Tag Archives: Neilson Family

Their Working Lives: Part 1

When I was finally able to access the 1921 census for Scotland for the first time last year, I was excited to see how much more information was given about the place of employment of each family member – not simply a job description, as had been the case before. Oh, if only such detailed notes had been included in previous decades! A quick phone call to my mother resulted in her filling in the gaps: as I reeled off the list of employers for whom my family had worked, she was unexpectedly reminded of the jobs her parents and their siblings had once had, and the stories they’d told her about their workplaces.

Not only was I able to ascertain that in 1921 my grandfather, Alexander McKay, was still working as a newly-qualified electrician for the firm in which he undertook his apprenticeship (Anderson and Munro), but my grandmother, at 15, was a year into her own apprenticeship as a dressmaker with John Allan Silk Mercers and Drapers on the South Bridge of Edinburgh’s old town, where she worked helping to create bespoke outfits for the wealthier women of Edinburgh. It was here the teenage Catherine Neilson learnt to do many of the intricate tasks (such as button covers and fastening loops in the pre zipper age) which stood her in good stead when it came to making her own clothes and those of my mother as a girl. This was a skill my mother picked up from my grandmother as a teenager herself, passing on some of what she’d learnt to me a couple of decades years later. Regrettably I never had the patience to take it further, growing up as I did in the new era of fast fashion and the burgeoning trend of visiting charity and vintage shops to search for retro outfits.

Catherine (right) and Christine Neilson in homemade dresses

My grandmother’s older sister Bessie was also working as an apprentice dressmaker for the St Cuthbert Co-operative Society. It was perhaps a less salubrious address, but it appeared that she’d had just as rigorous a training: it was Bessie who’d made my grandmother’s intricate silk wedding dress from one that was being made for a wealthy client at John Allan’s. The story goes that my grandmother simply described the dress her department was creating, while Bessie sketched out the details, later going on to create her own design and pattern based on what she and my grandmother had put together. I often wonder why they did not simply ‘borrow’ the pattern from my grandmother’s place of work, but no doubt there were strict rules governing such bespoke designs, and if discovered any such behaviour would have probably resulted in instant dismissal, a shameful occurrence in those more deferential days.

My Grandmother in her wedding dress, 1931 (sister Chrissie is bridesmaid)

N.B. Although it was Bessie who made the wedding dress, tradition dictated that the oldest unmarried sister had to be the bridesmaid. Bessie had married young so it was Chrissie who had the honour, while my grandfather’s best man was his younger brother John, who was a theology student at Glasgow University at the time.

At the same time as Bessie and my grandmother were learning dressmaking skills, their older sisters – Chrissie and Jean – were folding envelopes for George Waterston and Sons, Stationers, in the printing works at Logie Green Road in east-end Warriston. This was a job that was soon to be replaced by machines as the end of the twenties saw such companies struggling to stay competitive during the era of the Great Depression. In a similar vein, their older brother Adam, a young veteran of the Great War, was working as a Letterpress printer at McDougall Educational Company, based at Allander House on Leith Walk, Edinburgh, part of the once-extensive traditional printing and publishing industry in Edinburgh.

The head of the family, my great-grandfather Robert Neilson, then aged 48, was still continuing in his trade as a brass finisher, now described as a ‘Brass Turner and Fitter’ for R. Laidlaw and Sons, Brassfounders, at nearby Simon Square. Advertisements from the period show that they made a range of goods from gas meters to piping and there is an old photograph which is said to be of my great-grandfather at work in the company (although it is impossible to work out which man he is, given that they are all sporting thick moustaches while they work at their respective benches). My mother thinks he is the man at the front but is now not sure whether she just assumed this at the time and now believes it to be true. I do think he has a look of my great-grandfather, though.

R. Laidlaw and Sons, Edinburgh, early 20th century

Another photograph of my great-grandfather at work (thought to be second from left in the middle row) – but in what looks like a different company – is one in which the workers are sitting in a group in the style of a school photograph with a slate chalked up with the company name. Images such as these were relatively common at the time as, just as with school photos, the photographer could hope to sell several copies to each of the employees. The photographs would have been taken outdoors due to the issues of lighting, and is another reason why the indoor image (above) is so difficult to make out. Yet it somehow tells us a more interesting story about the type of work which was undertaken than the more formal seated picture does and has a rarity because of this.

Robert Neilson at work, Edinburgh, 1905

N.B. It is, however, curious to note that, unlike Glasgow, Edinburgh University did not have it’s own press until the 1940s. So this photograph presents something of a conundrum.

A description of Laidlaw and Sons in 1888 reads with characteristic high Victorian hyperbole as follows: The firm have executed contracts for complete gas and waterworks, piers, bridges, &c., in all parts of the world, and have invariably afforded unlimited satisfaction by the results they have achieved. Messrs. Laidlaw, at their Edinburgh works, manufacture wet and dry gas meters of the most improved construction, also station meters up to the largest dimensions made, governors, pressure indicators, photometers, and gauges of all kinds ; water meters, light, medium, or heavy gas and water fittings, and brasswork of every description, inclusive of gasaliers, brackets, pendants, pillars, hall and lobby lamps, paraffin lamps, and complete fittings for the lighting of railway carriages by gas, &c., &c. In each of these highly important lines a uniformly high standard of excellence is scrupulously maintained, and nothing leaves the works of this house that is not fully competent to uphold its well-known reputation. The trade of Messrs. R. Laidlaw & Son has a wide range, having its connections among gas and water companies and municipal corporations, as well as the general trades in all quarters of the globe. The administration of this house has from the very first been characterised by a more than ordinary degree of vigorous and progressive enterprise, and this commendable managerial policy is consistently pursued by the present partners.

However much of a slog it is to get through that description, it reminds us of a time when British manufacturing was riding high and when Edinburgh was a city that supported a wide range of industries. A book entitled Industrial Edinburgh, published by a local association to promote trades in the capital in the census year of 1921, is rather optimistic when it states: Little wonder that with all its great attractions and advantages Edinburgh has become an important industrial centre, which, although not yet of first magnitude, is of considerable importance, and in the not far distant future will develop into one of the most important in the United Kingdom. A list of the burgeoning industries from a century ago reads like a roll call of some of the most environmentally unsustainable practices, including developing new coalfields, and expanding the production of fertilisers and industrial chemicals.

I have not been able to discover how long Laidlaw and Sons survived the technological changes of the 20th century, but their focus on supplying meters &C. for the gas industry does beg the question: what did the company do when electricity began to take over as the dominant source of energy? It must have been strange for my great-grandfather to have his new son-in-law electrify the family’s Edinburgh tenement flat in the early 1930s – perhaps a similar situation today would be a younger relative setting up the internet or a smart gadget in an elderly person’s household.

My grandfather (far left) working on electrifying tenements c1940

And so it seems that the pattern of our working is constantly in flux. New technologies replace old, and skills become outdated, often leading to mature workers being superannuated. Younger managers come along, keen to reinvent the wheel with their new management jargon, while experienced employees may struggle to stay relevant, despite having amassed a lifetime of skills that cannot easily be replicated through reading books and manuals or attending courses.

My mother was once an excellent touch typist with a fast speed and an ability to take down notes in shorthand equally quickly. She has a number of certificates to prove it, and growing up I was always finding bizarre notes in the house written in a strange set of characters. There were shopping lists, phone messages, even the John Craven’s Newsround headlines were jotted down in this impenetrable code when it was my turn to start the school morning by telling the rest of class the main news events from the previous evening.

My mother at work in The Ministry of Aviation, Edinburgh c1959

I do remember that when dictaphones and word processors came along in the eighties, most of my mother’s secretarial skills eventually became redundant. How superior I felt at times when explaining to her that she did not have to double-space between sentences or indent every paragraph when typing on a computer. Yet I am now at that same ‘dangerous age’ and often struggling to see the usefulness of integrating new technology into my teaching when I have been able to teach effectively for years without it. And just as my mother had to witness that mysterious language she learned become obsolete, the advent of mass produced clothing meant experienced dressmakers like my grandmother and her sister had few outlets for their skills beyond the domestic sphere.

Printers and Brass Finishers, Dressmakers and Envelope Folders they are all gone under the hill as T.S. Eliot ominously said in East Coker (along with the The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, Industrial lords and petty contractors) . As we will too, with our petty work squabbles and Zoom meetings and PowerPoint presentations. It is a salutary reminder that we’re all just bit players in the theatre of work who have only a short time to tread the boards before a disembodied voice shouts from the wings: Exit! Stage Left! Now!

Yet perhaps we could view this as a wake-up call, reminding us that we are so much more than just the sum of our paid employment. The legacy that most of us leave behind is rarely one associated with our roles at work.

The Incidental Genealogist, February 2023

The Queen’s/King’s Park: Part 1

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When I was growing up, our small market town possessed one old-fashioned department store which dated from the final years of Queen Victoria. The shop had always been known as Hourstons but at some time in the seventies it changed its name to Arnotts. However, everyone of a certain age continued to call it Hourstons. Many years later it reverted back to its original name, a change which confused a new generation of shoppers who’d grown up only knowing the store as Arnotts. This was confounded by the fact that some of the original Hourston-callers (who might have been able to quickly adapt to the new/old name) had eventually ceased to have such worldly cares as shopping. By then, calling the shop Arnotts marked someone out as being of a certain age, rather than the reverse.

And so it was for the British population last month, as we moved seamlessly from a queen to a king, while wondering about the names and faces and pronouns that would have to change on our money, stamps and passports, amongst other things. My mother remembered that same change seventy years ago when she was fourteen and in her final year at school. It was an era when most people under fifty had only known a series of kings, although the older generation still had fond memories of ‘the Old Queen’. Even by the time I was old enough to become aware of the whole business of monarchy, there were still plenty of elderly people around who had lived through the last years of Victoria’s reign, albeit mostly as children. Much like the presence of First World war veterans pottering on their allotments while silently carrying their war stories, this did not seem out of the ordinary.

Yet, only last month, as I was discussing my Scottish family’s connection to Holyrood Park, my mother confused me by calling it The King’s Park (the park’s other name when she was growing up). It was only later when I questioned her about the anomaly, as I was sure it was actually The Queen’s Park, that I discovered that the name changed along with the monarch. Thus, for my great-grandmother (b1874) it was possibly always The Queen’s Park (after Victoria); and, in a parallel with today, I can imagine how the name might have lived on while everyone had to adjust to the idea of an elderly king with very few people having any memory of the last time a male monarch was on the throne

I wonder how long it will take for the new name to slip easily of the tongue now? However, just like the previous time Holyrood Park took on the alternative appellation, it will possibly remain as The King’s Park long enough for everyone to eventually become used to the title, even if the idea of calling the park after a monarch does seem an outdated one. For those of us born in a less deferential age, Holyrood Park has always been the more commonly used term, in any case.

Arthur’s Seat, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh

This summer, I spent a happy afternoon in Holyrood Park (I cannot call it anything else), climbing Arthur Seat and exploring the ruins of the late medieval St. Anthony’s Chapel, built close to an underground spring. The royal park was once the hunting ground of monarchs and would have been a welcome view to those living in the crowded tenements which abutted the space, as well as a source of fresh air and a recreational space for the residents. These cheek-by-jowl tenements had sprung up in the 19th century to house the workers of the many surrounding factories and breweries, including my grandmother’s family. The Neilsons rented a top storey tenement with their own indoor toilet and a small functional balcony which overlooked the park (see A Tenement with a View), so lived in relative comfort, despite their lack of indoor space.

Catherine Neilson, Dumbiedykes Balcony, Edinburgh, c 1910

This photograph of my great-grandmother on the balcony of the Neilson’s tenement in the Dumbiedykes is one that I only came across recently, hidden at the back of the cupboard in an album belonging to my great-uncle Adam which had somehow become separated from the rest of the photograph boxes (see Messy Boxes). Too late to be included in my original post about the tenement balcony, it has found the ideal niche in this month’s story. And while it might not be of the same quality as the later photographs taken on the balcony (between 1930 and 1945), this informal image of a much younger great-grandmother is a rare find. It was probably taken when she was in her mid-thirties and had finally become used to a king on the throne, after having known only a queen for almost the first three decades of her life.

Adam and Margaret Neilson, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh, c1925

Another spontaneous photograph I treasure is of a great-great uncle and aunt in Holyrood Park in the days when people still dressed up to walk and picnic there on a Sunday. It’s one of the only pictures we possess of my great-grandfather’s older brother, Adam, and his wife Margaret. Adam Neilson was a blacksmith by trade – like his namesake father – and had grown up locally with his brother Robert (my great grandfather) and their five other siblings. Their parents had come to the city from the Borders region after their marriage, and like many new immigrants from the countryside had settled in the Dumbiedykes, near to the industrial centre. Adjoining steps near the bottom of the ladder of the seven Neilson children, the brothers appear to have remained close all their lives and no doubt would have sometimes met up on Sunday outings to the park in fine weather.

On the way to Arthur’s Seat, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh

As I walked up Arthur’s Seat on that dull August day this summer, welcome glimpses of sunlight lighting up the gorse bushes which scattered the hillside, I was aware that my Edinburgh ancestors had been ‘taking the air’ in Holyrood Park for the last 150 years and I was simply following this tradition. A piece of ‘wildness’ in the city that has changed little over the centuries, the park is described on its website as such: Holyrood Park is a rare example of unimproved grassland. Effectively unchanged since its enclosure as a Royal Park in the 16th century, it is rich in plant species and also provides a home to a variety of important invertebrate, amphibian, mammal and bird species. To find such a wildlife haven in the heart of a capital city is remarkable.

It is perhaps no coincidence that my grandmother’s family all lived well into their eighties and nineties. In comparison to my London ancestors (many of whom died young of bronchitis or tuberculosis) they seemed to be less afflicted by respiratory diseases. While ‘good genes’ are obviously important in determining longevity, proximity to such a large area of ‘wilderness’ must have played a role in keeping the Neilsons disease-free, as well as helping to promote a healthy lifestyle.

When my great-grandmother died in 1968 at the age of 94, the family were told that she had just reached the end of her natural life. Like the late Queen, her cause of death was put down to ‘old age’. And she had also simply wound down after a lifetime of being busy.

To be continued in Part 2 next month.

The Incidental Genealogist, October 2022

The Children in the Street

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It’s been particularly hot where I live in Switzerland this summer, and so early mornings and evenings are often the best times to be out and about. But as a self-confessed ‘owl’ (with another of my species as a house guest) it has sometimes been difficult to achieve much before sundown. Thus it was a treat to be able to enjoy a quirky British film at our local open air cinema last month, taking advantage of the cool evening breeze from the lake. Set in a gloomy, early 1960s Newcastle, The Duke was a rather incongruous choice for our location, yet despite that – or perhaps because of that – the mainly Swiss audience seemed to love the film, even if the subtitles did not convey all the nuances of the dialogue.

Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren played a suitably dowdy middle-aged, working class couple from that time; and although the period details seemed to be spot on, I couldn’t help but feel that the street scenes seemed rather contrived. Were there really that many children playing that many different games outside the terraces of Newcastle in 1961? Sometimes it was difficult to know where one game ended and the other began. Later, when my mother and I compared notes, we agreed that it had almost felt like watching one of Michael Palin’s Ripping Yarns, a 1970s comedy TV series set earlier in the 20th century, where British customs of all classes were parodied.

My mother did, however, recall that it had been common for her to play with friends in the streets in the 1940s, despite my grandmother’s lamentations that many more children were to be seen outdoors in her day. And while my own childhood had also been as relatively unstructured and technology-free as that of the previous generation, one of the main differences in the intervening decades was the increasing number of cars on the road. Yet because I grew up on the outskirts of a village and my mother in a city suburb, then it was difficult to really compare our experiences. Nevertheless, both of us came to the conclusion that the philosophy of our childhoods was mainly the same: to be able to explore our environment freely in the company of other children. Of course it was that same spirit which brought my grandmother and her siblings out of their crowded Edinburgh tenement and onto the car-free streets of the Dumbiedykes and beyond to the grassy freedom of Holyrood Park, which abutted the neighbourhood.

Mary Neilson (top left) with friends, Holyrood Park c1924

In the above image, my grandmother’s youngest sister Mary (b1917) was snapped playing with local childhood friends on the slopes of Arthur’s Seat, the extinct volcano which dominated the view from the balcony of the family’s tenement flat (see A Tenement with a View). Only a few years later, Mary would be taking the children of her older siblings across to the same park on sunny days.

Mary and Anne Neilson, with nephew Jimmy, c1930

In this photograph of my two great-aunts as teenagers dressed up for a day out in Holyrood Park with their fashionable thin wrist watches and lisle stockings, they are flanking their much-loved nephew, a child the whole family adored due to his sunny disposition. There is rarely a picture of Jimmy without a grin or laugh on his face. In contrast, his two young aunts never seemed to smile for the camera as children and were always captured with slightly wary expressions. When Mary and Anne posed with a neighbourhood child for a street photographer ten years earlier, they certainly did not look as if they were particularly enjoying the occasion.

Anne and Mary Neilson with a neighbour, Dumbiedykes c1920

I have always wondered who took that photograph of my great aunts. Was it the same person who also managed to assemble the large group of Dumbiedykes’ children out playing in the street (shown below)? The standard of the photographs would indicate it was a professional photographer who took pictures of local children whose parents would possibly then buy the copies. There were certainly other such photographs of groups of children in the city taken during the same timeframe, which I came across on a historical Edinburgh photography website. However, as one contributor who posted a similar street scene of Edinburgh children from the early 1920s pointed out here: I can’t imagine why this photo would have been taken. The frame is completely plain with no photographer identified. Who would bother? I doubt it would have been for payment that would have to be collected from numerous parents. Could it be a Sunday School photograph?

Dumbiedykes Children, c1920

The more I look at the details in our own family photograph above, the more I think that the Sunday school theory could be the best one. The children seem too smartly dressed just to have been playing in the street. In the back row, my Great Uncle Bob is wearing one of the narrow woollen striped ties of the period and in the front row my Great Aunt Anne (5th from right) is wearing gloves and a fashionable coat. I also know that the Neilson children were regular attenders at their local Sunday school at St. John’s Street Church on Holyrood Road, but that they were also members of the Band of Hope, a temperance organisation for children, based on Christian principles. However, given the small size of the group, I believe it more likely to be a Sunday school class, taken outdoors due to the technical limitations of the equipment at the time. Yet the domestic background and lack of adults remains a problem. Perhaps it really was just a street photograph and the parents had been forewarned, making sure the children were turned out neat and clean for the occasion. But whatever the reason for its creation, it’s certainly one of my favourite photographs in my Scottish family album.

The Incidental Genealogist, August 2022

The Portrait in the Shed

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Last month I returned to Scotland again for a short visit. And in a brief sunny two-day window bookended by cold and wet weather, my mother and I headed over to the west coast to visit my younger sister. Since we’d last seen each other, she’d moved into an old quarryman’s cottage in a tiny Ayrshire village. Set on the banks of the river Ayr with a nature reserve at her back door and a welcoming neighbouring pub with great food it was the perfect location for a weekend away, bringing back memories of our Ayrshire childhood in the seventies.

My sister’s terraced cottage was decorated in her eclectic style with objects old and new. In the entrance porch I was surprised but pleased to see the twin brass eagles that had graced my grandparent’s mantlepiece for all the years I’d know them. They were made by Robert Neilson, my grandmother’s father, who was a brass finisher by trade. As a child they’d always fascinated me – as they obviously did my sister – and they were just as exquisite as I’d remembered, with the strange detail that had intrigued me at the time: the birds’ flat-topped heads and outsized feet; their arched wings and the indentations of their feathers. I automatically reached out to touch them, as I’d always done, and felt that same unexpected coldness and roughness.

One of a pair of brass eagles my great-grandfather made

In the small room at the front of the house was an even greater surprise: the lost portrait of our Great Uncle Adam that I remember so well from the day we triumphantly unearthed it from my grandfather’s garden shed. That warm afternoon we’d set ourselves the task of emptying the shed of all its accumulated junk in order to make some play room for ourselves. I still can recall the musty damp smell of the tiny wooden building and the wonder as the area outside the shed filled up with all the tools and boxes that had been stored there (looking like it had doubled in amount once freed from its confines). Soon we could see a wooden floor and knew that we were on target to achieve our goal. Except we hadn’t quite worked out how everything would go back in.

With my grandparents in summer 1964 – the shed is behind us

We were lucky that day that my grandparent’s were fairly sanguine about the enterprise, using it as the spur they needed to get rid of some of the unwanted items they’d forgotten about over the years. But I’m not sure what they thought when we came proudly back into the house carrying a large and unwieldy framed photographic portrait of a young smiling man in military uniform. Oh, it’s Uncle Adam they exclaimed. When he was in the war. By that they meant the 1st World War, in which Adam Neilson had enlisted in the Signallers in 1914 at the age of 16 by saying he was older than he actually was. His parents had been furious and tried to get him out of the contract, with Great Grandma seemingly upset about the fact she’d just bought him an expensive new winter wool coat. Yet he had survived the conflict – like my London grandfather he felt it better to choose his regiment rather than be conscripted later – and gone on to become a much-loved uncle and now our oldest great-uncle.

Adam Neilson, c1915

Uncle Adam was very much alive when we found his dusty portrait (he died in 1982), but according to my mother he did not actually want the photograph after my great-grandmother’s death in 1968. Perhaps it was because he preferred not to be reminded of that time: my mother said that he never spoke about the war to anyone in his family. Seemingly my great-grandmother brought Adam’s picture with her (along with the rest of the boxes of photographs) from her Dumbiedykes tenement when she moved in with my grandparents shortly after being widowed in 1949. It hung on the wall in her bedroom in their Carrick Knowe house, but once she died it had seemed rather dark and old-fashioned with its thick wooden frame and so had been put into the shed and forgotten about.

I found it strange that Adam was the only child whose image had been turned into the equivalent of an oil-painted portrait, yet it was perhaps natural as he was the only child who saw active combat in the Great War, and left home while still a bairn (to his mother) and not by the usual route of a twenty-something marriage. And Adam had been (so the family story goes) her favourite son, although this was said more in the spirit of light-hearted teasing. After all, he was the first-born child and a beautiful looking, good-natured boy who looked very much like his father. In fact, as Adam aged he appeared to grow more and more to resemble my great-grandfather, Robert Neilson, and it is easy to confuse them in photographs.

Adam Neilson c1900

There had also been an Adam Neilson in the family for several generations and Great Uncle Adam shared a name with his father’s older brother, who had been named after his father (who also shared a name with his uncle, who had been named after his father). And so we can trace a line from the original Ur-Adam Neilson, a farm labourer from Athelstaneford in East Lothian, born in the 1770s, to the last Adam Neilson, born over two hundred years later.

Although the next generation was to feature a great number of Roberts, Catherines and Davids (David being the name of the Ur-Adam’s son – the line of Neilsons from which my grandmother had descended) there were to be no more Adam Neilsons after this one. Not only were less descendants being born (four of the nine Neilson children only had one child, including my grandmother and Great Uncle Adam), but the old-fashioned Scottish family naming traditions were dying out. My grandmother had expected me to be called Catherine (and was none too pleased when I wasn’t), even though that would have led to the inevitable confusion caused by four generations of living Catherines. Yet it is many of these ‘modern’ names (my own included) which now sound outdated in comparison to timeless classical names, and can be more of a give-away as to someone’s age.

Three Generations of Catherines – and a Carolyn – and that shed!

For Scottish family historians, the following naming patterns (taken from Scotland’s People) can be helpful when tracing a tree farther back. However, it is true to say that many families might have bucked this trend for various reasons:

1st son named after father’s father
2nd son named after mother’s father
3rd son named after father
1st daughter named after mother’s mother
2nd daughter named after father’s mother
3rd daughter named after mother

Adam’s namesake – his paternal uncle, Adam Neilson c1910

And now – and this is where my memory confuses me as to exactly what happened – there was a plan to hang up Adam’s photograph on the wall of my grandparents’ living room/dining room so that he would see it when he next came to visit with Aunt Lily. As usual there would be high tea with sandwiches and cakes on doily-covered cake stands with the best linen and the wedding china. Grandad would be jovial and crack his silly jokes. My grandmother would bustle around anxiously. My mother would become younger than we knew her. And we would shyly wait to be fussed over.

That Sunday afternoon, Uncle Adam was wearing a burgundy pullover and his white hair wisped around his shining pate. His round ruddy cheeks and dark lively eyes gave him away as a Neilson. What was it like for Grandma to look into the face of her father every time they did ‘the visiting’? Or for my mother to see her long-dead grandfather in her uncle? It must have been 1974 as Seasons on the Sun was played constantly on the radio, blaring out of houses and cars and back gardens. It was a song that managed to be both heart-breaking and schmaltzy, and defined that year in the way that popular tunes once did. It might have been Easter as I seem to remember there were gifts of chocolate eggs – too many as I later discovered when I was ill in the night. Or was that another time?

Adam with his mother, Christmas in Edinburgh, c1958

In any case, all I can now recall was that everyone in the family was good-natured about the appearance of the photograph in the place where there had been some seventies pin-art my mother had made for her parents. Then it stayed up on the wall beside the entrance to the kitchenette (the kitschy pin art had had its day) until my grandmother moved into her smaller sheltered home seven years after Uncle Adam died. It never went with her, but instead followed my sister from house to house. And now it was here in this Ayrshire quarryman’s cottage, where it seemed most at home.

It was only when I looked at it closely that I realised it looked more like a painting than a photograph, even though it had clearly been taken with a camera. Some investigating led me to the discovery that enlargements of small studio portraits were often enhanced using artists colours, such as oils or watercolours to make up for the loss of detail that occurred during the process . So that would explained why Adam’s features looked so soft and otherwordly, and why the sepia background seemed to be composed of delicate brushstrokes.

A search through the boxes of albums back in Edinburgh did not come up with the original portrait of Uncle Adam or indeed any other image of him in uniform. However, there was one photograph of Adam from this period that I came across which I found even more haunting than the dreamlike portrait. It showed a group of men – some in uniform, others without – at the end of the war. It would appear to have been taken at the time they were being demobbed, and was obviously in order to commemorate their wartime cameraderie.

Adam Neilson (back right) with soldier friends 1918/9

This the photograph that I would have liked to have shown to my Great Uncle Adam that Sunday afternoon in 1974. It might have been the way to gently generate some memories of his time on the Western Front, if the topic had been handled sensitively enough. Sadly we never got the chance. Yet even without any living voices to tell their tales, the faces of the young soldiers who survived the conflict are replete with their own stories.

The Incidental Genealogist, May 2022

Walking Pictures

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While I was undertaking February’s onerous task of organising the large and jumbled collection of Scottish family photographs, I came across a number of so-called ‘walking pictures’. So delighted was I with these spontaneous-looking images – like unexpected peeks into unguarded moments in my relatives’ lives – that I almost thought about giving them a separate category. In the end, I reluctantly filed them in their individual family folders, but not before deciding they should at least have their own chapter in my Scottish family story.

Most of us with collections of personal photographs from the last century will recognise the walking picture and may even been ‘victim’ of one. These opportunistic snaps were mainly taken in the 1920s through to the 1950s, before camera ownership was widespread. The business idea was simple: commercial photographers set themselves up on busy main streets or seaside resorts, catching pedestrians as they walked and talked and gazed around them. The walkers were often unaware of the camera pointing in their direction – at least until the moment when their wry smiles or looks of quizzical surprise were captured on film.

Walking pictures are a strange anomaly among all the other photographs in my album: they appear more like family snapshots in their informality, although those they portray had little control over them. To me, they almost feel like an invasion of privacy and it is surprising to think this practice was relatively common up until the 1960s. I even remember being caught (so it felt like) by a photographer talking such pictures in my Scottish seaside town in the 1980s. To suddenly have someone jump out of the crowd and point a camera at me was a new and uncomfortable feeling.

Needless to say, my then boyfriend and myself gave the photographer short shrift when he tried to sell us a copy of the image. Perhaps we would have felt differently had we not been penniless new graduates at a time of high unemployment in Scotland, worried about our futures, and discussing how we could raise the funds to get down to London to look for work. (See The Incidental Genealogist is Born for more about this period in my life, which was the eventual catalyst for my unplanned entry into the world of ‘heir hunting’ in the capital).

For this reason, I did not expect to see quite so many of these walking pictures in the family collection (although possibly many more were never bought). Perhaps in those days people were more grateful to have the chance to be photographed spontaneously! One set from the late 1920s was reminiscent of the stills from the newly popular ‘moving pictures’ and showed my grandmother with her younger sister, Ann, walking along Princes Street.

Catherine and Ann Neilson, Princes St. Edinburgh, late 1920s

What is perhaps most fascinating about the pictures than my relatives – after all, I am lucky to have many images of them throughout the decades – is the small details to be viewed on Edinburgh’s main thoroughfare. The men with their hats and canes; the woman with their dainty clutch bags and leather gloves: the cars and trams, which are almost hooting and tootling their way out of the photograph. Even the dandy strolling along purposefully beside the road, with his hand in his pocket and fashionably shorter trousers, looks like a film extra. Did the Neilson sisters bother to give him a glance a few seconds earlier, or were these swaggering types so common during the period that they did not merit special attention?

It is also interesting to note the way the Neilson sisters are being ‘photo-bombed’ by the harried-looking woman who seems to be attempting to overtake them on their left. Perhaps their walking speed had automatically slowed down as they realised they were about to be snapped, warily eying the camera. Whether or not they felt they had no choice about the way they had been preserved for posterity on what was possibly a regular Saturday morning shopping jaunt (shops closed at lunchtime in those days), I’m certainly glad they ordered copies of the set.

On the reverse of the strip was the generic name ‘walking pictures’, although no business address is given. I later discovered that the normal protocol was for the photographer to present them with a receipt for their images immediately after he took their picture, which they could then view and order at a nearby booth a few hours later.

Catherine Neilson with daughters Catherine and Mary, Edinburgh, early 1930s

The picture above from early in the following decade shows my grandmother with her mother and youngest sister, Mary, crossing the busy North Bridge from their home in the Dumbiedykes. (The Scotsman building appears to be behind them, indicating they were walking towards Princes Street). Although my grandmother was already married by then, she would be childless for a further seven years and so often spent any free time with her own family. Not only did my grandfather have to work on Saturday mornings at that point, but he did not allow my grandmother to have a career herself (despite her wanting to continue working as a fully-apprenticed dressmaker), too concerned by what that might (erroneously) indicate about their financial situation. Sadly this meant my grandmother turned her energies to housework instead, eventually becoming almost neurotic about the task. Perhaps that is why my own mother is happier living in organised chaos!

In that picture, it is my grandmother’s open smile and the brown paper parcel tied up with string Mary is holding (almost nudging the arm of the older gent in front) which particularly interest me. That carefully knotted package now seems like a throwback to another time, as do the fox fur stoles draped around the necks of my great-grandmother and great-aunt. I hadn’t noticed before how Mary’s fur actually has eyes and a nose, and it seems strange to think of this young working-class girl sporting such a glamorous accessory. However, my mother tells me it that it was relatively common to wear fur stoles in those days – perhaps it had even been a shared item or had been passed onto her from another family member. When I was about eighteen I recall ‘inheriting’ (or commandeering) my grandmother’s old fur coat, it being fashionable then for students to wear such an item. The argument was that vintage fur was better than buying new fur, and by giving these items a new lease of life there was respect for the creatures who’d died. But I always drew the line at something with a face.

In Grandma’s Fur Coat c1982

I wish I’d asked my great-aunt Mary how she came to be in possession of a dead animal around her neck at such a young age. However, while I might not know that particular family story, I do remember hearing from an early age The Tale of Grandma’s Hat. My grandmother (like most woman of that generation) wore a great deal of fashionable hats in her life, in particular the cloche hats of the 1920s and early 30s. Her round face suited that style, too, and she possibly knew it. In any case, the story goes that she spent a large proportion of her first week’s wages as a dressmaker on a hat she’d coveted. But while crossing Edinburgh’s notoriously windy and exposed North Bridge, the new hat blew off her head and landed onto the glass panes of Waverley Railway Station’s Victorian roof below. When my grandmother was finally able to retrieve her hat from the lost property office, it had been completely ruined by the elements. I remember when she told us this story, fifty years after the event, she still sounded wistful about the loss of this hat, which had cost the grand sum of four shillings and eleven pence. I also recall being told that her mother was shocked at how much she’d spent on the item. (Possibly her Presbyterian parents regarded this to have been a lesson learned in the twin sins of vanity and over-spending).

My grandparents and great-grandmother, c1945

In the walking picture above, my grandmother – who is now almost forty – has a new style of hat for new straitened times. My mother must have been in the world by then as the fashions indicate that this is the 1940s, as does the Victory Roll hairstyle of the young hatless woman behind my great-grandmother. Perhaps my mother is back at the seaside boarding house on this day, suffering from a summer cold in the unseasonably cool weather.

Neilson and McKay families on holiday, c1946

And then I find her, all dressed up to the nines in her trademark white ankle socks and hair ribbon, with her parents and grandparents and Uncle Adam, Aunt Lily, and older cousin Robert. My grandparents often went on holiday with this combination of relatives (maybe because Adam and Lily also only had the one child) and there are many photographs from that period in our collection, suggesting that someone in the group owned a camera. Did my grandfather still have his Kodak Brownie from his youthful twenties?

Neilson and McKay families, c1946

In the family snap above – which is from the same timeframe as the walking picture – the way the adults are looking so indulgently at the photographer (with whom my mother is complicit in her little-girl smile), tells us it is Adam and Lily’s teenage son, Robert, who is behind the lens. My mother and him were great friends, despite the age difference, and she told me this period in his life was the beginning of his interest in photography. This was not such a common pastime in those days due to the expense involved, so those who took it up at a young age tended to take it quite seriously. In fact, his parents allowed him to set up a dark room in the spare bedroom and in his twenties he became so fascinated by his new hobby that his then girlfriend (who would go on to be his wife) had to issue him an ultimatum. This led to them separating for some time, a period in which my mother remembers being invited round to visit more.

My grandmother with a friend and my mother, Arbroath c1953

Now we move into our final decade of my family collection of walking pictures: the 1950s. Fashions have changed a lot in the intervening three decades and my grandmother is noticeably older, as is my mother, who is fifteen and already showing the good looks that she inherited from the best parts of her parents. On the left of this image, taken in the seaside resort of Arbroath, is a family friend in almost identical hairstyle and outfit as my grandmother. She is obviously younger and looks like she might even be an older daughter: it will take a few years before hairstyles and fashion become delineated along generational lines.

Yet the small clutch bags and sunglasses that all three carry in their hands make them look unfettered and carefree. They could almost be modern women holding close their ubiquitous smart phones: a device which has turned us all into photographers, for better or for worse, but which rarely produces results to match the strange, unglamorous spontaneity of the walking picture.

The Incidental Genealogist, April 2022

February Fill the Dyke

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February certainly lived up to its old appellation of ‘fill-the-dyke’ this year – at least it did in Scotland. It was my first trip home in two years, and while many things in Edinburgh had changed, the late winter weather was just as miserable as I’d remembered, albeit persistently windier. I had never heard the old rhyme February fill the dyke, either black or white before, but my mother told me that it was one of her maternal grandmother’s favourite climate-related sayings, including the rather pessimistic Ne’er cast a clout before May be out. (Etymologists still cannot decide whether the May in question refers to the spring month or the arrival of the hawthorn – or may – blossom several weeks earlier, but there are compelling arguments for both alternatives).

Despite the ambiguity of the aforementioned rhyme, had it been May and not February my mother and I might have actually managed to do some of the things we’d planned (layered up or not): such as exploring the Canongate and Dumbiedykes area of the city where one side of our Scottish family had lived, or heading down the east coast to rural Athelstaneford, from where the Neilsons had originated. But due to the hostile weather we spent a lot of time indoors, sorting out the five messy boxes that contained all the Scottish family photographs amassed over the last 130 plus years. That in itself took up most of the week (and most of the living room), and in fact was a task that I’d still not finished when I was hurriedly packing my suitcase in preparation for my all-too-soon departure.

However, without the dykes being filled (both black and white) I doubt I’d have had the time to even manage to reorganise one of the boxes; so I have February to thank for my achievement. And even though I didn’t manage to digitalise all the photographs, I made at least a stab at sorting out the contents of the boxes into five separate categories. While it had always seemed fun just to prise open the lids and find random photos irreverently juxtaposed inside – my teenage mother playing tennis in flannel shorts in the 1950s next to a cabinet card of straight-backed Victorians – it was not conducive to any easy retrieval of images, something which needed to be rectified for my genealogy project. But therein lay the problem: how should the contents of the boxes be categorised?

In the end, the growing piles of photographs on the living room floor helped to make the decision for me. One small box would be for the paternal side of the family (the McKays), while a much bigger one would house all the Neilsons (sub-divided into the families of the Neilson clan), including my grandparents and mother (even though they were theoretically McKays). Another box would be reserved for all the cards, letters, telegrams and certificates that had become jumbled up with all the photographs over the years. The final two boxes would include some of the most eclectic of the images. One I named ‘The Victorians’ (despite many of the photographs actually being from the early 20^th century); the other ‘The Bright Young Things’, as it contained numerous tiny snaps of my unmarried grandparents and their friends and siblings larking about in various beguiling outfits in the 1920s.

What follows is my attempt to describe these two latter categories and to explain the logic behind them.

The Victorians: Finding the oldest of the photographs was the easiest and most enjoyable task and was akin to being reunited with old friends. These were mainly formal cabinet card photographs taken in photographers’ studios, and were the ones most treasured by our family. Although many were actually Edwardian (or even later), I’d once deemed all these people to be Victorians on account of the aged look of the sepia images and the formality of the sitters’ clothes and demeanour.

Unsurprisingly, in those days I was less interested in family history than seeking out images of other children, whether I knew them then as older relatives or not. I was fascinated by the fussy clothes they wore and their funny hairstyles. Yet it strikes me now it was the women whose fashions were the strangest and most distinct from what we wore in the 1970s (the period when I first set eyes on ‘the Victorians’). I shudder to think of how I would get on even trying to ease myself into one of their restrictive, heavy garments. And when I look at the photograph of the young Catherine Miller Thomson (my great-grandmother) I understand now why my mother and grandmother always commented on the size of her waist whenever we came across this cabinet card, taken to celebrate her eighteenth birthday.

Catherine Neilson (née Thomson), my great-grandmother, 1892

What I also find interesting is the hint of the smile on her lips. Although there is another two years before she will meet her future husband, Robert Neilson, at a summer picnic for brass finishers where one of her younger brothers will soon be apprenticed, I am sure she is aware of her youth and beauty on that day 130 years ago. Her six daughters would all go on to inherit her dark good looks and shapely figure, as well as her longevity. Despite the fact that my great-grandmother did not quite make the century, I was still lucky enough to have known this remarkable woman as ‘great-grandma’ for the first few years of my life.

Robert Neilson, my great grandfather (c1895)

I might have been able to meet my great-grandfather too, had Robert Neilson not slipped on the icy cobblestones that bitterly cold January day in 1948, shortly after retiring later in life (his brass finishing skills perhaps still needed to help the wartime effort). The box that includes all the cards and letters has a bundle of black edged notes to ‘Kate’ (the name by which my great-grandmother was mostly known), commiserating with her on her terrible loss. She’d kept those letters in an old suitcase along with the photographs of ‘the Victorians’ that my grandparents then inherited. I wonder if she ever reread them in the intervening twenty years before her quick demise at age 94 from ‘senile decay’, or whether she just could not bear to dispose of them. Perhaps she’d held onto them because – as many of the friends and relatives had written about my grandfather’s fall and subsequent blow to the head – The shocking death of Bob was so very unexpected.

The Burgeoning Neilson Family c1903

The above photograph always seemed rather strange to me – not just because no-one seems to be particularly enjoying the experience of being in the studio – including my good-natured great-uncle Adam (always jokingly said to be great-grandma’s favourite child), but because everyone in the family seems to be looking in different directions with only Adam and the baby actually gazing into the camera itself. I don’t know what the photographer thought he was doing when he set up this scene, but perhaps the presence of three young children put him off his stride. Adam certainly looks wary!

This reminded me of the time when I was photographed at our local playgroup by a man from the local newspaper who hid behind what seemed like a black cape affixed to a camera on a bulky tripod (in my mind it looks like one of those Victorian travelling seaside contraptions which I know it can’t be). He told us all ominously to watch the birdie, while a flash went off (in a puff of smoke?), confusing us even more. I’ve never forgotten my disappointment at not seeing a bird come out of the outsize camera, thinking it was part of a magician’s box of tricks. For the Victorian/Edwardian family, photography may have still felt like an act of magic and thus Adam’s quizzical look is perhaps understandable.

The Bright Young Things: For some reason I could not recall ever coming across quite so many snapshots (the era of home camera ownership had finally arrived!) of my grandparents from the 1920s before. Perhaps that was because all these images were small and individual faces were difficult to appreciate without the aid of a magnifying glass. In fact, if it wasn’t for my mother I might not have recognised my grandparents in many of the group photographs as their lively poses and swinging-twenties outfits seemed to go against everything they had stood for in my mind (relatively staid respectability).

It was only after carefully observing my doll-sized grandfather in one large group photograph that I saw he was clutching what looked like a folding Kodak Brownie. This led me to believe that he might have been the one who’d taken some of these photographs, perhaps passing his camera to a friend to use when he wanted to be included in the group. I also wondered if the reason I could not remember these snaps was that they had been stored separately from those we’d inherited from my great grandmother, and had only been added to the family collection after my grandparents’ death. But perhaps they just hadn’t interested me so much in those days, being eclipsed by the excitement of ‘the Victorians’.

My grandfather plus camera, front right, early 1920s

With the aid of a magnifying glass, these tiny photographs became a window onto a lost world of holidays doon the watter in Largs and Rothesay: mucking around with other twenty-somethings in a variety of get-ups, some of which seemed to involve fancy dress in a nod to Cecil Beaton’s original photograph’s of the so-called Bright Young Things. Unfortunately all the snaps were undated, leaving me to guess at which ones overlapped with my grandparents seven-year courtship (from 1924 to 1931), and which ones pre-dated that. As my grandfather was five years older than my grandmother (he was born in 1901 to her 1906), there are possibly even earlier girlfriends of his to be seen. But if there were any, we do not know of them.

I like to think of these photographs as the century-old equivalent of the ‘instagramable selfies’ of today’s youth, yet I am fascinated by the fact that in nearly every image everyone is hugging and hanging on to each other in a way that suggests they were relaxed and entirely at ease together. I often wonder if these relationships were especially intense due to the losses sustained during the First World War and the pandemic which followed, giving rise to a generation that wanted to enjoy life in the here-and-now. I’d always rather naively assumed it was the more moneyed classes who threw themselves into the spirit of the roaring twenties, but Grandad’s photographs seemed to prove that you did not have to be wealthy to partake of the excitement of the modern jazz age.

My grandfather (2nd from left) with friends c1925 in Rothesay

It would also appear that you could even have all this fun without the twin horrors of drink or drugs. My grandfather came from a rather religious, non-drinking family (his younger brother became a minister, and a sister married one), and there was a certain innocence about all his galavanting around, with many photographs (such as the one where he is holding the camera) taken at what appeared to be gatherings organised by the church or various clubs. But to the generation that went before, these young people of the modern age with their free-flowing, less formal clothes, short hair (the women) and shaved faces (the men) must have sometimes seemed as alien as the ‘flower children’ who were to follow them four decades later.

My grandmother (on left) with sister and friends on holiday c1925

Perhaps for me the most difficult thing is to imagine my grandparents, who I always saw as being too concerned with societal rules and regulations (what would Mrs so-and-so think?), as ever being young and carefree. One 1920s photograph I do remember from childhood – possibly because it was so incongruous – was one of my grandmother sitting on my grandfather’s motorcycle during an excursion to the Scottish coastal resort of Largs.

My grandmother with my grandfather’s motorcycle, late ’20s.

My grandmother was never comfortable with travelling in the sidecar (just glimpsed in the photo). What if it should become detached? So this motorcycle disappeared soon after their marriage, and like many of their generation they never bought a car to replace it. I possibly wouldn’t want to travel in that sidecar now either, but at my grandmother’s age I like to think I would have been delighted at the idea and the freedom it represented. In this photograph (above), I can almost see her thinking I wish Aleck would stop obsessing over this machine!

The Incidental Genealogist, March, 2022

A Tenement with a View

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As a child I was always drawn to the set of photographs taken from the balcony of my great-grandparents’ tenement flat in Edinburgh’s Dumbieykes area. Through these images I saw my grandmother morph from a gangly 1920s teenager into a young married woman in the 1930s and then as a mother in the 1940s. Fashion moved on over the decades, but the solid-looking wrought-iron balcony was a constant. I have been told that the views from the flat over Holyrood Park were spectacular, although unfortunately no-one in the family thought to photograph them. My mother credits the fresh air blowing in from Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags for the Neilsons’ longevity – in addition to my great-grandmother’s plain and wholesome Scottish cooking. Even if they did not take advantage of the outdoor space in quite the same way we would today, the family must have appreciated being able to step out onto the balcony on a sunny morning, or to simply have a place to hang up damp laundry or wet overcoats.

My Grandparents on the Dumbiedykes Balcony, c1930

My mother assures me that the ironwork on the balcony was painted dark green, but by the time I was born, the balcony, the flat, the street and in fact the whole area had been demolished. As an article in the Scotsman newspaper on ‘Lost Edinburgh’ (here) points out: By the 1970s the Dumbiedykes of old was all but wiped from the map, with stone and slate switched for concrete and steel. Sadly, a centuries-old community was displaced in the process. Like many so-called ‘slum clearances’ throughout the country in the post-war period, the replacement housing proved to have its own issues as the new high-rise estate was built using continental designs that were not robust enough for Scottish weather. It is also said that the workmen struggled to work with these ‘alien’ designs, resulting in sub-standard workmanship which has blighted the estate ever since. To be fair, however, there has recently been investment in both the buildings and the community (possibly due to the area’s proximity to the relatively new Scottish Parliament), and the views from the high rise blocks have always been an attraction.

The Dumbiedykes today (front) from Salisbury Crags

While I was growing up, my mother and her older relatives often talked fondly of the Dumbiedykes and expressed their sadness that the old stone tenements had been demolished. My great grandfather, Robert Neilson, had spent all his life there, and my great-grandmother, Catherine Neilson (née Thomson), had also lived there with her family after moving from the nearby Canongate, so they were both embedded within the community. The Dumbiedykes was an area built during the industrial boom in the 19th century to house the families who worked in the nearby factories and breweries in the East of the city (all now gone, too), and the tenements ranged from unsanitary and over-crowded buildings to relatively well-kept groups of flats, such as ‘the balconies’ where the Neilsons lived.

My mother has told me about her grandparents’ flat in such detail that I can almost imagine to have been there myself. One of her earliest memories was sleeping in the recessed bed in the living room-cum-kitchen, and falling asleep to the comforting sound of the grown-ups chatting or listening to the radio. It must have been warm and cosy in that room as great-grandma only had an old-fashioned black-leaded Victorian range in which to heat and cook with, which was always lit from dawn to dusk, and although the floor was linoleum, there was a homemade clippy rug in front of the fireplace. My mother remembers how early in the morning she would hear the brewery workers in their clogs clattering along the cobbled stones, then later she would rise to see her grandmother in her stays, washing in the kitchen corner of the room with its single cold tap. She found it strange that her grandmother always called this sink ‘the well’. but to the Victorian generation brought up in houses without indoor plumbing, it really must have seemed like having your own private well inside the house.

Catherine and Robert Neilson (my great-grandparents), Dumbiedykes c1945

The fact that a family of twelve lived in a two-bedroomed flat with no bathroom (only an indoor toilet – a luxury some others on the estate did not have) and a living-room which doubled as a kitchen and the parents’ bedroom at night, may seem like deprivation to us today and was one of the reason the houses were not deemed fit-for-purpose by the 1960s. But when speaking about their childhood, not one of the Neilson children (many of whom I got to know well in their old age) felt they had lacked anything while growing up. There were the usual squabbles for bed space and bath water, but nothing that hinted at the kind of poverty on which the post-war town-planners focussed; although it obviously did exist, particularly as the 20th century wore on and the buildings aged. My mother does recall one winter in the 1940s when condensation ran down the inside walls, which the family re-named ‘the weeping walls’, although she cannot recall if there was any specific reason for the event. However, it is interesting to speculate what would have happened to the estate had it been allowed to remain intact. Nearby upgraded tenements with balconies which escaped demolition are much sought after today with the outside space often decorated with plants and outdoor furniture.

Dumbiedykes Rd 1950s (c) Edinburgh City Libraries

In contrast, my mother never remembers the balconies in Dumbiedykes Road being used for anything that was not functional. As it was to all intents partly a shared area that ran along the front of the buildings, it would have to have been kept as neat and clean as the stairwell (stair cleaning being a rota that the women in the block shared). This was one of the reasons my grandmother still regularly scrubbed the steps leading to her 1930s ‘four-in-a-block’ house up until she had a stroke in the early 1980s. As a child I always found it strange to see her on her knees wielding a great wooden brush and a pail of soapy water, even in the winter, but it was a hangover from the days when everyone was expected to keep communal entrances clean – perhaps even forfeiting their tenancy if they did not. For that generation of professional housewives it was also important to show your neighbours that you were not slovenly.

I often think this strong Presbyterian streak was also what prevented people from using their balconies for rest and relaxation: they possibly wouldn’t have wanted others to think they were not busy working (if men) or cooking and cleaning (if women). Of course this meant that many housewives were trapped inside for hours on end, and I remember that my own grandmother was always finding things to do in the house, even on summer days. My mother tells me that all her adult life she would never just sit outside in the sun and relax, but only used the ‘back green’ for hanging out washing, despite the fact my grandfather was often to be found outside pottering around in their section of the shared garden.

When my great-grandmother became widowed in 1948, she soon gave up the tenement flat in the Dumbiedykes and spent the next two decades of her life living with her grown-up children. My mother tells me she spent most of the time staying with them in their two-bedroomed house, possibly because it was easier in a family with only one child. However, this meant that initially my mother had to share her bedroom with her grandmother, which was certainly not a long-term solution. Eventually my grandparents gave up their own room and slept on the pull-out sofa bed in the living room instead. This couldn’t have been easy for everyone, especially during my mother’s teenage years, and it seems that her strongest and happiest memories of her grandmother was of the time when she visited her in the Dumbiedykes. My mother’s grandfather was also a comforting and cheerful presence in those days, and my mother recalls his old comfy chair by the fire and pipe stand at the side of the range and that she would always kiss him on his bald head before leaving.

My Mother and Grandparents, Dumbiedykes c1945

On Fridays, my grandmother would meet my mother after school and they would take the number 1 bus all the way from their suburb of Carrick Knowe, in the West of the city, into Edinburgh’s old town, a place that my mother said always looked rather gloomy and seedy on account of the blackened soot-stained buildings and narrow cobbled streets. They would leave the bus in the Royal Mile and walk down St Mary’s Street towards the Pleasance, then cut down Holyrood Road. Before they went up to my great-grandparents third floor flat in Dumbiedykes Road, they would pick up a pre-ordered copy of The Girl’s Crystal from Miss Yardley’s local shop so that my mother could be entertained when the grown-ups were talking or listening to the radio – something they did a lot in those wartime days.

My mother recalls that when she was very young and it was time to leave her grandparents’ house (if they did not stay overnight in the recess bed) she would be picked up by my grandmother, tucked under her arm like a bag of groceries, and whisked all the way down the three flights of stone tenement stairs. Apart from the injustice of it all, she mostly remembers her mother’s boney hip painfully pushing into her stomach as she leapt from step to step. Knowing my grandmother – a small, nervy, sinewy woman with a vice-like grip well into old age who was always running late – I can just imagine her pounding down those stairs, rushing to catch the next bus to get home to make my grandad’s tea or to avoid the blackout. Yet those three flights of stone steps also used to fascinate my mother as she noticed they were worn into dips at the entrance and ground floor, but became flatter farther up the stairs where there was less footfall. This is, of course, is just the sort of detail that a child would pick out, and I remember being equally taken by the strange undulations in the stones on a section of my grandparents’ front path in Carrick Knowe – the result of a botch tarmac job many years earlier which is still there today.

Ann, Catherine and Mary Neilson, with nephew, Dumbiedykes, c1930

As the middle child, my grandmother had four older and four younger siblings: the photograph above shows her with the two younger sisters, Ann and Mary. These little girls (who I got to know well in their old age) learnt to slip notes out the coal cupboard in the tenement hallway to my grandmother when she was canoodling on the stair with my grandfather. The cupboard opened at both ends so that the coalman did not need to enter the house and was an ideal way to send out messages from the living room to tell my future grandparents when tea or supper was ready and they had to come inside.

The Neilsons’ childhoods were full of such stories about the ways they would help and support each other, in particular the girls. They learnt to let in late night returnees from ‘the dancing’ and share clothes and make-up and trade allotted household tasks with each other. It must have been a very intensive way to live, which makes me wonder how my grandmother felt when she left home after her marriage, with no job or child (for the first seven years) to keep her busy.

I was always fascinated by my grandmothers’ tales of growing up in a family of nine children that the evenings with the photo album seemed to prompt. And yet I naturally assumed that my life with my own bedroom and private back garden was far superior, and possibly even said as much. For years I believed my grandmother’s childhood must have been full of deprivations and boring chores and responsibilities, when I now believe it would have been an upbringing that in many respects was richer in experience than my own.

The Incidental Genealogist, February 2022