Podcast

Transcript

Four speakers: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Antonia Laurence-Allen [ALA]; Emma Inglis [EI]

[MV]
Love Scotland, brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
Behind every successful man is a surprised woman. Well, so the old joke goes. But when you look at the history of the world of work, the further you go back down the ages, the less visible women seem to be. That could lead us to believe that Scotland was once comprised of either grand ladies who enjoyed pastimes, or menial workers. But of course, there was so much in between.

So, we thought we’d take a look at some Trust properties and do a little digging on some of the women who inhabited them to discover what their working lives were and how they reflected the changing role of women as a whole.

To do this, I’ve enlisted the help of a couple of women who do a fine job of work at the Trust. Both are regional curators: Antonia Laurence-Allen and Emma Inglis. Ladies, welcome.

[ALA]
Thank you.

[EI]
Thank you. It’s lovely to be here.

[JB]
I’ve asked you to do some work for me and to choose three women each. Now, women’s history isn’t always front and centre. So, Antonia, was it difficult to choose three women?

[ALA]
Well, the short answer is no, because there are many women in the properties and they lie dormant, so to speak, because they’re often behind the scenes. They’re the ones who are doing the interiors; they’re the ones who are managing the estate. But what happens is often the men are the ones whose title is on the door, so to speak. They’re the ones who ostensibly pay the bills, or are the ones who charge for the architects, that kind of idea. But the more you dig, the more you find women who are actually involved in a huge amount of work on estates and in towns. And we’re starting to dig into those histories a lot more than we ever have.

[JB]
Emma, how did you fare?

[EI]
Well, I think I would agree with Antonia that, in the last few years, we’ve very deliberately been trying to find women’s histories at NTS properties. Some of those properties obviously lend themselves to women’s histories more than others do. For my part, I work with a number of very small properties where women have been quite prominent in the history of that place and have had a working history. So, for me, it’s been about putting some meat on the bones of those stories and trying to dig a little bit deeper about women that I have already known about. It’s just about going that extra mile in the research to find out what more we know about them as individuals, but also about the other women that were around them.

[ALA]
Oh yes, and I would add one more thing to that, which is instead of saying ‘he bought’ or ‘he ordered’, it’s turning it into ‘they bought’ and ‘they ordered’ – because often it’s the man and the woman, and actually predominately the woman, who’s doing the decorating and the interiors. It’s just that subtle difference of recognising that they’re a partnership. We always default to the male in history; at least we have. So, if that little shift of saying ‘they’ rather than ‘he’ is a simple little thing that we’re starting to do, I think is helpful.

[JB]
It changes the whole dynamic, doesn’t it? Well, I’ve asked you both to choose 6 objects from Trust properties as jumping-off points for what they tell us about our subjects. So, Antonia, would you like to start?

[ALA]
Yes, I’d love to start. The first object that I picked for you was something called a Bellarmine jug, and we have it at Gladstone’s Land.

[JB]
What’s Gladstone’s Land?

[ALA]
Gladstone’s Land is a tenement house in Edinburgh. It’s on the Lawnmarket and it is a trading tenement. Throughout, from the 16th century all the way up to now, it’s had various people living in it, from the ground floor and basement all the way up to the fifth and sixth floors.

The lady that we’re talking about today, her name is Issobel Johnstone, and we know about her because of the man that she worked for, which is quite common in the time. She wasn’t necessarily recorded as living in Gladstone’s Land, but her boss was. Her boss was John Riddoch. He was a merchant, and she owed him, on his death in 1634, £122, which in today’s money is about £20,000 It’s a lot of money.

[JB]
Crikey! £20,000 worth of ale! That’s a lot of ale.

[ALA]
That’s a lot of ale! So, she owed him money, but I think there was a combination of things going on here. She was a taverner, but she wasn’t the taverner. She was actually called a brewster, someone who brewed ale and sold ale, and this was a particularly female profession at the time because it was a domestic production. It was traditionally the wife of burgesses, merchant men in cities and burghs like Edinburgh, who brewed ale. Ale was the thing that people drank the most – morning, noon and night – because it was safer than water and most people couldn’t afford wine. Only the wealthiest could afford wine.

A lot of women got into the production. You had to make a lot of ale in order to feed the city of ale for every single day. Women were making this domestically, but they got into doing it professionally. And what they would do is they would buy the ale from their merchant and then they would sell it. They’d either store it in these Bellarmine jugs or they would literally pour it into people’s mugs with these jugs. And every time they poured a mug of ale, they would get some money for it. And the profit they made, the little bit extra that they paid, was their wage.

She would work most of the day running this tavern and she would then give the money back in dribs and drabs to her boss. But she didn’t just do that; she also worked in his shop. She worked cleaning out his store, and we think she was basically a servant for him.

What’s really interesting, I think, about it is that she basically had a business arrangement as a woman and as a servant with her master, which is quite an interesting working role for women at the time.

[JB]
Was it acceptable for a woman to be working in a tavern?

[ALA]
Yes, it was an acceptable job for a woman of many different classes. If you were the wife of a wealthy burgess, you didn’t have to necessarily work. You probably brewed your ale for domestic production. But if you needed to work as a woman, then there were certain jobs that were respectable, and this was one of them.

[JB]
What I didn’t know was that the idea of a man supporting a woman within a household, which we would think was always the case, was very much not the social norm back then. They both worked, they worked independently – there was equality, and they both supported a home and a family.

[ALA]
That’s right. I’m not going to tell you that there weren’t some efforts to try and control how much women worked. In the ale industry, there were attempts to control which women could work in the industry. I’ve got an idea in 1530 there was legislation in Edinburgh that a woman had to own her own brewing equipment. Now, that was expensive, so there are only certain kinds of women who could afford that.

But then in 1596, so we’re talking the end of the 16th century, there was the formation of something called the Fellowship and Society of Ale and Beer Brewers of the Burgh of Edinburgh. It’s a bit of a mouthful. They were threatened rather by the economic prosperity of women brewers, because by this time they were doing really, really well, brewing ale. So, they decreed that no one except the members of the Society were allowed to sell or buy the ale and beer produced by the Society – and you had to pay a fee to be part of this Society. So again, you’re excluding certain portions of women.

What’s interesting about this, though, is it didn’t last very long. It started in 1596, and it was disbanded in 1619. You only got about 20 years and the women were basically brewing ale and getting on with the job of feeding Edinburgh citizens.

[JB]
We’ll leave Issobel tending the bar in the 17th century. We’ll move to a less surprising working environment for women. Over to you, Emma, for your first chosen woman and your object.

[EI]
My first object is a painting of two women. It depicts the Borland sisters. Isabella is sitting at a handloom and she’s weaving probably some woollen cloth. It’s checked; it’s probably a woollen shawl. Her sister Marion is sitting with her back to the viewer and she’s sitting at a spinning wheel. This painting was produced in 1926 by a female artist called Alice Ramsay, who studied at the Glasgow School of Art, and it’s displayed at Weaver’s Cottage in Kilbarchan.

[JB]
And it was a life cycle thing, wasn’t it? They began in the industry as children.

[EI]
That’s right. It was very much expected that girls would take their part in what was essentially a family trade. Everybody was performing some part, and young girls would be employed first of all as pirn winders – essentially winding the thread onto the pirn, which then fitted into the shuttle. That was part of the weaving process. They might go on to be spinners as well and then they could also become apprentice, become a handloom weaver for themselves. And really, before the introduction of the Education (Scotland) Act in 1872, girls could be starting in their training, if you like, at a very young age.

[JB]
How old?

[EI]
Well, it seems to be in the census records that 11- or 12-year-old girls can be listed as apprentices until the Education (Scotland Act) came in and then after that it was very much 13, which was when girls left school.

[JB]
Oh, well, that’s alright then!

[EI]
They were well old enough to be going off and learning their trade then. They would be apprenticed until they were 17, and from the age of 17 effectively they were a fully fledged handloom weaver.

[JB]
What were the hours like?

[EI]
It depended what the trade was like. When trade was strong and prices were high, then the weavers, I suppose, were pretty much masters of their own fate and they could choose the hours that they wove. But it was a very unpredictable trade. And so, when the prices were depressed, then the weavers really had to weave particularly long hours. It could be something like 18 hours a day, just so that they could produce enough cloth to bring in the kind of wage that they needed to pay the rent and to pay for their food and all of those other expenses in life.

[JB]
Were men and women workers valued the same?

[EI]
It seemed to be fairly equal. Obviously, a lot of the information that we have about it comes from newspaper reports, so you have to take a little bit of a sense-check that their reports are probably written with some sort of angle. But they quite often deal quite equally with the male weavers and also the female weavers, particularly before the end of the 19th century when weaving was very strong.

And there was a real acknowledgement not only of the education that girls received and how important that was to them becoming fully fledged weavers and part of the trade – because obviously they had to understand mathematics and language, because that all fed into their understanding of patterns and being able to create the cloth – but also a recognition of how valuable it was to have a young lady who was a handloom weaver as a wife. This was an important thing to be marrying a girl who was a handloom weaver. Because what she was able to weave clearly then contributed to the economics of the whole family. So, it was very much acknowledged, certainly within Kilbarchan anyway, that both male and female weavers had a role to play.

[JB]
Much is made of quite a famous chap from Kilbarchan called Willie Meikle, who plied his trade quite famously abroad and he was a bit of a showman for the industry. No mention of his wife, but I understand that she was there along with him and completing equal tasks.

[EI]
That’s right. You have to look quite hard to find Maggie, or Margaret, Meikle. So much of the publicity around Willie Meikle was about Willie Meikle. But if you get your magnifying glass out and look a bit more closely, you can see that there are references to either his wife supporting his trade shows by spinning, but also sometimes taking to the loom herself and demonstrating the trade.

I think Willie was particularly good at selling the notion of the quality of handloom cloth at a time when the industry was pretty much dead in the water in Kilbarchan; there were really only a handful of weavers left. Most of the attention was put onto the male weavers and this loss of a noble craft and the idea of the man as the breadwinner.

[JB]
Why was this? Why were women becoming eclipsed?

[EI]
I wonder if it’s because of the generally external perception of the man as the breadwinner. The loss of the breadwinner of his trade was possibly regarded as more important than the loss of trade of a woman who, in a way, if she stopped weaving, she was still in the household. She was still looking after the children or looking after her elderly parents or whatever, and doing all those domestic activities that she already would have been doing side by side with the handloom weaving. So, the women just, I guess, sort of slid away, whereas the men, because that was their only job, maybe it meant more that they were lost.

But this is one of the reasons why I quite like this painting by Alice Ramsay, because it doesn’t portray the last days of handloom weaving in Kilbarchan in this sepia, mournful light. It’s showing two women who are busy in their workshop; they’re engaged in their trade. It’s lovely and light, it’s bright, it’s full of activity, it feels very positive – and it’s a very different sort of message that was applied to the male handloom weavers at exactly the same time.

[JB]
And that painting comes from about 1926, were you saying?

[EI]
Yes, 1926, and notably painted by a woman who perhaps had a different perception of the trade to male painters who were painting the lone male weaver at his loom.

[JB]
OK, well, you get three women in that, so you get 3 points! Let’s go back to Antonia now. We’re going to climb the social ladder. We’re going back in time, but we’re going to climb the social ladder. And our destination is Alloa Tower in Clackmannanshire.

[ALA]
Yes, Lady Frances Charlotte Erskine was born in 1715 and she’s the daughter of the 6th Earl of Mar. He ends up leading the Jacobite uprising in 1715 and it ends in Sheriffmuir, which is the battle just up the way from Alloa.

He doesn’t do very well and so he’s exiled and has to forfeit his estates. He is off with his wife and his newborn baby to Europe. While he’s in Europe, he goes off to Bohemia and he goes on a trip and he sees the glassworks there. There’s this amazing expertise in the area for making glass. And he knows that his property in Alloa is perfect for glassmaking because it has the sand that you need and the salt that you need, the sodium. It also has the coal to fire the kilns and it has the transportation links, so he’s desperate to get back to do it. But he dies before he can manage to get home.

It’s many years later, in 1740, when Lady Charlotte Frances Erskine is back in Scotland. And she marries …

[JB]
But before she goes, what is the object you have for us though?

[ALA]
It’s a glass bottle. You can find this at Alloa Tower. It’s one of the bottles that was made at that period of time in Alloa. It’s a very short stubby bottle and it was made blowing into a mould. You’d get this lump of molten glass and you’d blow into it, put it into a mould and then blow it until it fit the mould. And then, when it was cool, the mould broke and there was your glass.

[JB]
Was she allowed back then?

[ALA]
Yes, the land was forfeited but it was bought by the Earl of Mar’s brother Lord Grange. He was a bit of a nasty piece of work. But his son was the one who married Lady Frances Charlotte Erskine, so she married her cousin and kept the land therefore in the family. They married in 1740. Then they had the 2nd Jacobite Uprising in 1745, and only a handful of years after that, she’s decided to open this glassworks.

[JB]
She decided herself? How unusual was this entrepreneurial streak for a woman of her status and at that time?

[ALA]
Really unusual. It’s not unusual for women to be involved in business, but normally they worked slightly a step behind their husbands or their fathers. This was quite unusual because she led the way. She still needed to get permission from her uncle, which she managed to do, and also get the say-so from her husband and from her brother. Once she got through all the men, then she rolled up her sleeves and she was the one who – apparently, she was quite witty and she was very charming – and she really managed to bring her very difficult uncle on side and she – this is what’s so brilliant! – she brought Bohemian glassworkers to Scotland up the Forth on the boat, probably that turned around and took coal back out.

She was really clever. She knew that she needed to bring their families as well and build houses for them so that they stayed. But also got them involved in building and designing the glassworks so that they created something that was industrial on an industrial scale. This is really important because really it’s the first industrial-scale glassworking factory in Scotland.

[JB]
Do we know anything of her input on a day-to-day scale? I’m not saying that she was near the furnace, but did she manage it effectively?

[ALA]
So, as well as being involved in the glassworks, she took a front seat in the Alloa coal business and introduced steam power at one of the collieries. She built one of the first trams in the country because she knew that the most efficient way of getting the coal to the port was on a wagon.

[JB]
And the thing is, she is not one of the women who have been airbrushed from history, so to speak, because when I was looking at the Alloa glassworks, she’s still front and centre as the woman who started it.

I was really surprised because at that time, we’re talking mid-18th century, I couldn’t find many facts and figures for Scotland. But in London, let me find this … that approximately 10% of businesses in London were run by women at that time, which I find very surprising. They all had business cards as well, which is another little addition. But the business cards didn’t have Miss or Mrs; they had an initial because it was still a little bit unseemly.

[ALA]
I wonder if a lot of those businesses were involved in the fashion trade for example?

[JB]
Milliners, silversmiths, printing seemed to have been acceptable.

[ALA]
Yeah, interesting, she’s quite unusual for this industrial dirty work. And very innovative. She had money. She had the estate, but she could have sat back and done her embroidery and not really bothered, and wandered around her beautiful estate and go to her orangery. But no, she decided – I think possibly she was her father’s daughter. And she had that business acumen, but also the drive to invest in the town around the estate. She knew what she was doing.

[JB]
Lady Francis Erskine. We’ll take a quick break and we’ll be back in a moment.

[MV]
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[JB]
Welcome back to Trust Women at Work, and the women doing the heavy lifting for me today are Antonia Laurence-Allen and Emma Inglis, who are both regional curators for the National Trust for Scotland. Now, a world of work which during the Victorian era was the biggest employer of women – domestic service. But by the Edwardian era, things were slowly changing. Emma, your next lady would have worked in the service of a family, but I doubt that she would have considered herself a domestic servant.

[EI]
My next lady is Janet Stewart and she started off as a nursemaid to the children of Walter and Anna Blackie. They had five children in total. They ranged over quite a number of ages.

[JB]
And they’re significant because of their home.

[EI]
Well, that’s right. Their home eventually was the Hill House in Helensburgh, which was designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Sometimes the house is more famous than the family, so on a bit of a mission to bring the family to the fore in the stories that we tell there. And part of telling that story is about looking at the people who supported the family in their life in the house. Because although they weren’t a fabulously wealthy family, they were certainly wealthy enough to have a number of indoor servants – and outdoor servants as well – when they set up home at the Hill House in 1904.

[JB]
And you have a lovely photograph. Who do we have in the photograph?

[EI]
In the photograph we have Agnes Blackie, who was the youngest of the Blackie girls, and she’s sitting here; I think she was probably about six years old in this photograph. She’s sitting in a landscape with grass all around her, trees in the background. And next to her is a lady who is of middle age, I suppose, wearing quite a severe black hat and a lovely blouse and a long skirt in very typical Edwardian style.

[JB]
It looks like little round spectacles as well, to make the look complete. Now, this is nanny Janet Stewart. What do we know about her?

[EI]
Janet Stewart was born up in Portsoy, right at the top of Aberdeenshire, quite a long way from Helensburgh. I don’t know how she started her working life with the Blackie family, but she certainly worked for them when the family lived in Glasgow and then in Dumbarton, so well before they came to Helensburgh. She must have been nanny to some of the older children as well before she became Agnes’s nanny. They called her Nana, and because she’d been with the family for such a long time, certainly the oral history that we have from family members suggests that the children regarded her with a great deal of affection. Probably she was the most constant figure across their day. Obviously, they see their mother and father as well, but it would have been Nana who was there with them from dawn until dusk.

[JB]
And this photograph roughly dates to when?

[EI
The photograph probably dates to around about 1906/1907, so the family would have been at the Hill House for a few years then. We know that it can’t be any later than 1910/1911 because at that date Janet Stewart got married; she must have been in her mid-40s by that age. She decided to get married, and she moved back up north, so she went to live in Turriff, up on the Aberdeenshire coast.

[JB]
Now the Hill House was a big house, but it wasn’t a grand house. It wasn’t a stately home. What sort of team of servants would they have had?

[EI]
Well, as well as the nanny, who obviously would have spent most of her time with the children, there were also probably a couple of housemaids. They would have been responsible for the general cleaning duties in the house on a day-to-day basis. There was also a cook who would have produced all the meals. She used a lot of vegetables from the garden, which was the domain of the gardener and the gardener’s assistant. And then there was also a table maid as well, whose sole duties revolved around family meals – laying the table, serving at the table, clearing the table, which as you can imagine actually probably took up quite enough of the day as it was, with three family meals and quite a big family to feed.

[JB]
This is an interesting choice because it was a time of great change, wasn’t it, for those who were working in service? I found some figures in the census in 1891 and – this is for the UK as a whole – the number of indoor domestic servants was 1.38 million. But then if we jump to 1911, it had gone down to 1.27 million and of course the decline continued, didn’t it?

[EI]
It did. I think what’s interesting about the nanny is how long she stayed with the family. Certainly, between the 1901 census, the 1911 and 1921 census, you see an increasing turnover of the other female staff not just in this house, but in other houses as well, of the same social strata.

[JB]
Was this because other job opportunities were emerging?

[EI]
Yes, I think so. There was also the influence of the First World War in opening women’s minds and eyes, I suppose, to the different opportunities that they might have. I think perhaps being a domestic servant was no longer the only obvious choice for women, that they did have other opportunities that they could take up. Perhaps by that date they were able to be a little bit more demanding about the conditions, that they might have a bit more agency as part of their work and able to move on. They didn’t necessarily stay with the same family for a long period of time. They could move to other jobs if they chose. They weren’t that dependent, by that date, on their employer in that sense.

[JB]
And this is the time for another change in that we all know about what happens below stairs because of Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey. But there was also an emergence of middle-class families in comparatively – comparatively, I stress – smaller houses who wanted domestic servants as well.

[EI]
Yes. One of the other properties that we own is in the West End of Glasgow and that was the home of a solicitor, so a comfortable upper-middle-class family. We can see in the family records there that they just had one live-in servant – a female servant.

[JB]
And this was quite a tough gig, wasn’t it? Because you were expected to do everything.

[EI]
Yes, it’s not a small house. It doesn’t look very big from the front, but it goes up a long way and it goes down and back a long way as well. Although there was beginning to be changes in technology, some labour-saving devices, there were still other jobs which would have been pretty heavy work. Like doing the household laundry for example. It still took the entire week to do the laundry, from the point where you put everything in the tub and gave it a good scrub, to drying it, to ironing it, to putting it back in the cupboards again. A lot of these things were pretty labour-intensive and you can’t really blame young girls – and they quite often were young girls – for not wanting to take that on as their life work.

[JB]
And in terms of Nana Stewart’s later life, she had developed a strong bond with the family, which continued even though she was married and moved away.

[EI]
It seems so. The children apparently went to visit her during the summer when they were on holiday, and they would go up to Turriff.

[JB]
Canny parents, trying to offload the children!

[EI]
It’s a good long way away. They did well there. So yes, they went to visit Nana Stewart in her new life in Turriff and spent family holidays with her. So, they must have developed a really strong affection.

[JB]
That was a great example of shifting times. We’re going to a more intangible female force now. Antonia, you’ve chosen Elizabeth Hornel, who is the sister of someone much more well known: the painter Edward Atkinson Hornel. Why have you chosen her and what’s your object?

[ALA]
Well, I’ve chosen a photograph as well and actually I think it was probably taken in about 1910. It’s from a glass plate negative that is in Broughton House, which is Edward and Elizabeth’s house. There are thousands of them at Broughton House and they were taken by Edward Atkinson Hornel to help compose his paintings.

I chose her because she is so many things – and I think she is the reason that he was so successful.

[JB]
I have already recorded a podcast some time ago about Hornel. You say she’s vitally important. She wasn’t mentioned.

[ALA]
She wasn’t mentioned, of course not.

[JB]
Not once.

[ALA]
She pops up in a lot of his photographs and she pops up in a lot of his letters. And she’s also the reason why the house belongs now to the NTS. It was given to a trust after she died in 1950. That was Edward Hornel’s wishes, but she lived in the house for 17 years after he died. She was about 90 when she died and she made sure that all of their wishes that they had formulated over the years came to fore – the house was used as a public library and an art museum for Kirkcudbright, for the village and the town, and then it was handed over to the National Trust for Scotland.

So, she’s the reason why the Trust has the property.

[JB]
Why was she so significant during his life?

[ALA]
She was his oldest sister by about five years. The focus of Broughton House is on Edward. He’s the painter; he’s the one who had the professional career – and it was really on her shoulders, I think, that he achieved success. When he got the chance to go to art school in Edinburgh, she was already a teacher in Edinburgh and she chaperoned him. He wrote a letter back to his mother saying that she’d walked him off his feet the first day that he got there.

She was at that very starting point when women were starting to get into teaching. In 1872, as Emma’s mentioned earlier, it was the Education (Scotland) Act and this was really important because it made going to school compulsory for children aged 5–13. Now, if you wanted to study after that, you went to something called college from 15–16, and you took exams. The Church at this period handed over 548 parish schools – they got handed over to newly formed school boards. That separation of education and the Church was quite significant. Of course, it wasn’t fully separated for many years. But she became what was called a pupil teacher.

[JB]
And this must have opened the door for so many women to work.

[ALA]
I think it did. I think it took a little bit of time, but I think then it became a career that was achievable for a lot of women. They were paid less than men, and that was a given. It was cheaper to hire the women, but it allowed for a profession that was respectable. As you’d said earlier, these were the options that women had.

[JB]
And he started travelling to paint. It was a very lucrative business for him. She accompanied him.

[ALA]
She accompanied him; exactly.

[JB]
And what was her role there? Just a companion?

[ALA]
Yeah, I think so. They were very close brother and sister. He never married and nor did she, and at a certain point she decided that she was going to become his housekeeper. One of the things that is known from oral history is that he was a bit of a drinker. He liked his drink and I think that she managed his life, basically, and his household. I think that the older he got, he got a little bit more grumpy and a little bit more difficult to deal with and a lot quieter and shyer. And she was the sociable force.

But what’s really interesting is that there was a letter that was sent to Broughton House in the ’60s, and it was from someone who used to live in Edinburgh next to the Peploe family. Samuel Peploe was a very famous Colourist. She wrote saying that she remembers talking to the family. When Samuel Peploe would go down to visit his friend Edward Hornel, he would often go to Kirkcudbright with his wife Margaret. One time Margaret called in on Miss Elizabeth Hornel and found her in the studio painting on the easel, and she turned around and she said, ‘oh oh, I wasn’t expecting you. Oh, I sometimes do his backgrounds for him.’

[JB]
You’re not suggesting, in a sort of Shakespeare kind of way, that there was a woman behind it all?

[ALA]
I think there might have been. They travelled all over the world together. They made huge amounts of money. In 1909 and 1912 he had two massive exhibitions in Glasgow, and he made roughly £2,385, which in today’s money is £280,000, for two exhibitions. He was selling works at that time for as much as £400 a canvas, which is £47,000 today. I mean, it’s huge amounts of money.

[JB]
Well, I sincerely hope Elizabeth was on a decent percentage, but that’s a great example. She was a supporter and she also looked after his legacy. And perhaps if it wasn’t for her, then the National Trust for Scotland wouldn’t have Broughton House. So, that was a great one. Thank you very much.

It’s our final lady now. Emma, we’re going to the Tenement House in Glasgow and its occupants. Tell us about them and tell us about your object.

[EI]
At the Tenement House, I’m going to introduce you to a letter which was written by Agnes Toward, who was the lady who was actually responsible for us acquiring the Tenement House with all its contents essentially.

[JB]
Tenement House – tell us a little bit about that. There were two women who lived in it.

[EI]
That’s right. The Tenement House is a typical tenement in Glasgow. For those of you who don’t know Glasgow, it’s a flat in a block of flats essentially – very much traditional Glasgow architecture. It was the sort of tenement that was designed for a working-class family, but a solidly respectable working-class family, definitely not one of the worst tenements. And in 1911, Agnes Toward and her mother, who was also called Agnes Toward (we call her Mrs Toward), both moved into the Tenement House. Then after her mother died, she stayed there all the rest of her life. And she died there too, eventually.

[JB]
This is very important because for me it personalises a shift in the world of women in work, because Mrs Toward was a dressmaker, mainly in the home before she had a couple of shops. But Agnes Toward was one of the first women to go out to work in an office, and women in work became more visible then.

[EI
She did. Agnes Toward ended up working for two shipping firms, essentially, and it’s interesting because she had exactly the same sort of education as the girls in Kilbarchan would have had at the same time. They would have done their reading, their writing, their arithmetic, and because they were girls, they would have been taught plain sewing and a bit of needlework as well, in the expectation that those were the sort of skills that they would need to take them out into the working world and to earn a wage. What interests me about Agnes Toward is that she seemed to put all of that behind her and instead she went to the Athenaeum Commercial College in Glasgow and undertook a course in shorthand and typewriting. Off the back of that, she was able to take herself into a different world of work. Essentially, she was working in an office using those typewriting and shorthand writing skills, supporting male colleagues in this shipping firm. A very different sort of outlook, I suppose, starting from the same point with the education – a very different endpoint for her.

I get the sense that her job opened up opportunities. Not only was she working out of the home, but she was also mixing with different women in a different way that perhaps hadn’t been possible for her mother in the sort of job that she was undertaking. Although she was having to go out to work and she needed to go out to work to pay the rent, it’s a different view of a woman.

[JB]
As you say, it’s a snapshot of the world beginning to open out for women in work. The letter you have is a job application. I think it’s beautifully written. Would you mind reading it?

[EI]
Of course. This letter was written on 5 December 1910 and it’s addressed to 41, The Herald Office and it reads:
Referring to your advertisement in Saturday’s Herald, I beg to offer my services. I am well educated and have a thorough knowledge of shorthand and typewriting, having been trained in the Glasgow Athenaeum. I’m able to write shorthand at the rate of 120 words per minute and to operate the typewriter at 60 words per minute. I have 4½ years experience, and I’m presently employed in the office of a large shipowner’s firm, where I have been for the past 3½ years. But I’m desirous of making a change. Should you consider my application favourably, I shall be pleased to furnish you with full particulars as to character and abilities.
Yours sincerely, Agnes Toward.

[ALA]
That’s wonderful!

[JB]
We’re supposed to have advanced as a society. We don’t write letters like that anymore, and the handwriting is absolutely beautiful.

[EI]
I think it’s fair to say that for Agnes Toward, for all that she appears to have enjoyed her life and her work, it’s still underlying that imperative to work. The fact that she worked until she was 73, I think is quite telling because it was the days before there was very much Social Security; it was before the welfare state. So, she needed to work. Certainly while her mother was alive, she needed to work because she was supporting her ill mother for part of the time; she would need to pay the rent. If she didn’t earn the money, she didn’t have any rent. They didn’t have anywhere to live. So, for all that she appears to have had a job that she enjoyed, underneath it all there was still an imperative to work, which I think casts a slightly different light on that as well.

[JB]
Antonia and Emma, thank you so much. And thank you to the women that we’ve chosen for giving us such interesting life to discuss. Thank you for coming in today.

[EI
Thank you.

[ALA]
More than welcome.

[JB]
And if you’d like to visit any of the properties we’ve featured, you can find details of the opening times on the website. Head to nts.org.uk

It’s thanks to the work of Antonia and Emma, and others like them, that we have that precious window into our past. If you would like to help preserve our history and our wild places, why not join the Trust or make a donation? We are a charity and we could not do it without you. Until next time on Love Scotland, goodbye.

Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.

Transcript

Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Richard Oram [RO]

[MV]
Love Scotland – brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland, presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
‘Take an egg. Make a hole in the top of it. Take out the whites and the yolk, and fill the shell only with saffron. Roast the shell and saffron together in embers of charcoal until the shell wax yellow. Then, beat shell and all together in a mortar with half a spoonful of mustard seed. Now, soon as any suspicion is had of infection, disillue the weight of a French crown in ten spoonfuls of posset ale. Drink it luke warm and sweat upon it in your naked bed.’

I think Meryl Streep can sleep easy in her bed! That concoction was from a book published in 1594, called Present Remedies Against the Plague.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. You join me in the very place that did a roaring trade selling some of the ingredients for that unlikely antidote. I’m at Gladstone’s Land in Edinburgh, not far from the castle at the top of the Royal Mile, which at the moment is heaving with tourists. This is one of the city’s oldest buildings, 500 years of history within its walls. And it’s been painstakingly restored by the National Trust for Scotland. Where I’m standing right now, a man called John Riddoch had a shop which sold the herbs and spices for those potions.

We think of history’s plagues as rare and fleeting. But surprisingly, plague was a frequent and terrifying visitor to Scotland over a period of about 300 years. Gladstone’s Land is on Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket, so-called because in those days it was a busy market. The buildings around it were crowded and unsanitary. It was a great place to do your shopping … and to catch your death.
So, how could they even try to combat this lethal disease in their midst? Well, as we all discovered recently, a pandemic isn’t just for the history books. Of course, COVID wasn’t a plague, but it seems that our efforts to control and contain it were remarkably similar to what our ancestors tried to do centuries ago. While I was researching this subject, I was constantly directed to Richard Oram, a Professor of History at Stirling University. ‘Scotland’s plague man’ they told me. So, we had a chat.

Richard, welcome to the podcast.

[RO]
Hello there, Jackie.

[JB]
Are you happy being widely known as ‘Scotland’s plague man’ because that seems to be the consensus?!

[RO]
Yeah, it’s something that’s stuck. I just happened to be working on it at the time when things began to kick off again, and so yes …

[JB]
This is COVID?

[RO]
This was COVID. It’s a reflection on something that I do in my research.

[JB]
We’re here to talk about plague – a terrifying but fascinating subject that evokes crosses on doors and the terrifying cry of ‘bring out your dead’. What lured you to the subject?

[RO]
I’m an environmental historian, and critical to everything that I do within that is trying to get an understanding of the interactions between people and the wider environment around them. Most folk think about this maybe in terms of climate change and weather impacts, but we’ve also got to remember that disease pathogens are affecting human and animal populations, and also trees and plants and things like that as well. You need to look at the environment in the round.

[JB]
Before my research for this, my knowledge of plague was scant. I’d heard, obviously, of the Great Plague of London, but I had no idea that for a few centuries plague was rife in Scotland. Why isn’t this better known?

[RO]
In comparison with a lot of other countries, that’s actually remarkably little written in the contemporary chronicles, for example. You have to do an awful lot more digging to get the information about the plague in Scotland. Much of it is in the records of the royal burghs, so it wasn’t up there in those big iconic texts that folk would tend to go to – things like John of Fordun or Walter Bowers’ Scotichronicon and things like that. Because they maybe only mention it in a couple of places, there’s a tendency to think it hit Scotland less than elsewhere.

[JB]
But as we’ll found out, it certainly hit Scotland. So, when does Scotland’s significant plague history begin?

[RO]
1349. People in Scotland had probably been aware that plague was spreading westwards across Europe for a couple of years prior to that. When it arrives in England the previous year, the Scots are absolutely dancing up and down with glee, calling it the ‘foul death of the English’.

[JB]
Oh dear. That doesn’t show us in a good light, does it?

[RO]
Well, remember this is the middle of the second phase of the Wars of Independence, so the enemy has been inflicted with this horrible disease and this is God’s judgment. Clearly, it’s God’s judgment; everybody knows that God’s on the side of the Scots …

[JB]
How bad was that first wave of plague here?

[RO]
Well, again this is one of the problems with the understatement that you get in a lot of the sources. John of Fordun’s chronicle, which is our earliest surviving text, speaks about a third – and all that really means is a huge number of people. He had no idea how many had actually died.

[JB]
So, he was implying a third of the population died?

[RO]
A third of the population died. And in a lot of the modern analysis, that type of figure is the one that tended to be bandied around until folks started to dig into things in other countries, looking at death registers (where they existed) and wills and testaments. And you began to get an indication that it was actually significantly worse. If only 30% of your population died, you got off lightly. You could be looking at upwards of 60/70%, and in some locations possibly even as high as 80%. Rare cases, but generally you’re looking at somewhere between 60 and 70% might have died in the first epidemic.

[JB]
Good grief! No wonder it was known as the ‘great mortality’. Now, as far as Scotland’s concerned, is it correct that the next wave, if you like, came about 12 years later?

[RO]
Yeah, it’s back in the early 1360s, and we actually know more about that – the second death as it’s usually referred to – than we do about the first one. And then after it, it’s coming back every 7–10 years through the remainder of the 14th century, and each time it’s given a number. And then suddenly in the early 15th century – because it’s quite obvious this is something that’s just going to keep on coming, keep on coming, keep on coming – they stop numbering them and it just becomes a fact of life and death. Another fact of life and death.

[JB]
You mentioned the fact that it was looked upon as something that came about if you were badly behaved or that it was God’s will, and I found something from the General Assembly from the Church of Scotland that really summed this up. It gave a list of the misdemeanours that caused plague. I’ll read you a bit:
‘through swearing, perjury, lies, profaning on the Sabbath;
with markets, gluttony, drunkenness, fighting, dancing, playing, rebelling against magistrates and laws of the country;
with incest, fornication, adultery, sacrilege, theft and depression;
with false witness;
and finally, with all kind of impiety and wrong.’
So, a bit of a catch-all there, I would imagine.

[RO]
But it’s describing a decent Friday night out in Glasgow! What you’ve got here is it is part of that whole Godly society and aspect that things that were seen as being even slightly morally dubious were seen as potentially opening the door to divine judgment. And divine judgment would mean plague. So, anything at all that is potentially exposing you to the suggestion that you might be behaving in a less-than-proper manner, that has to be clamped out. As historians, we have a tendency to look at the political and the social side of it, forgetting that the religious side of it is actually – in the medieval and through into the post-medieval period – as important, if not more important, in people’s lives.

[JB]
They were the top dogs, yes.

[RO]
But, it’s also the first thing that … if you look even in the original Acts of Parliament that are concerned about trying to control plague spread. Embedded into the parliamentary acts you have got religious processions, prayers, masses being said, the bishops to lead within the dioceses. So, it’s a spiritual cure that is being sought first and foremost and then everything else is the belt and braces: let’s clear up the mess, let’s get rid of vermin, let’s prevent people moving around, that kind of thing. But it’s the spiritual one is the first focus.

[JB]
Let’s get in among the people of the 14th and 15th centuries. They already had diseases to cope with. There was typhus, there was smallpox. When word got around that the plague had arrived, or the plague was back, how did they view it? Was it abject terror?

[RO]
Well, it’s one of the things again that we need to look at the sources we’ve got from other parts of Europe. And there’s a whole variety of responses. It is actually like looking at the way in which society dealt with COVID when it first began to impinge on our consciousnesses. There are folk who were in denial – there were folk who were thinking ‘it won’t affect me; I live a clean life. God won’t afflict me.’
There’s folk who began to look for scapegoats; in mainland Europe you’ve got identification of marginal communities. In parts of Germany, parts of France: the Jewish population. Clearly, this is well poisoning because it’s ‘find the other’, people who are potentially not being afflicted the same way because they may have a different lifestyle. They’re not mingling with the wider population, so at first they seem to be slightly protected from this. ‘They’re being protected – does this mean they’ve got some pact with Satan that is keeping them safe?’ It’s looking for those sorts of scapegoats that you can blame. Beggars – because they’ve got the jealousy of the rich; they’re poisoning the rich to get their wealth. You’ve got nurses – because it’s keeping them in employment! Grave diggers – again, the same kind of principle that there is some Satanic brotherhood of grave diggers out there who are trying to get more holes in the ground to keep them in employment! So, there’s all that kind of response to it.
And then, there are the folk who are almost numbed because they’re seeing very, very close family members contracting this disease, which they can’t explain, and dying horribly in pain in a very, very short period of time. The psychological impact must have been immense.

[JB]
Who did it kill? Can we characterise it? Was it the elderly, the young, the vulnerable? And how did it kill?

[RO]
That’s an interesting question, Jackie, because the accounts vary. One of the most interesting things is actually again looking at that second and then the third pandemics. It talks about, for example, the second one is the plague of young men. So, there seems to be a gender differential coming in there. Also, that it’s younger people. Now, this may be that somehow or other they are more vulnerable; their immune systems have somehow been compromised. But what we’ve got is, across the piece, it affected regardless of your age, your gender, your social status. The only thing that perhaps protected the rich more was that they could move. They could get away. They could perhaps run faster and further than your average townsman or country woman. You’re seeing a great leveller, I think is perhaps the best way to put it.

There’s a lot of suggestion that the impact in the first of the outbreaks in the late 1340s/early 1350s may have been worsened by the fact that that would have been the adult generation who’d lived through what’s known as the great European famine. Earlier in the 14th century, when the climate had really begun to deteriorate badly, there’s a pan-European famine. In Scotland we tend to call it just a dearth, because it was already bad here and only got slightly worse, but it still meant the folk are under-nourished. There is a possible correlation in that, that they may have been immunosuppressed or compromised, the same kind of way in which we saw people who were more at risk from COVID, for example.
So, across the piece, we’ve got a suggestion that people who may have had some underlying weaknesses, health conditions, general vulnerability – but it’s also affecting folk who we would regard as fit, healthy, young, active. And it kills them just as fast and just as efficiently as the elderly, as the sick.

[JB]
We’ve all seen the dramas. We’ve all seen the boils, the terrible boils. Is that representative? Is that what it was like?

[RO]
Yeah, yes. Almost without question, the sources are telling us that you’re getting these great swellings, the buboes – hence bubonic plague. These tend to be in the primary lymph nodes in the neck, armpit and the groin. Now, the big debate was whether the bubonic plague, as we know it, was what was around in the medieval period. That’s been hypothesised since the late 19th century, but it’s only just in the last couple of years that the DNA analysis has been done that has finally identified – the genome sequences have been identified – that demonstrate that the medieval plague was bubonic.

So, we can now with a degree of confidence start to look at the way in which the symptoms are being described in the contemporary sources and see it tallies. And where there’s deviation from that, as you said earlier, there are other diseases around as well and it’s quite likely that, alongside the bubonic plague when it’s floating around, we’ve got a whole cocktail of other things happening as well. The bubonic one is just the most terrible visitor out of a whole series of other unwelcome guests.

[JB]
Because there was pneumonic plague and septicaemic plague. If you got bubonic plague, was death automatic or did some people pull through?

[RO]
Some people pulled through and I think that’s the thing to … You can still contract bubonic plague nowadays – that’s something to bear in mind – but it is treatable.

[JB]
Thank you for that.

[RO]
It’s easily treatable – treatable and survivable. Even then, it was treatable and survivable. And it’s probable that some folk contracted it and may have developed just mild symptoms, and then it passed. Now, that’s bubonic. If you got the pneumonic or the septicaemic variety, they’re pretty much 100% fatal. Certainly, septicaemic is – that’s straight into the blood system, your entire system starts to shut down incredibly rapidly. Pneumonic is highly contagious and spread in the same way that COVID was – in droplets through coughing and sneezing and things like that. The only problem with it is it used to be thought pneumonic was the more likely one to be around but it’s such a virulent spreader and such a rapid killer that it would actually burn itself out because it would kill too many people too quickly, and then it’s not able to spread. The one that most folk would have been exposed to is bubonic.

[JB]
And if you caught bubonic plague and if you managed to pull through, did you end up with some immunity? Because as you’ve explained, it came in waves, so maybe you had 3 or 4 in your lifetime.

[RO]
There appears to have been, in the medieval variety of this, no acquired immunity. [Wow.] So, if you got it once and survived, you could get it again and die.

[JB]
Ok. And in terms of, we’ve spoken about how people then thought or why they thought it arrived, because they had behaved badly and they had transgressed, had they any idea back then how it spread?

[RO]
Theory changes over time. There’s a whole variety of theories floating around. In the 14th century you’ve got, as I said already, poisoning of wells for example. The main theory was these were darts of divine wrath, coming down from God. And so, you had to look for divine protection. There’s lots of imagery – again mainly from northern Europe – showing the Virgin Mary spreading her cloak over humanity to deflect the darts of plague coming down. You’ve got all these suggestions that it’s some kind of invisible, unseen force. Then you start to see ideas emerging in the later medieval period around about bad smells. This is the origin of what by the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries is the miasma theory. And so, you get references to people breaking open casks of strong-smelling onions, and in the smell, plague was released.

You’ve got a series of accounts as well where it’s believed that bad air – the miasma – is trapped in bales of cloth. When the cloth is unfolded in markets, it releases that into the atmosphere. There’s a development of an idea of contagion – you’re gaining the disease through touch. You’re touching something that is carrying this unclean-ness. And so, you start to see again a lot of development of cleansing ideas, so boiling money for example, before you handed it over to somebody. If you were giving change back, you had to put it into a cauldron of boiling water and scoop it out with a ladle, so that you’re not handling potentially contaminated goods. The whole thing is in constant evolution in terms of the understanding for how this is being spread, but it is really into the era of modern medicine before the awareness of the role of fleas, the role of a bacillus carried in the blood and then transmitted via the flea, as being the cause.

[[JB]
Well, let’s take a little bit of a break here, Richard, from the buboes and boils. When we come back, we will talk about how Scotland was ahead of the curve actually in using legislation to try to halt the spread of plague. Back in a moment.

[MV]
Treat someone special to a year of new experiences with a National Trust for Scotland gift membership. Gift them great days out and do your bit to help protect our amazing places. Gift a year of membership at nts.org.uk/gift

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast. Today, we are talking plague with Professor Richard Oram. Richard, the act of 1456, tell me about that.

[RO]
This is the first piece of anti-plague legislation anywhere in the British Isles. It’s an act of a General Council of Scotland. It’s not a full parliament act; that’s just me being pedantic, but you’ve got this act that’s produced and it’s drawing on practices that had already begun to develop in mainland Europe, mainly in Italy and in France. Nowadays, we would think of them as public health and public hygiene enactments but there’s also the spiritual dimension included in there with the requirement for the clergy to be performing processions and all the rest of it. But this is a really, really important act. If you ever look at it, it’s unbelievably short because it’s what we would class now as a piece of enabling legislation. It sets out: right, these are the basic things you need to do; and then it says: local authorities, it’s your responsibility to deal with this. Because you need the local legislators, the local governors, to be empowered to actually take strong action to stop plague spreading nationally.

And what they’re looking at is, as I say, measures that have been tried and tested. The Italian city states have been at this game from the 1380s, 1390s. So, 60 years later the Scots have picked this up. But the emphasis as well is that it’s another 60 years before there’s similar legislation enacted in England, and England suffered much greater frequency and much greater intensity of plague in that period. But then again, they were having a civil war, so things do get in the way.
Scotland was very much ahead of the game and it’s partly to do with the way in which Scotland has got this strong relationship with Europe. A lot of knowledge exchange, back and forward along the communication routes down into Rome.

[JB]
As you say, the Act was quite short, and it was basically quarantine containment. Things which, and I’m sure listeners are the same, as you hear this, it’s not just from the pages of history because we’ve all experienced something very similar, at least in terms of the regulations, very recently. So, containment, quarantine – and this is when we get the human stories. This is when we start to find out about how people reacted because of the contraventions. Give me some of the human stories.

[RO]
First and foremost, you mentioned quarantine and bear in mind they were talking real quarantine – not 14 days, this was 40 days. If there was any indication of somebody within the household possibly, not even definitely, possibly having plague. If somebody developed an unexplained fever, that had to be reported and your entire household would be put into quarantine. This then had the impact on individuals that they can’t go about their daily business. There’s no state aid; there’s no support. So, how do you live? You’re having to draw on whatever resources you’ve got available to you. You’re not able to communicate with anyone outside your house except through the medium of the watchmen, who have been charged to look after the neighbourhood in which you are.

So, you get cases like there’s one early 17th-century case up in Elgin in Moray where the plague wasn’t in the burgh, it was in the villages outside the burgh. So, there’s a prohibition on communication between the country dwellers and the townsfolk. There’s a young woman in Elgin who has a boyfriend in one of these communities outside. She, against the regulation, sneaks out at night, goes to see him … and this is where everybody says, oh and of course she gets the plague and brings it back into town. No, she didn’t. That’s the saddest part of the story. She comes back in fit and well, but it’s discovered that she has breached the regulation. So, she’s flogged, branded and thrown out of the town permanently because she’s endangered the lives of everybody else.

The most extreme cases – the Town Council minutes of Edinburgh have got some really, really juicy stories. You’ve got two women who were publicly drowned in the quarry holes because they’d gone into a house where they had been plague deaths, removed bedding and were shaking the bedding out prior to selling it. And because they had again – because of that belief that cloth may contain this horrible disease, that they were releasing this into the air and endangering their fellow townsfolk – they’re drowned.

There’s a tailor who kept it quiet that his wife was in bed at home with plague, and then she dies. He still tells nobody. He goes to attend mass in St Giles, so this is the great chief mass of the day – you’ve got most of the burgesses in there. And it transpires afterwards that his wife’s dead, so he’s sentenced to be hanged at his front door. The rope breaks, so they hang him again. The rope breaks again and eventually they decide that clearly God doesn’t want him to die, so we’ll just brand him on the face, flog him and expel him from the town ‘with his bairns’, as the record puts it. And that’s him becoming a vagrant, economically destitute with children. But it’s the fact that he had endangered everybody else by his actions.

[JB]
And also the fact that people who were thought to have plague, they were taken outwith towns, outside villages – completely quarantined, left alone – and that families who were left back at home had no idea whether they lived or died.

[RO]
Yeah. Most of the big towns have got what’s by the late 15th, early 16th century being termed ‘the foul muir’. This is where the infected went out to live in temporary … basically a little shanty town. If you were lucky, there would be a chapel out there, so at least you’d be getting spiritual comfort from having that. If you go round Dundee, you’ve got St Roch’s at the west end of the town centre and the Roodyards at the east end – those are the two foul muir areas. Roch is one of the plague saints, so there was St Roch’s chapel in the middle of this. On the Boroughmuir of Edinburgh, again you’ve got the St Roch’s chapel and this is where the plague-afflicted of Edinburgh were put out. Very canny Edinburgh burgesses, of course. They provided the timbers to build the temporary lodgings and then, rather than burn it all at the end of the plague, they had it carefully disinfected and stored so they could bring it out at no extra cost the next time it came around.

[JB]
That’s public money, after all, isn’t it?!

[RO]
You’ll have had your tea! And then one of the ones that tends to be forgotten about is in Glasgow, where you come in towards Queen Street station from the north and come down though the St Rollox area, that again is the same Roch Chapel. That was Glasgow’s foul muir. Even small towns had them. Stirling had a really good one down at the south end of the old bridge, but little communities – there’s a greatly detailed story that took place basically just outside where Edinburgh airport is now, on the muir between Gogar and Ratho, where the infected from one community had been put out onto what was shared grazing land between the two communities. The other village believed that they were going to be driven off this land, so they went and actually destroyed the booths that the plague victims were living in and drove them away – they just drove them out to die in the terrible weather at the time.

[JB]
This will be very resonant with people listening. Weddings were restricted to a few guests. Schools were closed. Children – perhaps not so resonant – were thought to be super-spreaders, yes, but they were just described as dangerous, uncontrollable and dirty. And kids under 15 were ordered off the streets as well as dogs and pigs – an interesting grouping there.

[RO]
Yep. Children actually … there’s a very nice list where it’s vermin, which includes obviously rats and mice, dogs and cats and pigs – and children!

[JB]
Gosh. What were the medics doing during all of this? There were medics but not as we know them.

[RO]
Most of the medicine of the later 14th, 15th and even into the early 16th centuries is tending to be around about dietary control, purging the body. Fumigation is actually a major thing done, not just in terms of fumigating infected properties. This is what the mediciners are doing. They are also advising on the physical conditions, not just on the bodily health. If there’s houses potentially infected with plague, they would be fumigated with strong-smelling, smoke-producing plants and things of that kind, scrubbed with salt water. You were getting prescriptions of things that would actually probably kill you just as effectively as the plague itself would have done.
They are experimenting. You’re getting some folk who try things like lancing the buboes, to get the foul materials out of the body. Sometimes this works. We’ve got a few European accounts of folk who had their buboes lanced and lived.

[JB]
I’m grimacing. I mean, this is difficult – I’m making a podcast and grimacing! Go on!

[RO]
But some folk – the physical shock and then the potential re-release of all of this gunk (it’s the best way to describe it!) from your lymph nodes back into your bloodstream. Remember, they’ve got no idea about blood circulation. They have got no idea about microbe theory; there’s no understanding that this is a bacillus – just nothing like that.

[JB]
There were so-called plague doctors, weren’t there? We’ve seen maybe the drawings of the long beaks that they had, the masks?

[RO]
Yeah. That’s late though. That’s something that starts to emerge in the 16th and 17th centuries. They are still practising the medicine that was prescribed, believe it or not, in the 14th century. You’ve got Gilbert Skene, this mediciner in Scotland who makes a fortune out of producing his description of the pest and the various remedies that you could use. This becomes a multiple bestseller; goes into multiple editions. Rich man.

[JB]
I’ve got a line from that. He described it as ‘a corruption or infection of the air, or a venomous quality and maist hurtful vapour thereof’.

[RO]
Absolutely!

[JB]
Thanks for that, Gilbert – that’s a great help! But in terms of the doctors, they thought that if they had these beaks and filled them with herbs, that would somehow protect them.

[RO]
Sweet air. It’s the absolute antithesis of miasma. If you’ve got foul contagion, if it’s bad smell, if you’re breathing good smell, this is all part of that ancient system where it’s meant to be around about the bodily humours and things like that. So, you’re getting your body into balance and you’re purging or cleaning out the things that are actually going to negatively affect it. But that had been the 1380s, the Mandeville Tract. John Mandeville went to produce this literary tract about how to treat the pestilence. And it’s the same ideas being recycled – plagiarism on a grand scale! There’s very little advance.
The one big thing, and you nailed it when you were saying with these face masks, that is the emergence of our first real PPE. Because along with the face mask – if you see any of the surviving ones – they have got built-in goggles so that you cannot be coughed on and get droplets in your eyes. They have hoods. They’re wearing a full-length, heavy canvas coat, big thick gloves – all of which would be washed after you have been in contact with the infected. This is what we would understand as the equivalent of scrubs or the full biohazard-type gear that we have nowadays.

[JB]
When did plague die out in Scotland, and why?

[RO]
I’ll deal with the second bit first. We don’t actually really know why. It was in decline anyway through the 17th century. Scotland’s first indication that it was on the way out is the last epidemic that we know of, apart from a brief thing that we won’t talk about in Glasgow in 1900, but you’ve got the 1645–48 epidemic which occurs in the middle of the Civil War, and it’s really nasty. This is one of the worst outbreaks that had been for decades, and it’s made worse by the war. Everybody can see that it’s the movement of people, refugees, armies, lots of folk crowding together, so there’s a lot of concern that disease will be around for a long time yet.

And then the 1640s come and go. 1650s: there’s plague in England, doesn’t make it to Scotland. 1665: the Great Plague in London, doesn’t make it to Scotland. And people are beginning to think, hmm, something’s changing here. By the time you get into the 1680s/1690s, it’s clear that it’s not come back to England either but it’s still rife on the Continent. The last big epidemic in Western Europe: the 1720s, down in the south of France; 1780s in Moscow; but after that it becomes something that you get in North Africa, the Middle East. It’s just gradually receding and it’s not because we’ve done anything like develop antibiotics; it’s possibly because people are becoming much more rigorous about anti-plague enforcement, much more aware of different ways of dealing with those public hygiene aspects in terms of street cleansing and things of that sort.

[JB]
I know that during the famous London outbreak, Peebles banned immediately, as soon as they got wind of it, trade with England. We had really tightened things up. Now, you have mentioned the plague in Glasgow in 1900. Very briefly, tell us about that before we scare the living daylights out of our listeners. What happened?

[RO]
By that date, the British Imperial Medical Service in India had done a lot of work on identifying bubonic plague, how it’s being spread around, and had linked it with vermin and fleas being carried within vermin. It’s like an aberration in time but it’s a result of Glasgow, Second City of Empire, and the trade connections with India. Infection arrives with the ships’ unofficial passengers. It’s in small concentration down in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of the city. This is still even after the City Improvement Act. But, it is dealt with very efficiently; you have got very, very limited spread. It caused panic, but by that stage there’s a much greater understanding of disease control and infection control. Rather than a full-blown infection, it’s a localised outbreak similar in the kind of national concern it caused to the 1960s typhoid outbreak in Aberdeen. Thankfully, it remained contained and spreads is in the tens, rather than the thousands and millions of the earlier.

[JB]
Richard, looking back at how they dealt with plague 300 years ago from our supposedly sophisticated world now, I was surprised to learn that the measures they were taking were very much like our own in terms of COVID. But what I want to ask is that: 300 years of plague in Scotland is something that we know little of today. Is it possible that 400 years hence, what we’ve all gone through with COVID will likewise become just a footnote in history?

[RO]
I don’t think it will be a footnote in history because if you look at some of the wider ramifications of it, it has that economic knock on global conditions. It’s one of these situations, as a historian I’m bound to say, we need to give it a few years actually to see how this plays out, but no, I don’t think it’s going to be just a footnote in history. It will be one of these global phenomena in not quite the same level as the Spanish flu epidemic for example, but something that we need to be thankful in the UK that we got off as lightly as we did. If you look at some of the other countries around the world where the impact was much more significant, I don’t think we’ll be allowed to forget that COVID-19 was a transformative episode. Let’s hope that, certainly in my lifetime, we don’t have anything similar coming along again.

[JB]
Well, that is a wise note on which to end. Professor Richard Oram, plague man extraordinaire, thank you for your time.

[RO]
Thank you very much.

[JB]
Professor Richard Oram, plague man extraordinaire, taking us through a fascinating but terrifying chunk of Scottish history. If the walls here at Gladstone’s Land could talk, I bet they’d have a tale or two to tell. I’m off to do some more exploring – it is so worth a visit. Opening times and details of events can be found on the Trust website: nts.org.uk

Thank you for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Love Scotland podcast. Just click the button and each episode will download for free and be there for you hopefully to enjoy whenever you feel like it. I will be back with another soon. Until then, goodbye.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird.
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