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WHITE HORSE CLOSE: PHILANTHROPY, SCOTTISH HISTORICAL IMAGINATION AND THE REBUILDING OF EDINBURGH IN THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY
R. J. MORRIS
White Horse Close stands on the north side of Edinburgh’s Lower Canongate. The enterprising tourist, who turning aside through a narrow and anonymous archway, will find a surprisingly spacious courtyard, sheltered from the noise and dirt of the main street. There is a puzzling lack of identity about the architecture derived from the restorations of the 1960s, which have been variously labelled as ‘modern vernacular [. . .] so blatantly fake that it can be acquitted of any intention to deceive’ and as ‘heritage rather than history’.1 Despite this, the Close retains much of the outline and footprint of its origins in a late medieval burgage plot and carries the burden of a lieu de mémoire, a place for the telling of stories of Scottish history, of Mary Queen of Scots, Bonnie Prince Charlie and long gone coaches setting out for London.2 The Close survived as a significant part of Edinburgh and Scottish self-presentation because of another reconstruction of the later 1880s and early 1890s. This reconstruction was the work of architect James Jerdan and was undertaken on the initiative of Dr Alexander Barbour and his sister Jane Whyte.3 It was the result of a complex of factors, many of which are forgotten in the current imagination of Edinburgh. The first reconstruction came at a moment in 1 J. Gifford, C. McWilliam and D. Walker, The Buildings of Scotland: Edinburgh (London, 1984), p. 216; C. McKean, Edinburgh: An Illustrated Architectural Guide (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 38. 2 Holyrood Archaeology Project Team, Scotland’s Parliament Site and the Canongate: Archaeology and History, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (Edinburgh, 2008); Dorothy Bell, Edinburgh Old Town: The Forgotten Nature of an Urban Form (Edinburgh, 2008); E. Patricia Dennison, Holyrood and Canongate: A Thousand Years of History (Edinburgh, 2005); P. Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris, 1994). The English translation is slightly different in content, Realms of Memory, trans A. Goldhammer (New York, 1996), but both show the enormous variety of locations for this cultural process. 3 Dictionary of Scottish Architects, www.scottisharchitects.org.uk [accessed 12 Sept. 2011]. Jerdan had recently set up in independent practice after ten years as clerk of works with the wellconnected firm of James Maitland Wardrop.
Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 33.1, 2013, 101–128 DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2013.0064 © Edinburgh University Press 2013 www.euppublishing.com/jshs
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R. J. Morris the remaking of the central area of Edinburgh when key members of the elite were looking not only for the cultural references of Calton Hill or Old College but also for an authentic reference to specific earlier built environments. William Chambers had financed the restoration of St Giles Church to form a ‘cathedral’ to rival Westminster Abbey. His industrial rival had paid for the restoration of key buildings in the Castle, a Scottish version of the Tower of London with references to religious heroes and a violent kingship.4 White Horse Close was more than a work of architectural heritage. The Close resulted from ambitious plans of philanthropic management that linked ideas from London, notably those of Octavia Hill, the changing nature of the evangelical ambitions of the Free Church of Scotland, the continued concern of the Edinburgh elite about the social and sanitary conditions of the poor and working classes and the wealth and prestige of the growing financial and professional classes of the city.5 Taking the narrative of the creation of a key part of Edinburgh’s built environment as the focus of an enquiry into the landscape, society and culture of the late nineteenthcentury city provides a variety of methodological problems and opportunities. The activities of the main players fit uneasily into the categories of welfare and housing history. There was little sense of a division between philanthropic motives and market processes, and the state, in the form of the local state, was a constant reference point. The activities of those involved crossed the boundaries of religious, gender and class history. At the same time, few of those involved wrote about what they were doing in a systematic manner. There was none of the determined advocacy and instruction of an Octavia Hill, or even the social sermons of James Begg and Thomas Bell.6 Hence the historical analysis of the motivations and relationships involved in the rebuilding of the Close depends upon context, public actions and family relationships. These depended upon the opportunities and experiences of the Edinburgh economy, some of which were specific to the late nineteenth century. Concern for the social and moral relationships of the poor and working classes had grown from at least the 1830s. A wide range of interventions had been proposed, including the granting of political rights, temperance and teetotalism, 4 R. J. Morris, ‘The Capitalist, the Professor and the Soldier: The Re-making of Edinburgh Castle, 1850–1900’, Planning Perspectives, 22, 1 (2007), pp. 55–78; J. C. Lees, St Giles, Edinburgh: Church, College and Cathedral from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Edinburgh, 1889), pp. 256–74; W. Chambers, Historical Sketch of St Giles Cathedral (Edinburgh, 1909). 5 J. Lewis, ‘The Boundary between Voluntary and Statutory Social Service in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Historical Journal, 39, 1 (1996), pp.155–77; C. Brown, The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730 (London, 1987), pp. 130–208; R. Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh: Land, Property and Trust in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 365, 415–58. 6 G. Bell, Day and Night in the Wynds of Edinburgh and Blackfriars’ Wynd Analyzed (reprint of 1849 edition, East Ardsley, 1973); J. Begg, How Every Man May Become his own Landlord; or, A Way by which to Elevate the Condition of the Masses of Britain, and Develop the Resources of the Country: Being a Lecture, Delivered in Newington Free Church, at the Request of the "Scottish Social Reform Association", on the 6th of March 1851 (Edinburgh, 1851) and Happy Homes for Working Men, and how to get them (London, 1866).
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White Horse Close and the Re-building of Edinburgh poor law reform as well as the aggressive bible Christianity of the city missions.7 By the 1860s, such interventions had come to focus on the built environment. A variety of model dwellings appeared in the city. The Edinburgh Co-operative Building Company was founded in 1861 and proved of long-term importance for Edinburgh. The impact of such initiatives tended to be at the edge of the built city, where land costs were lower than in the central area. For the central area the dominant intervention was provided by the Edinburgh Improvement Act of 1867. This involved major demolitions. Many of the oldest buildings in the city were lost. Some 2,721 homes were destroyed but only 340 built in the area affected. In return, Edinburgh gained a major increase in circulating space, with new and wider streets such as Chambers Street and St Mary’s Street. These provided space for increasing traffic and the growing number of institutional buildings like the Industrial Museum of Scotland and Heriot Watt College.8 By the 1880s, there was an increasing unease over what had been done. Witnesses to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes felt that the clearance had done little more than increase overcrowding in the areas surrounding the improvement area. There was also a change in terms of the ethics and aesthetics of preservation. James Begg was dismissive of attempts by Lord Cockburn and others to preserve the medieval Trinity Church.9 Daniel Wilson, secretary of the Society of Antiquaries, went around Edinburgh producing engravings and water-colours of buildings that were to be demolished. One of the few such buildings to survive remains as a major impediment to traffic in the lower High Street. It survived, claimed Wilson, because many believed that John Knox once stayed there and it still remains as sacred space, a monument to the bible Christianity which dominated mid-century.10 In the last thirty years of the century Edinburgh placed an increasing value on the aesthetics of the old. The Cockburn Society was formed in 1870. The Old Edinburgh Club, formed in 1901, included in its first publication a survey by Bruce J. Home of the surviving older buildings of the central area of the Old Town.11 In the late 1880s, Edinburgh, like most of British society, was a long way from admitting the 7 G. Morton, Unionist Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland, 1830–1860 (East Linton, 1999), pp. 97–132; G. Morton and R. J. Morris, ‘Civil Society, Governance and Nation, 1832–1914’, in R. A. Houston and W. W. J. Knox (eds), The New Penguin History of Scotland (London, 2001), pp. 355–416. 8 J. Johnson and L. Rosenburgh, Renewing Old Edinburgh: The Enduring Legacy of Patrick Geddes (Glendaruel, 2010), pp. 31–68; R. J. Morris, ‘Death, Chambers Street and Edinburgh Corporation’, History Teaching Year Book, 6 (1992), pp. 10–15; Second Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiry into the Housing of the Working Classes. Scotland, C.4409 (1885), Q18,841, evidence of Bailie Clark. 9 J. Begg, How to Promote and Preserve the True Beauty of Edinburgh: Being a Few Hints to the Hon. Lord Cockburn on his Late Letter to the Lord Provost (Edinburgh, 1849). 10 D. Wilson, Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time (Edinburgh, 1848). There were later editions in 1873 and 1891; Private letters of Sir Daniel Wilson respecting James Mosman’s house at the Netherbow, Edinburgh 1897; Elizabeth Hulse (ed.), Thinking with Both Hands: Sir Daniel Wilson in the Old World and the New (Toronto, 1999). 11 B. J. Home, ‘Provisional List of Old Houses Remaining in High Street and Canongate Edinburgh’, Book of the Old Edinburgh Club, 1 (1908), pp. 1–30.
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R. J. Morris need for a major intervention by the local state to build and subsidise housing for working people. This was to come in the 1920s and 1930s after the inflation and rent strikes of the 1914–18 War had wrecked any chance of such provision by the market.12 By the late 1880s, an increasing number of people had come to believe that effective change could be brought about by the carefully directed activities of informed and educated members of the elite. Small-scale but cumulative activity was designed to manage and manipulate market forces and provided leadership for the poor and working classes. The necessary change thus brought about would take place within the frameworks of regulation and professional guidance provided by the local state. One of these interventions was the rebuilding of White Horse Close. The story began with a special meeting of the Public Health Committee of Edinburgh town council. The Medical Officer of Health and the Burgh Engineer submitted a list of properties which they judged ‘uninhabitable’ and asked the council to call on the proprietors to show why such properties should not be ‘shut up’. One of these was a tenement in White Horse Close in which two of its four houses were already empty.13 Some twenty months later the following notice appeared in The Scotsman: CANONGATE AND WHITE HORSE CLOSE To be sold within Dowell’s Rooms, 18 George Street, Edinburgh on Tuesday, 1st March 1887 [in virtue of the powers contained in a Bond and Disposition in Security] The TENEMENT of SHOPS and DWELLING-HOUSES forming nos. 23, 25, 27 and 33 CANONGATE, EDINBURGH; and the TWO TENEMENTS of HOUSES forming nos. 1 to 13, 15 and 17 WHITE HORSE CLOSE, CANONGATE extending backwards from above tenement on each side of the Close. The Frontage of the whole Property to the Canongate is about 76 feet. Rental £263, 2s. No Feu-duty. Upset Price, £1900. Mr WHEATHERHEAD, Factor, 25 Canongate, will show the Property; and the Titles and Articles of Roup are in the hands of J & J MILLIGAN, W.S., 15 George Street.14 12 J. Melling, ‘Clydeside Housing and the Evolution of State Rent Control, 1900–1939’, in J. Melling (ed.), Housing, Social Policy and the State (London, 1980), pp. 139–67; R. Rodger, ‘Scotland’, in C. G. Pooley (ed.), Housing Strategies in Europe, 1880–1930 (Leicester, 1992), pp. 105–31; J. Melling, Rent Strikes: Peoples’ Struggle for Housing in West Scotland, 1890–1916 (Edinburgh, 1983); A. McKinlay and R. J. Morris (eds), The ILP on Clydeside, 1893–1932: From Foundation to Disintegration (Manchester, 1991). 13 The Scotsman, 26 Mar. 1885. 14 The Scotsman, 15 Jan. 1887.
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White Horse Close and the Re-building of Edinburgh Meanwhile the opportunities and problems of the tenement had been debated within the committee of the recently formed Edinburgh Social Union (ESU). The ESU had been founded in January 1885 under the leadership of Patrick Geddes, then a young lecturer in Edinburgh University, and Mrs D. Douglas Maclagan, wife of an Edinburgh stockbroker, whose siblings included Andrew Douglas Maclagan, Regius Professor of Forensic Medicine and a senior professor in the university.15 The stated aim of the ESU was ‘to raise the standard of comfort mainly by laying stress on the value of beauty and order in the surroundings of life’. It intended to buy houses for the poor through a limited company. It was inspired by the work of Octavia Hill, and Patrick Geddes was sent to the Industrial Congress in London to learn more. The ESU was about more than the provision of improved housing. Activities included an art guild, a music guild, a window box gardening committee and a campaign to decorate public buildings.16 On 2 February 1886, ‘it was considered whether anything could be done to save the White Horse Inn from being destroyed by persuading someone to buy it and hand it over to the Social Union’. Two weeks later, ‘A letter was read from Mrs Dick Peddie, wife of a leading Edinburgh architect, discouraging the buying of the White Horse Inn Property as too expensive to admit of an adequate return, the idea was accordingly given up.’17 Mrs Maclagan was equal to this challenge. She was in correspondence with the Burgh Engineer and read letters from him favourable to the purchase of the Close and later of the White Horse Inn.18 The initial auction for the Close had not gone well and a new announcement was made for an auction in Dowell’s Rooms on Tuesday 19 April, this time with an upset price of £1,500.19 The key phrases here were ‘save’ and ‘adequate return’. The ESU sought to link its concern for working-class housing with the preservation of the built environment and to do this within the constraints of the market.20 The apparently disparate aims of managed philanthropy and conservation of the built environment were not unique to Edinburgh. The uneasy alliance of Octavia Hill and Ruskin expressed their Englishness with the same dual agenda. The key relationships were between the financial and professional elites of Edinburgh, especially their wives and the local state, which offered professional advice and authority as well as the initial closure order which structured the property market. At the ESU meeting on 19 May 1887, ‘the purchase was announced of the White Horse Close property for £1,740 by Mrs Whyte and Dr Barbour’.21 15
H. E. Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner (London, 1990). My thanks to Paul Laxton for information on the Maclagan family. 16 The Scotsman, 6 Jan. 1885. 17 Edinburgh Public Libraries (hereafter EPL), Edinburgh Social Union, Minute Book, 1885–1892, q YHV 250 E 23 S, 16 Feb. 1885. 18 EPL, Edinburgh Social Union, Minute Book, 1885–1892, 3 Mar. 1887. 19 The Scotsman, 26 Mar. 1887. 20 M. Hall, ‘The Politics of Collecting: The Early Aspirations of the National Trust, 1883–1913’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 13 (2003), pp. 345–57. 21 EPL, Edinburgh Social Union, Minute Book, 1885–1892, 19 May 1887.
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R. J. Morris Dr Barbour and his sister promptly set about the reconstruction of the Close. The petition and plans prepared by their architect, James Jerdan, were delivered to the Dean of Guild Court on 1 October 1887 seeking permission to: abolish the present stairs and staircases in Front Tenement, and also stairs to Tenements in Court and to form new stairs in place of the above, also to erect and form Water Closets and sinks with all the necessary fittings and drains for same, and renew the roofs and repair the chimney heads on Front Tenement, and also to renew and build Brick partitions and other walls, the steps of stairs and plats of same, also floors of W.C’s to be formed of red concrete, the Balconies with railings on low Buildings in Court to be formed of timber, the windows of the latter building to be enlarged and the windows of Front Tenement to be renewed; all on the property known as White Horse Close Canongate Edinburgh.22 The neighbouring property owners were informed, the warrant granted on 10 November 1887, and the process followed in the minutes of the ESU. The plans revealed several features of the ambitions, opportunities and environment of Dr Barbour, his sister and the ESU. The ground floor plan (see Figure 1), together with a similar plan for the upper storey, showed limited ambitions. The reconstruction was not about providing more space for working-class families but about sanitary engineering. The layout was typical of much of urban Scotland.23 There were shop units opening onto the main street and domestic accommodation in the court behind. There were to be forty-three units but the majority, twenty-seven, were to be ‘single ends’ and only eight were room and kitchen. Four were linked to the shops and the rest were room and ‘closet’, which probably meant no window. In terms of rooms per household and all that this meant for health and privacy, this was little better than the existing accommodation for Edinburgh as a whole. The real advance was in sanitary accommodation. Water closets were to be provided with concrete floors and mostly set apart from the houses on the new balconies. The battle to control and dispose of human waste was joined with all the resources, some quite recent, of sanitary engineering. Water closets were placed on concrete floors to prevent waste matter soaking into the timber fabric of buildings. Special attention was given to the reduction of smell. It was noted in red ink, ‘all Soil pipes of WC’s and Sinks will be carried up the full size to the different roofs at least two feet above daylights of Dormer windows’. In addition, there were box traps for each sink. The final defences were provided by a Buchan trap designed to stop vermin and smell rising from the sewer, which ran down the Canongate. 22 23
Edinburgh City Archives (hereafter ECA), Dean of Guild Court, Petition, 1 Oct. 1887. H. Clark, ‘Living in One or Two Rooms in the City’, in A. Carruthers (ed.), The Scottish Home (Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 59–82.
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White Horse Close and the Re-building of Edinburgh
Figure 1. Ground floor plan, White Horse Close. Source: Dean of Guild Plans, 1 October 1887, ECA.
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R. J. Morris William Paton Buchan was a key figure in Scottish sanitary engineering. He was born in Fraserburgh in 1836, became a journeyman plumber in Glasgow and set up his own business. He perfected the Buchan trap, which not only shut off smells and vermin from the main sewer with the U-bend, but also eliminated house smells through a ventilation pipe and allowed solid matter such as floating faeces to be washed away through the ‘cascading action’ produced by the sharp drop between house sewer and the water surface of the U-bend. His experience was set out in his plumbing textbook first published in 1876. His carefully engineered ceramic products were based upon the theory that sewer gas escaping into a house was an important cause of fever. ‘It poisons the blood, has a bad effect upon the heart, lowers the system [and] has sent thousands to a premature grave.’ The medical theory might not accord with modern science but the outcomes in places like White Horse Close were houses that were much pleasanter to live in and a structure of sanitary engineering that still survives in many Scottish tenements.24 The elevation of the interior court (see Figure 2) showed the social engineering involved in the reconstruction. Balconies were a key feature. They enabled the water closets to be detached from the living space, providing air and ventilation around sources of smell and potential infection. The balcony also enabled the restoration to provide a separate ‘front door’ to each ‘house’. Although the sense of ‘privacy’ involved was very limited, households could now enter public and communal space without going through the space of other households. The value of such privacy in Scottish working-class culture was indicated by the design of the ‘colony’ houses being built by the Edinburgh Co-operative Building Society and reflected in the comments made by A. C. Telfer, president of Edinburgh Trades Council on the impact of lodgers: ‘The home is not a home it ought to be, the privacy and modesty between sexes is to a certain extent interfered with.’25 The elevation also provided a small addition to the aesthetic of the court. The little timber and plaster gable end not only hid the privy but announced that this was ‘domestic’ space. It would not have been out of place in the villas which Jerdan was designing for clients in the growing tramcar suburbs of south and west Edinburgh. It was a small move away from the utilitarian, functional construction of much improved working-class housing, such as Begg’s Buildings in nearby Abbeyhill, provided a generation earlier. Likewise, it avoided the Scottish renaissance display of turrets and crow-steps that accompanied the municipal triumphalism of St Mary’s Street, constructed under the Improvement Act of 1867. 24 W. P. Buchan, Plumbing: A Text Book to the Practice of the Arts or Craft of the Plumber (5th edition, London, 1889), pp. 217, 230, 257–9; J. Chalmers, ‘The Late Mr W. P. Buchan, Sanitary Engineer, Glasgow’, Proceedings of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 27 (1895–6), pp. 151–5; M. Oglethorpe, ‘The Bathroom and Water Closet’, in Carruthers (ed.), The Scottish Home, pp. 203–21. 25 R. Rodger, Housing the People: The Colonies of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1999); Second Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiry into the Housing of the Working Classes. Scotland, C.4409 (1885), Q.19,198.
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Figure 2. Elevation for the west side of White Horse Close. Source: Dean of Guild Plans, 1 October 1887. ECA.
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R. J. Morris Here was a small contribution to the ESU agenda of improving the welfare of the poor through improving the aesthetic aspects of their environment. The next episode followed two years later when Lyon and Turnbull announced the sale of the White Horse Inn itself, which lay at the back of the Close. An earlier attempt to sell the property had failed and the upset price was now £450.26 In February 1890, the Barbours were back to the Dean of Guild Court asking for a warrant to: take off the present roofs, also take down part of chimney heads, and clear out present partitions and floors etc at Whitehorse Inn, Canongate and to put on new roofs and also renew the floors and partitions, fireplaces, chimney heads, stairs and drains etc.27 The plans had much in common with those for the Close itself. The standard of accommodation was slightly higher. There were fourteen house units. Eleven of them were room and kitchen, many with a separate cupboard for storing coal. There were five water closets, just over one for every three households. This compared with the Close, which had four WCs internal to specific households, leaving fifteen between the other thirty-nine units – again, just over one for every three households. The plans for the Inn included several dimensions not evident from the earlier application.28 Industrial modernity was present in the drawing of the steel beams which were to support the old building (see Figure 3). Important in Edinburgh’s collective memory was the night of 24 November 1861, when the early seventeenth-century tenement at the head of Bailie Fyfe’s Close in the High Street had collapsed into the street burying thirty-five people.29 Reports at the time linked the collapse to the rotten state of old timbers and to more recent alterations to the fabric. The antiquarian impulse to preserve old buildings was all very well but the architect was anxious to show that the restored Inn had the security of a modern building. The elevation for the Inn (see Figure 4) showed considerable respect for the historical form of the Inn. A few crowstepped gables were added which, by 1890, was a familiar signature of respect for Scotland’s architectural history and identity. A date, 1523, later the subject of much controversy, was added to one gable. The domestic effect of the wooden gables was enhanced by several pigeon holes, although there is no evidence that they were ever used. The plans (see Figure 5) showed not only a slightly better standard of accommodation than the Close as a whole but also a sense of collective provision. One unit was set aside for a bath and later evidence on the 26 27 28 29
The Scotsman, 27 June 1889 and 17 Sept. 1887. ECA, Dean of Guild Court, Petition and Plan, 22 Feb. 1890. The Scotsman, 25 Nov. 1861. J. Grant, Old and New Edinburgh, Vol. 2 (London, 1886), p. 241; Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh, p. 365.
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Figure 3. Steel Beam for White Horse Inn. Source: Dean of Guild Plans. 22 February 1890. ECA.
management of the Close suggested some sort of club house had been allocated. For the moment, ESU ambitions linked cleanliness with the desire to improve the orderliness and welfare of their tenants. The purchase and restoration of White Horse Close and the Inn was a substantial property transaction. A variety of factors created the market in which the transactions of the Close were embedded. The first were the demands of Edinburgh town council, its officers and Public Health Committee, which made the ownership of the ancient and crumbling properties of the Old Town increasingly expensive. The growing sophistication of by-laws and local improvement legislation was reducing the opportunity to profit from such properties.30 The second feature was the chaotic and insecure nature of much of the local economy. David Chalmers, joiner, 4 North Back Canongate, was one of the neighbouring property owners notified of the plans to remodel White Horse Close in 1887. He was a van builder who, in 1880, had raised money on the security of his property in North Back Canongate but 30 The Scotsman, 26 Mar. 1885; William Skinner (Town Clerk) and Alexander Harris (Depute Town Clerk), The Edinburgh Municipal and Police Act 1879 with Incorporated Clauses and Analytical Index (Edinburgh, 1879).
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Figure 4. Elevation for south side of White Horse Inn. Source: Dean of Guild Plans. 22 February 1890. ECA.
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Figure 5. Detail from the ground floor plan of White Horse Inn. Source: Dean of Guild Court, 22 February 1890. ECA.
entered sequestration in 1882 after which the property was managed by trustees.31 It probably included the Inn, and the terms of the auction notice suggest that trustees in sequestration were pushing the sale process. The purchase and restoration were closely followed by the newspapers and the committee of the ESU. This enabled an estimate to be made of the total cost. The purchase price of the Close was £1,740 and its restoration cost £3,400.32 For the White Horse Inn, purchase was £550 and restoration around £1,000.33 The purchase price for the Close included a sixteen per cent premium on the upset of £1500 and, for the Inn, a twenty-two per cent premium on £450. The restoration cost for 31 32
The Scotsman, 4 July 1890. EPL, Edinburgh Social Union, Minute Book, 1885–1892, 19 May 1887; The Scotsman, 27 Feb. 1889. 33 The Scotsman, 28 Feb. 1887 and 28 Feb. 1889.
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R. J. Morris the Close was 195 per cent of purchase price and 182 per cent for the Inn. The consistency of these ratios suggested that the published figures were reasonably accurate. The published accounts of the ESU showed that, in the 1890s and 1900s, this investment went part of the way towards achieving the stated aim of showing that good management could provide housing for the poor within the market and make a profit. After rents had been collected and taxes, repairs, cleansing, insurance and other management expenses had been deducted, the sums returned to the ‘proprietors’ amounted to about 3.8 per cent of the capital the Barbours had invested.34 The investment in the Close was made in the face of a steady decline in the Edinburgh housing market in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Applications to the Dean of Guild Court for building warrants were in decline, as were the rental returns of private landlords like James Steel.35 House sales from the Edinburgh Co-operative Building Society reached their lowest point in its nineteenth-century history. The 3.8 per cent rate of return compares with the 6.8 per cent dividend they might have gained from railway equities over the same period, the 4.13 per cent on consols or 5.3 per cent on municipal stock. The best of the London Model Dwellings Companies paid over 7 per cent.36 Dr Alexander Barbour and his sister Jane Whyte accepted the risks of a declining market and the opportunity costs of a rate of return lower than less risky assets. Their motivation and ability to act in this way may be deduced from the context of their family and public life. The explanations derived from the religious and economic history of Scotland. Immediate resource availability depended upon the date of their father’s death and the not untypical economic history of the Barbour family. Dr Barbour and his sister were the youngest children of George Freeland Barbour, who died on 15 January 1887. His will was published four months later. He left substantial real estate to his wife and sons. His personal estate was valued at £444,706. After estate duty had been paid and obligations to his wife were satisfied, including a legacy and an income for life of £2,900 a year, there was a residue of £345,362. A third of this went to each of his two sons and a sixth to each of two daughters. During 1887, Dr Barbour would have had some £115,000 available and his sister some £58,000.37 The Freeland Barbour wealth originated in land and cotton spinning in the west of Scotland. George, in partnership with his brother Robert, moved to Manchester where they made major accumulations of wealth as commission agents trading in cotton and cotton goods in all parts of the world, especially in India.38 In 1853, after the deaths of 34 35
EPL, Edinburgh Social Union, Annual Reports, 1896–1905. R. Rodger, ‘The Victorian Building Industry and the Housing of the Scottish Working Class’, in M. Doughty, Building the Industrial City (Leicester, 1986), pp. 152–206; Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh, p. 343; Rodger, Housing the People, p. 47. 36 S. Morris, ‘Market Solutions for Social Problems: Working-class Housing in Nineteenthcentury London’, Economic History Review, 54, 3 (2001), 525–45. 37 The Scotsman, 1 Apr. 1887. 38 The Manchester Guardian, 7 Nov., 21 and 29 Dec. 1877.
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White Horse Close and the Re-building of Edinburgh his two eldest sons in a railway accident, George moved to 11 George Square, the earliest of Edinburgh’s elite south-side suburbs. Edinburgh was a base for major involvement in railways and finance capital. He was a shareholder in the Union Bank and North British Railway Company, a director of the Glasgow and South Western Railway Company, a director of the Scottish National Insurance Company and the Edinburgh and Bathgate Railway. Less gloriously, he seconded the motion for accepting the liquidator’s report for the Western Bank in 1871. Wealth originating in industry and commerce was thus attracted to the growing and relatively stable financial sector of Edinburgh, where it became available to finance White Horse Close. Dr Barbour and his sister left little by way of letters, diaries or other personal records so their motivations must be deduced from the environment from which they came and in which they lived. Dr Alexander Hugh Freeland Barbour was born in Edinburgh in 1856 and was thus in his early thirties during the White Horse developments. He entered Edinburgh University in 1875, where he took a distinguished medical degree.39 One of his professors was Douglas Maclagan, whose sister-in-law, wife of stockbroker Maclagan, was instrumental in the ESU activities which led to White Horse Close. Maclagan had been Regius Professor of Forensic Medicine and Public Health at Edinburgh University since 1853. He had worked with Henry Littlejohn, Edinburgh’s first Medical Officer of Health. Maclagan, the professor, introduced a degree in Public Health to the University in 1875.40 These professional, financial and family relationships were characteristic of the powerful overlapping elite networks of Edinburgh society, which were the basis for much innovative social and cultural activity. At the time of the White Horse activities Alexander was assistant physician in the Edinburgh Royal Maternity and Simpson Memorial Hospital. In 1889, he poured his experience into the publication of the formidably entitled, Anatomy of Labour as Studied in Frozen Sections and its Bearing on Clinical Work. In an age battling to reduce high levels of maternal and infant mortality, he would have ample occasion to reflect upon the conditions in which many of his patients lived. He would go on to be consulting physician to the hospital.41 His sister Jane was married to the Rev. Alexander Whyte, minister of Free St George’s in Shandwick Place. It was an elite church in the west-end of Edinburgh. Alexander Whyte was the illegitimate son of a labouring-class woman from Kirriemuir. His grandfather was a sawyer. His life was a lived reality of those great Scottish myths of the lad o’pairts and the power of faith. Alexander seemed to have an insatiable appetite for books and sermons. He had a faith in education in the form of reading and preaching, which took 39 40
The Scotsman, 22 Apr. 1875, 23 Apr. 1877, 24 Apr. and 2 Aug. 1878. D. Maclagan, ‘Address in Forensic Medicine: Forensic Medicine from a Scotch point of view’, British Medical Journal, 17 August 1878; B. M. White, ‘Maclagan, Sir Andrew Douglas (1812–1900)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online edn, Oct 2009, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/59857 [accessed 16 Sept 2011]. 41 www.ma.hw.ac.uk/RSE/fellowship/fells_indexp1.pdf [accessed 24 August 2011].
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R. J. Morris him from schoolmaster, to college in Aberdeen and eventually to the position of assistant and then minister at St George’s in 1870.42 There was a remarkable range of experience in the household. Jane came from one of the wealthiest families in Edinburgh. She was from a generation of young women who had leisure and education. She shared reading classical texts with her brother Robert and had access to classes given by sympathetic professors like Masson and Calderwood in literature and philosophy, well before women were admitted to the classes and full membership of the university. This group had little sense of ‘careers’ in the twentieth-century sense but they were ready and anxious to enter public life.43 Many like Mrs Maclagan and Mrs McBride were leaders in the ESU. Others like Flora Stevenson, also active in the ESU, would go on to take leading positions in local government. The account of the Whytes by their nephew, another George Freeland Barbour,44 Robert’s son, described a generation in the Free Church moving from an evangelical emphasis on individual conversion to a focus on the social conditions of faith.45 The public activities of George Freeland Barbour, father of Alexander and Jane, gave some indication of the source of inspiration for his children’s activities. As a leading member of the Free Church in Edinburgh he was engaged in more than finance capital. At times his activities represented his generation’s concern for individual conversion and faith, especially when this involved combating the ‘errors’ of Roman Catholics. He supported the French Canadian Missionary Society, the Fund for Manses and Mission Buildings in India and Africa, and the Spanish Evangelical Society.46 He moved to more ‘social’ aspects of the evangelical agenda. He was a director of the Edinburgh Magdalene Society, providing shelter and reform for prostitutes at their ‘asylum’ in the industrial suburb of Dalry.47 It was a lesson in faith, sexual discipline and class responsibility. He supported the ‘Industrial Brigade’ which provided lodging and training for homeless boys in Fountainbridge, another industrial suburb, and spoke in support of the sabbath, reminding fellow railway directors of their responsibilities.48 He supported Catherine Sinclair’s Cooking Depot on George IV Bridge.49 This project of the evangelical novelist entailed many principles evident in the Close 42 43
G. F. Barbour, The Life of Alexander Whyte, DD (London, 1923). E. Gordon and G. Nair, Public Lives: Women, Family and Society in Victorian Britain (Yale, 2003); S. Hamilton, ‘The First Generations of University Women, 1869–1930’, in G. Donaldson (ed.), Four Centuries. Edinburgh University Life, 1583–1983 (Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 101–15. 44 G. F. Barbour, Robert’s son, was a minor literary figure, active in Perthshire liberal politics. In 1912 he was appointed to the Royal Commission on Scottish Housing, Edinburgh Gazette, 5 Nov. 1912; Report of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Industrial Population of Scotland, Rural and Urban (Edinburgh, 1917). 45 Brown, The Social History of Religion. 46 The Scotsman, 17 Jan. 1866, 27 Nov. 1869, 17 Feb. 1872. 47 The Scotsman, 7 Dec. 1861, 5 May 1864. 48 The Scotsman, 24 Dec. 1869 and 31 May 1866. 49 C. Mitchell, ‘Sinclair, Catherine (1800–1864)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25612, accessed 19 June 2012].
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White Horse Close and the Re-building of Edinburgh twenty years later. He was amongst the ‘influential citizens’ who attended the opening and sampled the food which: ‘in future is to be provided to the working classes for 41/2d. The Lord Provost was insistent that this was not a charitable establishment. No person here receives charity; he must pay for what he gets’. The payment would yield a small profit which went to finance further activities. The Cooking Depot was a demonstration that working-class welfare could be improved by good management within the market-based profit-seeking system.50 George Freeland Barbour was active in the Gladstonian Liberal party and campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Act and demanded ‘voluntary hospitals’ for the treatment of venereal diseases.51 Both the Barbour and Whyte households were at the centre of the developing thought and social action of the liberal wing of the Free Church of Scotland. It was a culture of deep faith based on prayer and bible reading but supportive of the new, and to some subversive, bible criticism of men like Robertson Smith, who was sacked by the General Assembly from his post as Professor of Hebrew at the Free Church College in Aberdeen.52 Central to such Free Church culture was the belief in the disciplined freedom of the self-directed individual. Much of the social action of people like the Barbours and Whytes was directed towards providing the conditions for discipline and freedom. Both Alexander and Jane had the means and the motivation to develop White Horse Close but they lacked time. The managed philanthropy offered by the ESU was ideal for them both. Alexander was committed to the maternity hospital and regretted that he had no time to give as superintendent of the ESU Housing Department.53 As the wife of an elite Free Church minister, Jane had a full time occupation in its own right. They handed over White Horse Close and the Inn to the ESU for management. ESU management involved more than the repairs and regular collection of rents on which they insisted. At the end of 1889, they had formed two evening classes for boys in the Close. RECs or ‘recreative evening classes’ were important in many of their properties.54 They created a library in White Horse Close to which Thomas Nelson, a leading Edinburgh printer–publisher, then engaged in funding the remaking of Edinburgh Castle, gave twenty-four books.55 In December 1890, ‘Mrs Maclagan intimated that she was anxious to open an old clothes shop in one of the properties – partly to supply the tenants with good clean clothes, partly in order to be able to give work to 50 51 52
The Scotsman, 11 Mar. 1864. Ibid., 19 Jan. 1872. J. L. MacLeod, The Second Disruption: The Free Church in Victorian Scotland and the Origins of the Free Presbyterian Church (East Linton, 2000), pp. 38–124; S. J. Brown, ‘Reform, Reconstruction, Reaction: the Social Vision of Scottish Presbyterianism, c.1830-c1930’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 44 (1991) pp. 489–517; J. Stewart, ‘Christ’s Kingdom in Scotland: Scottish Presbyterianism, Social Reform and the Edwardian crisis’, Twentieth Century British History, 12, 1 (2001), pp. 1–22. 53 EPL, Edinburgh Social Union, Minute Book, 1885–1892, 25 Oct. 1889. 54 Ibid., 18 Oct. and 15 Nov. 1889. 55 Ibid., 23 Feb. 1890.
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R. J. Morris the wives of tenants out of work.’ She was to provide the initial finance but ‘such a shop would be more than self-supporting’.56 The ESU provided clubs, classes and entertainments as well as the regular contact between rent collectors and tenants, designed to assist and discipline tenants on the Octavia Hill model.57 At the end of 1890, they reported ‘a Christmas tree [sic] had been held at White Horse for the women and that New Years Entertainment had been organised for the tenants and children of White Horse and Brown’s Close (about 200 in all being present)’. Achieving their aim of improving working-class welfare by good management and the market proved a difficult task. The ESU was motivated by an ideal of ‘citizenship’ based upon contact between social classes, countering ‘the want of sympathy and fellowship between different classes’.58 It saw ‘the mismanagement of cheaply rented tenements a disgrace to the city’.59 It was anxious ‘to provide opportunities for higher tastes and pleasures’ as well as changing the ‘unwholesomeness and discomfort’ of the housing.60 The rent collectors were ‘trained’ on Octavia Hill principles.61 They not only performed ‘the ordinary duties of landlord’, but also helped and guided tenants ‘by being ready to afford them the benefit of what wider knowledge the collectors may by force of circumstance be possessed’.62 Miss E. S. Haldane wrote the annual reports of the housing committee and confirmed the focus on order, the need ‘to raise public opinion as to cleanliness’, as well as keep within the disciplines of the market. They charged ‘our landlords’ five to six per cent commission on rentals. By 1900, the routine was established:
From the club-rooms one or more rent collectors start every Monday morning. Each one has a collecting book containing the names of from ten to thirty tenants, and it is her duty to get the rent from every house. Each tenant has a rent book in which our rules are printed, and in which each payment is entered and initialled. Our rules are very simple: we insist on regular payments and cleanliness, and we forbid lodgers without permission [. . .] The actual taking of money is a very small part of a rent collector’s Monday morning’s work. In one house the door handle has come off, in the next a tenant is leaving and the deposit has to be paid back: downstairs there is a choked drain, and upstairs there is an angry woman warring with her neighbour.63 56 57
Ibid., 12 Dec. 1890. N. Boyd, Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale: Three Victorian Women who changed their World (London, 1982), pp. 107–60. 58 EPL, Edinburgh Social Union, Annual Report, 1896, p. 5. 59 Ibid., 1900, p. 1. 60 Ibid., 1896, pp. 1–7. 61 S. P. Walker, ‘Philanthropic Women and Accounting. Octavia Hill and the Exercise of “Quiet Power and sympathy”’, Accounting, Business and Financial History, 16, 2 (2006), pp. 163–94. 62 EPL, Edinburgh Social Union, Annual Report, 1896, p. 7. 63 Ibid., 1897, p. 2.
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White Horse Close and the Re-building of Edinburgh Many problems were related to overcrowding and the growing pressure on accommodation. In 1897, they reported fifteen applicants for one of their Canongate houses.64 Problems were increased by the expansion of industry in the area, which increased the demand for housing whilst at the same time demolishing older residential property.65 Demand pressure made it easy for them to enforce a policy of separating orderly from disorderly tenants. Miss Haldane reported that on taking over a property: the tenants were many of them unsuitable: there was much drinking amongst them, and some were living immoral lives, rendering it impossible for the more respectable neighbours to enjoy peace or quietness. It was clear that these must be got rid of.66 Care was taken with the choice of new tenants. ‘We do not want the vicious and irregular who drift about from factor to factor.’ They also put pressure on those who did not take their turn in cleaning the common stair and whose houses threatened to become ‘centres of disease [. . .] One or two others have had to go because of their evil tongues and quarrelsome ways.’67 The major influence on the recreation and management of the Close was the product of a quite remarkable elite female culture generated in Scotland in the last third of the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane, housing manager for the ESU, provided a glimpse into that culture.68 She was close to her mother and they exchanged letters each day that they were apart. The heavily gendered culture developed by previous generations produced large amounts of leisure, structured by compelling ritual.69 This leisured ritual in Scotland was destablised by a deep respect for education and by the religious commitment of the Free Church evangelical, especially the obligation to self-direction before God. Elizabeth Haldane and her friends were products of this explosive mixture. The second line in the transcript of her diaries read, ‘did some Hegel with Aunt J’. The rituals of elite femininity - calls, tea, dinners, shopping and concern for each other’s health were used to hold together the network of young women who ran the ESU housing. They read Ruskin and listened to sermons from Dr Candlish and Alexander Whyte. Mrs Maclagan was central to the group. It was a world of privilege, both material and intellectual. They discussed and promoted girls’ education and ‘our suffrage’ and sharpened their debating skills in the Ladies’ 64 65 66 67 68
Ibid., 1897, p. 5. The Scotsman, 15 Sept. 1888. EPL, Edinburgh Social Union Annual Report, 1897, p. 8. Ibid., 1900, p. 3. J. Alberti, ‘Elizabeth, Anderson Haldane’, in E. Ewan, S. Innes, S. Reynolds and R. Pipes (eds), The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh, 2006), pp. 154–5. 69 L. Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and The Season, (London, 1973).
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R. J. Morris Edinburgh Debating Society, which met around the mahogany tables of wealthy New Town houses.70 The confidence and strangeness of the coming together with the culture of poverty was evident in several perceptive letters to Elizabeth’s mother: All this morning I was at E Arthur Place with M Horn helping her with her tenants some of whom had a ‘moonlight flit’ and gave her a lot of trouble. Then to the office and I came home and dressed and went to 59 and some other places. We went to tea with the Stevensons in Oxford Terrace. We had a very successful tea last night at White Horse Close. It was an ‘at home’ of the tenants of two small and rather respectable closes Panmure and Playhouse. Maggie brought flowers, bright table clothes etc and the people took tea in sociable batches and then there was music in which Katie Tottie who was at school with us took part by whistling and playing the guitar – or as people called it, the gidgetar. She comes from Yorkshire and is about six feet – ‘a real gallant lady’ they said: in fact the height of all the ladies intrigued the people much [. . .] The tenants also sang and eventually enjoyed the party much. The room (maybe Inn) which I think you have seen looks very nice at night. This afternoon I hope to pay the bills.71 Despite its welfare-orientated motivations, the ESU was often caught between the pressures of the market, the demands of municipal regulation and the cultures of the very poor. At times, its authoritarian philanthropy resulted in chaotic and harsh measures. The ESU acquired nearby Campbell’s Close in 1896. The property was overcrowded, ‘broken window panes, rotten floors and ruinous walls were everywhere in evidence’. By the start of June, the ESU had failed to clear the property of all existing tenants and the remainder: who were all on weekly rents, received notice to quit. As they had not done so yesterday by noon, the ten families, comprising between thirty and forty people, were ejected by a Sheriff officer, and their furniture was piled up in the yard behind. There a rude encampment was made. The people lighted fires, cooked their food, and endeavoured to make themselves as comfortable as it was possible to do in the circumstances. Later, however, in the evening heavy rain commenced to fall, and the outcastes, including amongst them a large number of children, were in a miserable plight. Some of them took refuge in the covered pend, others remained by their furniture, and with it got 70
L. M. Rae, Ladies in Debate, being a History of the Ladies’ Edinburgh Debating Society, 1865–1935 (Edinburgh, 1939); L. Leneman, A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland (Aberdeen, 1991). 71 National Library of Scotland, MS 6047, Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane to her mother, 14 July 1891 and 25 Feb. 1892, ff. 55, 60. Miss Tottie was almost certainly the granddaughter of a leading Leeds Whig politician of the 1830s, T. W. Tottie. The Stevensons, notably Flora, led the Edinburgh women’s movement into public life.
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White Horse Close and the Re-building of Edinburgh thoroughly soaked by the rain [. . .] there was nothing else for them to do but to return for the night to the houses from which they had been evicted [. . .] The unfortunate people complained very bitterly about the treatment which they had received, some of then stating that they had been tenants in the property for ten years or more. Most of the men were absent searching for new accommodation, finding nothing, especially at the 1s 6d a week many paid in Campbell’s Close: ‘The officers of the Children’s Shelter offered a night’s refuge to the children of the evicted families, but their offer was not taken advantage of, the people preferring that their children should remain with them.’72 The clash between philanthropic intentions and the market conditions of low irregular wages and rising property prices was not always as savage as this, but these contradictions underlay what the Barbours and the ESU were trying to do in White Horse Close. The outcomes of the authoritarian philanthropy of the ESU, the Barbours, Miss Haldane and her friends may be divided into two disparate kinds. These involved the welfare of the poor and the ‘saving’ of the historic environment. Both were an aspect of the identity and assertion of the urban middle classes in the years leading up to 1914.73 The contribution which White Horse Close made to the welfare of the working classes can be estimated in two ways. The first is derived from the census manuscripts of 1881, 1891 and 1901.74 In 1881, White Horse Close was the census enumerator’s nightmare, itself an indication of chaotic conditions. Half way round the Close, the enumerator seemed to stop and repeat the journey around the Close. On the second pass, a small number of households omitted the first time, like that of Widow Balfour at No.27, were included. Second surnames were omitted, ignoring the Scottish custom of including all female family names in legal documents. Mistakes were corrected. Janet O’Neill now had a son-in-law, not a grandson. The census enumerator’s convention of dividing each household by a half line and each ‘house’ by a full ruled line gave further evidence of the chaotic nature of the Close. In 1881, the ‘house’ in Scotland had been clearly defined for the first time as ‘every dwelling with a distinct outside entrance from a street, court, lane, road etc or, 2) with a door opening directly into a common stair.’75 In 1881, there were sixty-nine households living in thirty-five such ‘houses’. There were only ten households with their own discreet house. There were four empty house units. By the 1891 census, there were thirty-nine households and three unoccupied units, evidence that the Close was only partially re-constructed. 72 73
The Scotsman, 5 June 1896. S. Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City, 1840-1914 (Manchester, 2000); H. E. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, 1870–1914 (London, 1976); S. Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis (London, 1976). 74 The census details are taken from the microfilms held by Edinburgh Public Libraries. The relevant sections are 1881, Registration District (RG) 685–3 Enumeration District (ED) 85, 1891 RG 685 –3 ED 73, 1901 RG 685–3 ED 81. 75 Ninth Decennial Census of the Population of Scotland taken 4 April 1881, C.3329 (1882), pp. x-xi.
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R. J. Morris There was no reference to the White Horse Inn. The 1901 census showed the full impact of the discipline imposed by the ESU. There were fifty-four households and two empty units. As was implied by the plans submitted to the Dean of Guild, every household had its own ‘house’. The work of the ESU and the Barbours in White Horse Close was typical of a wide variety of initiatives in the later nineteenth century designed to improve the housing of the poor and working classes. It was small-scale, cumulative and subject to disciplined management within carefully argued theories and objectives. The ESU took care with the selection of tenants and of properties to manage. It rejected offers of properties in the Cowgate area of Edinburgh. This area had to await the direct intervention of the Corporation in the following decades.76 The local state was the only agency able to undertake the risk and management costs of housing in the poorest areas of Edinburgh. The ESU required tenants who were orderly in their conduct and regular payers of rent. At the same time they refused tenants whom they felt could afford better accommodation. These were taken care of elsewhere, by the privately rented sector and by the Edinburgh Cooperative Building Society which, by the 1900s, provided around three per cent of Edinburgh’s housing stock, mainly on the fringes of the built area where land costs were cheaper.77 Comparison of the household heads in 1881, 1891 and 1901 showed the impact of the policies and niche which the ESU had chosen. There was a substantial change in the gender of heads of household. In 1881, sixty-eight per cent had been male. In 1901, eighty-seven per cent were male.78 The search for the more secure regular rent payers clearly worked against female-headed households. There was little impact on the occupational structure of the Close. Amongst male heads of household labourers of varying kinds were thirty-eight per cent. Men with skilled and semi-skilled occupations rose slightly from thirty-one per cent to thirty-six per cent. There was a drop in those involved in transport, especially carters. The Edinburgh Co-operative Building Society ‘colonies’ were based upon a mixture of co-operative and building society principles within a shareholders registered company. Gender balance was about the same as the 1901 Close with eighty-six per cent male-headed households in 1871–91 but occupational composition was very different, dominated by shopkeepers (9.3 per cent), white collar workers (16.2 per cent) and the printing and building trades 76 Johnson and Rosenberg, Renewing Old Edinburgh, pp. 98–114; Edinburgh Corporation reported building over two hundred house units between 1897 and 1900, J. F. J. Sykes, ‘The Results of State, Municipal, and Organized Private Action on the Housing of the Working Classes in London and in Other Large Cities in the United Kingdom’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 64, 2 (June 1901), pp. 189–264. 77 Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh, p. 391. 78 In pre-1919, Liverpool Corporation Houses the figure was seventy-three per cent. C. G. Pooley, ‘Patterns on the Ground: Urban Form, Residential Structure and the Social Construction of Space’, in M. Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol 3, 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 461.
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White Horse Close and the Re-building of Edinburgh (20.3 per cent).79 The most enigmatic change in the Close was in the birthplace of the heads of household. In 1881, forty-three per cent were born in Edinburgh. In 1901, it was sixty-three per cent. The reduction was in heads born in the rest of Scotland. This was quite different from the higher social status tenants of the Edinburgh Co-operative Building Society, where 72.5 per cent came from Scotland outwith Edinburgh and Leith. There were clearly two streams of migrants from the countryside and smaller towns of Scotland. One was composed of successful craftsmen, shopkeepers and white collar workers, the other of those who lacked the security to meet the demands of the ESU. The ESU served the ‘respectable’ poor and semi-skilled. Those who accepted the discipline required by Miss Haldane and her friends were offered an orderly environment, albeit with limited accommodation. In part, that order comprised accommodation which met the sanitary and construction standards of Edinburgh Corporation, but order was indicated by a sharp change in the way in which White Horse Close appeared in the local press. Pre-1889, residents made regular appearances in the local courts. Margaret Reid or Snedden was an extreme case of personal disorganisation. She was witness in a Court of Session case brought as a result of the family disputes of the M’Laren household. She had five illegitimate children, three born in Lauder and two in Edinburgh. She had worked ‘in the laundry’ and lived for a while in White Horse Close and spoke of ‘certain familiarities having taken place between the defendant and herself at the Morningside house and that the result was the birth of a child’.80 In 1877, James O’Donnell was convicted for wife beating and because this was a second offence he was sent to jail for two months with hard labour. Although he was described in court as ‘an elderly person’ he appeared in the 1881 census manuscript as a fifty-three year-old maltman whilst his wife was a fifty-six year-old hawker of fruit. They were gone by 1901.81 Throughout the 1870s, there was a stream of White Horse Close people brought before the police and sheriff courts for not sending their children to school. Alex Christie and John Reid, a blacksmith in the Court, but a slater in the 1881 census with two daughters described as scholars, were both involved.82 The activities of Elizabeth Dempsie or M’Farlane were examples of exactly the sort of behaviour which the ESU wanted to eliminate. She was ‘convicted of trafficking in spirits in her house at White-horse Close, Canongate, on Sunday last, without a certificate, and this being her second offence, was fined £15, with the alternative of three months imprisonment’. It was an activity the newspaper aptly called ‘Sunday 79 80 81 82
Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh, pp. 406–7. The Scotsman, 15 Jan. 1887. Ibid., 22 May 1877. Ibid., 25 Dec. 1876, 12 Jan. 1878; R. D. Anderson, Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland: Schools and Universities (Oxford, 1983), pp. 107–9. Schooling to the age of thirteen had been made compulsory by the Education (Scotland) Act 1872.
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R. J. Morris Shebeening’.83 Surviving in such chaos required often complex strategies which, on occasion, show through the census manuscript. In 1881, there were six households in 25 White Horse Close. Three of them were headed by O’Neills; Janet, widow aged sixty-two, washerwoman; Henry aged twenty-four, carter, married with four children; Francis aged twenty-seven coal carter, with two children. Peter Menzies, another coal carter lived at the same address, whilst Henry and Janet both had lodgers, David and William Dalgleish from Liberton, both carters. Family and occupational alliances as well as lodgers and multiple incomes were the basis of these households, divided only by half lines in the manuscript. After the ESU intervention there was a sharp drop in such reports. The rent collecting ladies who believed in ‘citizenship’ must have looked on with some satisfaction when George Gunn of White Horse Close seconded George Doull as candidate for the municipal election. Doull was a member of the Social Democratic Federation and was campaigning for an eight-hour day for municipal workers. George Gunn was active in the Edinburgh and Leith Municipal Workers Committee.84 It was a rough world of the fractured and fractious labour movement, street corner politics, competing publications and hotly debated strategies. In a property-owning franchise Doull gained only 141 votes out of 2,042. It would be 1909 before the Labour Party gained a municipal seat.85 The Close had a double role in the aspirations and imaginations of the Edinburgh middle classes and their ambitions for the presentation and reputation of the city. The British Association met in Edinburgh in 1891. This distinguished international gathering of scientists not only heard men like Professor Von Helmholtz of Berlin talking about electromotive force but were offered an afternoon walk led by Hippolyte Blanc, the architect involved in the recent restorations in Edinburgh Castle.86 The walk included Edinburgh Castle with the restored Old Parliament Hall and St Margaret’s Chapel, St Giles Cathedral, recently restored under the direction of William Chambers, a leading printerpublisher and former Lord Provost, John Knox House, saved from street ‘improvements’ by its sacred associations, and the newly restored White Horse Close.87 The Close joined a series of recently ‘restored’ buildings which monumentalised the history of Scotland in a period of carefully reconstructed national consciousness.88 The double meaning of the Close and the Inn as a lieu de mémoire for the people of Edinburgh was emphasised by the manner in which the contribution of Dr Barbour and his sister was welcomed, as much as 83 84 85
The Scotsman, 7 Mar. 1877. Ibid., 9 and 22 Oct. 1898, 3 Mar. 1900. Ibid., 2 Nov. 1898; J. Holford, Reshaping Labour: Organisation, Work and Politics – Edinburgh in the Great War and After (Beckenham, 1988), pp. 147–51. 86 R. J. Morris, ‘Edinburgh Castle and the Remaking of Medieval Edinburgh’, in A. Dakin, M. Glendinning and A. MacKechnie (eds), Scotland’s Castle Culture, (Edinburgh, 2011), pp. 266–79. 87 The Scotsman, 28 July 1892. 88 Morton, Unionist Nationalism, pp. 155–88.
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White Horse Close and the Re-building of Edinburgh an act of preservation and restoration as one of philanthropy. Even the ESU had talked in terms of ‘saving’ the buildings. The Scotsman paid some attention to the sanitary aspects of the restoration, but most enthusiasm was reserved for the historical. The newspaper retailed the story of the name being derived from ‘a white palfrey belonging to Queen Mary’, and confused the building with another White Horse Inn in Boyd’s Close off St Mary’s Wynd where Dr Johnson had visited, but praised the fact that ‘the alterations have taken every precaution to preserve the fine picturesque features of the building, and admirers of the quaint old tenement will be pleased to learn that its external appearance has not been modernised’. It gave an account of the Dutch tiles found in the house where Bishop Paterson had lived and the flooring of Scottish fir repaired with Baltic timber. It believed ‘hewn stones’ of the building came from Gilmerton and the rubble walls were field stone from the base of Salisbury Crags.89 There had clearly been a certain amount of oral mythology around what earlier in the century had been called Davidson’s Close, including stories of Queen Mary’s palfrey and the ‘low building where the cavaliers of Prince Charles’ Court housed their cattle’. The eighteenth-century historians of Edinburgh had little interest in the Close. The first critical and scholarly account came from Daniel Wilson, Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries in the 1840s, close friend of William Nelson, restorer of Edinburgh Castle. By the 1880s, Wilson was President of the University of Toronto.90 He acknowledged the part Scott played in the making of meanings in the Close: Amongst the antique groups of buildings in the Canongate, scarcely any one has more frequently attracted the artist by the picturesque irregularity of its features than the White Horse Close; an ancient hostelry to which fresh interest has been attached by the magic pen of Scott, who peopled anew its deserted halls with the creations of his fertile genius. Wilson was dismissive of the tales of Queen Mary’s palfrey but accepted the accounts of Prince Charles and his followers and of the activities of Bishop Paterson. Wilson had found a letter in the City Chambers archives with ‘a minute narrative of his [the Bishop’s] proceedings . . . with “that Jezebel the Duchess” [of Lauderdale]; the Town Guard of Edinburgh, etc., all told in somewhat too plain language for modern ears’.91 The letter was probably written by Covenanters who hated both Lauderdale and the Bishop. The serious contribution of the Close to Edinburgh’s imagination, as with so much Scottish landscape, began with Walter Scott. In Waverley (1814), the supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie took lodgings ‘in a small paved court’ off the 89 90 91
The Scotsman, 27 Feb. 1889 and 28 Feb. 1890. Wilson, Memorials of Edinburgh; H. H. Langton, Sir Daniel Wilson: A Memoir (Edinburgh, 1929). Wilson, Memorials of Edinburgh, vol 2, pp. 113–15.
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R. J. Morris Canongate with the ‘buxom widow’ Mrs Flockhart.92 When The Abbott (1820) was published readers were introduced to: the inn or hostelrie of Saint Michael, which stood in a large court-yard, off the main street, close under the descent of the Calton-hill. The place, wide, waste, and uncomfortable, resembled rather an Eastern caravansary, where men found shelter indeed, but were obliged to supply themselves with every thing else. When the supporters of Queen Mary took lodgings: the bustle and confusion of this place of public resort, furnished excitement and amusement. In the large room, into which they had rather found their own way than been ushered by mine host, travellers and natives of the city entered and departed, met and greeted, gamed or drank together [. . .] Altercation of every kind, from brawling to jesting, was going on amongst the groups around them, and yet the noise and mingled voices seemed to disturb no one and indeed to be noticed by no others than by those who composed the group to which the speaker belonged.93 Within a decade the Close had become a standard stopping place for every topographical artist who visited Edinburgh looking for copy. The Storers already had the Close included in their Views in Edinburgh in 1820.94 Skene included it in A Series of Sketches of the Existing Localities alluded to in the Waverley Novels in 1829.95 Horatio McCulloch, better known for his dramatic pictures of the Highlands, was there in 1845.96 George Cattermole followed in 1847.97 There were many others. By the 1860s, the photographers had arrived. Archibald Burns visited in 1868. He had recently photographed the demolitions of Chambers’ Improvement Act of 1867.98 Thomas Begbie and Edward Yerbury both visited sometime in the 1850s and 1860s.99 By the 1900s, the Close was firmly in the international itinerary for photographers and was visited by Alvin Langdon Colburn, who produced 92
J. Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott (London, 1995); W. Scott, Waverley (Melrose edition, Edinburgh, 1897), pp. 219, 327. 93 W. Scott, The Abbott (Melrose edition, Edinburgh, 1897), p. 161. 94 J. and H. S. Storer, Views in Edinburgh and its Vicinity (Edinburgh, 1820). 95 J. Skene, A Series of Sketches of the Existing Localities alluded to in the Waverley Novels (Edinburgh, 1829). 96 H. McCulloch, ‘White Horse Close, Edinburgh, 1845’, National Galleries of Scotland. 97 J. P. Lawson, Scotland Delineated in a Series of Views by C. Stanfield and G. Cattermole, drawn in lithography by J. D. Harding (London, 1847). 98 A. Burns and T. Henderson, Picturesque ‘bits’ from Old Edinburgh: A Series of Photographs by Archibald Burns, with Descriptive and Historical Notes by Thomas Henderson (Edinburgh, 1868); R. J. Morris, ‘Photography, environment and “improvements” in Scottish Cities, 1860–1900’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, Tome 116 (2004.2), pp. 787–95. 99 D. Patterson and J. Rock, Thomas Begbie’s Edinburgh: A Mid-Victorian Portrait (Edinburgh, 1992), pl 137; M. Cant and T. E. R. Yerbury, Yerbury, a Photographic Collection, 1850–1993 (Edinburgh, 1993), p. 35.
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White Horse Close and the Re-building of Edinburgh striking pictures of children at play in the Court for work closely associated with pictorialism in the United States.100 The Close became a place to show distinguished visitors. It was a line in the standard guide books and remained as the stock photograph in the annual reports of the ESU.101 The Barbours handed the Close to a trust in 1926 and it made its uneasy way towards the restoration of the 1960s. White Horse Close was no ‘imagined slum’ but it did play a double part in the Edinburgh imagination.102 It was singled out by the ESU as a suitable target for managed philanthropy because of its historical associations. Its purchase was opportunistic, encapsulated and romantic. If there was a spatial fix, it was at a micro level, a matter of doors, steel beams, water closets and drains. The detail of the processes of restoration revealed the strength and creativity of the Edinburgh-based networks of family, church, university, local government officers and neighbourhood, which brought together the resources of the growing financial sector of the city and the knowledge base of the university. The changing orientation of the elite Free Church congregations towards a social evangelicalism was part of a wider middle-class desire to manage class relationships and remodel the material environment of the city. The class segregation of Edinburgh was evident and increasing although the geographical distances were in fact small. Many of those involved were within thirty minute’s walk of White Horse Close. Any distance was social and psychological, often softened by the romantic imagination of a Walter Scott novel and of the later antiquarians. All this was embedded in a culture which was questioning the meaning of religious faith and commitment. The sense of the individual independent before God, the sense of the obligation of class privilege linked with the belief that, if only class relationships could be remodelled and class skills passed on, then problems of poverty and disorder could be remodelled within the opportunities of the market and without the interventions of the state. Even within the brief and limited success of White Horse Close, the sense of freedom from the state and reliance on management within the market was an illusion. The local state was a perpetual backdrop to the restoration. It was a resource, a supervision which disciplined the materiality of the building and enforced the benefits of a changing building technology. The intensification of regulation created opportunities for intervention by those like the Barbours. At one level the ESU showed that improvements could be made within the market. A small dividend was paid on the Barbour’s investment. The working of the market to create this small oasis of social and sanitary order was made possible by two key inputs. The first was the willingness of Alexander Barbour and Jane Whyte to accept the risk of investing 100 ‘A Court where the Children are at Play, White Horse Close, 1950’, from R. L. Stevenson, Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes: With 23 plates by Alvin Langdon Coburn (London, 1954), pl. 6. 101 M. J. B. Baddeley, Thorough Guide Series, Scotland (pt. 1) (London, 1908), p. 27 ‘a hostelry made famous in “Waverley” . . . it is now a private dwelling and has been restored.’ 102 A. Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representations in Three Cities, 1870-1914 (Leicester, 1993).
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R. J. Morris capital in one of the most insecure sectors of the Edinburgh property market. They probably also incurred significant opportunity cost by not seeking to sell out to the prosperous industrial establishments which surrounded them. The second major input was the ‘free’ labour of women like Elizabeth Haldane and her friends for the management of the housing. White Horse Close was based upon the ethical investment of a wealthy elite prepared to accept the risks involved, and upon the voluntary labour of a generation of educated women drawn from that elite. They combined a concern for the welfare of the working classes, for class relationships, for landscape and for historical memory. In many ways success for the ambitions of the White Horse Close restoration was brief and brought to an end by the realisation that the management of class relationships within the market and the transmission of middle-class social skills to the poor could never ‘solve’ issues of poverty and housing. The 1914–18 War with the rent strikes and rent controls, as well as feelings of obligation which followed the mass involvement in fighting, marginalised the arguments of the ESU and other followers of Octavia Hill. Several elements of the restoration remained. The most obvious was the Close itself, which was part of a battle for space in the inner city. The railway, institutional buildings, the demand for circulating space and the expansion of industry (especially in the lower Canongate) resulted in the mass destruction of domestic housing. The intervention of the ESU ensured that the Close remained domestic housing. The Close had been an arena for the ambitions of a generation of educated and wealthy middle-class women to enter the public sphere.103 These ambitions were sustained and expanded in a variety of women’s citizenship organisations after ‘our vote’ was gained in 1918. White Horse Close continued to represent selected elements of Scottish history and hence of the nature of ‘Scotland’. It remains a place for story telling even when key relationships of class, religious and gender history which remade the Close in the 1880s and 1890s have been forgotten.
103 Sue Innes, ‘Constructing Women’s Citizenship in the Interwar period: the Edinburgh Women’s Citizens Association’, Women’s History Review, 13, 4 (2004), pp. 621–42.
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