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Authors: Rick Wilson
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show up at his father’s deathbed.
Yet the son who did not quite make it to the old widower’s departure – who had been too busy sleeping off ‘the night before’ at a mistress’s house – also received the benefit of any doubt. With his weaknesses and indiscretions hardly believed or recognised by wider society, he was seen as a chip off the old master craftsman and gentleman, who had been Deacon of the Incorporation of Wrights, cabinet-maker extraordinary and Mason of Lodge Kilwinning, Canongate. Surely William would be another safe pair of Brodie hands? And so, as night follows day, within a year the bereaved son was filling the father’s shoes as a Deacon Councillor of the City, a position that gave him primary access to lucrative council projects in his field.
It seemed William Brodie had been left holding a whole handful of life’s trump cards, which must have felt like quite a triumph for one so keen on gambling …
So how would he play it? The safest bet would be to feign a furrowed brow of grief and hold all these cards close to his chest while relaxing into his perceived respectability and watching his potential customer base grow organically. But if the truth were known, his wayward soul was not enamoured of safety or respectability. He was cunning enough to present that face to the world for as long as possible, but under the shadow of his three-cornered hat there was a mischievous if calculating brain that sought the darker side of life, that ached for illegitimate adventure. He would, of course, try to keep it well hidden while he enjoyed the fruits of his inheritance, but he no doubt sensed that that would be finite – as indeed it proved to be.
Though he enjoyed the fruits of the New Town’s demands, one thing he wouldn’t do with his new-found fortune was join the gentry’s exodus to the north. His life was intensely centred around the Old Town and he sensed that it would survive and even thrive. For even before the coming of the New Town, the city had been gaining post-Culloden confidence. New banks had appeared to service government and the landed gentry and support burgeoning industries such as engineering and shipbuilding, coal, iron and cotton. But to put the icing on the cake, rising alongside the elegantly ordered New Town, with its royal street-name tributes and King George III’s personal endorsement, was the city’s new international reputation as ‘a hotbed of genius’, home to the leaders of a new wave of ideas known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The city’s intellectual buzz was encapsulated in this memorable comment attributed to the King’s Chemist, Englishman John Amyatt, talking in the mid-1700s: ‘Here I stand, at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, take fifty men of genius and learning by the hand.’
The Cross? He meant the fourteenth-century Mercat Cross, part of which still stands in Parliament Square within an elaborate Victorian base built in 1885, the landmark where royal proclamations and other official announcements were read out, where merchants and citizens – and enlightened figures – gathered to talk and exchange ideas. As such, the area of the Cross was still the city’s hub, focus of most of that new cultural consciousness – despite the developing New Town. For while Craig’s architectural masterpiece (now a World Heritage site) created the kind of living space that the Old Town had lacked, forced as it had been to expand ever upwards with unhealthy, packed-out, reach-for-the-sky tenements, the new scheme had taken on the nature of a social experiment – successful in many respects but with the socially divisive effect of separating rich and poor as never before. Its exclusivity was threatening to create sealed-off lifestyles that would erode inter-class relationships.
The privileged professionals in the newly gentrified north could not be totally isolated, however, as there was a conspicuous shortage of
Yet the son who did not quite make it to the old widower’s departure – who had been too busy sleeping off ‘the night before’ at a mistress’s house – also received the benefit of any doubt. With his weaknesses and indiscretions hardly believed or recognised by wider society, he was seen as a chip off the old master craftsman and gentleman, who had been Deacon of the Incorporation of Wrights, cabinet-maker extraordinary and Mason of Lodge Kilwinning, Canongate. Surely William would be another safe pair of Brodie hands? And so, as night follows day, within a year the bereaved son was filling the father’s shoes as a Deacon Councillor of the City, a position that gave him primary access to lucrative council projects in his field.
It seemed William Brodie had been left holding a whole handful of life’s trump cards, which must have felt like quite a triumph for one so keen on gambling …
So how would he play it? The safest bet would be to feign a furrowed brow of grief and hold all these cards close to his chest while relaxing into his perceived respectability and watching his potential customer base grow organically. But if the truth were known, his wayward soul was not enamoured of safety or respectability. He was cunning enough to present that face to the world for as long as possible, but under the shadow of his three-cornered hat there was a mischievous if calculating brain that sought the darker side of life, that ached for illegitimate adventure. He would, of course, try to keep it well hidden while he enjoyed the fruits of his inheritance, but he no doubt sensed that that would be finite – as indeed it proved to be.
Though he enjoyed the fruits of the New Town’s demands, one thing he wouldn’t do with his new-found fortune was join the gentry’s exodus to the north. His life was intensely centred around the Old Town and he sensed that it would survive and even thrive. For even before the coming of the New Town, the city had been gaining post-Culloden confidence. New banks had appeared to service government and the landed gentry and support burgeoning industries such as engineering and shipbuilding, coal, iron and cotton. But to put the icing on the cake, rising alongside the elegantly ordered New Town, with its royal street-name tributes and King George III’s personal endorsement, was the city’s new international reputation as ‘a hotbed of genius’, home to the leaders of a new wave of ideas known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The city’s intellectual buzz was encapsulated in this memorable comment attributed to the King’s Chemist, Englishman John Amyatt, talking in the mid-1700s: ‘Here I stand, at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, take fifty men of genius and learning by the hand.’
The Cross? He meant the fourteenth-century Mercat Cross, part of which still stands in Parliament Square within an elaborate Victorian base built in 1885, the landmark where royal proclamations and other official announcements were read out, where merchants and citizens – and enlightened figures – gathered to talk and exchange ideas. As such, the area of the Cross was still the city’s hub, focus of most of that new cultural consciousness – despite the developing New Town. For while Craig’s architectural masterpiece (now a World Heritage site) created the kind of living space that the Old Town had lacked, forced as it had been to expand ever upwards with unhealthy, packed-out, reach-for-the-sky tenements, the new scheme had taken on the nature of a social experiment – successful in many respects but with the socially divisive effect of separating rich and poor as never before. Its exclusivity was threatening to create sealed-off lifestyles that would erode inter-class relationships.
The privileged professionals in the newly gentrified north could not be totally isolated, however, as there was a conspicuous shortage of
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