Diarmid Mogg

For more stories of forgotten invalids and tragic accidents, go to tenementtown.com.

Pigeons perch on the windowsill of a flat to which they have gained entry through the broken window panes.

Addendum:

The third-floor flat has been without occupants for some time, but this winter, thanks to friable putty and ancient glass finally giving way, the vacancy ended and, nearly 250 years after it was built, the tenement welcomed its latest, non-rent-paying, residents.

For most of the 20th century, prior to becoming Boots in 1993, the ground-floor-right shop was Findlay’s chemists, of which a corroded sign is all that remains.

“The Scots 150 years ago ate more vegetables than the English, but today Scotland lags behind in this respect, and in this lag lies danger to our national health. A tendency to headaches, bad gum conditions and over-tiredness may be traced to a lack of green vegetables.”

During the second world war, 6a St Patrick Street (ground floor left) was a Food Advice Centre, run by the Ministry of Food, which gave people information about subjects such as how to prepare salad and vegetable dishes, in which the Scottish diet was perceived to be lacking.

The west side of the tenement is on St Patrick Street, which makes up part of the stretch between Nicolson Street and Clerk Street.

A photograph of the west side of the tenement, which is on St Patrick Street. Two shops take up the whole ground-floor level.

That ended the premises’ life as a shop. It became the backroom of Findlay’s chemists, which had a shopfront around the corner, and was used for the manufacturing of Violiv hand cream, advertised as a “marvellous treatment for roughened hands”.

In the 1920s, the premises became a confectioners, run by Joseph Rovira (frequently fined for selling cigarettes outwith the licensed hours). After he died of bronchitis at fifty-five, his wife ran the shop, until her daughter, who worked with her, died of tuberculosis in 1937.

The drain was, we can only hope, fixed and the sewage-soaked masonry dried out by the late 1880s, when the shop at no.23 (to the left of the stair door) brought a new aroma to the street: “Now opened, The Fish Shop … fresh supply every day.”

After complaints, the Paving Board visited and found “the putrescent contents [of the drain] were belling up through the road metal, and sending forth a stench enough to make a strong man sick” and that “there can be no doubt that the ground flats are saturated with the contents of this drain.”

In 1854, the old drain beneath the tenement was so decayed and clogged that “the universal experience of the locality” was “that at night the smell is so strong and so offensive in the houses, ‘that it is just like lying beside a decomposing corpse.’”

A photograph of the front of the tenement on East Crosscauseway

1879—Isabella Milligan, 25, who, after six years of marriage to Adam Hay, a baker, withdrew her personal money from the bank, gave Adam £10, and left for Glasgow with their lodger—Thomas Thomson, her husband’s foreman—never to return.

Michael died in 1898, aged 67, sclerotic arteries unable to convey blood to his extremities, which blackened and withered away, and was buried in the Jewish section of Newington cemetery.

In 1881 “so great was the crush of people at the Theatre Royal last night anxious to see Mdme. Sara Bernhardt” that Michael “was severely injured on entering the gallery. He had to be carried out, and was conveyed home. We believe some of his ribs were broken, and his back was considerably injured.”

1889—Michael Wasserzug, jeweller in the High Street. A daughter, Rachel, died of scarlet fever a month before her third birthday; a son, Henry, died of tuberculosis aged 26. Great misfortunes, unremarked by the press. A lesser one made the papers:

1930—John Black, arrested for loitering outside the tenement, betting slips about his person. A £10 fine did nothing to deter him; he had been caught in the same spot once before and was arrested there several more times in the 1930s, the fines increasing to £25 before he either gave up or moved on.

1939—William Wooler, 55, whose request for a divorce from his wife, who had left him in 1925, was refused because he admitted in court that “since 1934 he had committed adultery on a few occasions, the last occasion being in 1938.”

Mary died in 1971, at the age of eighty-eight, of a stroke, in a Craigmillar Park nursing home. The hospital for incurables is now the headquarters of Historic Environment Scotland.

She concluded: “I have a nice little home of my own, and a nice little post in the Royal Infirmary, and I have many good friends.”

Throughout the 1950s, she wrote to the Evening News with reminiscences about her years in care. In one letter, she wrote, “I have never forgotten the many examples of courage and quiet endurance I witnessed in hospital and give thanks that, although not strong, I can still carry on in a quiet way.”

She packed her flat with ornaments, pictures and cards from friends—“I have spent so long looking at bare walls I can’t have too many things to look at now.”

After some time—months? Years?—her eyesight improved sufficiently for her to move into a flat in the East Crosscauseway tenement. A job was found for her in the Royal Infirmary, “looking after the salt cellars and pepper pots in the staff dining room.”

In 1943, at the age of sixty-one, Mary was deemed to be cured of tuberculosis, but the disease had affected her eyes, and she was transferred to the Thomas Burns Home for the Blind, a few streets to the south.

And Dr Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle’s inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, was one of Mary’s doctors—“Dr Bell always called me his ‘bright lassie’.”

There was also a missionary woman who had contracted leprosy and passed the remainder of her life in isolation in a hut in the hospital grounds, her meals passed to her through a small hatch in the wall.

…She did, and we were all invited to the wedding. I couldn’t go, but I got a piece of cake.”

There was a girl who was in for seven years with spinal trouble and was often visited by a young man. Mary said: “One day he proposed, right at the foot of my bed and said he would come back for her answer next week, and that he would give us all a party if she said yes…

Later, she recalled her fellow patients, such as an old man who counted the matches in the boxes that were brought to him and was outraged if there were too few, and Mary Marr, completely paralysed by arthritis, who read the news to the ward if a paper was propped up in front of her.