My dad - Thomas Morgan McGurk (better known as just Tommy) - grew up in the early years of the 20th century in the Old Town of Edinburgh, which was pretty rough in those days. I don't know when he scribbled down the following memories, but it was probably in the 1970s sometime. Really fascinating stuff!
[N.B. I own the copyright on this piece. If you want to use it for research, that's fine, but please ask before publishing anything, either online or in print. I'll almost certainly say, "yes," but of course I'd expect my father's name to be credited.]
And who today remembers “Jack Paul’s?” It had a shop, a modest little business, at the foot fo the West Port facing the Salvation Army Women’s Hostel, which marks the Vennel. He sold sweets and sweet, small wares, if memory is right. All the young ones knew him, and loved him. He was avuncular in a matey sort of way. I have a blurred picture of him in my mind, but who knows? Time smudges the memory, and in its whimsy, creates false memories. Jack Paul! I feel very young again!
The “Head o’ the Port,” where the Irish lads and lassies assembled on Saturday evenings, the new ones who were newly “across” gathering together at the end of the week to hear friendly voices and talk of familiar things, and go to Confession in the Sacred Heart in Lauriston Place in preparation for Sunday’s Mass and Communion, and be introduced to the domesticity of getting their groceries at Rogan’s shop at Lady Lawson Street corner, so often as the talk had it “on tick”, to be redeemed the following Friday or Saturday when they had some money. Rogan - do I remember him rightly? Big enough, unmistakably Irish, with a florid countenance, more fatherly than paternal. I cannot seem to recall a smile on his face. I doubt if he died a rich man. God rest his soul.
There was a small greengrocer’s on the opposite side of the street, where polite children could get a few discarded cabbage leaves for their pet rabbits. The Main Point Pubic House and Stalker’s at the corner of Lauriston Street. [And the fabulous tale of the rum and the whisky!]
The Victoria lodging house on the same side, lower down. And the “lands”, and the “closes” through which you could nip down, for a variety of reasons, into King’s Stables Road.
There was also a lodging house on the opposite side, facing Portsburgh Square. The building is still standing, looking very derelict, a lodging-house for ghosts. And the Police Station. In the basement there was rigged up a boxing-ring, where Paddy Fee was the focus of a motley club. “Nippy McDermid”, Bob Watson. You didn’t need a strip, you just took off your jacket and waistcoat (not everyone had the latter), and climbed in, and under the eye of the omniscient and unsmiling Paddy, you got stuck in. Some well-known names of the time came and talked, and exercised - at least one Scottish champion honoured that spartan gymnasium.
The Grassmarket - this is during the First World War - the Corn Exchange - Mrs Croan’s dairy: where are Molly and Jimmy today? The Castle Lodging House, since euphemistically titled, “The Castle Trades Hotel” - Pat Loftus’ Lodging House up one of the closes on the same side, less pretentious but an Irish labourer’s home. Father Power knew them all, as they knew him and his zeal for temperance and the saving of their souls. On the other side, up one of the closes, lived the “Mother of Sin”: as the media of the day told. Who was she? What? Why? The ears of a child are an open door for words to enter. By the grace of God, very little of the junk in his attic mind is explored. She is a name in the mists of my memory - no doubt others can unlock the riddle.
Tommy Peebles, Boot and Clog Manufacturers - have I the title aright? A large, impressive emporium in the midst of one of the busiest and most densely-populated thoroughfare-cum-market-cum- community-spots in that quarter of Edinburgh, where poverty and squalor and sin and ribaldry and drunkenness and crime were the next-door-neighbours of craftsmen and small businesses and decent underfed housewives and clean children, morality and a quiet gentility striving to keep their heads high, and the rest, all close nurtured in an involvement of living and loving and dying, unsuspected even to this day by the cosy property-owners not hundreds of yards away in Lauriston and Spittal Street and the Lonsdales, where drama has been, and still is, enacted on a more dignified and salubrious stage.
The West Bow - George Henderson, butchers; “ Willie” Main, the tin-smith; Lumsden’s Dairy (don’t you remember the beautiful “Henny” Lumsden?); the Bethany hall Mission; Mrs McGrath’s smallwares shop; she was a widow, small, buxom, motherly-looking, more critical than loving in the eyes of the child customers who brought her so much unprofitable custom (who had much pocket-money in those school-days?), the barber’s shop with the Mission above it; the “close” at 112 which was the gathering-place for most of the shcool-children; A.M.Russell, Wire and Rope; Barnie’s Grassmarket Mission; the house at the corner of Grassmarket and the West Bow where, as D.K.Broster in The Flight of the Heron has it that the Young Pretender clandestinely visited in the dead of night on his first evening in Holyrood Palace after Prestonpans.
What more does the inquisitor, Memory, summon to the bar? The busy streets of a summer evening, where, while the sun made long shadows down the Candlemaker Row across the Cowgate Head, and the high tenements drew closer in the approaching twilight, as children shouted and played, and jostled for leadership, and screamed their brief quarrels up and down the pavements and through the closes” and even young women athletically took their turn in the long “jumping-ropes”, where the nimblest could jump in the cocoon of a flying rope, held at both ends by two who vigorously “cawed”, until they eventually had to trip the rope in the hurricane of a “perrigay”[?] - and the ball-games, where the quick of eye and hand could catch a long thrown ball with a cry of insolent pride - and “kick-the-can”; and the inevitable drunks, of both sexes, and here the female of the species was indeed a degraded specimen, who so often fought and scratched with a venom never exhibited by the most besotted male - she could dishonour the character of her adversary with a vocabulary that could ignite coldest fires of a fellow-whore - and the friendly “polis” with his mailed fist, and his persuasion towards peace - who remembers “hand-me-down-the-moon”? He was taller than anyone the eyes of a boy had ever seen, and the same eyes never saw him other than unflappable and victorious - then, of course, there was PC Johnston, the police boxing-champion, who, legend averred (and to this day I don’t question it) would give the largest drunk the choice between being escorted to the “office” or hiding up one of the closes! Let us not forget the poor, foolish “meths drinkers”, or the “red biddy” men - a fill up of the bottle from the well at the foot of the West Bow, and they were a yard or two into one fo the stairs, where they - very often two of them - emptied the bottle, and got the bonus of a second “drunk” for nothing! There were the street buskers - though that would not be the name they were known by - who sang, or gave selections on an accordion, or got tied up in ropes and escaped, (not many pennies would drop into theri caps, for who had pennies to spare?) - and the band from Barrie’s Mission, and the Salvation Armyh Band, which I’m afraid made more diversion than conversions. How memory regilds the scene!
Next to the Lumsden’s Dairy, on the lower slope, was the workshop for Young’s, the surgical instrument makers; and on the upper slope, at the same side of the street, was the post office - so commerce and officialdom did much to reliever the drabness of one of the least colourful byways in the centre of the city, albeit its function, which was as a thoroughfare for convenience between George IV Bridge, Melbourne Place, the Lawnmarket, the High Street and all that activity of Edinburgh civic life, and the Grassmarket to the limits of squalor marching upon Lothian Road, and Tollcross, to the genteel world beyond, the Warrender estate, and Marchmont, and the big mansions even beyond that, where the retired nabobs from the trading in the Far East had embattled the grandeur of their retirement, and sprawling around even to the hills the discreet homes of the opulent burghers, whose proud independence and respectability was expressed in a blend of a conservatism of estate and a chilling awesomeness in the eyes of any of the children who, [?]ing to the recreation which the Blackford Hills offered, passed by in silent wonder and secretly coveted, without understanding why.
The West Port - West Bow and Victoria Street - Candlemaker Row - the Cowgate - Guthrie Street - Blair Street - Niddry Street - the Canongate - Holyrood Road (“The Back Canongate”) - the Dumbiedykes - the Potterrow - the Pleasance - the pubs - there were, if my memory is right, 5 in the Grassmarket: O’Rourke’s at the foot of the West Port, the Beehive, the Gothenburg, Hare’s near Barrie’s Mission, and a fourth, the name I’ve forgotten, but it was smaller and its façade was a window of small, old-fashioned squares, framed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more were of “bottle glass” - there was on one pub in Victoria Street, Menelaws I think, where, ‘twas said of the owner, old an acidulated, was said to be his own best customer - it was taken over by an ex PC from Edinburgh City Police, David Murray, I seem to remember, who eventually died of double pneumonia - a man of commanding stature, “one would have taken a lease of his life” - Orroch’s, the bookbinder, Dongles the newsagency shop - and let’s not forget Thomson the violin-maker in the Upper Bow, over the Terrace, where one was always welcome to go in and talk music, especially violins, and be given a violin to try out at the counter - a delightful man who belonged to an earlier era, and who left happy memories - the Original Secession Church on the enclosed reaches of the Terrace - the mind is now searching at random in the dim corridor of memory, and the ghosts are unwilling to return - there was, or course, at 96 West Bow, I think that would be the number, for some time, a shop premises used for the sale of coal and paraffin oil, and firelighters and the customer could buy coal by the pound there, according to her means - the place was an ante-chamber of Hades, with dim lighting (gas or oil?), coal covering a large area of the floor at the back, the walls stained by coal-dust and dross, but - the smell! - oh joy! - what a rhapsodic mingling of aromas, coal and paraffin and firelighters - no florists in the Edens of Princes Street had anything to compre what titillated the nostrils and strangely excited the senses of an impressionable boy, who had no reason to enter other than to satisfy his seducible nose! To be young, to be very young, is to create ones’ own Aladdin’s Cave - the imagination of a boy is the Magic Lamp, the Philosopher’s Stone, the True Elixir, the Mountain of Gold, the lands-beyond-the-horizon, the Pot of Gold at the foot of the Rainbow!
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