PRIDE AND PREJUDICE....

This is a fairly dated piece in terms of when it was written, but the issues, themes and the story are all timeless.
Indeed, it's actually quite relevant right now, as a new film, Belle - which tells something of this story  - is due for release sometime this year.




  ELEGANT and perfectly poised, the young lady sits in all her finery with a book laid open on her lap, her dusky companion by her side.

Lady Elizabeth Murray's hand reaches out to the pretty young woman, gently touching her gown.

On the surface, it's a fascinating image of two young women born in the same era but surely separated in society and status by the mere colour of their skin.

One has been delivered into 18th-century aristocracy. The other, presumably, can be little more than her slave.

It is a striking painting but the assumption that this is a lady and her subservient maid couldn't be more misguided.

For in an era of slavery, when many of African descent could only look forward to a life of service and misery bereft of basic human rights, when even Edinburgh banks were involved in the owning of ships transporting slaves, Dido Lindsay was the rare exception to the rule.

Born the illegitimate daughter of a liaison on the high seas between a Scots aristocratic naval officer and the black slave he captured, Dido enjoyed privileges, wealth and a social status that her contemporaries in the latter half of the 1700s could only wish for.

But there was more to Dido than simply being lucky enough to be born into an enlightened and loving family who refused to allow the colour of her skin to relegate her to a life below stairs.

In fact, the graceful, elegant and enigmatic Dido may well have been the spur which prompted her great-uncle, the First Earl of Mansfield, William Murray, to deliver a historic ruling that led to freedom for thousands of those less fortunate than her.

 With her portrait going on public display for the first time at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh (FEB 2002), interest in her remarkable story has been reawakened.

"Her story is fascinating," agrees Margo Norris, archivist at Scone Palace, ancestral home of the Earls of Mansfield. "Her role was unusual - most black people in Britain at the time would have been employed as servants, pageboys or footmen - she was treated as a member of the family.

"And she went on to become reasonably wealthy in her own right."

The picture, by one of England's best artists of the late 18th century, Johan Zoffany, is among the most thought-provoking items at the Great Houses of Scotland exhibition currently running at the Portrait Gallery in Queen Street.

Curator at the time James Holloway says the very fact Dido's image appears in a painting, which would have cost her family thousands of pounds to commission at the time, indicates her elevated status.

The portrait is among a beautiful collection of works contributed by Scone Palace, including a magisterial painting of William Murray, dubbed "the greatest lawyer of all time", resplendent in the robes of the Lord Chief Justice of England.

Born at Scone in 1705, he had left post-Union Scotland and Jacobite turbulence in the hope of establishing his career south of the Border. He was called to the English bar in 1730, quickly earning a reputation as a brilliant lawyer and the nickname "Silver-tongued Murray" for his public speaking gift.

He would go on to become the only man to serve as Lord Chief Justice for 32 years. He was also an MP, Solicitor General of Scotland - during which time he and his family lived in Edinburgh - Chancellor of the Exchequer and was on good terms with many figures in the intellectual movement Scottish Enlightenment.

But the legal tangle which confirmed his position in history was a landmark decision to emancipate the slave James Somerset by declaring in 1772 that his master had no right to sell his freedom.

His decision sent shock waves through the land. It spelled the beginning of the end of a shameful chapter in British history and gave hope to thousands of black people who had been driven out of their native homes, on to slave cargo ships in horrific conditions and sold into a life of slavery, lining the pockets of their wealthy owners.

That would probably have been the fate awaiting Dido's mother. Wrenched from her homeland, she was crammed into the hold of a Spanish slave ship for what would have been a terrifying and life-threatening journey across the Atlantic. Conditions would have been horrific: many were doomed to die on board from outbreaks of smallpox, dysentery, scurvy or from sheer terror. Some jumped overboard.

Those who refused food would be forced to their knees and a red-hot coal pressed to their mouth to make them scream. Their jaws would be wedged open and food emptied down their gullet.

But the Spanish slave ship was captured during the siege of Havana by William Murray's nephew, Rear Admiral Sir John Lindsay. His eye was clearly caught by one young woman in particular, and remarkably he refused to abandon her when she inevitably fell pregnant.

Instead, he brought her home and organised a job below stairs as a housekeeper at his uncle William's mansion, where Dido was eventually born.

But, as John Cairns, professor of legal history at Edinburgh University who has studied the 18th-century black population in Britain, explains, the childless Murrays had no desire to relegate this "bastard" infant to the kitchens.

"We have to remember that these people were aristocrats with a high sense of their own importance," he says. "It was of tremendous significance to have aristocratic blood in your veins - and Dido had aristocratic blood. The blood of William Murray's nephew, Lindsay, flowed in her."

Although she may not have had the entire run of the house, and it is not known whether she travelled north to Edinburgh when Murray did, Dido certainly enjoyed an elevated status.

"She had particular responsibility for running the dairy and poultry," says Ms Norris. "But judging by her fine clothes and the fact she had a reasonable income - especially after her father's death when he left her GBP 1000 - it's highly unlikely she ever got her hands dirty.

"She grew up with the other young woman in the painting, Elizabeth, the Second Earl of Mansfield's daughter, and would have been her playmate. Dido was treated a little bit like a nanny governor - neither below stairs but not quite completely above the stairs."

Certainly her presence among an aristocratic family did not impress everyone who came to visit, or attract their approval. American Thomas Hutchison, Governor-in-Chief of Massachusetts Bay, seemed to question the motives behind William Murray's affection for her when he wrote: "A Black came in after dinner. She had a very high cap and her wool (hair) was much frizzled in her neck, but not enough to answer the large curls now in fashion. She is neither handsome nor genteel. They call her Dido. He (William Murray) knows he has been reproached for showing fondness for her - I dare say not criminal."

Dido's role within the family may have remained little more than a curiosity, but for one particular court case which came before her great uncle in 1772. He was by this time Lord Mansfield and his ruling would have ramifications on both sides of the Atlantic.

It's not clear just what influence Dido's presence in Kenwood House may have had as he ruminated over the case of a negro called James Somerset, whose desperate bid to escape the chains of slavery had posed the groundbreaking legal question over his right to freedom.

However, Lord Mansfield found in Somerset's favour, and set him free. It was a ruling that created mayhem in Britain and America, as downtrodden slaves saw the Somerset finding as a sign that their term of imprisonment was finally at an end.

They gathered up what few possessions they had, and deserted their masters in droves.

At last they too could count themselves as free as a young girl called Dido.

 

Cutting the chains

EXACTLY what influence Dido Lindsay may have had over her great uncle's finding in a landmark legal case is lost in the mists of time.

But what is clear is the profound impact Lord Mansfield's Somerset finding had - not only on the slave trade but on Britain's relationship with America.

Somerset had been brought to England from Massachusetts in 1769 by his master, a Scotsman called Charles Stewart.

He absconded but was recaptured, put in irons and placed on board a ship bound for Jamaica where he was to be sold into slavery.

Anti-slavery campaigners, seeking a test case, decided to challenge Stewart's right to buy and sell his servant's liberty.

Although Lord Mansfield's decision referred specifically to Somerset's case, his finding that "No Master was ever allowed here to take a Slave by force to be sold abroad because he had deserted from his Service" was seen as a fatal blow to the future of slavery. The case was cited as ending the slave trade in Britain on both sides of the Atlantic, prompting slaves to desert their masters and, citing the Somerset case, seek independent employment.

But there was a further side-effect of Lord Mansfield's ruling.

American colonists fighting for white colonists' freedom from Britain were quick to use it to boost their own argument: that if all men are created equal, why then should they remain "enslaved" to a country thousands of miles away?

 

First published Edinburgh Evening News February 2002.

www.edinburghnews.com

Arctic Convoys: through hell and high water to victory.

THE waves crashed around them, 60ft high, and the men of the Arctic Convoys, frozen to the bone and in terror of the German bombs, pressed on in what Sir Winston Churchill once called "the worst journey in the world".

Of course, he might well have thought that. Those hardy souls on board the merchant ships and the navy vessels charged with protecting them knew better. They knew it was much, much worse than that.

A freezing hell spent dodging Hitler's deadly U-boats and vicious Junkers 88s, sleepless nights and terror ridden days, when the journey around Norway in Arctic seas towards Archangel and Murmansk took them past hundreds of hidden inlets and coves - perfect hiding places for enemy attack.

Conditions were horrific enough. Then there were the sights, the heart-stopping moments when men could only watch helplessly as comrades plunged to their deaths from frozen decks into ice cold water, where within just three minutes they would perish.

Jim Simpson was there, fresh faced, just out of his teens. Today he is in his 91st year, ramrod straight, medals pinned over his heart glittering; the Arctic Emblem - a white polar star with a red Russian dot in its centre, pinned proudly upon his immaculate jacket, his brand new Arctic Star medal shining the brightest.

He sits in a plush armchair in his Barnton Avenue home, a model of a ship on a table nearby, some naval type prints on the wall clues to a remarkable war service that, 70 years on, is as painfully vivid as ever.

Not that he's one for talking too much about it. He hands over some notes a relative has made with help from his wife, Sybil, which detail how he joined HMS Devonshire and headed off on an ocean voyage from which more than 3000 men would never return. The notes are factual and detailed enough yet there is little in the pages to hint at what it was really like for a young Edinburgh lad on one of the most hellish journeys imaginable.

Gently ask him to share some of the emotional turmoil of four years spent bobbing on Arctic waters like a plastic duck in a fairground shooting game, and he looks down at well polished shoes at something suddenly fascinating and totally absorbing.

"I can't really explain it," he says quietly. "When you're being attacked with Junkers and bombers and U-boats on your tail at the same time, wherever you went there was a U-boat behind you.

"Then look around and you can see a wall of water 60 feet high chasing you. We had a lot of near misses. We lost a corvette one night," he adds, and in his mind's eye it's almost certain he can still see a small but hardy little boat, specially built to serve with honour in the convoys, broken by a U-boat torpedo.

"He's never really spoken about it until recently," chips in Sybil, who has heard more about her husband's Arctic Convoys experiences in the last few years than in all their 65 years as a married couple.

She is not the only wife who is only now learning of how spectacular and humbling a job their husbands did during the war. For just what it was really like for the thousands of brave sailors has only recently started trickling out, voices finally found as a campaign aimed at recognising their contribution in the form of a special medal gained momentum, led by, among others, Jock Dempster from Dunbar. Jock, of course, died just weeks after receiving his longed for Arctic Star and before he had the chance to wear it at a public ceremony.

Jim's Arctic Star shares space on his jacket with the 1939-45 Star, the Atlantic medal, the War Medal and a special Russian Convoy Medal awarded by a grateful Russia to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the convoys. His wife keeps the ribbons bright and fresh by scrubbing at them using a toothbrush smeared with a little gentle soap.

They were on his chest again yesterday as he stood in the War Museum at Edinburgh Castle, VIP guest at a new exhibition which tells the remarkable story of the Arctic Convoys through striking images, first-hand testimony and poignant, personal objects.

Among the items on display are an aged telegram delivering the worst news possible to a wife back home of her lost husband, alongside a packing case covered in beautifully coloured labels including one that says simply "with thanks to the British convoys", well-worn uniforms, grainy photographs, and the bell of HMS Edinburgh, sunk by the Germans with her cargo of gold on board, payment from grateful Russians for American help.

Jim was 19 years old when he left home to work in Skara Brae in the Orkneys, building camps for the army and Royal Air Force. After six months he was back in Edinburgh to answer his call-up papers.

Waiting for him after brief training at Devonport was HMS Devonshire, newly refurbished with hi-tech radar designed to help detect U-boats - radar that, along with a brilliant captain, would save the crew's lives time after time.

Her role was to provide cover for air operations by planes launched from aircraft carriers - a death-defying task in itself - from the guns of German battleship Tirpitz, lying in Altenfjord in occupied Norway. The Tirpitz was just one enemy vessel facing the 50 or so ships in the convoys taking vital supplies to Russia, danger came also in frequent fire from Nazi planes and U-boats firing torpedoes night and day.

"We hardly slept," remembers Jim, whose job was "damage control", closing off the bulkheads to prevent the ship taking in water in the event of a direct hit.

"We were never in our hammocks when at sea, if we slept it was usually on the main deck - we could be at 'action stations' for hours.

"Our job was to keep her [Tirpitz] in harbour while the aircraft carriers sent off their planes to bomb her.

"Some of the planes didn't make it back. Sadly quite a few men were lost," he adds. "There was no time to rescue them, there were other planes coming in. It was horrendous for all concerned."

Men went days without sleep, he remembers, warming now to the idea of talking about it. Clothes went unchanged - it was minus 50, the idea of stripping off was unthinkable.

"Conditions were unbelievably bad, the seas were rough, it was freezing cold," he says. "The deck would often freeze - so did the moisture in our noses and our moustaches."

And all the time enemy spotter planes buzzed the convoys, followed by the Junkers 88s in wave after terrifying wave of attack.

"The Junkers dropped their torpedoes mainly at dusk," adds Jim, "it was difficult to see where they were. We opened fire, gunners were shooting all day long. We had to be alert at all times, U-boats were all around. We fired off depth charges from the stern of the ship when they were too close for comfort.

"We didn't think too much about the Germans," he adds. "I suppose they were lads just like us. But it was them, or us."

Jim was eventually demobbed in November 1946 - having left the Arctic he joined HMS Jamaica for service in Indian waters. Life with Sybil from then on involved the much less dramatic task of working in construction and raising their family. Today, they have five grandchildren.

Telling his story now, says Sybil, is mostly for them and their children's sake, so the vital chapter in British war history won't be forgotten.

"He didn't speak about it until there was an Arctic Convoys veterans reunion recently. Since then he's been telling more stories," she adds.

"We want the grandchildren to hear his story before it's too late."

constant threat of attack from air or U-boats

The Arctic Convoys sailed from Britain from August 1941 until May 1945, delivering urgently needed supplies to the Soviet Union including tanks, vehicles, weapons and raw materials.

Their route took them through incredibly harsh environmental conditions in dense fog and turbulent seas, with freezing temperatures causing ice to form on the ships to the extent that it could cause vessels to capsize if it were not removed immediately.

As if the appalling conditions were not enough, there was the constant threat of German attack from the air or from U-boats based in Nazi-occupied Norway. Churchill, right, privately admitted that he would have been happy if even half of the Convoys got through. In fact, the success rate was rather higher, with 707 of the 811 merchant ships to sail arriving safely. However, over 3000 sailors were lost.

One of the most poignant stories in the exhibition is that of convoy PQ17. It was passing the west coast of Nazi-held Norway when incorrect intelligence suggested that the Germans were going to launch a concerted attack. The convoy was ordered to scatter, leaving ships wide open to attack.

Twenty-four of the 35 merchant ships in the convoy were lost.

A frantic rescue operation ensued, featuring vessels including the SS Rathlin which was credited with rescuing 634 crew from 13 sinkings.

One of the personal stories in the display is of James K Thompson, a boatswain on the SS Rathlin. In January 1943, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his role in shooting down two enemy aircraft in defence of convoy PQ17.

The Russian connection is brought up to date with the loan of objects by Timofey Kunitskiy, who works in the Consulate General of the Russian Federation in Edinburgh. His grandfather was a senior officer in the Russian navy and was involved in many air reconnaissance operations. Objects on loan include winter-weight fur gloves used in air reconnaissance and various navigational instruments

 

Appeared Edinburgh Evening News May 2013

2013 Johnston Publishing Limited

 

The day a bomber crash landed in craiglockhart

IT was just before noon, on a fairly normal Monday in an otherwise
ordinary yet smart part of town, where the street of neat bungalows and their equally neat little gardens must have seemed - until then - relatively unscathed by the horrors of war.

Women were going about their daily household chores, a few men had wandered down to Craiglockhart's "Happy Valley" allotments to tend to their ground. All were quite probably counting the days until Christmas and then the dawn of a new year. It would soon be 1943, maybe war would end soon.

They heard it before they saw it. The loud drone of a plane's engine - too loud, not quite right, it made them stop what they were doing and raise their heads up to scan the sky.

And what they witnessed must have made a terrifying sight.

Skimming the trees, a few dozen feet from the ground and heading straight towards the recently built bungalows and neat gardens of Craiglockhart View was the fearsome sight of Bomber Command's most trusted workhorse, the twin-engined Vickers-built Wellington, more than 60ft long with a wingspan of nearly 90ft, designed to be armed with up to four machines guns and capable of carrying a 4000lb bomb.

On board, her five frantic crew were embroiled in a desperate battle. Just over an hour into their secret test flight from RAF Defford in Worcester, the Wellington had experienced a critical and ultimately fatal equipment failure.

They surely knew they were in the final, terrifying moments of their lives. But as the neat rows of Craiglockhart View bungalows loomed before their eyes, they would also know that it wasn't only their lives at stake.

Next year will mark the 70th anniversary of one of Edinburgh's worst plane disasters, when five brave fliers on board the Wellington bomber perished just feet away from the bungalows of Craiglockhart View.

Incredibly - in a feat of flying skill under enormous pressure that almost defies belief - the 24-year-old pilot drew on all his abilities to bring the plane down in the heart of a tightly packed community without a single further loss of life.

All on board perished: five young men, one of them married, one an American seconded to join the RAF test flight and one whose remains now lie just a few miles away in a grave on Corstorphine Hill beneath a stone that, in a poignant indication of the sacrifice made by some families, also pays tribute to his pilot brother lost just a few months before him.

Hard to believe now, but the demise of the Wellington bomber on that fateful day in December, 1942, barely made headline news at the time. Details of the drama were sandwiched between stories about a New Year rugby match, a fire at a Hermand Street garage and the ongoing work to compile a Scottish National Dictionary, on page four of the Evening News. That's in sharp contrast to today, when the RAF is consistently making headlines for completely different reasons as cutbacks throw doubts over the future of Scottish air bases and trainee pilots face being made redundant.

Now, as the 70th anniversary of the accident looms, one local councillor believes the time is right to honour the immense courage of those unfortunate souls on board.

Fountainbridge/Craiglockhart Councillor Gordon Buchan began pushing for a memorial to the doomed airmen after he heard of how some locals in the area had dug up bits of the aircraft in their gardens.

"People spoke of finding little bits of aluminium, and when I asked around some people said they saw it as children.

"It seems that the pilot was trying to avoid the houses and land on the fields at Meggetland.

"If this had happened these days, there would certainly be a memorial of some description."

Because this was a secret test flight - and the middle of a war - the background to the accident remains sketchy. What is known is that the crew of five was flying from RAF Defford, the recently opened base for the Telecommunications Flying Unit, later known as the Radar Research Flying Unit. It operated flight trials, testing new equipment devised by civilian scientists designed to give Britain and her allies the edge in the skies over Europe. This was where radar systems which would revolutionise the capability of Allied aircraft were put to the test and where Air to Surface Vessel radar developed to spot German U-boats was devised - a crucial element in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Radar enabled accurate navigation and target identification - perhaps it was this that the Wellington Mk III crew were secretly testing?

The bomber was around an hour into its journey when it suffered some kind of equipment failure and was instructed to return to base. But as the crew wrestled with that problem, the port engine failed.

The flight stuttered over Turnhouse, went into a stall and began its plunge to the ground in the skies above Craiglockhart. The brief reports of the accident paint a vivid and distressing picture of the plane crew's final moments.

One unnamed resident said at the time: "I head the aeroplane and from the noise I judged it must have been very low. Then I saw it just skimming some trees. It seemed to be in trouble and I was horrified because it seemed utterly impossible to avoid crashing into the houses in its path.

"It went very low and I heard a crash. I ran down a side road towards the canal then there was a burst of flame and when I got in view of the allotments, the plane seemed to be awfully close to one of the houses.

"Ammunition was banging and popping and it was hopeless to attempt to get near the crash"

In fact, the plane had come down in the back garden of one of Craiglockhart View's bungalows, just feet from the back door and the startled middle-aged woman inside.

One man tending his allotment nearby had an equally narrow escape - rooted to the spot just 30 yards from the scene, he was showered by debris which fell all around him yet somehow avoided hitting him.

The crackle of exploding bullets, the flames and the noise sent residents scurrying to air raid shelters, many thinking the streets were under attack from a machine-gunning raider.

But those who had witnessed the drama were in little doubt that the pilot, Thomas Lennox-French, had skilfully manoeuvred his stricken plane in its dying moments and against all odds intentionally brought it down just short of Craiglockhart View's homes. The only damage was some broken windows and a small fire on the roof of the bungalow which, reported newspapers at the time, charred some wallpaper in the back room. The female occupant of the house was said to be slightly shocked but uninjured.

The outcome for the young crewmen on board was a dreadful death. Even if anyone had survived the impact of the crash, the intensity of the flames and the exploding ammunition meant there was no hope of rescue. The crewmen's deaths were registered, one after the other, with the Morningside registrar on Hogmanay, 1942: Flying Officer Lennox-French, 24, Warrant Officer Andrew McFadyen, 26, Flight Sergeant Charles McGregor, 28 and the only married man among them, John Harper, 29, a Flight Sergeant.

Missing from the roll is 1st Lieutenant S Kaulis, of the US Army Signal Corps, also on board the flight.

It's not too late to mark their sacrifice, insists Cllr Buchan. "We should remember what people did during the war," he stresses.

"We are trying to get a grant from the Neighbourhood Partnership and looking for somewhere appropriate to locate a fitting memorial."

"It's important the people are aware of what other generations have sacrificed. It's important to show respect."

POIGNANT STORY

PRECIOUS little is known of the crew who perished when their Mk III Wellington bomber dive-bombed into gardens in Craiglockhart View.

But a small section of Corstorphine Hill cemetery holds a poignant memorial to one.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission plot in the south-east corner contains 35 Second World War graves and it's here, in section B, grave 558, that the remains of Wellington bomber pilot Thomas Lennox-French lie. His grey stone tells its own remarkably poignant story, for as well as marking the details of his untimely demise, it also commemorates that of his older brother, Robert.

Sidney and Euphemia French's two sons were both doomed to perish while serving in the RAF.

Robert, Thomas' older brother by four years, was named in the London Gazette of April 9, 1940, one of several dozen RAF volunteer reserve personnel to become "pilot officers on probation".

But just weeks later, at the end of May, his name appears in The Scotsman as one of many reported missing. By February 1941, he was officially named as missing, presumed killed in action

NOSTALGIA: The bizarre Georgian love temple.

 

AS the doors to Dr James Graham's mysterious Temple of Health creaked open, the sight which greeted the crowds of curious Georgian gents and their blushing ladies was nothing if not intriguing.

Beyond rows of crutches and walking sticks abandoned by owners who had been "cured" of all manner of ailments, and lurking behind scantily-clad "Goddesses", was the ultimate prize.

Dr Graham's 12ft-wide tilting bed was lavish and extremely expensive - it is said to have cost the good doctor a whopping £10,000 to create - but for the desperate, childless and the sexually adventurous, the Edinburgh-born medic's invention brought hope and, no doubt, put a smile on many despairing faces long before Viagra was invented.

For a rather hefty £50 a night, the sterile, impotent or simply curious aristocratic Georgians were guaranteed a cure to their sexual woes by way of an aromatic mattress, several powerful magnets and a jolt of electricity.

Whether anyone actually did conceive courtesy of Dr Graham's wild invention is lost in the mists of time, but several of his other bizarre theories and ideas - and those of his fellow quacks - may sound familiar 250 years on.

Mud baths, vegetarianism, aromatherapy and electrotherapy are commonplace today, yet revolutionary for Dr Graham's blue-blooded audience, drawn to his temple by celebrity endorsement and shrewd marketing.

He was just one of many quacks who combined showmanship with a gullible public to earn himself a place in medical history. But just who was Dr James Graham and how have his wacky health ideas evolved to affect us today?

Born the son of a saddler and raised in the Cowgate, he studied medicine at Edinburgh University only to drop out before graduation. Still he pursued a lifelong career in medicine which, combined with his charisma and talent for showmanship, made him the toast of Georgian society and one of the first 'sexologists'.

He was in his 20s when he emigrated to America, where the electrical experiments of Benjamin Franklin prompted his idea that "electricity invigorates the whole body and remedies all physical defects". By 1775, Dr Graham operated clinics in Bristol and Bath. Now it was time to open the lavish London Temple of Health and Hymen and reveal Dr Graham's most bizarre invention of all - the celestial bed.

His name was already known to some of the cream of society - the Prince of Wales, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and British historian Catherine Macaulay - drawn to the smooth-talking Scot for his "famous aetherial and balsamic medicine" and his "elixir of life".

But that did little to prepare them for what they would find behind the creaking doors to his Temple of Health and Hymen. Payment of two shilling and sixpence allowed the curious to pass through the main hall and into one of the opulently decorated rooms, lit by scented candles and filled with erotic paintings.

While he delivered his lectures on health - or, more precisely, sexual health - Goddesses of Youth and Health, scantily clad young and attractive women, would pose provocatively in their virginal white silken robes. Among them was the Goddess Hebe Vestina, a 16-year-old former domestic servant named Amy Lyon, whose main role was to frolic naked leaping in and out of a mud bath which Dr Graham claimed would enable users to live to 150 years of age. Eventually, Amy would leave Dr Graham's employ to re-emerge as Emma Hart, better known still as Nelson's Lady Hamilton.

But it was the celestial bed that was the most intriguing of all of Dr Graham's inventions. Stuffed with spices and essences, surrounded by "the exhilarating force of electrical fire", the bed certainly commanded its users to put on a spectacular performance.

"At the head of the bed appears sparkling with electrical fire a great first commandment: Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth", declares Dr Graham's Temple brochure.

"No feather bed is employed, but sometimes mattresses filled with sweet new wheat or oat straw mingled with balm, rose leaves, lavender flowers and oriental spices," it continues.

"The sheets are of the richest and softest silk, stained sky blue, white and purple. Sometimes the mattresses are filled with the strongest, most springy hair, produced at vast expense from the tails of English stallions."

It also contained 15cwt of magnets and was built with a double frame, enabling it move on an axis and tilt at the vital moment to assist in conception.

"From a medical point of view he was not taken seriously at all," says writer Jacqui Lofthouse, who researched Dr Graham's bizarre practices for her novel, The Temple of Hymen. "But he was a great figure in society at the time.

"You could liken his temple to today's reality television, where there would be this fascination - it would be fashionable and a wonderful occasion as well as an element of titillation."

And although on the surface Dr Graham's theories seem outrageous and bizarre, they may not be a million miles removed from some of today's common practices, she adds.

"Some of the things he did can be linked to today," says Jacqui. "He was into eating seeds and nuts for health and lots of fresh air. A lot of what he advised is what you might hear advocated now."

Dr Graham is said by some to have invented the mud face-pack, vegetarianism and electrotherapy, still used in hospitals today.

His penchant for the use of celebrity endorsements and astute marketing of his Temple were also templates for today's advertising campaigns.

Despite his theories, however, Dr Graham did not live to a ripe old age. As his Temple fell out of fashion he found himself poverty-stricken and back home in Edinburgh. Sinking into madness, he took his theories on food to the limit and released a publication: How to Live for Many Weeks or Months or Years Without Eating Anything Whatsoever - a theory adopted by today's bizarre sect of breatharians, who claim to survive on light. Dr Graham died before he reached 150 - the age he seemed to think entirelly possible to achieve - some say from starvation, others from a ruptured blood vessel, yet his fame lives on.

The Temple of Hymen by Jacqui Lofthouse is published by Penguin Books.

Edinburgh Evening News June 2005

NOSTALGIA: Clued up Littlejohn inspired Sherlock

A BUZZ of excitement rippled through the High Court in Edinburgh. The scene was one of the most dramatic trials to grip Victorian Edinburgh, at centre stage was one of the most familiar faces to grace the halls of justice.

Henry Duncan Littlejohn took his time entering the witness box. Methodical and precise, no doubt savouring the moment, he made himself comfortable while the public benches, packed with curious spectators who had queued for hours to see for themselves the spectacle of this dramatic trial, settled into silence.

"The veteran doctor, without whom no great trial would be complete, stepped into the box, and having taken the oath, poured out a glass of water and settled down to an examination which lasted well over two hours," reported The Scotsman at the time.

Littlejohn's appearance in the trial of the year - indeed, that particular hearing in 1893 would go down in Scottish legal history for its unsatisfactory outcome, its high drama and its bloody detail - was sensational. So much so that his gruesome evidence, in which he dissected in intricate detail his postmortem findings, even down to the smell from the victim's opened stomach, his shattered skull and blown apart middle ear, was reported in intricate detail.

Indeed, so gripping was Littlejohn's testimony, that by the time forensic detective Dr Joseph Bell took the stand to support his colleague's claim that the victim could not possibly have simply shot himself, his evidence merited merely a passing mention in newspaper reports from the time, and it seemed simply a matter of fact that the accused would be found guilty.

The sensational trial - known as the Ardlamont case - brought two of the most dynamic characters of the time together in a powerful real-life drama that gripped Edinburgh society.

Of course, Dr Bell's impressive powers of deduction had already inspired his student and one-time clerk Arthur Conan Doyle to create the world's best-known sleuth.

But while he is typically given credit for providing the fictional detective's DNA, there's little doubt that the astonishing figure of Henry Littlejohn - forensic scientist, police surgeon and, when not dissecting bodies, the man responsible for completely transforming public health and sanitation in Edinburgh - played his own role in forging the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Interest in just who inspired Conan Doyle to create his multi-faceted and charismatic lead character has been revived with the BBC's contemporary adaptation of the classic stories, which have received rave reviews. On Sunday, the final episode in the latest trio of Sherlock stories starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the consulting detective, The Reichenbach Fall, hits screens, inspired by The Final Problem in which Holmes locks horns with his criminal nemesis Moriaty.

But while Conan Doyle's creation broke the mould when it came to delivering a super sleuth with skill, dazzling intellect and personal magnetism, in real life Henry Littlejohn - and eventually his son Harvey, born 150 years ago this year - was every bit as fascinating and remarkable.

For father and son not only helped develop forensic science skills that endure today, between them they helped bring to justice the perpetrators of dozens of bloody and brutal crimes. And in Henry Littlejohn's case, he would also help improve the lives of hundreds of poverty stricken citizens and bring comfort and medical help to their sick children.

This year marks 150 years since he was appointed to the dual role of surgeon of police and medical officer of health in Edinburgh. To hold one of those roles would have been quite enough for most men - as surgeon of police he was expected to carry out postmortems, testify in court and attend executions - to take on the public health role too was almost superhuman.

Father and son were, agrees Dr Paul Laxton, who is writing a book about Henry Littlejohn's life, exceptional characters. "Henry Littlejohn was very prominent in dealing with murder cases all over Scotland - to then take on a role in public health and at the same time lecture at Edinburgh University was quite incredible. His son, Harvey, succeeded him as chair of medical jurisprudence at Edinburgh University. There is a lot of academic writing that supports the theory that Sherlock Holmes is not based on one man, but on several people. And, of course, Littlejohn would have been well known to Conan Doyle.

"Edinburgh at that time was a village, all middle class people in the New Town wined and dined together and knew each other well. Bell and Littlejohn were two major characters."

Henry Littlejohn's impact on Edinburgh life was dramatic. Born in Leith Street in 1826, he was the seventh child of a master baker. Aged 21, he graduated in medicine from Edinburgh University with distinction and trained at the Sorbonne in Paris before becoming a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh in 1854.

His speciality, however, was forensics, a growing and fascinating area of detective work that seized upon scientific understanding and medical advances to help crack crime.

From the halls at Edinburgh University where he'd lecture for hours without notes, to the hush of the courtroom where he'd present evidence in fine and often nauseating detail, Littlejohn cut an impressive figure with his strong, determined jaw, top hat, long coat and Gladstone bag.

His ability to dissect a crime scene - and a victim - was legendary. But it was his new role as medical officer of health that impacted on most Edinburgh citizens' pitiful lives.

Tragedy had struck in 1861 when a High Street tenement building collapsed, killing 35 people. The horror led to calls to clean up the city's ruinous buildings and improve sanitation for Old Town citizens.

Within a few years Littlejohn had single-handedly produced a damning report that prompted the clearance of dire tenements. He pioneered smallpox vaccination programmes that dramatically improved the city folks' health and helped lay the foundation for the Sick Kids hospital.

Enough for one man, perhaps. But Littlejohn's other skill - the one that may well have planted a seed in the mind of Edinburgh University student Arthur Conan Doyle who attended his lectures - was forensic science.

"Littlejohn was very famous in Edinburgh and throughout Scotland," says Professor Dorothy Crawford, assistant principal for public understanding of medicine at Edinburgh University, who has written about Henry Littlejohn in her medical history book Bodysnatchers to Lifesavers.

"He made an enormous impact on public health but he was also in court a lot and was an incredibly popular lecturer to students who taught from his own forensic cases.

"This was at a time when photographic evidence and fingerprinting was being introduced and Conan Doyle would have been very much involved in that. Of course Conan Doyle's novels hit the public at a time when detective work was becoming more scientific and being a medic and a writer meant he excelled."

Conan Doyle penned The Final Problem, in which Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriaty apparently plunge to their deaths down the Reichenbach Falls, in December 1893. At the same time, the Ardlamont murder trial was creating a national sensation that held Victorian Edinburgh and beyond engrossed - one newspaper report of proceedings stretched to a staggering 44,500 words.

Forensic evidence provided by Littlejohn seemed certain to seal murder accused Alfred Monson's fate. Monson, described as a "gentleman's tutor", had gone shooting on the Ardlamont estate with a friend, Edward Scott, and young gent Cecil Hambrough in August 1893 when, they claimed, Hambrough accidentally shot himself.

Their story was accepted until Monson appeared with two life insurance policies in Hambrough's name, taken out a few weeks earlier, benefiting Monson's wife.

In two hours of gripping evidence, Littlejohn picked over the injuries to Hambrough: the position of the wound, the damage to the victim's skull, his stomach, scorch marks from the bullet.

His testimony - backed by Dr Bell - would have put Sherlock Holmes himself to shame. There was just one problem; the jury wasn't convinced and returned a not proven verdict.

It was one of the few occasions that Henry Littlejohn's wealth of experience, brilliant mind and astonishing charisma was not quite enough.

Appliance of science

FORENSIC detective Dr Joseph Bell is typically regarded as the main inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. But lesser-known Sir Henry Littlejohn was almost certainly another.

One case of which the young Conan Doyle would have been acutely aware caused a sensation in Edinburgh in 1878 - the same year he took up his role as clerk to Dr Joseph Bell.

Eugene Chantrelle's wife Elizabeth had been found ill in bed, apparently overcome by escaping gas. Littlejohn attended the scene and his knowledge of poisons quickly came into play.

He suspected that she was actually suffering from opium poisoning. Languages teacher Chantrelle was charged and convicted of her murder.

As Edinburgh's Police Surgeon and Chief Medical Advisor to the Crown in Scotland, Littlejohn was required to attend Chantrelle's execution.

In a curious twist that further entwines Littlejohn, Bell and Conan Doyle, Chantrelle is said to have turned to Littlejohn and muttered: "Give my compliments to Joe Bell. He did a good job in bringing me to the scaffold."
Edinburgh Evening News January 2012

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.

Secrets of the Forth stir memories for war child Joan

10 September 2010

IT must have been exciting for the young table maid as she made her way north from her home in Devon to Scotland, bound for work in the fine Murrayfield mansion of a local well-to-do family.
It was a Saturday in 1926, and 25-year-old Mary Gooding had paid a whole £1 for her one-way, second-class cruise on board the SS Royal Fusilier, a 2.1 tonne steamship berthed in Wapping in preparation for the voyage to Leith.

On board this fine vessel - which was described at the time as a "miniature liner", with her grand fittings and impressive fixtures - was chief engineer Archie "Nobby" Clark.

Ten years older than Mary, he'd already seen the world as a merchant seaman. Now 35, his thoughts had turned to settling down, the London-Leith "commute" less challenging than the Atlantic routes he was used to sailing.

As the Royal Fusilier steamed northwards, somewhere between the Thames and the Forth, the chief engineer and the table maid met.

Their destiny was sealed.

Love may have bloomed on the Royal Fusilier, but there would be no romantic end for this fine vessel. Today she lies embedded in the mud, 46m below the surface of the Forth.

According to those divers determined to endure the chill of the estuary waters, she is tipped on to her port side, brass portholes still shimmering slightly in the murky water, her surface well preserved and home to colonies of marine growth.

A few miles away lies the broken remains of her almost identical "sister" ship, the SS Royal Archer, scattered across the sea bed some 15 miles west of May Island.

Stablemates in the London and Edinburgh Shipping Company, war with Germany transformed them into Merchant Navy workhorses, ferrying cargo between Scotland and England's capital cities, gum and paste for manufacturing, paper and that most crucial wartime commodity, food.

To be on board one when it was sunk by a Nazi attack would be bad enough.

Yet Archie, with his unsuspecting wife Mary and their daughter Joan waiting at home in Leith, ended up fighting for his life on both.

Incredibly the loss of the vessels just months apart did not even merit a mention in newspapers at the time.


Understandably, though, they dominated the childhood memories of Archie's daughter Joan Woodburn, now 79.

Now thanks to another quirk of fate, her vivid recollections of the Fusilier's unique role in bringing her parents together and both vessels' dramatic demise, are helping bring wartime history to life.

Tomorrow she will be a special guest of honour at Trinity House museum in Leith, where maritime history experts will explore the fates of the Forth's many wrecks as part of Scottish Archaeology Month.

Historic Scotland's maritime unit will reveal footage of a sonar survey of the Firth's most famous wreck, HMS Campania - one of Cunard's first great liners which sunk in 1918 - and a Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber.

Movingly for Joan, they'll also unveil recent underwater photography of the Royal Archer.

It will be a poignant event for the pensioner who spent years searching for two striking models of the vessels which she graphically recalled from her childhood, only to finally find them just a few miles away from her Portobello home, at Trinity House.

"I always remembered these huge models of the Fusilier and the Archer from when I was a little girl," says Joan, of Bryce Avenue.

"My mother would go to the shipping company offices in Bernard Street to pick up my father's wages and they were there. They were beautifully made, big with lots of detail and I loved to look at them because they reminded me of my father.

"When the offices closed, I always wondered what had happened to them."

Joan had given up hope of ever setting eyes on them again until last year when she popped into Trinity House for its open day.

"I walked in and, oh my goodness, there was the Archer," she says. "When I walked upstairs I found the Fusilier too.

"I'd been looking for years, and there they were."

Becoming reacquainted with the two vessels after so many years reopened poignant memories of when, as a little girl, she waved her dad off to serve on the Fusilier and the Archer.

The outbreak of war had transformed the glamorous liners into Merchant Navy workhorses, a far cry from the days when they'd cater for passengers in plush surroundings, serving breakfast for three shillings, dinner for four.

As war raged, Joan and her mother often had no idea where Archie might be. Which made his arrival on the doorstep of their home at 206 Leith Walk one bitter February evening in 1940, dishevelled and barely dressed, all the more disturbing.

"Of course there were no telephones, so we didn't know his ship had gone down," recalls Joan. "We heard a taxi outside, which was unusual enough. Then out he walked.

"He was wrapped in a blanket, wearing just long johns and shoes that didn't fit - he'd lost everything when the ship went down
"He'd been in Leith hospital, checked over and just sent home."

Her father had been on board the Archer, loaded with a cargo of gum and paste bound for Leith, when the blast from an underwater mine ripped through her bow.

The explosion destroyed three of her lifeboats and engulfed the wireless room in steam from burst pipes.

The captain frantically ordered three remaining lifeboats to be launched only for one to capsize, throwing the ship's quartermaster overboard.

Unable to swim, he drifted towards the damaged bow of the vessel, supported by his lifejacket.

In chaos, the remaining 28 crew, including Archie, struggled to launch the remaining lifeboats, pausing to rescue two stricken colleagues on the way.

The Royal Archer's demise was rapid - just 30 minutes after the explosion had occurred, she was gone. There was little time for recuperation for her crew either. Joan recalls her father being sent back to sea almost immediately.

This time he returned to the vessel which held such fond memories - the Royal Fusilier.

She was ferrying a cargo of rice and paper from London to Leith in June 1941 - an easy target for the German aircraft hunting for their prey along the east coast.

She was seven miles east of Amble in Northumberland when she was bombed.

As she began to list, the crew of 15 piled into lifeboats only to be told to return to the vessel while it was towed north by one of two destroyers in the area.

Seven miles north east of the Bass Rock, she could go no further and capsized.

Hugh Morrison, Collections Registrar for Historic Scotland, who runs the museum, says Joan's links with the two vessels has been invaluable in helping bring history to life.

"It is fantastic to have someone like Joan present who can bring the personal story to life of those who lived and served on some of Leith's most famous vessels," he says.

"We are delighted that she will be here this weekend to share her story with visitors."

The Trinity House, Secrets of the Forth, Archaeology Day takes place on Saturday. Entry is free.