I recently asked my mother this:
‘Mum, Recently when watching Suzie Fletcher, the leather restorer, on BBC Repair Shop I found my thoughts returning to childhood when you took us each year to a shop retailer to get new school outfits and satchels. I remember that shop well. I enjoyed visiting it. I recall the helpful staff and the shop had everything. The shop smelled of leather. A smell that I still love. I would like to try and write a poem about this shop. Can you recall its name and where it was located? I am sure that you can!’
My mother replied:
‘The shop where I got your uniforms was Clan House in Grove Steet so we would be there most years. I think there is still a Clan House but not sure where though I think there may be one opposite and down from the Churchill Theatre.’
What follows is a timeline of research that I have undertaken in relation to Clan House, Grove Street. This research is of course incomplete.
Clan House was originally ‘Grove cottage’ and part of the estate of Grove House. This house belonged to the Bonar family who prospered in the time of the industrial revolution. In the early 19c the house, being close to the heart of Edinburgh, was let to the Murrays of Elibank.
24 September 1820, Caledonian Mercury:
30 December 1824, Caledonian Mercury [child mortality]:
A map from the 1820s:
22 January 1825, Caledonian Mercury [child mortality]:
16 February 1828, Edinburgh Evening Courant [following the death of John Bonar in 1825]
1829 map by Claud Shaw [these improvements were not carried out: Grove square was not to be]:
25 August 1832, Edinburgh Evening Courant [deadly cholera]
12 June 1834, Caledonian Mercury [industry carries on]:
1853 Ordnance Survey map [the two summer houses of Grove House somehow still survive]:
15 November 1873, Scotsman:
19 December 1885, Edinburgh Evening News: Grove Cottage has become ‘Fountainbridge Hall’:
1893 Ordnance Survey map [on this later map it is annotated as ‘Mission Hall, seats for 400]:
17 February 1897, Edinburgh Evening News:
9 June 1928, Edinburgh Evening News:
1 April 1932, Edinburgh Evening News:
9 October 1946, Edinburgh Evening News: There is a clue here to a new life for what was Grove Cottage, and now known as ‘Clan House’:
Summer 1946: The Enchanted Capital of Scotland published by Noel Fyfe:
12 January 1947, Edinburgh Evening News:
18 August 1947, Edinburgh Evening News:
13 May 1954, Edinburgh Evening News:
19 December 1967, Scotsman [this so happens to be the day that I was born]:
23 January 1981, Scotsman [around the time when my mum took me to Clan House to get me ready for school]:
28 July 1990, Edinburgh Evening News:
23 December 2001, Scotland on Sunday:
From Facebook [recent times]:
