If it ever crosses your mind that your home is becoming a bit over-crowded, spare a thought for the families who lived in Edinburgh's Grassmarket, in the shadow of the great rock of Edinburgh Castle, a hundred years ago...

The flats at today's Thomson's Court were built only twenty-five years ago, but they occupy the site of the original Thomson's Court and Castle Wynd - traditional Edinburgh tenements or "closes".

Living Cheek By Jowl
In the Grassmarket in 1891, in a house with only one windowed room (In Edinburgh we call our flats "houses") - lived a seventy-eight year old organ grinder and his forty-five year old wife. Their fifteen-year old son played the concertina for a living and their youngest son was at school. With the family lived a female lodger with her two wee daughters; she earned her living as a bird fortune teller! As if this was not cosy enough, there was another boarder, also an organ grinder and their four children - three daughters aged two, four and six and a baby boy of just three weeks.

This goes some way to explaining why, in pictures of old Edinburgh, the streets are thronging with people. It was just too crowded indoors!

A Nineteenth Century Melting Pot
Some of the crowds came from the many lodging houses that existed in the Grassmarket at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1881, James Giblin, his wife, five daughters, one son, two step-daughters, one step-son, his siter-in-law and her son, lived with two lodgers in a house with two rooms. In the same stair (in another house) lived eleven Bavarian musicians, eight Italian musicians and two shopkeepers, with the lodging-house keepers and his wife and daughter.

At 65 Grassmarket (Gilmour's Close) lived Bridget Jones and her nine-strong family, with their fifty-four lodgers, and William Gribbin and his family, with their eighty-four lodgers (in twenty-one rooms!) I would have preferred to stay with Patrick Cusack, at number 85, as he and his wife and family lived with only twenty-one lodgers in the comparative luxury of ten rooms.

Even during today's Edinburgh festival, when the town is packed with artists and tourists from the four corners of the globe, when grumpy Edinburgh residents Scottish Forebears find their favorite Pubs and cafes stowed out with visitors, the Grassmarket is never as busy as this!

The More Things Change...

By the time of the 1891 Census, number 65 was known as "Jones' Lodging House", and number 75 had become a model lodging house, licensed for 411 residents, also known as "Calvert's Lodging House" or "Castle lodging House". There were rooms to let for more than three hundred people at number 68,74,89 (Warden's Close) and 100A Grassmarket and at number 79 still lived the Italian Musicians and a botanist from Saxony.

Nearly all of the lodgers were men - single or widowed, and most were in employment - working as boot-closers, tinware-hawkers, horse-shoers, rivet-makers, all sorts of jobs no-one does nowadays.

...The More They Stay The Same
Interestingly, even today, Edinburgh's Grassmarket still contains lodging houses for men down on their luck. These sit incongruously next to new hotels, specialist shops selling expensive handbags, "vintage" clothing, kites, cookbooks (run by a famous Fat Lady) and fossils (found by a famous paleontologist), student pubs and smart new flats with spectacular views of the castle.

What Was Life Like For Your Family?
If you'd like to know more about how your Scottish ancestors lived, get in touch with us to learn more about Scottish genealogy and what we can do to trace your Scottish family tree for you.
Vicky Stephenson .