Review of Edinburgh: A New History, by Alistair Moffat, pub. Birlinn 2024

[sheenaghpugh]

I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn
On Lammermuir. Hearkening I heard again
In my precipitous city beaten bells
Winnow the keen sea wind.

(Poem found in the unfinished manuscript of Weir of Hermiston, after the death of Robert Louis Stevenson)

John Amyatt’s remark in the 1770 about the incredible flowering of the Enlightenment in Edinburgh is well known. “Here I stand at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can in a few minutes, take 50 men of genius by the hand.” But the city has the statistics to back up its intellectual boasts: it is truly amazing how many “firsts” it can claim. The first non-ecclesiastical university in Britain. The first teaching hospital. The first hospital (Craiglockhart) set up to treat those suffering from what was then called shell shock. The earliest purpose-built archive in Europe, Register House. The first use of anaesthesia in the process of childbirth. The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Moffat’s readable history gives some background to this flowering, and starts, properly, with the area’s geology. The topography of Edinburgh was shaped in the Ice Ages: “As gravity and rising temperatures drew the Lomond glaciers eastwards, they collided with the hard rock Edinburgh Castle now sits on, and they were forced to divide. Having scoured and buffed the old volcanic pipe down to the bare, sheer cliffs now visible on three flanks, the ice flow scraped out the deep ravines on either side: what became the Grassmarket/Cowgate and Princes Street Gardens and the site of Waverley Station. And crucially for the development and later nature of the city, the glaciers left a long tail in the eastern lee of the Castle Rock, the tail on which David I’s medieval town would be built.”

These cliffs and ravines made it hard for the “precipitous” city to expand outwards in most directions; instead it went upwards, in the form of tenements, resulting in a great number of people, of all classes, crammed into a small space. This had its drawbacks in terms of hygiene, but it also made for a concentrated, collaborative society in which everyone knew everyone else and could easily swap ideas in the city’s clubs and streets.

What also helped was the Scottish passion for education. Wealthy philanthropists routinely founded schools: George Heriot, goldsmith and moneylender, known for his well-filled pockets as Jinglin’ Geordie, founded in 1659 a school for orphans, George Heriot’s Hospital. In the quadrangle (for the school still exists in Lauriston Place), there is a statue of Jinglin’ Geordie, and the Latin motto under it translates as: ‘This statue shows my body, this building shows my soul.’ Remarkably for the time even girls were not forgotten. “In 1694 the Merchant Maiden Hospital opened. The school was the result of the generosity of Mary Erskine, a remarkable woman who made her fortune by setting up a private bank. Like George Heriot, Mary was childless, having lost her three boys and two girls in infancy. Her endowment had a very specific purpose: it was for the maintenance (and education) of the daughters of burgesses in the city of Edinburgh.”

Another, later, Edinburgh girls’ school had the motto “Light and Joy” and a liberal curriculum with no homework. Its name was St Trinnean’s. “When the artist Ronald Searle encountered some of the girls during the Second World War, he drew a picture of genteel chaos. The St Trinian’s films became legendary, and the portrayal of the headmistress by Alastair Sim was a beautifully observed caricature of certain Edinburgh middle-class attitudes. Having been brought up in the city, he knew them well.” And the rest is history, as they say.

The crowded nature of Edinburgh also, of course, facilitated the forming and fast action of mobs, as it did in pre-revolutionary Paris, and “the beast”, as the Edinburgh mob was known by some, inspired considerable fear in the town’s authorities. Occasionally someone would arise who could to a degree lead and control this mob, most notably, around 1750, Joseph Smith, cobbler, who, “when an issue or injustice came to his attention, picked up his drum and walked up and down the High Street banging it loudly. Ten thousand could be at his back in moments, and no power in the city could resist those numbers.” Smith seems to have used his power over the crowd only for good, but that anyone, particularly a working man, could exert such influence must have alarmed the burgesses.

Smith is one of many “characters” who enliven the pages; a serious history need not lack humour, and anecdotes like that of Dr James Simpson and his friends, experimenting with anaesthesia, are welcome; “To find the most effective form of chloroform, they inhaled it. With one sample, they at first felt very cheerful and then all collapsed only to wake the following morning. That was the one, they agreed.”

I can’t think of any important aspect of city life that Moffat does not cover in this history, and only once did I feel inclined to disagree with him. When he says, “Most witches were either strangled or drowned before their limp bodies were tied to the stake, but others, like the women of 1608, were burned alive (‘worryit’ in Scots)”, I think he is mistaken about that word. Whatever happened to these particular women, “wirryit”, in Scots, does mean “strangled”. But this is a lively, thorough and useful history of an extraordinary city from the Ice Age to the present day.