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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

For more stories of urban misery and cruel fate, go to tenementtown.com.

Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

Plans changed in favour of the more profitable tenement housing that would come to define the city’s new districts in the 19th century, leaving the older buildings oddly stranded in a row of taller neighbours, and giving the last Georgian residents of the southside a taste of the new age to come.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

Rankeillor Street was envisioned as a terrace of elegant townhouses in the style of the New Town, but only two (shaded on the map below) had been built by 1817, when a slump in the market halted construction.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

1835—Alex Peat, bookseller, who was drowned, along with his brother, when the ice cracked under a group of skaters on Duddingston loch—“these two, melancholy to relate, sank before any efficient aid could be afforded.”

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

1860—Dr James Lawrie (ground-floor-right), who owned the Sciennes Hill Hydropathic Baths, featuring a "NEW and IMPROVED ELECTRO-CHEMICAL BATH for the removal of Mercury and other deleterious substances from the body, as well as a remedy for Paralysis, Sciatica, Rheumatic, and Nervous Complaints.”

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

1866—Miss Margaret Laing, who died of “Natural Decay”, aged 70—the daughter of Major Thomas Laing, who fought in the Peninsular war, where he was nicknamed “Robinson Crusoe” and shunned by the other officers due to his “not being very exact in his dress and being eccentric in his habits”.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

1866—John Bent, from Sussex, whose studies in the medical school were financed by an inheritance from his grandfather, who had made a fortune selling sugar grown by his slaves in his plantation in Demerara.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

Thomas had practised in various fancy addresses in the New Town before, in his 50th year, moving to Rankeillor Street in the southside, where, within a month, he contracted pneumonia and died of a heart attack.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

1883—Thomas Winton, dentist (ground-floor-left), “who has had long experiences in the first houses of London and Paris” and “manufactures and inserts Beautiful Enamelled Teeth at prices so moderate as to defy all competition.”

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

“I never at any other time had a feeling in any way resembling that. At the time, I was in perfect health, and in every way in comfortable circumstances. I may add I never knew of my sister’s illness.”

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

“By the next mail, I got word that at 11 am on the 7th January my sister died. The island I lived in was St Kitts, and the death took place in Edinburgh. Please note the hours and allow for the difference in time and you will notice a remarkable coincidence.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

“I got up with a strong feeling that there was something happening at my old home in Scotland. At 7 am I mentioned to my sister-in-law my strange dread, and said even at that hour what I dreaded was taking place.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

1883—Mr A C___n (ground-floor-left), who wrote to the Institute for Psychical Research to report an uncanny incident that took place on 7 January 1871, when he was living in the West Indies:

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

Samuel died of a heart attack in 1909, aged 60, in Newcastle, where he had opened his own picture framer’s (“Deathblow to Big Profits—Best & Cheapest Picture-Framing Shop in the City”). Isadora went to live with one of their children in South Africa, where she died in 1946, aged 84.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

(They had eight other children— Paulina, Isaac, Louise, Henry, Solomon, Reuben, Jacob and Floretta—who all survived into adulthood.)

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

1874—Samuel Glasstone, father of the above children, a Russian Jew who arrived in Scotland with his parents around 1860. His father went into business as a picture framer, and Samuel followed him into the trade. When he was 25, he married Isadora Mayer, the daughter of another picture framer.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

1883—Baby Glasstone, name not recorded, stillborn.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

1884—Agnes Glasstone, who died when she fell and fractured her skull, aged nine.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

1887—Jacob Glasstone, who died of whooping cough, aged eight months.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

Dr Stocks married his fiancée later that year, and continued in practice into the 20th century.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

The BMJ declared that the responsible functionaries, from the “blundering policeman” to the “careless police solicitor”, should be censured in Parliament. That did not transpire.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, outraged on the doctor’s behalf, noted that “Dr Stocks was released by means of a note whose laconic and curt tone of officialism touches the sublime, the like of which might be written to announce the release of a dog.”

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

He remained there for two weeks, until uproar from the medical community—the BMJ called the case “a startling misuse of the powers vested in the representatives of the Crown”—won his release; all charges dropped.

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Diarmid Mogg @diarmidmogg.bsky.social · 1d

A post-mortem confirmed that Alice had undergone an abortion; Dr Stocks was charged with murder, brought before the court, then “handcuffed between two pickpockets and conveyed in custody to the town gaol” to await trial.

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