BATHED in winter sunshine, Old Assembly Close opens off the High Street and slopes down towards the Cowgate, past two very different Edinburgh institutions, the Fringe Box Office and the Faculty of Advocates.
It is a much wider, airier passageway now than it was on the night of 15 November 1824, when a pot of heated linseed oil in the workshop of engraver James Kirkwood burst into flames. The resulting conflagration raged for three days and would become k
nown as the Great Fire of Edinburgh, razing an entire swathe of the Old Town, killing 13 people and rendering hundreds homeless.
Nearly two centuries on, a book of beautifully detailed engravings that show the devastating aftermath of the blaze, originally published to raise funds for those left destitute by it, has been gifted to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS). These images can also be seen on the commission's website. Titled The Great Fire, the book was hurriedly issued, rather like a special newspaper "disaster" supplement today, by William Home Lizars, a notable Edinburgh engraver: its illustrations depict the skeletal ruins of buildings in the disaster's wake - including the highest tenement in the city, which was eventually demolished.
The fire is also regarded as a catalyst in the development of Britain's first integrated fire brigade, under its first superintendent, James Braidwood, who would become known as the father of the British fire service.
In the early years of the 19th century, as the well-to-do migrated to the emerging New Town, they left the city's poor crammed into the tenements of the Auld Toun. The tall "lands", as they were also known, were crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, separated only by narrow closes, where fire was a constant threat. But, within a place and period in which fires were all too frequent, as the Edinburgh chronicler Robert Chambers remarked, 1824 was "remarkable, beyond all former years, for the number of fires, one each month being the lowest calculation"; and the Great Fire outblazed all of these.
"It seems to have started in the printer's workshop here, which was on fire by 10 o'clock, and by 12 o'clock it had started to work up through the floors of the building," explains Iain Fraser, curator of archaeological collections with RCAHMS. "The fire engines arrived promptly - the municipal fire service had been set up just a few months before, but they were still in the process of training, and they spent the first hour trying to put the machine into operation; then, because the close was so narrow, they couldn't get the hosepipes to play on the higher parts of the building. By the time the engine was up and running it was just too late."
From Old Assembly Close, the fire worked its way up the south side of the High Street towards Parliament Square and St Giles, devouring the nearby offices of the Edinburgh Courant- the upper façade of which eventually crashed into the street - and much of Old Fishmarket Close. As molten lead flowed like lava and clouds of flying sparks showered the dense crowds in the street, wind-blown burning embers spread as far away as the Easter Road toll house. The spectacle, reported The Scotsman on 17 November, "was awfully sublime".
By 9am the following morning, the fire appeared to have abated, but embers had spread on the wind, the flames had jumped tenements eastwards and by midday, before anyone realised what was happening, the spire of the Tron Kirk was ablaze. As this paper reported: "The upper part [of the steeple] being composed entirely of wood, the flames soon made their way through it, while the lead covering was seen pouring down its sides. In a short time it was completely enveloped in flames, presenting a most singular spectacle." By ten o'clock that night, fire had broken out yet again in an old tenement - one of the tallest in the city - at the south-east corner of Parliament Square. The Edinburgh Evening Courant recorded: "The whole horizon was completely enveloped in lurid flame. The consternation, the daring, the suspense, the fear that sat upon different faces, seemed each appropriately lighted up to express their several emotions the more vividly..."
The destruction of the church steeple, in particular, captured the popular imagination, with some religious elements pronouncing it a divine judgment on the sins of the city. Chambers overheard one old lady express her belief that the conflagration was "a judgment in consequence of the late Music Festival".
To gain an impression on what Old Assembly Close looked like before the fire, Fraser and I walk a few steps further up the High Street to Borthwick's Close which, as it is today, remains the kind of narrow, sunless stone crevasse which the neighbouring close was back in 1824. It was around here that some of highest tenements in the city, their south faces plummeting into the Cowgate, were so badly damaged they had to be demolished - one of them 11 storeys high, says Fraser. "They proposed using cannon, but I think it was realised that that was just a bit too dramatic, so they used a combination of gunpowder to blow out the foundations and chains to pull down the upper structures. The Royal Engineers got the men to undermine it, and a Royal Naval vessel, HMS Brisk, docked in Leith, offered its crew to assist with hawsers and chains."
Eventually heavy rainfall helped to containing and extinguish all the fires, but not before 13 people had died, two of them firefighters, one a child run over by a fire appliance, and a young man crushed during the subsequent demolition of a tenement. Notable properties claimed by the fire included the "improved" Assembly Room, once a popular venue for dances, which had been superseded by the Assembly Rooms in George Street, and the Parliament Square shop of the famous Edinburgh caricaturist, John Kay.
A relief committee raised £11,749 over the next two years - including a donation by a private of the Midlothian Yeomanry of a £1 note, which he said had blown towards him during the fire.
Much of this was awarded in compensation for injuries and for damaged property, but £1,645 of it was paid to the dependants of those killed, including £350 to the widow of David Coulter of Leith naval yard, who died fighting the fire and left eight children. While published as a charitable venture, in its way Lizars' book, with its sketches of the demolishers at work amid teetering ruins, is paralleled by the Royal Commission's statutory remit to record buildings under threat of demolition.
One of its buildings investigators, Diane Watters, explains, recalling how she and a photographer hastily recorded what was left of the buildings gutted by the Cowgate fire of 2002. "I got calls from colleagues on the Sunday," she says, "and on the Monday morning we were on the site. It was touch-and-go, utter chaos. They were worried that the big gable on to the Cowgate was going to come down. We tried to record all that we could, focusing first on that big gable [which was demolished shortly afterwards].
"It was more or less a month or two of recording - we'd pop down if they were pulling any bits down and we got a good relationship going with the regional archaeologist.
"Then we went through our own archives at the Commission, and we found that we had a fantastic record of the development of the whole site. So in a similar way to [Lizars's] record of the Great Fire, we recorded all the buildings that came down."
In the meantime, some of Lizars's pictures can be accessed at the commission's website in their Canmore database (www.rcahms.gov.uk), evoking the aftermath of the fire that devastated a community but helped shape Britain's first integrated fire service.
THE FATHER OF FIREFIGHTING
THE first "Superintendent of Fire Engines" of Britain's first municipal fire service had been appointed just weeks before the Great Fire. James Braidwood, inset, hadn't reached his 24th birthday when he was given the role, but he set about organising the new service with a vengeance and would go on to write seminal texts on firefighting and become known as "the father of British firefighting".
Despite the disastrous nature of the Great Fire, and widely published references to the lack of co-ordination in fighting it, Braidwood and his "Pioneers", as these early firefighters were known, were exonerated from blame by an inquiry. However, the investigation did identify a lack of a clear directive as to who was in command. Reports of the Great Fire indicated police officers and municipal officials, as well as Braidwood, had all been issuing often contradictory orders. The city fathers consequently passed a now commonplace law giving the firemaster, or his deputy, complete command of all firefighting operations. The city also moved to install more firecocks - the lack of which had hampered the Great Fire operations.
Braidwood, who was just 30 when he published the first book on firefighting written in the English language, went on to become superintendent of the London Fire Brigade. A meticulous, level-headed and courageous firefighter (during the Edinburgh blaze he personally removed two casks of gunpowder from an ironmonger's shop threatened by flames), he eventually fell victim to his old adversary, dying under a collapsing wall near London Bridge during the great Tooley Street fire of 1861. Plans are afoot to erect a statue of him in Parliament Square.
