Book review: 10 Scotland Street, by Leslie Hills
First, the inhabitants of the fictional 44 Scotland Street, known and loved by readers of this paper, play no part and get no mention in this history of number 10. This is the house where Leslie Hills, better known as a film producer, has lived for the last half-century.
Scotland Street belongs to the second New Town. It had never been as “good” an address as Heriot Row or Great King Street, or indeed Drummond Place immediately above it, but it has had a rich variety of house-owners and tenants. With assiduous research of national and city archives and use of the national census, Hills is able to give names, family history, occupations and medical history of everyone who has lived in number 10 – and a great many occupants of other houses in the street as well. The result is remarkably interesting.
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Hide AdMost attention is given to the first and long-term occupants of her own house, David and Ann Whytt, for both of whom she has formed a warm, if posthumous and inevitably one-sided friendship. The Whytts were upwardly mobile. David began in a small way as a bookseller. Edinburgh was the city of bookselling and publishing, many, David among them, combining the two trades. He flourished, all the more so when he secured a commission from the Admiralty, a profitable enterprise during the long Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, auctioning the cargos of captured ships, many Danish vessels seeking to avoid the blockade of France imposed by the Navy. Prize money went to the captain, officers and crew of the ships that took them, but the auctioneer made a handsome profit. Deeply devout the Whytts would be members of the Free Kirk after the 1843 Disruption.
One of the most interesting chapters deals with David’s bachelor brother, William. Hill thought this would be a dull chapter; far from it. Also a bookseller and music publisher, William as a very young man ambitiously commissioned Haydn to compose music for a selection of Robert Burns’s poems and songs. Later, he became the chief agent in Scotland for the sale of Broadway pianos. He invested well and wisely in businesses and property and it doesn’t seem that his business suffered when in later life he published only religious books. His will, running to many pages, is a remarkable document; Hill reports it in full.
Edinburgh grew busier and richer, despite much poverty and high rates of mortality, especially among women during pregnancy and childbirth and in children. Large families were normal but the lists of those who died young is shocking to see. Once again, one thinks that the real heroes of the 19th century were physicians and those who engaged in medical research. It was also the century of Empire. Hill recognizes how Scotland flourished on account of it, while being also ashamed, especially of slavery and indentured labourers.
As Edinburgh grew richer, Scotland Street declined. It never became a slum, but there were fewer owner-occupiers like the Whytts, who retained ownership of Number 10 until the 1930s, but no longer lived there, content presumably to collect the rent. The book becomes less interesting in the first half of the 20th century; Hill continues to have something to say about the succession of tenants and how they lived in considerable numbers in the house that would be hers, but one misses the detailed story of the Whytts.
Nevertheless, this is a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable book, a work of prodigious research and also an engaging partial autobiography as well as the story of number 10, and indeed the whole street. Scotland Street flourishes again today. Anyone who loves Edinburgh and is fascinated by its private histories will be entranced by this book. It will surely have many eagerly investigating the history of their own house and street.
10 Scotland Street, by Leslie Hills, Scotland Street Press, £24.99