The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde (4 page)

The gutters ran ‘as big as burns’, reported a resident of the time. And if you wandered off the beaten track after a night at the club or tavern, it was spooky and dangerous, dark and overpoweringly smelly. This thanks not only to the elevated residents slopping out their human waste to the walkways below at the day’s end – while famously crying out ‘Gardyloo!’ to alert passers-by – but also to horses and the proximity of the Nor’ Loch which, before becoming the fragrant Princes Street Gardens, was a stagnant cesspool for the submergence of every unpleasantness imaginable, including bodies and parts thereof.

Oh, and of course, there were the fish.

The fish? Not the kind that might have lived (or more likely, died) in a filthy pond like that, but fish from the cleaner waters around Newhaven and Leith that were buyable at the Fishmarket Close or from wandering, basket-laden fishwives. These fish, after being relieved of much flesh, would be used for a certain degree of illumination along these dreadfully dingy closes. Their scales would be luminescent enough to justify wary residents nailing the skins at intervals along the closes’ lowering walls. They did not exactly light up the scene like sunshine but certainly, on ageing, could pick out a direction of travel, rather like the emergency floor lights in modern aircraft, while adding to the general odour.

It was understandable that people craved to see where they were going as they made their way through the overcrowded Old Town, down these dark narrow alleys and up the exhaustingly steep climb to their cold, cramped homes – which could be as high as twelve storeys before touching the clouds. In the absence of gas or electric street lighting and given the outdoor uselessness of unprotected beeswax or tallow candles, there were only one or two other ways of easing your nocturnal fears and discomforts. It did not give out much light, but the whale-oil-fired street lamp, occasionally protruding from its street wall mounting, was a lot better than nothing. Then there was the hand-carried dark lantern as favoured by Deacon Brodie on his night-time adventures, the ‘dark’ meaning that its candle-flame could be closed off to the elements (and indoor curious eyes) by means of a sliding shutter. And there were the young lads – or ‘caddies’ – with burning-brand torches who would see people safely home for a price.

Once indoors, the piscatorial pong would be even stronger, as fish sustained the people – packed like sardines themselves – not only as food but also as a source of oil for their ‘cruisie’ lamps. Fuel was also needed for warmth, cooking and the boiling of water, and all of these heavy essentials had to find their way up the steep and filthy, urine-smelling common stairs. Enter again, the blue-bonneted caddies, some of whom would specialise in carrying water barrels on their backs.

Caddies? Readers will be familiar with the word as used to describe a golfer’s club-carrier, and while its provenance is not entirely clear, owing something to the French word
cadet
– for a military officer’s helper – it seems to have reached the International Open courses via a circuitous route from the capital of the cradle of golf, where it depicted something akin to a street messenger. Described by the chronicler Robert Chambers as ‘ragged and half-blackguard-looking’, caddies were nonetheless allowed to be ‘amazingly acute and intelligent’ … and, apparently, trustworthy.

They were mainly rough-and-ready characters from the Highlands who – always for a price – would employ their raw power to perform the carrying feats that kept the tenement dwellers alive. But that was only part of their repertoire. They were also guides, gossip-mongers, people-finders and general dogsbodies (an interesting word in view of the fact that in the mid-1700s they were employed by the town council to catch and kill every dog they saw to prevent the spread of rabies). Edinburgh’s first historian, William Maitland, described them as ‘errand-men, news-cryers or pamphlet-sellers’ who, as of 1714, became an organised society subject to regulation and supervision by the council, responsible for upholding the monopoly of members’ activities in the city. Council magistrates determined the number of members, who each wore a standard-issue blue linen apron as a badge of identification ‘which none may lend on pain of losing his privilege’.

Congregating around the central Mercat Cross near St Giles cathedral and summoned with the call ‘caddie!’ on a first come, first served basis, they had strict rules of behaviour in each other’s interest, with Rule 5 saying: ‘When one is called to go an errand, or sell a paper, where two or more are present, he who cometh first to the person who called him, shall have the benefit of what is sold or had for going the errand, unless the person who called otherwise determine it.’

You couldn’t be in the city for more than a few hours, wrote the young visiting Englishman Edward Topham in his
Letters from Edinburgh
in the mid-1770s …

… Before being watched, and your name, and place of abode, found out by the Cadies … and they are of great utility, as without them it would be very difficult to find anybody, on account of the great height of the houses, and the number of families in every building. [They] faithfully execute all commands at a very reasonable price. Whether you are in need of a
valet de place
, a pimp, a thief-catcher, or a bully, your best resource is to the fraternity of Cadies. In short, they are the tutelary guardians of the City, and it is entirely owing to them, that there are fewer robberies, and less house-breaking in Edinburgh, than any where else.

Another Englishman – an army officer – recalled in the 1750s how he was guided to his lodgings at night, just as the beat of the city drum signalled the time for residents to empty their chamber-pots from their windows with that cry of ‘Gardyloo!’ (from the French
gardez vous de l’eau:
watch out for the water). ‘The guide went before me to prevent my disgrace, crying out all the way, with a loud voice, “Hud your haunds”. The throwing up of a sash, or otherwise opening a window, made me tremble, while behind and before me, at some little distance, fell the terrible shower.’

With water being newly piped to houses instead of being drawn from communal street-wells, the caddies and their
raison d’
ê
tre
within the city disappeared in the early part of the next century – but not before being taken up by the embryonic golfing fraternity, the gentlemen of Edinburgh who hired them to carry their golf clubs when playing on Leith Links and Bruntsfield Links.

Anyway, the growing favour being won by this civilised sport among wealthier sections in Brodie’s time – when George III benignly ruled the joined-up post-Culloden British nations while the American colonies were going their independent way and the French were about to revolt against their aristocracy – indicated that there was another side to the chaotic, unruly and often belligerent life of what could be truly a hell of a city.

And yet, and yet …

Visiting travellers, like the 24-year-old Topham, had often gasped at its theatrical elegance, despite the rough human texture that lay beneath, and in a period of relative stability and generally buried differences with the outside world, its other, shinier side began to push ahead in the reputational stakes.

While this Other Edinburgh was growing into a dramatic stage for intellectual enlightenment, attracting some of the country’s best brains, the city’s physical beauty was also being enhanced with many expensive new public buildings created in the Greek neo-classical style, so that it would sometimes be known as the ‘Athens of the North’. And to top it all there was the New Town, a monumental new architectural endeavour which, despite still having rather basic lavatories, was to organise the city on an elegant grid system and tempt the professional classes from the Old Town over to the previously underdeveloped north of the city, where their successors are still to be found today.

Not that the more refined citizenry had been getting their footwear dirty on the slimy, slippery cobbled surfaces of the High Street. Fine ladies in long dresses over many petticoats could lift themselves above the mucky surface by fixing iron pattens to their shoes. For others who would normally travel by carriage – but couldn’t here because of the tight thoroughfare and narrow closes between the tall houses – there was always the sedan chair. Perhaps that should be plural, chairs, as there were two types: those ornately decorated models owned by the well-heeled and the less fancy black-painted utilitarian types of the time, which were for hire in the manner of today’s black cabs.

What did it cost? The sedan tariff list of around 1770 – when a pair of chickens cost 1
s
(one shilling, about 5p today) and home rentals between £1 and £20 a year depending on social status – gives the price of a whole day’s hire as 4
s
(20p), while a single journey within the city would be 6
d
(2.5p). It was at least another shilling on top of that for any journey half a mile beyond the city limits.

The contraption, in which passengers could travel from door to door and even from one building’s interior to another, was carried by two muscular men, usually Highlanders again, with one trudging on ahead and one skittering along behind. And the gentleman or lady so keen to avoid the filthy streets touching their expensive clothes would enter from the front so that the carrying bars would not have to be removed.

It was, after all, a tough enough job for the carriers, as many of their customers were heavy and drunkenly relaxed old men. His brawny helpers also had to be rain and cold resistant, as sedan chairs were much in demand in bad weather – just like today’s taxis.

There were no such weighty challenges with the lighter package of Mr Brodie, though he was quite capable of being tipsy. Sometimes, of course, the sedan would take him to places that might suggest this apparently respectable businessman, councillor and Deacon of Wrights, this pillar of society was rather cracked and leaning – or at the very least a little off-centre. So how did he escape public censure for so long? How did he engender such discretion in such men if not through the look-what-we-have-in-common touch? And there were more surprisingly shrugged shoulders. Apart from all their other duties, the town centre’s army of caddies heard and saw everything of any interest in and around their patch. As such, they were the eyes and ears of the Town Guard, another colourful body of men, who, as the forerunners of the police when law enforcement was left entirely to local initiative, should have at least been interested in Mr Brodie’s already suspect nocturnal doings.

Colourful? Well, to a degree. Dressed in faded red uniforms and plumed hats, the Town Guard consisted of about 120 men officially devoted to guardianship of the city and preservation of public order. They were present on all public occasions but only a limited number were regularly on duty. The rest were allowed to work at their trades, subject to being called out at a moment’s notice. In truth, the body was something of a Dad’s Army, composed mainly of discharged soldiers who were still able – just – to shoulder a musket or wield a Lochaber axe and use them in a street brawl.

The young poet Robert Fergusson, who died four years before Brodie’s demise, called them ‘that black banditti’, having encountered their tender mercies too often after his ‘regular bacchanalian irregularities’. Sir Walter Scott wrote of them that, being generally Highlanders:

They were, neither by birth, education, nor former habits, trained to endure with much patience the insults of the rabble; or the provoking petulance of truant-boys, and idle debauchees, of all descriptions, with whom their occupation brought them into contact. On the contrary, the tempers of the poor old fellows were soured by the indignities with which the mob distinguished them … On all occasions – when holiday licensed some riot or irregularity – a skirmish with these veterans was a favourite recreation with the rabble of Edinburgh.

Nevertheless, it remains a mystery how Brodie’s capricious ways and ‘protracted peccadilloes’ (Roughhead’s words) somehow escaped the attentions of the Guardsmen even at the very beginning of his criminal career. It was to become highly suspected at one point that he had helped spring a convicted and condemned criminal from the Tolbooth Prison and had him hidden, fed and watered within the grandiose Greyfriars tomb of Sir George Mackenzie, tormentor of the Covenanters a century before. But nothing could actually be pinned on him. And indeed, until the very end, Brodie retained the respect and esteem of his fellow citizens, as he went about his daily business, regularly attending council meetings, and latterly even sharing his colleagues’ anguish at the dreadful series of crimes that had befallen the great old capital. Even more puzzling with hindsight was the apparent lack of neighbour-to-neighbour gossip about him, when ‘stairhead’ scandal was a phenomenon well recognised by Fergusson:

Now Stairhead Critics, senseless Fools,

Censure their Aim, and Pride their Rules,

In Luckenbooths, wi’ glouring Eye,

Their Neighbours sma’est Faults descry:

If ony Loun should dander there,

Of aukward Gate, and foreign Air,

They trace his Steps, till they can tell

His Pedigree as weel’s himsell.

Luckenbooths? Built around 1460, these ‘locked booths’ housed Edinburgh’s first permanent shops, sitting in a row of seven tenement buildings connected to the Old Tolbooth Prison and running parallel to St Giles Cathedral. Originally exclusive to goldsmiths and jewellers, they later housed ‘ane chymist and druggist’, a baker, milliner, hairdresser and even a toyshop.

***

With the great looming bulks of St Giles and the Tolbooth centrally dominating all proceedings, and the potential targets of many more side-by-side shops lining the route between the closes, this then was the condensed world of William Brodie. His life, his work, his home, his leisure and his loves – not to mention his crimes – were all concentrated around this mile-long encapsulation of human life and all its failings and foibles. The many layers of its deeply textured society provided an aptly confusing backdrop for the identity crisis from which he obviously suffered. For while he would often avail himself of a sedan chair as a member of the city elite, he also felt something acutely in common with the simple men who carried him there. The feeling was almost mutual, as the customer who was described in some accounts as ‘small and slender’ was easier to carry than most, as well as quite affable and able to show the common touch. But it wasn’t as simple as that, of course.