Innholdsfortegnelse for January-February 2023 i History Scotland

The Egyptian Halls is an A-listed building in the heart of Glasgow, designed by the prominent Victorian architect Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson.Yet, despite its importance, it has lain largely empty for over 40 years. The Egyptian Halls was built for iron founder James Robertson, with its design commenced in 1870 and the building completed two years later. The Egyptian Halls SCIO reports that the condition of the building has ‘deteriorated significantly’ within the last four decades, and it is now ‘permanently shrouded in scaffold’ awaiting repair. But whilst the condition of the building has suffered, a recent independent structural assessment found it to be sound. The current ownership group has held an interest in the building for over 20 years, and 100 per cent ownership for over ten years. Whilst a…

As recent Crafts Council reports have shown, there is a massive UK market for craft, particularly amongst the under 35s, with jewellery the type of artefact most likely to be purchased. Knowing a ‘thing’ has been made by hand gives it greater intrinsic emotional value than the things we own that we know are mass produced. What we now term the ‘creative industries’, of which craft makers form an important part, are recognised as major contributors to the Scottish and UK economies. Iconic handmade luxury goods – Harris tweeds, Shetland knitwear, highland pottery or single malt whisky, to name a few – help to define a unique Scottish identity that appeals the world over. Television programmes such as The Great British Sewing Bee or The Repair Shop are hugely successful…

Marjory Kennedy-Fraser was a music teacher, suffragette and significant player of the Celtic revival movement, promoting a resurgence of interest in so-called Celtic culture and arts in the early 1900s. Born in Perth on 1 October 1857 to David Kennedy (then a house-painter, but later a world-renowned singer) and Elizabeth Fraser, Marjory was the fifth of ten children. The family toured the world as a singing troupe, visiting India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and America. Marjory was trained as a pianist and played as her father’s primary accompanist during their world tour in the 1870s. Marjory Kennedy married Alexander Fraser, a mathematics teacher, on 16 April 1887. After her marriage, she withdrew from performing as public opinion at the time was still apt to regard marriage as the end…

On display in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen is an elaborate altarpiece depicting the Scottish saint, Ninian of Whithorn. Before the Protestant Reformation, it had adorned the altar of St Ninian in St Olaf ’s Church, Helsingør. Elsinore, as it is better known in English, was an important port town at a key juncture in the trade between the Baltic Sea and North Sea and was home to a large community of Scottish merchants, including the Lyall family who had founded the altar in 1511. Altars and chapels founded by Scots, and dedicated to St Ninian, could also be found in other key trading towns in the later Middle Ages, including Bruges (1366), Bergen Op Zoom in Brabant (1510) and Copenhagen (c.1500). Flanking Ninian on the altarpiece in…

The author acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises their continuing connection to land, waters and communities. This writer also pays her respect to Aboriginals and Torres Strait cultures and Elders past and present. Isabel Cruickshank, alias Booth Crime: stealing a tablecloth Previous crimes: assault (18 days in gaol) Gaol report: a thief, habite and repute. She had a ticket of leave by 31 December 1841. Declared free by servitude on 27 April 1842 Born: Macduff, Banffshire. Baptised 26 April, 1789, Church of Scotland Age: 46 years Relationship status: widow with three children, including a son, James and a daughter, Jane. Lived at Hanover Street, Aberdeen ‘Let no-one say the past is dead, the past is all about us and within’ (Oodgeroo, Kath Walker, Aboriginal poet) Between…

Dundee’s historic links to slavery are being acknowledged with the publication of Breaking the Chains, a city centre walking trail and map exploring the various ways in which Dundee is connected to the history of slavery and anti-slavery, much of which is still largely unknown to many Dundonians. The map and trail have been created by Leisure & Culture Dundee and the University of Dundee Museums in association with Woven Together: Dundee’s Multicultural History Project. Research on the ‘Breaking the Chains’ project was carried out as a result of actions from the Black History Working Group led by Dundee City Council. As part of those discussions, Dundee, alongside other cities in Scotland and across the UK, has begun to assess its role in the transatlantic slave trade and acknowledge some…

On 5 November 1688, a Dutch fleet lay anchored off the coast of the small Devonshire town of Torbay in England. The inhabitants would be the first witnesses to a sizeable army, at least 14,000-strong, landing on the shores of Britain. This army was led by Prince Willem Hendrik of Orange, stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, and his intervention would herald a momentous change in the history of the three kingdoms ruled over by James VII & II (1633-1701). The ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688, as it would come to be called, saw James dispossessed of his throne in England as a result of William’s invasion. The causes of the Dutch intervention and subsequent political collapse of James’ regime in England have been well-trod by historians, especially Tim Harris and Jonathan…

Amidst the complexities of dynastic opposition and civil war during the later Jacobite era, the loyalties and material commitment of individuals were often in flux and have not always been so simple for historians to cleanly define. Allegations of significant Jacobite desertions have long been suspected (and more recently have been examined), but little scholarly enquiry has been made into cases of defection by soldiers within the government forces who were charged with quelling the Jacobite threat in Britain during the ’45. Resistance to martial service permeated both sides of the conflict, but deserting ranks to avoid combat is one thing, while joining up with the enemy is another entirely. Archival evidence shows us that soldiers in British service – including loyalist highlanders on campaign in Scotland – deserted their…

Iam lucky enough to work with a fantastic and complex museum collection. My job is to make sense of the jumble resulting from centuries of collecting and incomplete historical records, and then attempt to collect the records with the objects. Through recording or cataloguing items, we can piece stories together, make connections and gradually make order out of the chaos of human experience. Museums have not always been meticulous about their recordkeeping. Those that began collecting in the 1800s or earlier are unlikely to have much information, making any cataloguing very tricky. When most people think about museum cataloguing, they conjure up images of dusty rooms and faded old cards in a filing cabinet. This is now far from the truth, and recently museums have completely changed what cataloguing should…

Please could you introduce the Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic? The Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic (DASG), a British Academy recognised project, is an online storehouse of Gaelic texts, lexical resources and audio recordings for Scottish Gaelic based at the University of Glasgow.When we were set up, in 2006, our first aim was to digitise the wordlists and other material collected for the Historical Dictionary of Scottish Gaelic (HDSG), dating from the 1960s to 1980s.The resulting online fieldwork archive is a wonderful resource of traditional Gaelic from across the highlands and islands with around 50,000 headwords. From 2008, we began digitising texts to create a large corpus of Scottish Gaelic. Corpas na Gàidhlig now includes more than 340 texts – of a wide variety of genres from all periods of…

T homasSulman’s 1864 bird’s eye view map of Glasgow forms the basis of the project, allowing website visitors to explore the city at the height of the industrial revolution. A bespoke animation has been created by SUUM design studio that tells the story of the city of that time, whilst an interactive microsite featuring a zoomable version of the map enables viewers to explore it in great detail. The project also features a series of events including online evening talks and short lunchtime seminars. Visit https://gallusglasgow.glasgowheritage.org.uk…

In the 19th century, the music hall was the preeminent form of popular entertainment in Britain. At its peak, it employed over 80,000 and entertained 25 million people a year. Springing from the back rooms of pubs in the 1830s and 1840s, by the 1870s over 400 music halls could be found in London alone. Yet, despite its immense popularity, only four original music hall buildings exist in Britain today and only one remains intact in Scotland: Glasgow’s Britannia Panopticon. Most have been demolished or converted into theatres and other buildings. Even harder to find is a record of the audiences of the halls. Newspapers, however, can tell us much about a hall’s history. Advertisements tell us who performed and how much it cost to enter. In cases of accidents…

The Clan Forbes family history project was run by the author Philip Stead, a postgraduate researcher on his final year of the genealogical studies programme within the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Strathclyde, and partly funded by the Clan Forbes Society. I have now completed my findings on the degree of relationship between Clan Forbes members and the Forbes chieftain lineage, which I will explore here. The study utilised traditional genealogical research to identify a sample of well-documented descendants of a Forbes chieftain and used genetic genealogical research to compare clan members in order to make conclusions on the degree of relationship among the participants. Documented Scottish noble descendant sample Three well-documented descendants with very recent ancestry via the direct paternal line of a Forbes chieftain were…

It is no secret that our streets and statues often celebrate history’s well known, white men – something of which I only realised the extent when I read Sara Sheridan’s Where are theWomen? When I started my postgraduate research, I was inspired to ask the same question of the interpretation used in our heritage sites – where are the women? I am not the first (nor will I be the last) to question how often women are mentioned in heritage sites. In 2019 Dr Karen Dempsey highlighted the absence of women’s stories in castle studies. I decided to put her research into practice and throughout my Masters degree, I designed interpretation proposals which explored the ‘hidden histories’ of Scotland – specifically those relating to Scottish women who have been misrepresented…

In 2022, the Scottish census included a question that asked individuals to state whether they could understand, speak, read or write Scottish Gaelic or Scots, inviting people to tick all that applied – and thus giving future generations a picture of how widespread these languages are some two decades into the 21st century. An understanding of Doric (a dialect of the Scots language) is something I was brought up with, and which I have found within my own family history. In 1892, the reporter of the local newspaper who was interviewing my 3 xgreat-grandmother who lived in Glenlivet reported: The Gaelic language was the common mode of speech by the people here everybody spoke it but now alas exclaims our centenarian ‘I can find no one able to converse with…