When boys were boys...

IT was a life in so many ways tougher yet so much simpler than today.
Messing about on the river, warming hands around an open fire, climbing precarious ledges and playing ‘soldiers’ with sharp sticks for guns, and then heading home again, bodies crammed in the back of a rickety truck.
Not a health and safety officer with a clipboard to tut-tut, not a strictly worded government rule saying ‘Don’t do that, you might get hurt’ to be seen.
No Ninento, no Xbox, no iPod and no smartphone.
And not a care in the world.
These striking, sometimes poignant images, have been gathered in print for the first time, recalling an innocent age which wasn’t so many years ago but could surely not be further away.
For they show a lost age when boys could be boys, their playground was the great outdoors and there was little more thrilling than rowing a handmade boat to a rocky outcrop in the Forth and noisily charging across its barren landscape.
Some of the photographs have a haunting poignancy: such as one showing young Scouts with toy guns skirmishing on Blackford Hill in 1910, blissfully unaware that in just four years’ time they might be marching to war for real.
And who knows how many ever came back…
The images are part of a fascinating lifetime collection of photographs taken by a man who not only recognised the benefits of letting boys be boys, but whose generosity and dedication to the Scout movement gave them an opportunity to enjoy the outdoors to its utmost.
Keen photographer William Edgar Evans (pictured right) was 26 years old when Lord Baden-Powell began the boy Scout movement in England - he was never a cub and he was never a Scout.
What he was, though, was probably the best Scout leader the boys of Morningside’s 6th troop Charlotte Chapel could ever have dreamed of: a First World War veteran, a natural science expert who made digging around rock pools a thrilling education, a natural-born leader and a storyteller with a brilliant knack for a good campfire ghost story.
When he became their scoutmaster in 1920, he brought along his camera, capturing his young charges on camping trips to Gullane and Oxton in Berwickshire, collecting on behalf of the Scott Antarctic Fund, messing about on the canal and, in one striking image, perched on top of one of the towering masts of a wreck lodged in thesands of Aberlady Bay.
That could have been enough.
But Evans - eventually he’d become known as Pa Evans to his Scouts - also recognised that city life for some lads could be dire, an escape to the countryside or better still, the seaside, a rare treat.
He bought two cottages, a large property and a playing field at Canty Bay in 1923, using money left by his well-to-do father.
By 1936 he’d established the Evans Trust for Boys and transferred Canty Bay to be used as a place for the Scouts to camp, climb, sail, where they could feel the sun, often the rain, on their young faces and the sea breeze in their hair.
One of them was Jack Cairns from Morningside, now in his early nineties, who vividly recalls his first Cub Pack holiday at Canty Bay in July 1929, as if it had happened yesterday.
“Apart from an occasional visit to Portobello beach I knew nothing about the sea-shore so a foray into the rock-pools at low water with Pa Evans was a learning experience not easily forgotten,” he remembers.
“A walk along the coast past Tantallon Castle produced much information on birds and flowers and a potted history of the castle.
“In the evening we sat around the den fire drinking cocoa, the lighthouse on the Bass Rock sent its six flashes in to the room, Pa told stories of prisoners on the Bass and the possibility of smugglers in Canty Bay until the cub leader chased us all off to bed.”
Evans other passion, of course, was photography. And, unlike many amateurs, he kept meticulous notes and diaries to accompany his images.
They have been brought together in a fascinating book that spans his lifetime, with images of Edinburgh streets, places, landmarks but especially people, some of them stiff in their Sunday finery, some proud in their Scout uniforms and some just enjoying life.
The book has been compiled by local historian Malcolm Cant, who says the minute he saw Edgar’s collection of glass slides and glass negatives, each dated and indexed, he knew it was of major significance.



“Evans photographic archive is undoubtedly a major contribution to the Edinburgh scene and deserves to be better known,” he adds.
‘Pa’ Evans died, aged 79, in 1963, when Britain was entering the Swingin’ Sixties, Beatlemania was at a peak and Flower Power was around the corner.
Even then, life for boys was changing. The age of innocence was already being lost.
But Canty Bay, Evans’ gift to young people, remains. Today it is still run by the Evans Trust, its facilities are still used by church organisations, schools, other Scout and Guide Troops and youth groups.
And the bay where its founder once thrilled with tales of smuggling and ghosts, pirates and adventures, looks just as it always did.
The passage of time has altered our children’s lives in ways Pa Evans couldn’t have imagined but, says Jack Cairns, Canty Bay remains.
“The Scout Association has changed radically in the 90 years since Pa’s first camp at Canty Bay,“ he agrees, “but the trustees and leaders of today remain united in the desire to maintain this idyllic place as a living memorial to a man who could bring natural sciences alive, but could also tell a good ghost story.”

Edinburgh and the Forth Through the Lens of Morningside Photographer William Edgar Evans, by Malcolm Cant, is published by Stenlake, price £15.99.