It’s the result of a social history project involving a group of people who met at Royston/Wardieburn community centre over a period a several months to talk about some of the things they remembered from their childhood and as they grew up, went to work, perhaps got married and had families.
They reflected on the influence of school, remembered going to the pictures and the dancing, recalled their feelings about workplaces like Scottish Gas at Granton, and discussed the changing face of the city.
Jim Aitken, a retired teacher who was the tutor for the social history group, said: “This was one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve worked on. It was serious and it was crazy - so much humour, so many diversions - and it’s a great social history. You’re dealing with stories, with memories, and you’re with a understanding of the stories and the memories - and it’s all here in this booklet.”
Here are extracts of some of the stories from the booklet, mostly in their own words.
5. Tales of the tawse
Several of those who took part in the project have memories of the tawse - the school belt. Liz Hiddleston remembered her classmates being belted for spelling mistakes and for giving wrong answers in Mental Arithmetic. Winnie Burke spoke of being hit across the hand by a teacher with a wooden ruler and her hands bleeding. "This is surely not the way to go about creating a love of learning." Pat Gilhooly recalled a particularly brutal Geography teacher who would make her friends cry with the ferocity of his beltings. She was to be belted but she took her hands away as the belt was about to hit her hand and said to the teacher, ’I suggest you take this up with my mother,’ and walked away. | TSPL Photo: Phil Wilkinson
6. 'My very own Stradivarius'
Helen McRae wanted to build a summer house in the back garden for her husband after he developed diabetes and began to go blind, but there was no-one to help her. "My daughter attended Ainslie Park. She would have liked to do woodwork but that was a class only for boys. I decided that I would go and ask the Head at Craigroyston High School if I could attend the woodwork class as an adult. The Head agreed and told me I might get some ribbing from the boys but not to let it bother me. At the start they were a bit cheeky but it soon settled down and they were fine with me. I did manage to make the two doors for the summer house and got a joiner to fix them for me." She then joined an adult education class in woodwork. "My daughter needed a new bed and I thought I would make her a new one. In fact, I went on and made two. There was a posh lady in the class who came from Cramond and she was making a violin. We had a challenge with one another whereby she would make two beds and I would make a violin." And she did. She calls it 'my very own Stradivarius'. | TSPL Photo: Greg Macvean
7. 'Initially we were treated like lepers'
Anna Hutchison spent the first part of her childhood in Glasgow's Royston area before moving to its namesake in Edinburgh. She recalls: "My father had tuberculosis and was sent to Ruchill Hospital. It is a dangerous disease and it spread to the rest of our family with the exception of my sister and mum. I got it and went into hospital too. My mum and dad never married and this meant we were not entitled to a council house in those days. We lived in a single end with outside toilet in cramped, unhealthy conditions. This was why we moved through to Edinburgh. I was 10 years old, a mere child. We couldn’t believe we had an inside toilet and kept playing around with it so that it broke. And having a bath in the house felt like luxury. However, it was not plain-sailing. We were from Glasgow and had been victims of tuberculosis. We were initially treated like lepers and called every Weegie epithet you can imagine. There was an Edinburgh sense of superiority over us and I loathed it since we were all from the same class background. I also came to find that Glaswegians thought that everyone from Edinburgh was snobby and this too was ridiculous. There was one family who befriended us and that was the McGregors. I remain on friendly terms with them to this day. Gradually, we would be accepted and that was because we weren’t going anywhere else. | TSPL Photo: Albert Jordan
8. Finding my own way
Pat Gilhooly recalls being unimpressed by the churches her mother "dragged" her to as a child and then finding her own path. "My mother’s family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren. At age 9 my father died of his war injuries and this deeply affected my mum. She took to the church and joined various Baptist churches. In my teenage years I became what you might call ‘a wild child.’ I would go around on scooters and motor -bikes and smoke as well. I was becoming a rebel and this coincided with the flower power rebellion of hippies opposed to the Vietnam War. This was the time in 1967 when Scott Mackenzie sang about heading to San Francisco with flowers in your hair. There was a counter-culture that emerged and one writer who became popular around this time was Hermann Hesse. Reading this writer who had died in 1962 but whose works started to gather a following in the late 1960s, was nothing short of life changing for me. It was his novel ‘Siddharta’ that made me realise – just as Hesse had realised earlier – that ‘for different people, there are different ways to God." | TSPL