in the civil wars. It was then that an additional misfortune seemed to fall on the city. One morning, a strange sail appeared in the Forth. Some of the old sailors recognised the cut of the ship and the news was swiftly sent to Edinburgh, to the home of the current Provost, Sir John Smith of Groat Hall. The ship, heading for Leith, was a Barbary Corsair, and no doubt manned by North African pirates who would burn, pillage, rob and take slaves.

A heavily armed group from the ship came ashore and after terrorising Leith, made their way to the Netherbow Gate where they demanded entry to the city. The Provost arrived and spoke with their leader. He begged them to spare Edinburgh and promised that, in return, they would be given a large amount of treasure, gathered from among the rich citizens. Besides, he pointed out, there was plague in the city and it would be dangerous for the sailors to remain.

The pirate leader agreed to this but with one additional item. He also wanted the son of the Lord Provost. The Provost wrung his hands and said that such a condition was impossible to meet – for he had no son! He had only a daughter and, alas, she was already dying of the plague.

The pirate leader went to consult with his men and when he returned said, “Very well, then bring me your daughter for I have an elixir of wondrous potency and I will cure her of this malady.”

The Provost had no choice but to agree and the young woman was brought to a house in the Canongate, where the pirate took up residence. Remarkably, after a few days she recovered, was restored to health and allowed to go.

It was now revealed that the chief of these Barbary pirates, and the man the Provost had been speaking with, was none other than the fugitive Andrew Gray. The ship. in which he had made his escape twelve years before, had been captured by pirates and he had been sold into slavery in Morocco. He ended up in the court of the Emperor who, recognising his skill and intelligence, had promoted him. His work for the Emperor was so outstanding that he had been favoured with with riches and rewards. Finally, he sought permission to leave and was gifted a ship and crew. He had then returned to his native city intending to seek his revenge in blood but it seems that his fair captive changed his mind.

He married Sir John’s daughter and settled down in the Canongate, living the life of a wealthy citizen, his earlier crimes forgotten in return for his saving the life of the young girl and the small matter of his men not burning Edinburgh and Leith to the ground. And above his door, he erected a statue of his royal patron, the Emperor of Morocco. Look out for him when you’re next passing.

After all this time it’s impossible to prove how much of this tale is true and how much fancy – the good folk of Edinburgh have always had an ear for an entertaining story – but that particular piece of Canongate has been known as Morocco Land for a very long time. There is also a deed for the property dated 1731 that shows that the resident at that time was one, John Gray. Coincidence – or might he be a descendant of the Canongate Corsair? 

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A couple of blog posts back, we touched on visiting the National Monument on Calton Hill and also its alternative names of ‘Edinburgh’s Folly’ and ‘Edinburgh’s Disgrace’. Though it has become an icon of Edinburgh, and as easily recognisable in the city’s skyline as the castle itself, few visitors know the story of this incomplete structure and the concept behind it.

The first mention of a National Monument dates from 1816, a little over a year after the Battle of Waterloo that had brought to an end more than 20 years of more or less continuous warfare with France. The idea was discussed at a meeting of the Highland Society of Scotland and various proposals put forward. One of the attendees that day was Lord Elgin, the man who had removed the decorative frieze from the Parthenon in Greece – the sculptures that would later become known as the ‘Elgin Marbles’. We cannot be certain that it was Lord Elgin who proposed a scheme to build a facsimile of the building that he knew so well but his presence at the meeting is surely significant.

By January 1822, plans for the royal visit of King George IV to Edinburgh were well in hand. Sir Walter Scott, active in both the organisation of the visit and the Highland society, considered that it would be the most perfect conjunction of circumstances if, during the visit, the king could lay the foundation stone of the new monument. An appeal for £42,000 was launched, signed not only by Sir Walter but also Henry Cockburn and Frances Jeffrey, among others.

For a season the idea of a modern Parthenon gracing the Athens of the North obsessed the middle classes of the city. The Edinburgh Review noted that many who just a twelve month before knew nothing of Greek architecture “now talk of the Parthenon and of peristyles and cells and intercolumniations and pediments with all the familiarity of household objects.”

It was proposed that the Memorial should be more than just a recognition of the war dead. There could also be catacombs where the famous and great of the future might be interred – a sort of Scottish Westminster Abbey.

In the event, the king declined the offer – probably because he was advised that Sir Walter would try to tap him for a donation. Indeed, the project ran into financial difficulties from the start. By April 1823 only £16,000 had been raised.

Parliament in London was approached for a grant of £10,000, partly on the idea that this was not merely a Scottish scheme but ‘A splendid addition to the architectural riches of the empire’. Parliament was not persuaded.

Nonetheless, it was decided that a start should be made. The architect chosen for the work was C R Cockerell, an acknowledged expert on Greek architecture and the obvious man for the job. However, the committee also decided that they should have a local man on site and additionally appointed William Playfair, already noted for his neoclassical work in the New Town. This was not the most happy of working arrangements and in the end, Cockerill was relegated to little more than supplying drawings while Playfair got on with the actual work.

The material chosen came from the Craigleith Quarry, near the city. Playfair had used this stone extensively in the New Town and understood the quality of the material. It took 12 horses and 70 men to move the larger pieces and work proceeded at a slow pace. By 1829 only 12 pillars had been completed – and that’s when the money ran out.

It’s since been suggested that the backers of the scheme understood when they started work that the building would never be completed. If true, one must admit it was conceived as the most awe inspiring folly in the land.

Rather inevitably, schemes to finish the building surface every few years and, just as certainly, come to naught, for those ideas are themselves flawed. They misunderstand the relationship the people of Edinburgh, and Scotland, have with the National Monument. We don’t see it as a failure or something shameful. It’s in the Scottish character to think big and go for the great prize, even if you fail, rather than be cautious and conservative to gain the lower honour.

The building, even in its incomplete state, may still fulfil the original concept. When we told the story above to a visitor, he stood for a moment regarding the columns and then said, “Now, when I look at this, I don’t see a bit of an old temple. I see a rank of Scottish soldiers, standing erect, ready to go into battle and do their duty.”

Which is perhaps more fitting than a completed temple filled with dusty memorials to lost lords and forgotten politicians.

The middle of the nineteenth century was a time when men thought big. Brunel was building ships and bridges, Robert Stevenson was circling the nation with lighthouses and Joseph Paxton was creating the Crystal Palace. Here in Edinburgh, we also had those who dreamed on a large scale. Take for example, John Cox.

John Cox was born around 1805 into a wealthy family who had made their fortune in the production of glue and gelatine at their Gorgie Mills works in the west of the city. He joined the family business as a young man and soon proved his worth, improving production processes and seeking out new uses for their products. He was also an inventor, holding several patents, including one for an early form of typewriter. However, his claim to greatness, in more than one sense of the word, must surely lie in one particular creation.

As he went about his business in Edinburgh, John could not help but notice that for many of his fellow citizens it was a far from healthy place. Those with leisure time to spare could ride, hunt, play golf and enjoy numerous outdoor pursuits. But for the working classes, such as those employed in the glue factory, healthy exercise was more difficult to come by. John Cox thought about this and came up with a plan. And it was a plan on an epic scale.

In 1864, Cox obtained a parcel of land, just to the west of the recently opened Scotland Street Railway Station. Soon after, huge amounts of timber began to arrive on site and curious structures started to rise. Few who watched the works take shape could guess at what this extravagant construction project could be and speculation was rife.

Finally, in April 1865, all was revealed as announcements in the local press announced the opening of Edinburgh’s new wonder, a place where every man, woman and child could come and enjoy fun-filled physical exercise – the Royal Patent Gymnasium!

It was an instant success. With an entrance fee of just sixpence, it was affordable to all but what made it truly remarkable was the scale of the equipment.

There was the ‘Great Sea Serpent’, a rotary boat, 471 feet round situated in a pool of water, pinned to a central shaft by wire spokes. Six hundred people at a time could sit in the boat and row. It was said to achieve speeds worthy of a small steam vessel.

Another popular item was ‘Chang’, a giant see-saw, a hundred feet long by seven feet wide mounted on a central pivot above which swung the giant figure that gave the apparatus its name. Up to 200 people could fit on Chang and the brave souls on the far ends would be propelled fifty feet into the air. Water tanks were placed beneath to dampen the crash as they returned to earth. Health and Safety rules were still some way in the future…

Elsewhere there was the ‘Patent Velocipede Paddle Merry-Go-Round’. Named after the early type of bicycles that had become a craze in the 1860s, this was 160 feet in circumference and could seat 600 would-be cyclists who would propel the machine by sitting astride the rim, holding on to handlebars and pushing with their feet.

For those who preferred more individual exercise there was an athletic hall, with an instructor and a complete range of the more usual gym equipment as well as velocipedes and the largest training velocipede course in Scotland.

If your taste was for something a little gentler, there was a small lake with boats and canoes that transformed in the winter months into a skating rink, complete with gas lighting.

The Royal Patent Gymnasium was truly a wonder of its age and people came to it from all over Britain – think of it as sort of Alton Towers with a Victorian good purpose sensibility. In its heyday, special event days could bring in 15,000 visitors – more than visit Edinburgh Castle even today.

For a few decades it was a roaring success but, as is always the case, over time the taste for such things diminished and towards the end of the century, with visitor numbers falling, the gymnasium closed. A newer enthusiasm took over and a football ground was opened on the site, home to St Bernards, who were Scottish Cup winners in 1895. Later, an office building and car parking were built there and in 2018, there are further plans for the area, with retail, residential and hotel uses all being put forward.

No trace of the Royal Patent Gymnasium remains to be seen but you can find a picture of it here: http://canmore.org.uk/collection/1120480

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Modern historians, looking back at the Edinburgh of the eighteenth century, chiefly characterise the Scottish capital as a place of enlightenment thinkers – the city of genius. This is, of course, perfectly correct, for the discoveries and new ways of thinking of men such as Adam Smith, James Hutton, David Hume and Robert Adam were building the foundations of our modern way of life. 

However, there was another side to the city, an aspect made up of the 95% of men – and virtually 100% of women – who were disenfranchised from learning, decision making and politics. Individually, they were unimportant, their names mostly unheeded at the time and certainly lost to us now. But, on those rare occasions when the faceless and the powerless came together in some common cause, they became the living nightmare of the ruling elites, who then had a single name for all of them. The Mob.

The Scots law that was enforced by Lords, Magistrates and Bailies was harsh. Hundreds of offences carried the death penalty; many more could result in transportation to the colonies and a life of slavery. An individual had to very brave, or very foolish, to raise either hand or voice against their rulers. In such an atmosphere, grievances, real or imagined, would fester below the surface, the subject of grumbled conversations in the markets and angry talk in the taverns. Then, some incident would occur that would set this smouldering resentment ablaze and the Mob would emerge from the closes and wynds of the Old Town to make its feelings known, and take matters into its own hands. One such incident occurred in September, 1736. It became known as the Porteous Riot.

The roots of the Porteous Riot go back a further six months to 14^th April, 1736 when a convicted smuggler named Andrew Wilson was publicly hanged in the Grassmarket. At the time, smuggling was defined as not only the importation of goods without paying the appropriate duty but also the production of spirits within Scotland without paying tax.

This locally produced spirit was known as Peatreek, equivalent to the Irish Potcheen, or American Moonshine. Although Wilson had been convicted of burglary, he was also involved in the Peatreek trade and the natural sympathy of the crowd was with him and against the excise men.  He had also helped his co-accused, one George Robertson, escape from the courtroom and had then grappled with the law officers. In doing so, he sacrificed himself in order that his friend might get away, and many of the crowd thought of this act as noble and heroic.

At the hanging, this partisan feeling manifested itself as some in the crowd started throwing stones at the hangman and officials. John Porteous, Captain of the City Guard on this day, responded by ordering his men to open fire directly into the crowd. Some witnesses said that he himself had fired his pistol at point blank range, though he denied this. Several people were killed, some accounts say nine, and many more wounded. There was no evidence that any of the casualties had been involved in the stone throwing.

Why John Porteous took this apparently reckless action is uncertain. Some say he lost control and panicked, others stated that he was drunk on duty. Whatever the reason, he was swiftly arrested and put on trial. His defence was that the magistrates had ordered him to be there, with armed men and had thus implicitly sanctioned his opening fire on the crowd should the need arise. An early example of, “I was only following orders.” Unsurprisingly, the magistrates did not agree and he was found guilty of the crimes of murder and mayhem. There could be only one sentence; he would go to the gallows. The date set for his execution was 8^th September, 1736.

However, it’s an almost universal truth that those in authority dislike it when those involved in law enforcement fall foul of those same laws and while Porteous was being held in the Tollbooth prison near St Giles Cathedral, powerful friends were busy. A petition appealing for clemency was sent to King George II in London. George was on his summer holiday when it arrived – he’d gone back to Hanover – and the matter was dealt with by Queen Charlotte. She granted a stay of execution for six weeks, presumably so that the king could deal with it properly when he returned from his German provinces.

When news of this arrangement reached Edinburgh there was widespread discontent. The populace suspected that there was some double-dealing going on. It was thought that the temporary stay of execution would be made permanent or even that Porteous would be pardoned.

On the evening of September 7^th, a crowd gathered at the West Port gate into the city. From there, they marched up to the High Street, secured the Netherbow Port, to prevent troops billeted in Canongate from entering the city, and proceeded to the Tollbooth. Now, some 4,000 strong, they set fire to the doors, stormed in and pulled John Porteus from his cell.

He was dragged down West Bow to the scene of his crime in the Grassmarket, outside the location of the present day Last Drop pub. There was no scaffold in place, (it was assembled for each hanging and then taken away afterwards) so a dyer’s pole was pressed into service. There was also no rope, so one had to be obtained from a local shop. Legend has it that they broke in and took the rope but left a guinea on the counter to pay for it. If true, this shows a fine delineation between what the mob considered was acceptable lawbreaking (lynching) and that which was unacceptable (theft).  

John Porteous swung just after midnight, on the ‘due date’, September 8^th. The Mob had once again demonstrated its power, and with the deed done, it melted away.

The government in Westminster was outraged. Threats were made against the Edinburgh magistrates (who were suspected of having turned a blind eye), the city in general (removal of city status) and of a whole host of other humiliations. It was even muttered that the incident was the start of another Jacobite rebellion and the army should be deployed. Eventually, cooler heads prevailed and most of the intended sanctions abandoned. The uneasy status quo was restored.

No person was ever convicted of taking part in the Porteous riot.

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In Edinburgh, the tourist season never really comes to an end; like the sea at Porty beach it rises and ebbs but never goes away entirely. One thing that does seem to change as the seasons turn is where our visitors come from. Over the past month, American visitors seem to have predominated and it was while I was chatting to one of these that the topic of The Mound came up.

“What is its proper name?” she asked me, and I had to tell her it really is ‘The Mound’. To be fair, both Edinburgh/Auld Reekie and National Monument/Edinburgh’s Disgrace had come up earlier in the conversation so it might have seemed to her a reasonable assumption that many other things in the city have a colloquial name to go alongside their ‘official’ name and I’d just used the former. (In fact that is true but we’ll go into it another time).

The origins of the mound go back to around 1780 and an Old Town resident named George Boyd who had a clothing shop in the Lawnmarket, (one early 19th century book described him as a ‘dealer in Tartan’, which seems a little picturesque). George was fond of visiting the works in the developing New Town but disliked having to go around via North Bridge. He thought a direct connection from Lawnmarket to the new suburb would be the ideal thing. It appears other thought the same, for he managed to persuade his neighbours to help him with paying to have some stepping stones put in place across the bed of the Nor Loch. Though this had been drained, it was still swampy and otherwise impassable. This though, was just the beginning, for George was about to have a stroke of genius.

Over in the New Town the building works were proceeding apace. However, the levelling of ground and the digging of foundations were producing vast quantities of waste earth, where was all this spoil to go? ‘Why not make a bridge with it?’ suggested George, and the idea of the Mound was born.

Permission was sought from the city council and they readily agreed. For the next fifty years an average of 1,800 cartloads a day would be tipped onto what the locals first called Geordie Boyd’s Brig then the Earthen Mound and finally just, the Mound.

Because it was just packed earth, the Mound wasn’t suitable for stone buildings but a range of smaller wooden buildings, some little more than shacks, soon appeared, offering a range of low-brow entertainments such as gambling tables, shooting galleries and coconut shies. There was also the slightly more respectable Rotunda where visitors were entertained by moving circular panoramas, courtesy of a magic lantern show. These were all cleared away in the 1840s when the National Gallery was built. The roadway was widened and macadamised around the same time.

Today, the mound is still fulfilling George Boyd’s original vision of a thoroughfare connecting the Old Town to the New. However, I wonder if he ever had a moment of regret. For the town council decided that while the Mound was a splendid addition to the city, it didn’t join the Lawnmarket quite where they wanted. Therefore they added a sweeping curve round behind the Bank of Scotland to meet Bank Street. To do this they obtained parliamentary permission to demolish some old buildings ‘almost without value’, they said and ‘sinking fast under the pressure of their own weight’. One of these buildings, was George Boyd’s shop.

Reflecting back on my conversation, I can’t help but think that the city fathers of the day were a little remiss, and that our American visitor had glimpsed their error, for surely the proper name of the street should have remained, Geordie Boyd’s Brig, thus giving locals the opportunity, of referring to it, for obscure historical reasons, as ‘The Mound’. Somehow, that would be more Edinburgh.

Edinburgh has always been a city of innovators, adventurers and free-thinkers. Men like Adam Smith, David Hume, Dugald Stewart and James Hutton (to name but a few) have embraced the city and in turn been accepted as its sons. One man who has no statue or memorial here, but surely deserves a similar honour, is Dr. James Graham.

James Graham was born in the Grassmarket in June 1745, the son of a Fife saddler and an English lady. He studied medicine at the university but seems to have quit before finally qualifying. This minor setback did not stop him from calling himself ‘Doctor’ Graham.

Sometime before 1770 he moved to Yorkshire, married and then set off for America. For a while he had a practice in Philadelphia, where he learned about the electrical experiments of Benjamin Franklin and from these became convinced that electricity was the new panacea. Extolling the virtues of these discoveries he wrote, “Electricity invigorates the whole body and remedies all physical defects.”

In 1775, as the American War of Independence ignited the former colonies, Graham returned to England where he continued to practice medicine with the emphasis on ‘Effluvia, vapours and applications aetherial, magnetic or electric’. Among his patients was Catherine Macaulay, famed as an intellectual in a period when women were more usually famous for who they were sleeping with. Whatever the nature of her illness, James Graham must have tackled it with some success, for in 1778, at the age of 47, she scandalised Georgian society by marrying James’ brother, William, who had just turned 21!

In 1780 James arrived in London and swiftly opened his ‘Temple of Health’, an opulent and lavishly furnished set of rooms in the newly completed and ultra-fashionable Adelphi. Entrance cost a crown, and clients were entertained with music from hidden musicians, perfume wafting through the air and the attentions of the ‘Goddesses of Health’ – Graham’s young female assistants, dressed in diaphanous classical costumes. They would listen to lectures, try out the ‘medico-electrical apparatus’ and purchase Dr Graham’s patent medicines.

A year later, in 1781, he opened his next venture, ‘The Temple of Hymen’, in Pall Mall, a clinic devoted to the needs of couples having difficulties in conceiving. The highlight of this new establishment was the Celestial Bed.

Graham had been working on this for some years, and the finished product was worth the time he had devoted to it. The frame of the bed was decorated with gilded dragons, glass columns and ‘erotic illustrations’. Above, there was a canopy, within which were dispensers of exotic perfumes (mixed with an invigorating dash of ether), and a large mirror. The mattress of the bed was filled with the hair of stallions and “sweet new wheat or oat straw, mingled with balm, rose leaves, and lavender flowers”. It could also be tilted, so that couples could find the most advantageous positions. An electrical current was run through copper coils in the headboard, to fill the air with ‘magnetic fluid’ that encouraged “the necessary degree of strength and exertion to the nerves”. The bed would also create music via a set of organ pipes, triggered by the couple’s movements. All this was yours for just £50 a night. For comparison, the average workingman’s wage at the time was 8/- (40p) a week.

For two guineas, you could hear Dr Graham give his astonishingly frank lectures on sex and procreation, (a matter he regarded as a patriotic duty), as well as the evils of prostitution and masturbation. He would end the lectures with a free electric shock. There were brass connectors concealed in the padding of each seat.

Despite a client list that included some of the wealthiest and most noble families in the land (the Prince of Wales had a go on the Celestial Bed) Graham was not universally popular. His fame inevitably brought him enemies. A London newspaper of the day, the Morning Herald, denounced him as a quack and launched a campaign against him. In 1783 he sold his goods, closed the Temple of Hymen and returned to Edinburgh.

Back home, Graham once again started lecturing, giving his fellow citizens those candid views on matters sexual. The Edinburgh magistrates it seems were not quite so sanguine as their contemporaries in London. They deemed such things to be improper for public discussion and banned him from speaking. The doctor then published ‘An appeal to the Public’, in which he attacked the magistrates for silencing him. They countered with a complaint against Graham and took him to court. Bearing in mind that his accusers were also his judges the outcome was inevitable – he was fined £20 and imprisoned until the debt was paid.

Following his release, he undertook a final series of lectures. Presumably these were sufficiently ‘watered down’ so as not to upset the Bailies. One surviving advertisement cautions ladies to get to the hall early, in order that they may get a seat.

He also continued to treat patients with his electrical equipment and sell copies of his book, The Guardian of Health, Happiness and Long Life but his popularity was waning as his behaviour became increasingly eccentric. He would wear no woollen clothes but dressed almost entirely in white linen. As he walked through the streets, he would take off his clothes and give them to the poor. A noble gesture perhaps but also one that got him arrested again.

He took to sleeping naked, with no blankets or cover and all the windows open, saying that excess heat was to blame for most illness. He sought permission to build a house atop Arthur’s Seat, in order that he might get the full benefit of an Edinburgh winter. He took up ‘earth-bathing’, essentially being buried in soil up to the neck, claiming that by this means the body could absorb all the nutrients needed for life.

Finally he decided that he was a messenger from God and founded the New Jerusalem Church in Lochend Close. After this, he would sign letters, ‘Servant of The Lord, OWL’ (which stood for Oh Wonderful Love). He would remain the only member of this church.

By 1794, he was not only earth bathing but had had taken to wearing clothes made from cut turves and fasting for long periods. The magistrates decided that once again he should be confined, but this time for his own good and in the gentler surroundings of his own home on Buccleuch Street, opposite Archer’s Hall. It was there that he died, quite suddenly, at the age of 49. He is buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard.

From the distance of two and a quarter centuries, it is easy to dismiss James Graham as a quack, a trickster and a charlatan, but that would be unfair. Contemporaries spoke of him as being warm, friendly and generous. His patients recorded him as attentive and caring. There is no reason to suppose that he thought his treatments were doing anything but good, despite their bizarre aspects.

His life contained a bold mix of drugs, drama, money, sex, religion, royalty, science and scandal. Not bad for a lad from the Grassmarket. Thinking of which, wouldn’t that be the perfect spot for a memorial to the creator of the Celestial Bed?