The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde Read Online Free PDF Page B

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