Edinburgh Life Stories, part five: 'I saw miners fighting the police in Edinburgh's Grassmarket during the General Strike'

AT 97 years young, Tommy Carson has become a bit of an Edinburgh celebrity. Impresario, pensioners’ champion and a music hall showman in the good old days of variety, there seems little Tommy hasn’t done.
Tommy Carson records his memories for the Living Memory AssociationTommy Carson records his memories for the Living Memory Association
Tommy Carson records his memories for the Living Memory Association

It was a chance visit to the Living Memory Association’s museum in Ocean Terminal, during which he spotted himself in an old photograph, that led to his sharing memories of his childhood in the Grassmarket of the 1920s and ’30s with the Association’s Miles Tubb. Those memories are now part of the Life Story podcast series.

Born in 1922 and raised in the Grassmarket, Tommy remains a force of nature today, with vivid memories of his early days. Never one to see things through rose-tinted glasses, however, Tommy is not afraid to recall the poverty of the time, of how mother struggled to make ends meet and of watching police and miners fighting in the West Bow during the General Strike of 1926. In fact, watching that violence unfold is one of his earliest memories.

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As a child, he lived at 91 West Bow, now a listed building, “It had a stair made of wooden panels, I think it was a fire hazard but we didn’t know about things like that in those days,” he says. “When I was four years old, in 1926, I saw the miners fighting with the police in the General Strike, terrible, terrible... They came down Victoria Street to the West Bow and the police were at the West Bow moving up from our well, which gave out water to the people. There was scrambles, fighting... I was looking out a window as I was only a kiddie but it was sad, very sad.”

97 year old Tommy Carson97 year old Tommy Carson
97 year old Tommy Carson
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Camping by Portobello beach

“We used to watch the girls skipping and sing as they did, ‘The wind, the wind, the wind blows low...’. Leroy was a made up game, but you made up all your games. One boy ran the game, then you all hid, he would come looking for you and when he caught you he would put you in his den, but the other boys could run in and free you from the den.”

When not playing in the street, Tommy went to St Ignatius Roman Catholic school on Glen Street, he recalls, “We used to go into the Protestant school for school diners and we never fought.”

“I remember my dad going to the employment exchange, the buroo. He wasn’t home with his money - about 3/- a week when he wasn’t working - as he’d called into a pub on The Grassmarket called Campbell’s, it’s The Last Drop now, and my mother said to me, ‘Go down and tell your dad his dinner’s ready.’

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“So I went down and, unknown to me, my mother must have followed me and when I walked into the pub my father was in a corner singing Danny Boy.

“Before I could say anything my mother said, ‘You, up the road and give me the buroo money.’ So she took him up the road, and he had a good drink in him mind, and as she pushed him up the stairs she was saying, ‘I’ll Danny Boy you...’”

Thoughtfully, he adds, “We had no money but he was drunk. My mother had to keep the family together, she had four or five jobs a day, scrubbing stairs and cleaning peoples houses. She’d get a couple of shillings in her hand and that was a lot of money because your dad wasn’t always working. It was hard to get a job. Very few people were tradesmen and you just got work when you could.”

Tommy had an older sister who looked after him when his mother was working. He says, “She was four and half years older than me and married at 16.

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“Everybody wanted away from the Grassmarket because they had no money, that didn’t change your character and make you bad, they were still good people, they were just poor. Poverty. You did your best to live but you did have carbolic soap to wash yourself and that made all the difference.

“I left school at 13 and you relied on who your mother and father knew to get a job. I got a job as a Page Boy at the NB Hotel, now the Balmoral, a highlight was seeing all the actors who stayed there, all Americans. I had a blue or a black uniform with buttons down the front and a wee box hat with a strap under the chin. My job was to take people down in the lift to the station from the hotel - they could go from the hotel to the station or the station to the hotel without anyone seeing them. You were on call all the time and my wage was 2/6d a week and tips.”

Still times were hard though, he recalls, “There were two pawn brokers up the West Port, you’d put your best suit in on the Monday and take it out on the Friday for the weekend. You paid a penny extra to have it hanging up during the week. That happened all the time.”

Listen to more of Tommy’s tales of Growing up in The Grassmarket of the 1920s and 30s with The Life Story Podcast free by going to

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https://lifestory.libsyn.com/tommy-carson-growing-up-in-the-grassmarket-1920s-and-30s

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