Issue No.

31 November 2011

Days of Fire and Brimstone: Perth at of religious revolution. The destruction of friaries after ’s sermon, May 2nd,1559. A picture by David Simon (courtesy of Perth & Heritage Trust)

Celebrating the launch of ‘Perth: A Place in History’

Chairman’s Notes and Archive News page 2 Review of ‘Perth: a Place in History’; 4 Perth during the Black Death and later Epidemics 7 The Enlightenment and Civic Improvements 12 The start of an Auld Sang; Perth and Parliament 1300-1707 18 Effie Gray; a Perth girl who married Ruskin and Millais 21

Chairman’s Notes

Dear Friends,

Our annual outing this year, was to the two archives in – that of the University of - dee and the Dundee City Archives. There are so many references in our archives to the rivalry between our two cities that it was a great pleasure to meet our Dundonian colleagues and friends to discuss our history without rancour.

In addition to standard university records, the University Ar- chive specializes in ecclesiastical records and those of the jute and linen industry. It also contains the magnificent photo- graphic collection of (1908-1970). The University Archive, Records Management & Museum Services care for the University art collection and a fascinating small museum.

After all too short a visit, we proceeded to the City Archives, which are housed in the City Chambers. There, over lunch, we were welcomed by some Friends of Dundee City Archives. De- spite the pouring rain, about half of our group very much wanted to participate in a guided tour of . In 1564, Mary Queen of Scots granted the land of the former Franciscan Friary to Dundee, with permission to use the yard as a public burial ground. The Howff is so named because it was used as a meeting place and, especially, as a place to resolve disputes.

Returning to the City Chambers, we were shown some treasures from the Dundee City Archives, including a document signed by Mary Queen of Scots, along with the spacious working area de- voted to the Friends (which we viewed with envy!). A simply lovely day, apart from the weather! A week later, on a very pleasant sunny afternoon, we had the pleasure of welcoming a group from the Friends of Dundee City Archives to Perth, for a walk around historical Perth conducted by one of our own experts, Graham Watson, and for a view of some of our Archive's treasures.

Mrs Margaret (outgoing President of the Perth Soroptimists) has joined the Friends as a volunteer, continuing Hilary's work on Women in Perth & Kinross. We offer her a warm wel- come.

As usual, we have drawn up a most interesting programme for our Season 2011-2012. I shall look forward to seeing as many as possible Friends at our open meetings. One problem is that it is often difficult to speak to more than a few of those who attend. Please do not hesitate to con- tact me or other members of the Committee if there are any issues you wish to raise with us.

With all good wishes, Margaret Borland-Stroyan

2 Archive News

As autumn fast approaches, we’re missing Anna, who did sterling work helping us get ready to put all our catalogues online. This has been a slower job than we anticipated, mainly because of technical issues (which I haven’t a clue about), but I’ve been told that we are getting there. Meanwhile, we miss Anna and hope that she goes on to find a job that really satisfies her.

We’ve had other work experience students in over the past few months, most notably one from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of (RCAHMS) who finished his week with us by finding a WW1 bullet! This was from a marvellous group of -based collections that was deposited with us, and which included a poignant set of

letters home from a young man who had been mortally wounded in the advance on Cambrai, France. So devastated was his family, that in the early 1920s they made a pilgrimage to the battlefields, bringing home the rifle bullet as a souvenir – hence its inclusion among the papers. Our student was sorting through them when he came upon the bullet – it ended up being removed by the police who were planning to dispose of it ‘safely’. Less heart-stopping, but equally interesting collections in this deposit included records of all the fish that had passed through Pitlochry Fish Ladder during the 1960s, and two Lawn Tennis Tournament minute books.

Collections that are now catalogued and available include MS305, the Samuel Black Watson letters, 1913-1918. These letters tell the story of Black Watson’s military career from when he joined as a young man of 17 in 1909, of his being invalided out from Gallipoli in 1915, and serving with the Scottish Horse and King's African ri- fles, before being discharged from the army on 22 May 1919. You can find out about our new accessions and catalogued collections on our web pages under ‘Archive News’.

Finally, you may remember in the last issue I mentioned the Perth Academy ‘Spot the Pupil’ event – well, photos and information are still trickling in, and we still need a volunteer to collate and organise the information….If you’d like to spend cold winter days in the warmth of the Archive searchroom, give me a call on 01738 477012. Jan Merchant

Friends of PKC Archive, AK Bell Library, Place, PERTH PH2 8EP

Scottish Charity No. SCO31537 Tel:(01738) 477012 Email: [email protected]

Hon. Presidents; The : Sir William Macpherson of Cluny and Blairgowrie : Mr Donald Abbott

Editor: David Wilson

3 Book Review

Perth: a Place in History

September saw the launch of a new book on Perth’s history which greatly extends our understanding of the origins and development of the city. Its twelve authors all took part last year’s very successful historical conference, but this book is not merely a raw collection of transcribed talks. For once, the usual book-launch hyperbole is thoroughly justified; it really is a landmark in historical scholarship about Perth, exploring an extraordinary range of subjects and periods at a depth which often sharpen the appetite for more.

In David Strachan’s own article, in which he explores the deep prehistory of the area, Perth is shown to be a relatively late starter in a locale studded with ancient ritual sites and defensive landmarks. Places like Moncrieff, Abernethy and the Scone district were regularly reoccupied by completely different cultures over time-spans of thousands of years. Then, as maritime trade became more important, Perth an obvious place for settlement--it was at the lowest fordable point on the river, but also the furthest upstream for larger boats. The original settlement around St. John’s was on an ‘island’ in the flood plain; only later, when the town expanded into low-lying areas, did the chief drawback of the site—its liability to catastrophic flooding— become equally obvious.

Derek Hall then takes the archeological story of the settlement forward into the early medieval period. Perth archaeologists love the waterlogged, oxygen-free ground under the city in which almost anything organic survives—even the stumps of trees from the original site clearance in the mid-1100s. The evidence uncovered reveals that Perth was a town of some prosperity in the early medieval period, but even at that early date it lived by making things rather than by trading alone; a way of life that persisted through the centuries, almost to the present day.

In stark contrast, Richard Oram’s environmental history shows that by the 1250s, the prosperity associated with the ‘medieval warm period’ was over, and was succeeded (with brief intermissions) by centuries of climatic deterioration, crop failures and recurrent famine, terrifying human and animal epidemics, including of course the ‘black death’ which first struck Scotland in 1349. It is probable that that these environmental factors account for Perth’s gradual decline from a major trading centre to a merely regional market three centuries later.

But as Alan MacDonald shows in his study of Perth and Parliament, it was just in this economically fraught period that the city became politically influential, both as a regular parliamentary venue and because of its prominence in parliamentary decision-making 4 It was usually represented on most important committees and commissions, to the town’s great benefit, for instance by securing large sums for bridge maintenance and rebuilding. But did its decades-long legal battle with Dundee over processional precedence stem from an uneasy awareness of its increasing economic inferiority vis-a-vis its flourishing neighbour?

And then Mary Verschuur brings us back to the realities of town life in the mid-sixteenth century by leading us on a tour of well- documented locations in the years leading up to the religious explosion ignited by Knox in St. John’s church in 1559. She visits centres of manufacturing, home to craftsmen who were often prominent protestants. In those years, holding the wrong opinions could be life-threatening; Mary Stirk, a tradesman’s daughter, was drowned in 1544 for the crime of not praying to the virgin when giving birth! The tour illustrates the wide range of Perth’s occupations and trades, which included making such goods as ‘spears, knives, helmets, gloves, saddles and ladders’ as well as the ubiquitous textile trades.

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Scotland was a liberating reaction to the dogmatic certainties of the past, and showed itself a commitment to rationality and order in intellec- tual, social and economic life, and a thirst for practical innovation and improvement. Christopher Whatley breaks new ground in showing how these attitudes were not just confined to and . In Perth they gave rise to the Academy, libraries and cultural societies, and the pursuit of order and elegance in the physical development of the town; a theme that Charles McKean also illustrates in his masterly elucidation of later eighteenth century projects like the miniature ‘New Towns’ of Rose Terrace and Marshall Place. However, the underlying reality was that Perth was still essentially a manufacturing town; its industries could be visually inelegant, its processes messy, and its working people were often turbulent and given to riot if their interests were under threat.

The Enlightenment also introduced a scientific approach into disciplines like mapmaking. But as Chris Fleet’s survey of maps of Perth emphasises, maps are never neutral—they always reflect the interests and the preoccupations of the mapmaker and/or whoever com- missioned him. Thus Petit, an officer working for the board of Ordnance, is concerned only with defencibility, while Stobie, the Duke of Atholl’s estate factor, reflects the interest of large landowners in agricultural improvements, forestry and above all, the ownership of land.

The early nineteenth century polymath, Dr. Adam Anderson, seems like a late flowering of the Enlightenment. He is treated in depth by our own Rhoda Fothergill, who describes a career that went far beyond the waterworks with which he is usually associated. Apart from his brilliance as a headmaster, he was involved in the introduction of standard weights and measures, the introduction of town’s gas (with talks and demonstrations to calm the faint-hearted), helping to deal with cholera epidemics, and adjudicating on riverside devel- opments that threatened navigation on the Tay.

Finally, Miss Fothergill introduces us to Sir Robert Pullar, founder of Pullar’s of Perth, the first of four businesses which dominated Perth’s industrial and commercial scene in the later

5 nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alia Campbell and Jacqui Seargeant de- scribe the humble origins and huge expansion of Bell’s and Dewar’s in , and finally Susan Payne describes the even more extraordinary transformation of an obscure local agricultural insurer, General Accident, into a world-wide giant under the inspired direc- tion of the Norrie-Miller dynasty.

Common threads link these success stories; imagination in seeing the opportunities of- fered by new developments in transport, communications and advertising, and a strong identification by entrepreneurs with their city, resulting in public benefactions (like the A.K.Bell Library itself) on a scale that dwarfed anything seen in Perth before or since.

Then suddenly, in the space of a few decades it was all over. Pullar’s stopped dyeing and died; the whisky firms were taken over by foreign multinationals who treasured the brands but abandoned their birthplace; General Accident, once Scotland’s third largest firm, was swallowed by an English insurance conglomerate. For the first time in its his- tory, Perth has virtually ceased to be a place where things were produced. It remains to be seen whether that is a viable model for its future. D.R.W.

Finally, please forgive a little trumpet-blowing The PKC Archive was far and away the most important source of information used by contributors to the book. Out of a total of 343 references cited in endnotes, no fewer than 85 related to PKC archive documents— a quarter of the total. No other re- source came anywhere near. It helps to explain Chris Whatley’s tribute, which Prof. T.C. Smout approvingly quoted in his introduction:

“...Perth also possesses one of the richest and most user- friendly local authority archives in Scotland...”

Perth: a Place in History is published by Heritage Trust, and is available at the A.K.Bell Library and good booksellers at £15 a copy. It could make a really appropriate Christmas present for a Perth Exile!

6 An excerpt from Perth in the : An Environmental History

by Prof. Richard Oram

In this chapter of ‘Perth; a Place in History’ Professor Oram explores the impact of envi- ronmental factors on the economic and social development of Perth between 1200 and 1650. In this period there was a dramatic worsening of the climate, leading eventually to the ‘little ice age’ which lasted until the mid-1800s. Crop failures, sometimes leading to acute fam- ine, were recurring events, and livestock disease could dislocate economies dependent on animal products. The apocalyptic mood of the times was heightened by devastating epi- sodes of infectious disease. In this excerpt from his paper, Professor Oram discusses the pro- found social and economic effects of these epidemics on the city.

Any economic crisis triggered by livestock disease in the early 1320s would have paled into insignificance compared to the effects of the human pandemic spreading from the east after 1347 and reaching Scotland in 1349, which we have come to know as the Black Death. In contrast to the abundant records from contemporary European, English and Irish writers, only one fourteenth-century account, by the chronicler John of Bordun, survives of that first episode of plague in Scotland. It states simply that 'there was in the so great a pestilence and plague amongst men...as...had never been heard of by man'; that fully a third of the human race was killed, and that its main victims were amongst 'the meaner sort and common people' rather than the magnates. A second plague epidemic reached Scotland in 1362-3, which killed one third of those who had survived the first pestilence, according to the chronicler Walter Bower. It was followed in 1380 by a third occurrence, which Bower again claimed killed one third of the remaining people. A fourth outbreak struck in 1392, but with an apparently reduced death-rate. The understated reference to these incidents in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century accounts has resulted in plague almost disappearing from the reckoning in most modern academic histories of later medieval Scotland. Only Alexander Grant has offered the sober but unsubstantiated opinion that 'plague still appears to have been the worst disaster suffered by the people of Scotland in recorded history'.

As with accounts of weather events and recurring food shortages in the fifteenth century, the relative absence of accounts of epidemics from historical narratives, certainly when compared with the extensive plague literature from elsewhere in Europe, may be more a problem of survival of sources than evidence for initial limited and then declining impact. In common with the fifteenth century issue of food supply, parliamentary and administrative re- cords refer to outbreaks continuing to affect the country down to the mid-seventeenth cen- tury, and set out the first measures to control epidemics. Parliamentary legislation in October 1456, in response to an epidemic which began in 1455, set in place measures intended to con- tain the spread of the disease and to protect the property of victims and their neighbours; it 7 was the earliest such legislation in Britain. Burgh authorities followed this parliamentary lead; Edinburgh had measures in place by 1499, which provided a model for other commu- nities, including Perth.

Although the disease that we have come to label as the Black Death is commonly identified as bubonic plague (the result of the bacillus Yersinia pcstis being transmitted by fleabites) descriptions of the medieval outbreaks and modern medical understanding of how bubonic plague spreads have raised doubt over that identification. Further question marks have been raised against identifying documented fifteenth-century 'pestilences' as outbreaks of the same disease that struck in 1349. In 1402, for example, there was a major epidemic of dysen- tery affecting the eastern part of the kingdom, with deaths reported as far north as Dundee. Walter Bower's description of the epidemic in 1420 which caused great mortality amongst 'not only magnates but also numberless men of the people', and which the common people named 'le qwhew', has led to its identification as some form of influenza. Influenza might

Death the King; personifications of death were extremely common in late medieval iconography. 8 also have been the 'swiftly-spreading pestilence' which broke out in Edinburgh in February 1431 and in Haddington in 1432, and which led to arrangements for the possible relocation from Perth to of a meeting of the Exchequer due to be held in February 1432. The high mortalities of the famine of 1439 were accompanied by an epidemic labelled 'the wame ill' which according to the chronicle accounts, killed as many people as in any previous pestilence, with a second epidemic spreading from later in the year which caused the death of those infected within twenty-four hours. The description of this epidemic has led to identification of the pathogen at work as Vibrio cholerae - cholera. In the majority of in- stances, however, we simply have the contemporary label of 'pestilence' used to describe out- breaks where different pathogens, or combinations of different pathogens, may have been at work.

Successive 'pestilence' epidemics struck Perth through the sixteenth century. In 1512, during a general epidemic throughout the kingdom, King James IV's councillors wrote to the burgh council with instructions for implementation of plague-control measures in line with the terms of the 1456 act. An epidemic of what was referred to as the 'Mallochis pest' struck Perth in September 1537. This may have been the start of the epidemic that in 1542-3 led to a claim by leading burgess Oliver Maxton that the burgh had been 'in point of uter distruc- troun thre yere sine or tharby be the pest, and the maist part of the hale commonrie fled for deid, and left the said burgh dissolait, without ordour or officiar'. Although Maxton was probably overstating the impact of the disease on the daily functioning of the burgh and the lives of its inhabitants to make his actions during the course of the epidemic appear more significant, it is unlikely that his claims were so outrageous as to provoke dismissive ridicule. The picture is of a community paralysed by the outbreak, effectively leaderless, and with sig- nificant numbers of townsfolk fleeing in fear of contagion and thereby compounding the burgh's difficulties in coping with and containing the epidemic.

Fear of pestilence remained strong throughout the 1500s, especially the threat of its entry to Scotland from abroad through trade with an infected area of mainland Europe As a seaport and trading burgh that had regular contact with places where plague outbreaks were recur- rent, this was very much a live issue for Perth. In November 1580, for example, it was reported to the Privy Council in Edinburgh that a ship containing the 'guidis and geir' of some Perth burgesses had entered the Tay estuary and been found to be carrying plague, some of its crew and passengers having already died. Although the ship-master had been or- dered to sail to the Isle of May at the outer limit of the of Forth and remain there in quarantine under pain of death, the ship had passed upstream and begun to discharge its cargo. The Privy Council therefore commanded the captain to take his ship to the May, or- dering no-one on land to have unlicensed communication with them under penalty of death. Anyone who had come ashore already was to be apprehended and executed, houses where they had lodged were to be closed, and the ship, boats, and all goods within it to be burnt. The burgh authorities were rigorous in the prosecution of their responsibilities, for they un- derstood full well the consequences of failure to round up those who had broken quarantine

9 Miniature from the Toggenhat Bible, Basel 1411. Supposed to illustrate plague, but are the blisters more consistent with smallpox? (Picture courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

and any goods that had already been dispersed. Their diligence on this occasion ensured that no outbreak occurred.

Prompt action by the government in Edinburgh and the local administration in Perth and the district around the appears to have contained any threat in 1580, but four years later the burgh was not spared. One of the most severe recorded visitations of plague to affect Perth started in autumn 1584 and lasted a full year before burning itself out in autumn 1585, reportedly killing 1427 townsfolk of all ages, which would have repre- sented around one third of the population. The king had been in the burgh when the epi- demic struck, and despite the instructions issued by his own Privy Council to restrict movement of people from infected into uninfected areas, he nevertheless fled to , ordering the closing of all ferry routes and bridges across the Forth to prevent the south- ward spread of plague. Four of his household were not as fortunate as James in escaping from Perth, being amongst the first victims of the outbreak. By early November the epi- demic had spread widely through the district around Perth and down into , apparently moving along the main lines of communication, which led to James and his Privy Council placing fresh restrictions on movement through the infected areas. By March 1585 it was clear that hopes that the winter months would see an end to the outbreak had been mis- placed and more drastic measures were authorised to staunch any further spread.

10 For a community which lived by its trading, the most severe of these measures was the sus- pension of all public gatherings and markets in Perth until the epidemic was clearly over and their temporary relocation to some nearby, uninfected place. All burgesses of Perth, except for a handful licensed to move and certified as being 'clene' of any infection, were prohibited to go to the relocated market, their few certified fellows being charged with buy- ing food, clothing and other necessary items sufficient to support the town. The ban was repeated in Apri1, pointing to a major dislocation of Perth's trading activity, and as late as the 19th to 21st of August it was still being reported that the plague was 'spreding in di- verse pairtis of Louthean, Fyffe, and about Perth'. Indeed, the instruction issued on 21 August—three days before local records noted the official ending of the epidemic—for a public proclamation citing the Earl of Atholl in a court action to be made at the market cross in 'becaus of the infectioun of the pest within oure burgh of Perth', suggests that the prohibition of public assemblies in the burgh had continued right through the summer months. Along with the loss of what was probably around twenty to thirty per cent of its population, this six-month suspension of its market and trading rights was a body-blow to a community which had already been experiencing a marked decline in its economic prosperity.

The costs of a major epidemic such as that of 1584-5 should not be underestimated. The disruption of its trade through its harbour and market was not simply a question of incon- venience to local traders and consumers; producers in the burgh's commercial hinterland had been permitted to dispose of their goods through the markets in unaffected in the wider region and external merchants had gone to those rival markets to buy and sell trade items. Dundee in particular, plague-free until October 1585, had benefitted from its old rival's misfortunes. Now Perth needed to recover as much of its lost revenues as possi- ble. In September 1586, therefore, the council launched an action in the Convention of the Royal Burghs against Dundee for the recovery of tolls and other revenue lost to that burgh during the epidemic, citing as the main reason for its action financial losses occasioned ‘throw the lang continuance of the pest within the said burgh'. On this occasion they were granted some relief, although not enough to offset the full cost of the anti-plague measures that the town had borne.

In conclusion, the vibrant trade that would have been needed to overcome the dislocations and material shortages caused by environmental changes depended on people, both to create demand and service the supply. Epidemic disease helped to suppress both sides of the equation with awful regularity for the remainder of the middle ages. Perth did indeed have an apparent ability to replenish its losses with fresh blood from its rural hinterland, but as its economic base contracted in the sixteenth century, its ability to attract economic migrants declined, as they gravitated to more prosperous alternatives— Edinburgh above all others. As a legacy of the interplay of economic mismanagement, climate change and epidemic disease, at the close of the sixteenth century a burgh which had been in the top four of Scotland’s international trading centres three hundred years earlier had sunk to the status of a purely regional market.

11 An excerpt from Perth in the Era of the Enlightenment

by Christopher A Whatley

Professor Whatley’s paper is a ground-breaking study of the eighteenth-century culture of Scottish towns. He demonstrates that the Enlightenment in provincial towns was not just an intellectual phenomenon, but was also severely practical, being concerned with such matters as economic development, agricultural and industrial innovation and their social conse- quences. Its epicentre was of course Edinburgh, the ‘hotbed of genius’, but its influence was soon felt in towns like Perth, newly prosperous from the linen trade, whose leading citizens were determined not to be left behind, as becomes clear in the following extract from Profes- sor Whatley’s article in which he discusses—

Civic Improvement in Eighteenth Century Perth

The promotion of Linen was part of a grander mission (but never a co-ordinated plan) to enhance Perth’s attractiveness as a commercial centre. Following the lead of Edinburgh, and in common with many other towns, the authorities in Perth engaged enthusiastically—albeit far from systematically and in a series of uneven steps— with the 'improvement' agenda of the time, at the heart of which were enhancement of the built environment and the provision of 'luxury' services. Indeed, the indications are that Perth's improvement process began a few years earlier than most of the other smaller Scottish towns; in this respect its nearest compara- tors seem to have been Dumfries and Montrose. The process began around 1734 with a scheme to widen the Skinnergate, then the only route into the town from the north, whilst at the same time plans were laid to improve the Watergate, the main route from the south. Recognising the importance of opportunities to the north, in 1752 the town council agreed to support the county commissioners in making a 'highway' through the carse of to Dundee and thence to 'the whole Burrows and Countys on the North and Northwest Sea Coasts’, a meas- ure that would tend 'greatly to the Encouragement of Trade & Commerce'. By removing im- pediments to the movement of goods and people, straightening and widening roads so that wheeled traffic could pass, and from 1764, supporting the campaign for the new bridge over the Tay, a greater degree of commercial efficiency was to be achieved.

Perth’s project was a major civil engineering undertaking, so much so that when construction began in February 1766 it was feared that such would be the demand for labour that there would be a shortage of workers in and around Perth; accordingly, two companies of foot soldiers were employed to work on the bridge instead — initially at least. They were after all, used to building military roads, and John Smeaton's bridge over the Tay was, like the military roads, seen as a project that was of major national strategic importance, not least as a means of making it easier for troops from the south to move north and thereby assist in 'improving and civilising' the Highlands. Accordingly the government provided around forty per cent of the funds to build it (£9,000 out of £24,000). 12 A view of Perth from the North Inch, drawn by either Andrew or Archibald Rutherford, showing John Smeaton ’ s new bridge over the Tay, opened in 1770 ( courtesy of Perth Museum & Art Gallery )

Improvement entailed not only majestic new structures like the Tay bridge, but also a sustained assault on the old where they inhibited commercial progress. Thus in 1765, the market cross was judged by the town council to be 'the great impediment' to the passage of what were called 'wheeled machines' through North Street and into the Kirkgate and the Skinnergate. Consequently the magistrates were authorised 'to remove the same and to dispose thereof by public sale'. This was a hugely significant step, as the market cross was customarily the ceremonial focal point for Scotland's burghs, an important symbol of the town's function and authority, from where official proclamations were made, and often the place at which transgressors of burgh laws were made to stand in chains in full view of the community. The removal of the cross in Perth therefore represented a preparedness to break with the past — to abandon the world of custom and tradition — and a declaration that in progress was the creation of a modern town.

But civic improvement was not solely about function. As important was what contemporar- ies often referred to as 'ornamentation', along with neo-classical elegance and order. Form and function were not always compatible. Throughout the period there was a tension, sometimes resolved and at other times not, between the need to encourage industry and commerce, and the enhancement of the appearance of the town. Another complication was lack of money, something which periodically caused the town to abandon or scale down its 13 more ambitious proposals for improvement.

Yet for all of the limitations of its individual members, and a studied refusal to separate private gain from public good, it has to be acknowledged that the town council's initiative was critical in reshaping the burgh. The trick was to provide low-cost inducements to in- dividuals and businessmen who, in serving their own private interests, would also benefit the burgh. For example, in the 1750s there seems to have been some reluctance on the part of private builders to invest, the cause alleged being lower than anticipated house rents. Thus, in order to encourage the building of new tenements, including those in South Street, the council during the summer months provided stone from the town's quarry at no cost to the builder. In fact the opening up of the town's stone quarry in the early 1730s was an important factor in the transformation of Perth. Previously, building stone had been scarce and expensive, and possibly as a consequence there were a large number of wooden buildings - anathema to eighteenth century urban improvers, not least as they were a major fire risk. It was for this reason that in 1749 the council purchased a fire engine - one of the first burghs in Scotland to do so. But whilst there was enough wa- ter for a fire engine, there was too little to drink, at least of a decent quality, with the re- sult that the lives of the inhabitants, as well as of strangers, were exposed to ‘many invet- erate maladies' according to an understated complaint made in 1761.

George Street, Perth c.1825. It was one of Perth’s new, wider, impediment-free thoroughfares, which fa- cilitated the movement of traffic and people from the South and across the new Tay bridge. Of particular note here are the Georgian buildings—some of the first in Perth-but also street lamps. Street lighting was an important marker of urban improvement. (courtesy of Perth Museum & Art Gallery) 14 It was concern about fire, but also for the appearance of the town, that the authorities paid increasing attention to roofs, with the preference being for slate rather than the more traditional thatch. This was important: a telling indicator for contemporary observers of how far a town could be considered as 'improved' in the late eighteenth and early nine- teenth century was the extent to which its roofs were slated. Other markers of urban ra- tionality that met with approval were stone-built housing regularly laid out (from Novem- ber 1751 all new tenements in Perth were to be stone-built with lime mortar, and old tim- ber structures ordered to be demolished). Essential too were sash windows (introduced to Perth at least as early as 1753) as well as wide, straight paved streets and night lighting. Indeed, nothing else would do: when in 1773 there was a suggestion that the houses in South Street were being rebuilt but not in a straight line, John Buchan, a lawyer, wrote in horror to the town council that if there was to be any deviation ‘the publick decoration of the street would not be answered'. Such houses, he went on, 'would stand with their fronts zig-zag to one another'. This, concluded Buchan, 'is the most unseemly and barba- rous-like thing that can be'.

In order to improve the amenity of the burgh, the town council had to exercise a strong degree of social control, or at least to attempt so to do. A series of proclamations were made and acts passed, listing rules and regulations designed to alter and improve the be- haviour of the town's inhabitants as well as to outlaw those practices deemed altogether unacceptable, all of which were publicly announced and usually displayed on posters pasted up throughout the burgh.

But what the proliferation of local regulations reveals, albeit unwittingly, is how unpleas- ant and in some senses chaotic Perth must have been beforehand. Petitions to the council from inhabitants complaining about the activities of their neighbours provide colourful but also telling insights into the nature of eighteenth century Perth and the scale of the challenge faced by the improvers.

An example from 1749 is the case of Mr William Thomson, who lived on the middle storey of a three-storey house near the river. Living above him was what nowadays would in popular parlance be described as 'the neighbours from hell'— the Goodmans. Mr and Mrs Goodman, according to Thomson, had for many years kept what he called a 'sort of pub- lick house, or ale house', which was now attracting ‘great companies of soldiers and...disorderly persons'. Sundays were no different, with the Goodmans and their cus- tomers allegedly cursing and swearing and 'prophaning the Lord's day, even during the hours of divine worship'.

This was bad enough if not unusual anywhere in urban Scotland; but the greatest offence was Mrs Goodman's daily habit of ‘throweing down foul water and other nasty stuff through the floor of said house upon your petitioners's furniture'.

A second but equally distressing nuisance was that allegedly caused by James Cuthbert, a hammerman. In Cuthbert's case this meant - apparently -that he was a joiner or carpen- ter who was also practising as a part-time, unregulated surgeon! This came to light in 1773, when his neighbour James Robertson, a staymaker, who lived on the floor beneath

15 Conversation and evening walk, the North Inch,1794. William Kay ’ s engraving illustrates a represen- tative sample of the burgh ’ s social elite perambulating on the North Inch. In the forefront is John Caw, the then provost ( n umbered 1 ) , Lord and Lady Breadalbane ( 4 ) , Majors Dalton and Hooper ( 5 and 6 ) and others including the lawyer Andrew Davidson 3 ) , a merchant, John Skane ( 10) and the cotton manufacturer, John Stewart ( 9 ) . From the fashion trade was Beau Watt, a haber- dasher ( 7 ) and Miss McIntyre, a milliner ( 8 ) ( C ourtesy, Perth Museum & Art Gallery)

him, complained that Cuthbert was in the practice of accommodating 'distressed and in- firm people' who were treated for conditions such as kidney stones or who required a limb to be amputated. This, however was not the immediate focus of Robertson's concern. His complaint was only about the noise, namely that he and his family were 'often keept from sleep for several whole nights together by the moaning cries and groans of these dis- tressed people, and sometimes the said James Cuthbert has two beds at one time occu- pied by such distressed persons'.

In tackling the challenges associated with the creation of an improved town the Perth authorities seem to have been more than usually successful, albeit that progress was slow and patchy and strewn with obstacles. For example, Perth was in the forefront in the provision of street lighting in Scotland; of the provincial towns Perth was the first to pro- vide street lamps, fuelled by oil, at least as early as 1746. Dumfries, in many ways similar to Perth, was ten years later. Indeed in terms of street lighting—essential for the mainte- nance of law and order and the safety of the citizenry after dark—Perth's record continued to be impressive in comparison to most towns, where progress was slow and patchy.

16 By 1820 Perth had become one of the more genteel of Scotland's provincial towns. It could boast its coffee house, reading rooms, assemblies, and a theatre in Glover's Hall. Around 1820, both Perth and Dumfries had thirty-three writers (or lawyers) and similar numbers of surgeons and physicians—the first and the last being occupations which pro- vided services to the middle and upper classes. There were a few provincial towns in Scotland which could boast a higher number of high-class services—hairdressers, perfum- ers, jewellers, coachmakers and the like—but in not many other places was there such a high proportion of well-heeled (or 'genteel') residents, including widows and spinsters.

But there was another side to Perth. It was one thing to create an elegant, ordered town in stone and slate; rather more difficult to accomplish the creation of an orderly urban community. Improvements which were driven primarily by, and in the interests of, the town's better-off inhabitants — with merchants seen as the main beneficiaries, backed by the town council — was sometimes resented and resisted by the 'lower orders'. When livelihoods were affected, protest was invariably the result; for instance, in 1770, just prior to the opening of the to traffic, the shoemakers of the Watergate objected that as a result of road re-routing associated with the bridge, they would be denied 'the East country people's business as crossed the river at the venals'. Opposition took on a more malevolent character in December 1771 when it was reported that during the hours of darkness 'some ill Getted persons throu down the Lodge One the Bridge that was Set there for to uplouft the Custom In & has Brok part of it’, presumably as a mark of protest against the bridge tolls, or perhaps to the very existence of the bridge.

With its large population of handloom weavers — who elsewhere in Lowland Scotland tended to be in the vanguard of radical and at times revolutionary politics — Perth in the 1790s and the early years of the nineteenth century was in reality somewhat at odds with the image of the town which the town's elite were intent on creating. There were charis- matic individuals too from the lower classes who were able to galvanise their neighbours and raise a mob. One of these was Blair Flight, a clockmaker, who was described as 'an odd-looking figure' with a countenance 'which indicates a mind capable of any mean action'. If there is a catch-all term which encapsulates what men like this stood for, it is custom, in defence of an older, pre-Enlightenment set of values. They were enforcers, so to speak, of what Edward Thompson has called 'the moral economy'. They were not unique to Perth but part of the hidden—or less easily accessible—histories of most places.

In conclusion, the Enlightenment zeitgeist clearly left its mark on Perth, even if, despite its desire for refinement, there was still a rough side to the town. But also in evidence was a proud provincialism, allied to a desire to place Perth at the forefront of provincial Scot- land, and a well-founded belief that Perth had its own distinctive place in Scottish society, and therefore in Scottish history. .

17 The start of an auld sang; an excerpt from Perth and Parliament, c1300-1707

by Dr. Alan MacDonald

In this paper, Alan MacDonald shows that Perth’s parliamentary significance was not merely as host to many of its meetings; its commissioners often took leading roles in parliamentary business wherever it met. In the early 1400s, Perth came tantalizingly close to being the de facto capital of Scotland. It jealously guarded its ranking as a senior burgh, which drew it into a long and tedious dispute with Dundee over their relative parliamentary status.

Perth is distinguished among the burghs as one of the very first to appear on a parlia- mentary list. In 1357, John Mercer, Robert Gatmilk and John Gill sat as one of the first ever urban representatives to be listed as attending a . Thus Perth was represented right from the start, and it would have been an exceptional parliament that did not have any representatives from Perth in attendance. Indeed, Perth was involved even before the start. In 1296, when the first Franco-Scottish treaty was ratified in Scotland, the seals of six burghs were appended, along with those of the leading church- men and nobles. One of those burghs was Perth. Only Edinburgh, and Dundee have more names in the lists of those who represented the burghs in parliament. It was also virtually unheard of for one of Perth’s commissioners not to be appointed to the key parliamentary drafting committee, the Lords of the Articles. Every piece of business went through this committee, which had to include the most powerful nobles and churchmen, and the commissioners from the most important burghs. In that forum, the burgh’s commissioners played a significant part in ensuring that the interests of the burghs in general, as well as those of Perth itself, were promoted.

Perth treated the matter of sending its commissioners to parliament so seriously that it even made an occasion of their departure and return. This was quite unusual among the burghs in general and serves to demonstrate just how important the burgh considered the role to be. In the 1640s, the burgh records show that Perth's commissioners received a 'bonnarlla' (ie a bon aller; a send-off) at what was called their 'way going' in the form of mulled wine, and further drinks were provided for them at their 'home coming', when they might receive a pint of sack, a sweet white wine. Gestures like this emphasised the significance of the occasion and the gratitude of the burgh for services done, cementing, through formal ceremonies, the relationship between the burgh and its commissioners.

What was in it for Perth? All of this expense and pomp demonstrates the significance of parliament to a burgh like Perth, and there were good reasons for this. Parliament was the place to secure and uphold one’s rights. Nothing could trump an act of parliament in 18 a court of law so obtaining one was important. Between 1550 and 1650, Scotland’s towns obtained 245 acts of parliament in their favour. Over 100 of those were accounted for by just five burghs (Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Dundee and Perth), with Edinburgh alone securing nearly fifty. The wealth and status of those five burghs gave them influence, enabled them to buy favours, got them onto committees, and eased the passage of their acts. Perth obtained sixteen acts in its favour in that 100-year period, the third highest number, behind only Aberdeen and Edinburgh. These acts, many of which simply ratified the burghs’ existing privileges, might look rather mundane to modern eyes, but we should not be too quick to dismiss their significance. To Perth, its bridge had always been a headache. In 1578, 1609 and 1641, acts of parliament were secured to help the burgh to either repair or rebuild their bridge; exceptionally, tens of thousands of pounds of central government funding were granted to the project. Its bridge was nationally important for economic and strategic reasons, so the crown was willing to help out. When the burgh’s commissioners returned home with news like that, they would have earned their pint of sack.

Then, as now, it was important to garner support in parliament, especially among prominent individuals. In 1606, the burgh's council minutes record how Perth sought to smooth the passage of the ratification of its new royal charter by giving half a tun of wine each to the Earl of Montrose (the king’s commissioner to parliament) and the Earl of Dunbar (the king’s treasurer) and a further puncheon of wine to the king’s commissioners. The size of this gift is best understood by conversion into bottles; a tun contained roughly 1,140 litres, equivalent to over 1,500 bottles, while a puncheon held about 450 litres or 600 bottles!

For most burghs, their parliamentary stories would end there, but Perth was a member of that select band of towns where parliaments actually met. Until around the middle of the fifteenth century, the Scottish parliament met in religious houses, usually the abbeys of Scone, Cambuskenneth and Holyrood until around 1400, with the Dominican Convent at Perth favoured in the early fifteenth century. All of these had close associations with the monarchy. The first recorded parliament at Scone met there in 1265, and Scone became one of the principal venues for parliaments during the fourteenth century (it was host to twenty- one parliaments out of a total of thirty-seven in the fourteenth century). As the nearest town, it is almost certain that such gatherings would have had an impact on Perth, even be- fore parliaments began to meet in the burgh itself.

The Dominican convent at Perth was established by Alexander II in the thirteenth century, and its royal lodgings were a favoured royal residence until the assassination of James I there in 1437. The parliaments that met at Perth between 1321 and the death of James I ap- pear to have met in that setting. However, after the murder of the king, parliaments ceased to meet in religious houses, and thereafter they rarely met in Perth. Indeed, it was probably the assassination of James I that thwarted a process by which Perth was emerging as the capital of Scotland. All over Europe, royal governments were becoming more bureaucratic and thus the itinerant nature of government was declining. The same process was happening in Scotland during the fifteenth century, and before 1437 Perth looked like the most likely

19 location for the government to put down its roots, situated as it was in a central position, a safe distance from England and close to the traditional coronation place.

In the first half of the fifteenth century, Perth was the favoured meeting place for parliament. In that period there were twenty-one sessions of parliament, fourteen of which met at Perth, while Edinburgh hosted only five. In the 1420s, James I even famously proposed to move the recently-created to Perth, a further indication of his desire to enhance its status as his main centre of power. However, royal favour switched decisively to Edinburgh as the century wore on. Between 1450 and 1500, there were forty-four parlia- ments, all but three of which met at Edinburgh, with Perth hosting parliament only once. The focus of power had begun to move decisively away from the ancient heart of the kingdom, with the coronation of James II at Holyrood in 1437 marking a deliberate rejection of Scone as Scotland's symbolic focus.

Yet the history of Perth as a parliamentary venue did not end in the fifteenth century, for parliament returned to the burgh in times of crisis during the seventeenth century. In 1604 and 1606, parliament met at Perth because of outbreaks of disease in Edinburgh, usually referred as the plague, but likely to have been a more locally-contained water-borne disease such as typhoid. In 1604, 'the town mustart fourteen hundred men in armes and gude ecupadge' for the visiting parliamentarians and their retinues. Its three sergeants, the armed officers who accompanied the magistrates on their duties and carried our judicial summonses and arrests, were given new sets of clothes, and one Alexander Peebles was given the burgh’s handzanyie —its ensign, or flag—‘to be borne by him in this tyme of parliament'. This was the first time that parliament had met in Perth since 1459 and the council were obviously determined to ensure that they put on a good show. Appearances were important when the most powerful men in the land were coming to town.

Two years later, when parliament once more had to meet in Perth because of disease in the capital, a 'wapinschaw' was held ‘to sie quhat prepararione may be had anent the parliament'. Because of the number of people likely to descend upon the burgh, the council also gave ten burgesses the daunting responsibility of being 'governouris and gydaris of the multitude' during parliament. Given the size of the retinues of noblemen, it is quite possible that a parliament with a membership of around 150 would have involved the influx of well over 1,000 people to the burgh, providing a considerable economic boost.

After 1606, it would be another forty-four years before parliament returned to Perth for what proved to be the last time. In the winter of 1650-51, the Scots were retreating in the face of Cromwell’s army and were forced to abandon Edinburgh. Sadly, however, the burgh accounts and council minutes from that time are lost, perhaps as a result of the disruptions caused by the Anglo-Scottish war, so we know nothing of how the town accommodated the estates on that occasion.

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The Life of Effie Gray Christine Wood finds some answers in our Archive

Much has been written and dramatised about Effie Gray and her life with both John Ruskin and John Everett Millais, some of it being exaggerated to make a good story. Thus, an attempt is made here to give a brief factual account of her life.

Her parents were George Gray, writer to the signet, and Sophia Margaret Jameson, daughter of Andrew Jameson, sheriff substitute of Fife. Effie’s parents were married at in Fife on 16th June 1827. At the time of Effie’s birth on 7th May 1828, her parents were living at Bowerswell, Kinnoull, which her father had purchased from Patrick Small Keir on 15th May 1827. Effie was born into a comfortable family situation, her father hav- ing his own solicitor’s practice, with property investments in Perth. Her family were nei- ther poor nor rich, but she would have had everything necessary to keep her safe, warm and in good health. In fact, the Plan of the City of Perth by John Wood in 1823 shows that the family home was located in grounds with a number of trees, surrounded by nurs- ery ground and four large properties with extensive gardens – peaceful and healthy condi- tions in which to live.

Effie was the eldest of fifteen children born to the Grays, seven of whom died young. Nothing is known of her early education, except what is stated in a book by Merryn Wil- liams which relates that she left home when she was 12 years of age and attended a board- ing school at Avonbank, Stratford. It was at that time that Effie first met her future hus- band, John Ruskin, when she paid a brief visit to his parents’ home while on her way to the school.

Effie and John Ruskin were married on 10th April 1848 at her family home of Bowerswell and moved to London, from where she accompanied him on various trips to Europe. De- spite being married for six years, the marriage was never consummated, and so Effie peti- tioned for its annulment in July 1854. The Old Parish Register for Kinnoull states:

21 The following entry is made here agreeably to Instructions from the Ses- sion to the Clerk in a Minute of date 30th July 1854 – on page 223 Minute Book (2) “To put on the record of proclamations at page 102 that the mar- riage on page 64 in 1848 of “John Ruskin of Denmark Hill London and Eu- phemia Chalmers Gray…was declared null and void by sentence of the Com- missary Court of Surrey in the Diocese of Winchester in a suit promoted by the said Euphemia Chalmers Gray against the said John Ruskin dated the 15th day of July 1854 - & that an Extract of this having been produced and read to the Kirk session was engrossed in their Minute of date 30th July 1854 at page 223 of Minute Book for Kirk Session (3) That in the margin on page 64 where said marriage is received the Clerk write “disannulled and for which see page 102”

Effie Gray (middle) at Birnham Hall, Dalguise 22

Obviously, Effie could not have had a very happy marriage with John Ruskin. She re- turned home to Bowerswell before her annullment and a year later married John Everett Millais there on 3rd July 1855. Millais was 26 years of age, had been born in and lived in London. He was a gifted artist, and was already an Associate of the Royal Academy. The Perth Museum and Art Gallery hold oil portraits of Effie and her daughter Mary painted by Millais. After their marriage in 1855, Effie and John rented Annat Lodge for a short time, located adjacent to her parents’ house, then stayed with Effie’s parents at Bowerswell from 1858.

Effie’s first four children were born in Perth, the eldest, Everett, at Annat Lodge on 30th May 1856 and the others, George, Euphemia Gray and Mary, at Bowerswell. In 1861 the family moved to London, where it is believed they lived at 7 Cromwell Place, Kensing- ton until 1877. The remaining four children – Alice Sophia Caroline (1862), Geoffroy William (1863), John Guille (1865) and Sophia Margaret Jameson (1868) – were born in London.

There were many happy times for Effie – the success of her husband as an artist, his elevation to a baronetcy and appointment as President of the Royal Academy; her chil- dren’s marriages and the births of grandchildren. However, the records show that there were times of pain and sadness. For example, seven of her siblings died during child- hood; her second-born son, George Gray, died of consumption at the age of 20 at Bow- erswell; and her husband passed away in August 1896 aged 67.

The Millais family did return to Scotland for visits and between 1883 and 1890 rented Birnam Hall in Little parish. It was perhaps the Millais’ friendship with ’s parents that moved them to take possession of Birnam Hall. The Coun- cil Archive has a collection of photographs featuring Beatrix Potter and her parents, some of which include Effie and other members of the Millais family.

By July 1891 Effie and her husband had returned to London. A letter from her nurse (written from 2 Palace Gate, Kensington) advised Robert Scott Fittis that her ladyship had been ‘…confined to bed for a fortnight and had been unable to write, but is better now’. Effie herself wrote to Fittis five weeks later intimating that she that she had been very ill for three or four weeks. Obviously, Effie was in poor health.

Sir John Everett Millais died on 13th August 1896 and was succeeded by his son Everett Millais. Thereafter, Effie returned to her childhood family home at Bowerswell. Sadly, Everett Millais died the following year on 7th September. Perhaps the double grief of

23 Effie (with parasol) surrounded by her family

losing her husband and first-born son within 13 months took its toll upon Effie, for she died at Bowerswell on 23rd December 1897 aged 69 years and was buried in the Kinnoull Cemetery.

So ended the life of the little girl, Effie Gray, who moved from the local circles of Perth society, to the busy gaieties of London and Europe through her marriages to John Ruskin and John Everett Millais. She had happy times, but mixed with bitterness, sadness and grief. Christine Wood

Sources;

Merryn Williams; Effie; a Victorian Scandal, (Brighton 2010) PKCA; MS2/1 The Fittis Papers, Photographs AK Bell Local Studies; Kinnoull Parish Proclamations Perth Museum and Art Gallery; Collections.

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