Number 38 - Information on residents

1818 – 1854 Walter and Henrietta (neé Gordon) Ferrier & 1851 - 1854 Susan Ferrier

Walter was the last of ten children born to James and Helen Ferrier. His siblings were Jane, Janet, Helen, John, Archibald, James, Lorn, Susan and William. As the family grew, they moved from Lady Stair's Close to George Street. In 1797, Walter’s mother Helen died. The two eldest daughters had moved away when they married; Janet to India and Helen to London. As Jane, the eldest daughter, was still living at home, it fell to her to take on the role of her mother. Jane had been engaged to an officer in the army but he was killed in battle before the marriage could take place. She was a great beauty and among her admirers had been Robert Burns, who sent her this poem.

When their mother died, three of the brothers were away in the army. William was fighting in India, James was involved in the Siege of Seringapatam and Lorn was in the West Indies. Sadly, all three died within a few years. Lorn in 1801, killed at the Battle in Demerara; and in 1804, both James and William, while abroad. Walter and two older brothers became solicitors. First to qualify in 1794, was the eldest son, John, and Walter was apprenticed to him, becoming a solicitor in his own right in 1811. Archibald qualified in 1796 but died in 1814. John and Walter worked together for many years in partnership. In 1804, Jane, now 37, married General Graham, and John married Miss Margaret Wilson, a close friend of the family who lived nearby.

Thus it was left to the youngest daughter, Susan, (portrait by R. Thorburn) to look after her ageing father. Susan was an aspiring writer, and would come to be seen as the Scottish counterpart to Jane Austen, but she had a weak constitution, possibly through being deeply affected by the death of her mother. During the winters of 1806 to 1808 she recounted that she had been too ill to write.The Ferriers were well connected with many of the few hundred people who formed the social elite of the time. Susan often visited the Duke of Argyll at Inverary Castle with her father and, as it had been her father who appointed Walter Scott a clerk of session, the Ferriers also visited the great writer. See Sir Walter Scott and Albany StreetIt was two years before this visit that Susan had begun writing her first novel, Marriage. Susan’s sister, Jane, negotiated with William Blackwood to have her sister’s first novel published, as Blackwoods had published a work by Jane, Lacuna Strevelinense; a Collection of Heads. Susan Ferrier received £150 for her first novel and it was published anonymously in 1818. The reasons for anonymity was partially because some of her fictional characters were based on real and recognisable people of her acquaintance, but primarily because at this time it was not considered appropriate for women to have a public role in their own right. Her first novel begins with a marriage, as a beautiful young English heiress marries the son of a Scottish laird. But Susan Ferrier shows that marriage does not always lead to 'happily ever after', as she tells the stories of two generations of heroines and their adventures north and south of the border. She wanted to create a believable portrait of the world she knew and so Scots language is included in the novel to reflect and describe the language that Ferrier heard around her. Marriage was an instant success, receiving many critical plaudits. It was translated into French and was equally well received there. She followed it with Inheritance. Again this was published anonymously and in a letter to her sister in London, Susan explained her desire for anonymity: ‘John (her brother) has now completed a bargain with Mr. Blackwood, by which I am to have £1000 for a novel now in hand, but

1880 – 1894 John Hay and Jane (neé Mansel) Thorburn

John Hay Thorburn, a Grain Merchant, married Jane [photo] in 1879, in Newcastle and the couple moved here. Thorburn’s business was based in Leith. He had a deep interest in the problem of Britain’s wheat shortages and, in the 1900s, proposed a plan to Government to redress the situation. He advocated the construction of a system of granaries at British ports, the creation of a system of grain certificates and Government ownership of the industry. When he gave evidence at the 1923 Royal Commission on the subject of food shortages, he was reported to be an economic expert. In 1895, three African chiefs from Bechuana, including King Khama, came to Britain to persuade Queen Victoria not to give their lands to Cecil Rhodes and his British South Africa Company. The visit is described in the book, King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen by Neil Parsons. Linked to this event, Thorburn, as Chair of the Scottish African Corporation Limited set up by a consortium of Scottish capitalists, approached the Colonial Office, offering to take over the land from the British South Africa Company, and give Karma a place in the development of his country alongside this new purely Scottish enterprise. Thorburn wrote: ‘As a Scotch enterprise has been long associated with all that is best in the history of African civilisation, this proposal might be found to be of practical value.’ King Karma visited Edinburgh but did not meet Thorburn, and the Scottish African Corporation’s plan was not progressed. Thorburn’s drive for commercial success often led to a frustration with those he saw as reluctant to new ideas. This is well demonstrated by his letter to The Times in 1911, on the high costs of phone calls in Britain’s - in 1930, a daytime phone call from Edinburgh to London cost the equivalent of £20 today. Thorburn recounted that when he approached the telephone company asking why every house in Britain could not be joined by phone wires and have calls at reasonable rates, as was the case in many other European countries, their reply was ‘that if it were adopted they would have so much business they would not be able to conduct it.’ His letter ends: ‘It is no wonder that we are being outstripped in the commercial race of the world when our destinies are in the hands of men of limited intelligence.’

Thorburn also was active in his role as General Secretary of The Free Church. He was a vociferous advocate of The Laymen’s League which promoted the reunion of the parts of the church that had split over the issue of the relationship between the church and the state. In another letter to The Scotsman he wrote: ‘The great advantage of the League is that through its branches the three Presbyterian Churches have now opened up to them a medium of conference where differences may be discussed, mutual concession arrived at, and the foundation for the reunion of our common Presbyterianism.’ However, while the League called for unity, it was against the idea of disestablishment and secularisation of the Church of Scotland.

Thorburn also wrote and published pamphlets on various subjects. One published in 1915, The Debacle of Kultur, is a dubious, but understandable in the atmosphere of the time, argument as to why God was on the side of Britain and its allies against the Germans. ‘The degradation of Germany, we have seen, comes from its Kultur, which destroyed the authority of the Word of God. Already we have many tens of thousands of aliens in our midst. After the war, when armies are disbanded, are we to receive hordes of these brutalised Kultured Germans into this country without let or hindrance?—the mere declaration of Peace will not change their character. To allow such free entry here will be a great moral and material wrong to our own people, especially to our working classes. Germany has, we know, lavished vast sums of money on its secret service of bribery and corruption in the U.S.A. and every European country. Millions were sent to the young Turks; even as far as China her gold was poured out. How much has been, and is being spent here, or who the traitors in high places are that have got it, no one has as yet found out; but that will come to light someday - truly “a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.”’ Of course the opposing forces were also claiming that God was on their side.

They had five children. The eldest son, David Hay, joined the army, serving first in the 2nd Cameroonians (Scottish Rifles). In the First World War, he fought in the South African campaign and then in Egypt, where he was twice mentioned in dispatches, and awarded the Order of the Nile (4th Class). This was for his bravery during the British defence of the Suez Canal, in which various Turkish and German/Turk-led Senussi attempts to capture or damage the canal were rebuffed. He retired as a Major. In 1929, he married Katherine Dixon. He was later appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Ayrshire. He died in 1962.

The second son, Harold Hay, studied medicine at Edinburgh University and joined the Indian Medical Service in 1906. He served on the North West Frontier and, in 1913, was appointed Agent of the Government of India in Khorasan. During the First World War he was instrumental in leading local soldiers to prevent enemy forces entering Afghanistan. After the war he lived in India where held various medical positions, latterly as surgeon to the Viceroy of India, and Inspector-General of Hospitals in Kashmir. In 1933, he was Chief Medical Officer of Rajputana. While there a Hindu fanatic tried to assassinate him, but Thorburn disarmed and captured the assailant and handed him over to the police. He was made a Colonel and a Companion Class in the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire (CIE). He married Diana Ross in 1936, the year before his death. She later became Housekeeper for the Governor of Kashmiri, Sir George Cunningham, and established a handicraft business, employing uneducated and unemployed Kashmiri women in making quilts.

1894 – 1905 Robert and Marion (neé Wright) Thin Robert Thin (portrait by Henry Wright) and his family moved here from Number 6. He was the youngest son of James Thin and Catherine Traquair. James Thin founded the famous Edinburgh bookshop on South Bridge, that remained in the Thin family until 2002, when it was taken over by Blackwells. James Thin was friends with many of the well-known literary figures of Edinburgh of his day, including Lord Macaulay, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. While two of his brothers took over running the bookshop, Robert qualified in Midwifery Practice in 1887, having trained at the Edinburgh Royal Maternity and Simpson Memorial Hospital. Later, he became the first general practitioner to be appointed President of the Edinburgh Royal College of Surgeons. He wrote College portraits: being biographical sketches on portraits in the hall of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. When he died in 1941, aged 80, a ‘Grateful Patient’ wrote: ‘In his visits, while he never gave the impression that he was hurried in his examination and advice, he never wasted his time. And how could be afford to when during an epidemic of influenza he would have over eighty visits to pay in one day, besides a consulting room full for one or two hours. His patients were patients, suffering human beings, whom he would help to the uttermost of medical resources. He was generous for he had many patients to whom he gave his service free. To the last days of his practice his eye was bright and his step light, and he must have climbed many thousands of stairs, so that when he was well on into his seventies one did not think of him as old or even as an elderly man.’

The Thins had one son, Robert Traquair, who also became a doctor, and his son, again Robert, became the third generation to practise medicine.

The Thins moved to Number 38 and from 1894 until 1898 the house appears to be empty.