54 Albany Street
1897 – 1927 Jane Fortune (neé Penny) and her daughter, Alice Durie (neé Fortune)Jane Fortune was the widow of Robert Fortune, the famous botanist and renowned plant collector. (Photo c. 1866 of Jane and Robert and John and Jane, the first of their five children) Sixty years earlier, in 1836, Jane, when just twenty-years-of-age, it appears that she worked as a servant at Number 43 Albany Street. It was from that house that she went to wed Robert Fortune, a young gardener working at the Royal Botanic Garden. Fortune had begun his working life as an apprentice gardener on an estate in Berwickshire, owned by George Kelloe, one of a number of estate owners at the time with an interest in plant breeding and the introduction of new species. Jane and Robert had grown up in the same part of Scotland.While Jane bore five children, Robert's career progressed. His experience with new species impressed and within six months he was sent to China on a plant collecting trip. In 1846, he was appointed Curator at the Chelsea Physic Garden, and undertook further collecting trips to China for the Horticultural Society of London, vastly increasing the range of species available to gardeners.
In 1848, he was commissioned by the East India Company to undertake another trip to China; this time specifically to collect tea plants for cultivation in the northern hills of India. The purchase of tea plants by Westerners was forbidden by the Chinese authorities as they wished to protect their monopoly, and also foreigners were not allowed to travel any distance from the European treaty ports. Fortune was in China for about two and a half years. To circumvent the Chinese restrictions, he disguised himself as a Chinese merchant and thus travelled to areas of China that had seldom been visited by Europeans. He gathered tea plants and seedlings in secret, and by pioneering the use of the Wardian Case, a miniature glasshouse for the safe transport of plants by sea, introduced 20,000 tea plants and seedlings to the Darjeeling region of India. He also took a group of trained Chinese tea workers to India help establish the tea plantations. Fortune introduced many trees, shrubs and flowers to the West, including the cumquat, and many varieties of tree peonies, azaleas and chrysanthemums.
When Fortune retired following a visit to Japan, he and Jane spent the last eighteen years of his life in London, a period when he was in increasingly poor health. He died in 1880.
Did Jane, now aged 81, and a respectable and well-off widow of a famous man, choose to return to live in the street where she had been a servant sixty years earlier, as it was from here she went to marry Robert, as a comment on how far she, and her family, had come from that earlier self. Her daughter, Alice, was also a widow. Her husband, John Durie, the owner of Elphingstone Collieries, Tranent, had died relatively young in 1896. Her only daughter, Daisy, married William Gemmill, an army officer, but he died in action in the last months of the First World War. Three years later Daisy re-married, to Alexander Mackenzie
1928 – 1944 Charles Kelman Robertson
Charles Kelman Robertson was a doctor and a member of the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians. He was a General Practitioner working from his Albany Street house. In 1930, he successfully patented an improved filing cabinet. The patent records it as being: ‘an improved cabinet for storing or filing cards and like sheets, being particularly suitable for use where a large number of record cards require to be within the reach of the operator or entry clerk, in order that entries may be made upon any record card without loss of time. The entries are usually made by the use of an accounting machine or 0 typewriter and it is desirable that the operator should have every record card within easy reach while remaining seated at the accounting machine or typewriter.’
1950 – at least 1980 Guthrie Somerville
Guthrie Somerville owned a shop in Broughton Street selling radios and televisions. He wrote a letter to The Scotsman the year before he moved here. His letter questions a reference in a recent lecture that the stone over the doorway of the church at Linton depicts David the hunter. Instead, he states that this stone is known locally as The Somerville Stone, and commemorates the slaying of a Border monster by a Somerville, in return for which the Somerville family were appointed huntsmen to the Kings of Scotland.
His son, David and his wife Christine took over the house.
