THE lives of 13 past residents of an Edinburgh tenement have been recovered by a local historian, and their stories tell a dark tale of the city.
Storyteller and historian Diarmid Mogg has revealed the shocking history of the building by the Union Canal, which housed multiple soldiers who were killed overseas.
The building, 35 Watson Crescent, was also the site of a break-in and assault by a murderer who was let out of prison daily for work.
The tenement’s grisly past is laid out on Tenement Town, on which you can find retellings of past lives in many other buildings in the city.
Buildings like this one, along the Union Canal, were built in 1898 for workers in the nearby foundries, breweries, and rubber factory that previously occupied the current Edinburgh Printmakers building.
Diarmid goes back as far as 1912, stating that a tenant named Andrew Spittal used to take his chickens to the Edinburgh Ornithological Society show, where he won prizes for the best yellow Border hens and best Border bird.
Unfortunately, other residents led less joyful lives than Andrew, such as a pipe layer (also living in the building in 1912) who was killed by a skidding lorry that crushed him against iron railings on Comely Bank Avenue.
It was also discovered that at least 22 men who lived on Watson Crescent were killed in the First World War – many of them living in number 35.
Four men were killed in action in France during 1917 and 1918, after enlisting in the Royal Scots.
A man named Duncan Scott was also killed soon after enlisting in the “Leith Battalion”, in a train crash that killed 200 soldiers near Gretna Green, Dumfries and Galloway.
The incident is considered the worst train disaster in British history and occurred after two trains collided with a stationary local train due to neglect from signalmen.
The building was also home to multiple petty criminals, including Annie Cruickshank who was fined £3 for stealing a handbag and 19s from a Princes Street shop in 1921.
The bad luck continues with a family of three in the 1930s – Margaret, William, and their son John.
Margaret reportedly died of cervical cancer in 1936, and four years later her son John passed away in the Sick Children’s Hospital with an abscess on his lung – he was nine years old.
Later, a fire in the flat left William with burns on his feet and blood clots in his legs, which spread to his lungs and killed him in 1946.
Finally, to add to the frightful series of events under one roof, 76-year-old Bertha Gatley was found unconscious and beaten up in 1970, by a man who had been let out of prison to complete a “training for freedom” scheme.
James Watson was a 35-year-old who was serving a life sentence for the murder of a prostitute in Glasgow.
After working a shift in Fountainbridge Dairy, he returned to a local pub to drink for hours before breaking into Bertha’s flat where he took £6 and some of her belongings, before leaving her in a coma with a broken jaw.
Diarmid states that “Watson—who, by some probably meaningless coincidence, shared his name with Bailie James Watson, after whom the street was named—was given a 12-year sentence.
“He was paroled in 1998 but convicted of drink driving the following year and returned to jail, where he may still be. Bertha died in 1973, aged eighty.”
He also admits “this was a grim one”.
