Number 6 - Information on residents

Colonel James Kirkpatrick died in 1805 and the two children from the marriage with Khair un-Nissa were sent to live with their grandfather, Colonel James Kirkpatrick, in England. The two children had been brought up as Muslims, and named Mir Ghulam Ali Sahib Allum and Noor un-Nissa Sahib Begum. Harriet, the wife of the surgeon, George Ure, accompanied the two children to England on board the Hawkeabury Indiaman. Soon after their arrival in London, the two children were baptised and given new Christian names, William George Kirkpatrick and Katherine Aurora "Kitty" Kirkpatrick. In 1812, William fell into boiling water and had to have an arm amputated. He married and had three children but died aged 27. Kitty Kirkpatrick grew into a famous beauty and, in 1822, she met Thomas Carlyle, who was then employed as Kitty’s cousin’s children's tutor. Although the two were attracted to each other, as Kitty had inherited significant wealth, marriage to a poor, struggling writer was not approved of. Instead, Kitty married Captain James Winslowe Phillipps and went on to have seven children. Carlyle, who immortalised Kitty in his novel, Sartor Resartus, married Jane Welsh (see Number 5). Having delivered the children safely, Harriet returned to Madras. In January 1807, George Ure died, leaving Harriet a widow with an infant daughter, Emily. Later that year, Kennedy and Harriet married. They left India in 1816 and settled in Albany Street and Kennedy practised as a physician, becoming a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1823. His account of the effects of an overdose of opium taken by a Mogul gentleman that he had treated in India in 1794 was published in the Edinburgh Surgical and Medical Journal. Alexander and Harriet had at least one daughter but no further information found. After Alexander died in Albany Street in 1827, Harriet lived on in the house until 1840 (possible the year she died). Harriet's daughter from her first marriage, Emily, married Francis Grove, an officer in the Royal Navy,  in 1826.

1840 – 1848 John and Georgina (neé Turnbull) Bertram

John Primrose Bertram was a solicitor (WS) and worked in partnership with William Nairne. Bertram became a solicitor in 1829 and married Georgina in 1833. They lived at Broughton Place before moving to Albany Street, and do not appear to have had any children. John's father was a Corn Merchant in St Andrews and in 1838 John was one of the founding members of the Literary and Philosophical Society of St Andrews; 'Several Gentlemen connected with the University and the City of St Andrews, being desirous of establishing a Literary and Philosophical Society, are anxious to receive the names of those Gentlemen, who are disposed to countenance such an Institution. Beside the general object of promoting Literary and Philosophic research the Society would especially have in view the establishment of a Museum in the University.'

In 1833 Bertram was admitted as a member of the Royal Company of Archers. Founded in 1676 as a private archery club, The Royal Company of Archers became the official bodyguard to the ruler when in Edinburgh. The Company was granted the right of perpetual access to all public butts, plains and pasturages legally allotted for shooting arrows in return for giving the Sovereign three barbed arrows on request.

In 1837, a Parliamentary Select Committee investigated ‘fictitious votes’ in Scotland and (like a number of other Albany Street residents) Bertram was listed as having such a vote for the County of Peebles. ‘Fictitious votes’ was a widespread practice that involved landowners selling the rights to parcels of their land to other wealthy individuals, who thereby gained a vote in the county elections, although few had any genuine stake in the county. For example, it was revealed that only six of the 19 Cromartyshire freeholders were genuine proprietors. While legislation in 1743 had ended some of the original methods of creating such votes, the practice had continued in more subtle ways, until by the 1780’s the system was shamelessly corrupt. Further legislation in the 1790’s had some further effect in curbing the manufacture of such parchment votes, but ingenious Scottish lawyers devised means of evading the legislation. 

The cost of buying such votes in Dunbartonshire in 1821 was reckoned to be £1,400, until the prospect of reform in 1831 reduced the cost to about one tenth of that value. Lord Grey’s Reform Act was designed to end the practice but slipshod drafting of the sections of the Act led to the manufacture of even more such votes. It was not until Third Reform Act in 1884 that the practice was fully ended. The Franchise Act ensured that all men paying an annual rental of £10 or holding land valued at £10 could vote. Of course universal suffrage did not come until much later.

Like many solicitors of the time, Bertram also acted as a banker and stockbroker and unfortunately this resulted in his bankruptcy in 1847. This forced John and Georgina to give up their Albany Street house and a year later, Bertram died. Georgina died in 1855.

1848 – 1851 Richard Caunter

Richard Caunte r and his two children, Robert and Isabella, lived in the house. He had recently retired from the East India Company in Malaysia, where he had worked for more than thirty years. He had served in Penang as the Superintendent of Police and there oversaw the convicts in the penal colony. Prior to the 1820s, when a regime that encouraged training and reforming was introduced, convicts mainly were involved in hard labour, developing the land and building public infrastructure. East India Company locations would request convicts from Britain when required.

In 1820, Caunter married the daughter of a fellow East India Company employee, Isabella Carnegie. She was just seventeen when they married and she bore him two or three children before she died in 1824. Her grave in Penang carries the inscription: ‘Wisely estimating the true nature of those Christian duties which properly belonged to her situation, it was her chief ambition in the retirement of her family to acquit herself with propriety in the several relations of a Wife, Mother, Daughter and Friend, and that she eminently succeeded the indescribable affliction of her bereaved Husband at her untimely death, and the deep regret of a tenderly attached circle of Relatives and Friends will best tell and surely the pure innocence of a life employed in the practice of domestic virtues was the best preparative against the unexpected and awful summons.’

His son, Robert, became a successful painter, exhibiting at the Royal Society of Arts. It was reported in 1847 that “Robert Caunter, Esq. Albany Street” had become a member of the Caledonian Horticultural Society and he  also was an early and prominent member of the Edinburgh Angling Club, which was instituted that same year. 3 

Caunter moved to Inverleith Row, where he died a few months later.

The 1855 Valuation shows that the house was still owned by the Kennedy family and leased.

1851 – 1856 William and Jane (neé Todd) Cuthbertson

William Cuthbertson was a solicitor (WS) and was a partner in Shepherd, Grant & Cuthbertson, with chambers in North Charlotte Street. He was the son of Thomas Cuthbertson, a Coach-builder in Edinburgh. Jane and he married in 1851 and moved here. They had at least one child here before moving to Northumberland Street.

1856 – 1873 Lodgings

These were run by William and Jane Lawson. Lawson also was a coach-hirer. 

1861 Lodger - Sophie Culbard

Sophie Culbard was the wife of a doctor in Dunkeld. Twenty years after lodging here, Sophie Culbard met a young girl in Dunkeld, where the girl often spent her family summer holidays. The teenage girl was Beatrix Potter. Beatrix kept a Journal with the entries written in her secret code. Fortunately the code has been deciphered and thus we have a glimpse of Mrs Culbard around 1881, seen through Beatrix Poterr’s eyes: ‘Mrs Culbard is somewhat elegant, slight, elderly lady, of plaintively amaiable freindliness, but perfectly incoherent in her conversation. She is very chatty, but her anecdotes have neither head nor tail.’ ‘ This we heard in a rambling narrative from Mrs Culbard during an afternoon visit, but the story as usual had no end. I walked back with Mrs Culbard, partly to hear the end of the story, if there was one, and partly to see their new Persian cat, Deb. First I heard the history of her seal-skin cloak, formerly a jacket of my aunt… and then to my intense amusement, a mournful and rather pitiable lament upon the existence of Dr. Dickosn, such indiscretions, distinctly libellous, and wnevnever we met anybody on the footpath she broke off and then rambled on again.’

By 1871 Jane Lawson had died. The lodgings clearly were in decline as at the 1871 census the only lodgers were George Bell, an elderly physician, and his wife, Sarah. William Lawson died soon after and his coach-hiring business, and the house, were put up for sale.