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Round And About, May 2012

May 312012

Voice’s Alex Mitchell takes readers on a tour of Aberdeen offering a snapshot in time with regard to the appearance, condition and history of some of the city’s streets, features and buildings.

Saturday 19th May 2012:
The first sunny day for ages, so I left the car at Union Square and went for a wander. The handsome Archibald Simpson building (former Employment Exchange) at the north-east corner of the Market Street & Virginia Street crossroads has been stone-cleaned to useful effect. Similarly the Tivoli on Guild Street has benefited from its restoration.

More stone-cleaning is being undertaken on the Carmelite Hotel on Trinity Street. The rectangular enclosures along Carmelite Street are now filling up with shrubs.

The trees planted along both sides of Rennie’s Wynd are taking hold now and doing their bit to enhance this otherwise fairly grim length of streetscape alongside the Trinity Centre car park.

Into the Green.

The shop premises formerly occupied by Coco Violet, just east of the Back Wynd stairs, remain untenanted.

Similarly the former butcher’s shop next to Correction Wynd and the large former sportswear shop on the south side.

Café 52 seems busy, but otherwise few people to be seen at 2.30 pm on a sunny Saturday.

The south side of the Green is already in deep shade. The Green and the surrounding area are characterised by very tall buildings and narrow streets and wynds, the unfortunate effect of which is to shut out the sunlight in the afternoons, even in the summer months.

Along Hadden Street. The trees planted in the rectangular enclosures alongside the Aberdeen Market are now protected by elegant & substantial black wrought-iron tree-guards, which create a welcome impression of regularity and symmetry.

Similarly the Rox Hotel up ahead on Market Street, its 1845 Archibald Simpson premises and frontage elegantly restored.

But the Market Arms pub at the corner of Hadden Street & Stirling Street is looking very shabby these days.

Down Market Street and along Shiprow Lane.

On Shiprow itself, the Ibis Hotel and the huge office development beyond, apparently still unoccupied. The lights are on, but nobody is at home.

Across Union Street and along Broad Street. The restoration and stone-cleaning of Marischal College really show up to good effect on a sunny day and the statue of Robert Bruce is also highly effective.

The restored Marischal College has become the ‘iconic’ backdrop of choice for any TV news item about Aberdeen and it does our town credit.

Along Gallowgate. The BrewDog premises in the former Marischal Bar have become something of an institution, an unusual case of a pub actually being improved by a change of ownership.

Down Littlejohn Street, across King Street and along East North Street to the Castlehill roundabout.

We lost the Timmer Market car park some time ago, to the huge disadvantage of businesses & residents in the Castlegate, and now the East North Street car park is closed down and being redeveloped as part of the new Health & Care Village on Frederick Street.

Nobody much in the Castlegate – a clutch of alkies are disporting themselves between the Sally-Ann and the Portals Bar, not doing anything particularly exceptionable, but hardly conducive to the ambiance of this historic locale or its tourist-related potential.

Down Marischal Street – a spectacularly dilapidated shoppie just up from the bridge over Virginia Street, still with its window display from about 30 years ago. Back to Guild Street, where the forecourt of the Union Square complex seems to have become the favoured place for kids to hang out and drop litter.

Holburn Junction – the premises of the former Beluga café/bar are now occupied by a Sainsbury’s Local, directly across this end of Union Street from a Tesco Metro in the former Bank of Scotland premises.

It seems that conversion of pubs into supermarkets does not require planning permission for change-of-use, and there are a lot of redundant pubs these days.

These new small supermarkets are the one positive development in High Street shopping locales these days, being convenient of access and encouraging people to walk to their local shops and on a regular basis instead of driving to an edge-of-town superstore once a week or so.

Out the Lang Stracht to Dobbie’s Garden Centre on the western outskirts of the city. The Garden Centre incorporates a substantial retail operation including books & magazines, leisure/outerwear – frankly, most of the togs a chap needs – plus a cafė/restaurant, delicatessen, butcher, baker etc.

Garden centres have a fairly banal image, but one can see the attractions of free & accessible parking, a clean, well-maintained environment, decently-behaved customers, clean toilets – it is easy to see the appeal compared with going into town. And it’s somewhere to go in the car, and not too far away.

The danger is that Dobbie’s may be the thin end of a wedge deployed to justify further retail development, followed as surely as night follows day by proposals for residential development and inexorable urban sprawl whilst retail activity continues to drain out of the city centre.

Saturday 26th May 2012:
Brilliantly sunny weather all this week.
Left the motor in the Denburn car park and walked down past His Majesty’s Theatre, under the Denburn Viaduct and into Union Terrace Gardens – full of people, many with small children – this is one of the very few down-town locations where kids can be allowed to run about without fear of traffic.
And not an alkie or smackheid in sight.

The 78 large mature trees are looking wonderful just now. Every aspect pleases, other than that of the Triple Kirks, its crumbling tower & spire now further enhanced by unpainted wooden boarding to shut out the peregrine falcons which were nesting there until recently.

The peregrines are a top predator, indicative of a whole food chain of wildlife species below them.

Belmont Street is full of people, checking out the monthly Country Market. On the brow of Schoolhill, looking towards Marischal College, where the Mitchell Tower is now conspicuously dirty-grey and unrestored.

This view of the College has been obstructed these last 40-odd years by the jumble of concrete rubbish at the Upperkirkgate end of the St Nicholas House complex – the octagonal structure, the long-redundant Post Office and the untenanted shops. Into St Nicholas Kirkyard via Back Wynd. Clumps of bluebells between the gravestones. Lots of people enjoying the tranquillity.

The anti-social element seems to have moved to the Castlegate these days.

To the Oxfam Bookshop, the last second-hand bookshop remaining in Aberdeen, where I obtained Misha Glenny’s magisterial history of the Balkans @ £3.99.

Bookshops and record shops used to be a principal attraction of town centres and High Streets, a reason for going into town, and now they’re almost all gone. What, if anything, will replace them?

Back over Union Bridge and down through the Gardens; again, every aspect pleases – the granite balustrading, originally matching that on both sides of Union Bridge, the Tuscan-style palazzi along Union Terrace, the statues of Edward VII, a.k.a. Edward the Caresser, Rabbie Burns, Prince Albert and William Wallace, and the wonderful and truly iconic vista of His Majesty’s Theatre up there on the Viaduct.

Contributed by Alex Mitchell.

Peter Williamson – Aberdeen Child Slave Part 5

Aberdeen City, Articles, Community, Featured, History, Information No Responses »

Jun 182011

With thanks to Mike Shepherd.

Peter Williamson was kidnapped as a child in Aberdeen harbour and taken to the American Colonies where he was sold as a slave.

On gaining his freedom, he was kidnapped by the Indians, living with them and eventually escaping from them. He then spent three years in the British Army fighting against the French and the Indians, only to be captured again, this time by the French.

As part of a prisoner exchange he was repatriated to Britain in 1757.

In Plymouth he was released from the army with a purse of six shillings. This was enough to get to him to York, by which time he was penniless.

He managed to persuade some local businessmen to publish his book, titled The Life and Curious Adventures of Peter Williamson, Who was Carried off from Aberdeen and Sold for a Slave. This sold very well and gave him enough money to return to Aberdeen in June 1758, fifteen years after being kidnapped.

He had several hundred copies of his book with him, some of which he managed to sell on the streets of Aberdeen. The book eventually came to the notice of Councillors and merchantmen in the city, and although nobody was named, they did not like what they read. The Procurator Fiscal lodged a complaint with the Provost and Magistrates, stating:

“that by this scurrilous and infamous libel … the corporation of the City of Aberdeen, and whole members whereof, were highly hurt and prejudged; and therefore that the Pursuer (Peter Williamson) ought to be exemplary punished in his person and goods; and that the said pamphlet, and whole copies thereof, ought to be seized and publicly burnt.”

A warrant was issued for his arrest. He was taken from his lodgings and brought before a Magistrate at the courthouse. Peter was asked to repudiate publicly everything he had said concerning the merchants of Aberdeen. Until he agreed, he was to be imprisoned and his books seized. After a short time in the Tolbooth (a jail in the Aberdeen Town House), he was bailed and stood for trial. On being found guilty, he was told to lodge a document with the court confessing to the falsity of the book and to pay a ten shilling fine, otherwise he would be imprisoned. This he reluctantly agreed to, leaving Aberdeen and moving to Edinburgh.

In a ceremony watched by the Dean of the Guild, the Town Clerk, the Procurator Fiscal and the Baillies, the offending pages were sliced from 350 of Williamson’s books and publicly burnt at the Mercat Cross by the town hangman. The remaining pages were never returned.

In Edinburgh, Peter contacted a lawyer and started planning for a legal challenge. He opened a coffee shop which became frequented by the Edinburgh legal fraternity and he started to teach himself Scots law. The year 1760 saw the start of an extended phase of courtroom battles against his persecutors in Aberdeen. In 1762, he was successful in getting the result of the Aberdeen trial reversed and was awarded costs and a £100 in damages.

The results of his investigations had revealed the names of the businessmen behind his kidnapping. These were Captain Robert Ragg, Walter Cochrane (the Aberdeen Town Clerk Depute), Baillie William Fordyce, Baillie William Smith, Baillie Alexander Mitchell, and Alexander Gordon, all local merchants with a share in the ship, Planter.

Further litigation ensued. Witnesses were found and they were mainly men who as boys had managed to escape kidnapping. The father of a boy who had sailed with Peter Williamson to the Americas testified. He said that while the Planter had been moored at Torry, his son had returned to him and refused to go back. He claimed that Captain Ragg and others involved had spoken again and again with him in the street, warning him that he would be sent to the Tolbooth if he didn’t send his son back to the ship. The boy went back.

The main incriminating evidence was the so-called “kidnapping book”. This was a ledger detailing all the expenses of the slave-ship venture. It mentioned Peter Williamson by name and included entries such as:

“To one pair of stockings to Peter Williamson, six pence; To five days of diet, one shilling and three pence.”

One entry read:

“To the man who brought Peter Williamson, one shilling and six pence.”

Eventually in 1768 the case was proved. Peter was awarded damages of £200 plus 100 guineas costs.

Child slavery was endemic in Aberdeen and elsewhere in the 1700s. The plantations in the American colonies were desperate for labour. The Book of Bon Accord (Robertson 1839) records that:

“The inhabitants of the neighbourhood dared not send their children into town, and even trembled lest they should be snatched away from their homes. For in all parts of the country emissaries were abroad, in the dead of night children were taken by force from the beds where they slept; and the remote valleys of the Highlands, fifty miles distant from the city, were infested by ruffians who hunted their prey as beasts of the chase.”

Skelton (2004) mentions that it was estimated that 600 boys and girls were abducted and sold for slavery between 1740 and 1760 in Aberdeen and the North-east. On the voyage alone that took Peter Williamson, there were 69 youngsters on board.

A BBC website accompanying a radio series on the history of the British Empire fills in some background from the period:

“Most accounts of British slaving date from the 16th century with the shipping of Africans to the Spanish Main. But less discussed is what happened to English and Scots eight, nine and ten year-olds in places like Aberdeen, London and Bristol. Many from those places were sold for forced labour in the colonies.

London gangs would capture youngsters, put them in the hold of a ship moored in the Thames and when the hold was full, set sail for America. Many authorities encouraged the trade. In the early 17th century authorities wanted rid of the waifs, strays, young thieves and vandals in their towns and cities. The British were starting to settle in Virginia. So that’s where the children went.

This was a time when it was common enough in Britain to have small children as cheap, or unpaid labour. In 1618 one hundred children were officially transported to Virginia. So pleased were the planters with the young labour that the then Lord Mayor, Sir William Cockayne, received an immediate order from the colony “to send another ship load.”
See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/empire/episodes/episode_36.shtml

Sources:

*Joseph Robertson: “The Book of Bon Accord”. Aberdeen 1839.
*Douglas Skelton: “Indian Peter. The extraordinary life and adventures of Peter Williamson”. Edinburgh, 2004.
*Peter Williamson “The Life and Curious Adventures of Peter Williamson, Who was Carried off from Aberdeen and Sold for a Slave”. York, 1757.

Read the full story here: The Life and Curious Adventures of Peter Williamson

Round And About, February 2011

Aberdeen City, Articles, Community, Environment, Featured, Information No Responses »

Feb 182011

By Alex Mitchell.

A bright, sunny Thursday afternoon. Left the car at Union Square and walked through the main aisle. A fair number of mostly young people are walking briskly and purposefully to and fro rather than window-shopping or going into any of the shops, other than Apple. Out on to Guild Street. The Edwardian frontage of the Station Hotel (1901) looks well in the bright sun.

Across Guild Street and into the recently-designated ‘Merchant Quarter’ around the Green. This whole area, as around the triangular site of the Carmelite Hotel – Trinity Street, Carmelite Street & Lane, Stirling Street and Exchange Street – is characterised by narrow streets, alleys and wynds, small medieval plots and very tall buildings which shut out the sunlight. The overall effect is dark, congested and Gothic, a bit like the medieval Paris depicted in Dieterle’s film of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1939).

There is also a marked absence of green space or trees. As part of The Green Townscape Heritage Initiative, ACC has laid down concrete rectangular enclosures for shrubs and trees, as in Carmelite Street and Rennie’s Wynd, but these will take time to establish themselves. The Green itself is in deep shade at 1.30 pm, with nobody much going about.

Out by Hadden Street, on to Market Street and along Trinity Lane to Shiprow. The huge City Wharf development, originally scheduled for completion in December 2009, was left unfinished when the Edinburgh-based developer, Kenmore, folded. The development is now owned by SI City Wharf Ltd, and what is striking is the lack of any apparent urgency to finish the job. Even the Ibis Hotel, which was relatively well advanced, remains as yet unfinished. The Harbour is full of oil vessels. Oil-related activity has surged now that the world price has reached $100 per barrel, comparing favourably with long-run extraction costs estimated at $30-50 per barrel.

Across Union Street and into Broad Street. Marischal College, newly restored, shines brightly in the sunshine, the single most iconic building in Aberdeen.

It is a pity the same treatment cannot be applied to the adjacent and contiguous Greyfriars Kirk.

The Church of Scotland wants £1.25 million for Greyfriars Kirk; but Aberdeen City Council estimate its value as being in the vicinity of zero, given that nobody else wants it and the building is full of dry rot.

Down Queen Street, once an elegant Georgian residential thoroughfare inhabited from 1791 by the young George Gordon Byron, later Lord Byron, and his temperamental mother, Catherine Gordon, heiress to Gight Castle. They later moved to Broad Street and young George attended the Grammar School, then at its original site on Schoolhill. Now Queen Street and Broad Street have no resident population at all.

Round by Aberdeen Arts Centre, in John Smith’s South Church of 1829 at the crossroads of King Street and North Street. Along East North Street towards the Castlehill roundabout. The new low-rent flats built around the old Timmer Market car park have been finished for some reason in a drab brown/black slate-like material. By contrast, the 1960s tower-block flats on Castlehill, viewed at a distance and in the full glare of the afternoon sun, achieve something like elegance and symmetry.

In by Justice Street to the Castlegate which is barely ticking over. Fifty-odd years ago, this was the city’s main bus/tram interchange. Alex ‘Cocky’ Hunter’s emporium and the Castlegate market were in full swing and the Sick Kids’ Hospital was round in Castle Terrace.

Up on to Castlehill itself by the one-time Futty Wynd. There remain long stretches of substantial granite wall from the C.18th Barracks and the earlier Cromwellian fortifications of the 1650s, and a circular indentation, as of a gun emplacement, overlooking the harbour. The Gordon Highlanders left the Barracks in the 1930s and these impressive Georgian buildings became a form of emergency housing until their demolition in the 1960s. There must still be people around now, between fifty and eighty years of age, who were brought up in that distinctly bleak and austere environment.

The odd thing now is that there must be hundreds of people living in the present blocks of flats, Marischal Court and Virginia Court – the equivalent of a large village – but at 2.30 on a sunny weekday afternoon there is nobody going about on Castlehill apart from a couple of Council workmen. Kids would still be at school at this time of day, but even so the entire vicinity is unnervingly silent and still and full of ghosts.

Down Marischal Street and along Regent Quay. The waters of the old natural harbour reached the foot of the Castle Hill at high tide, a line roughly corresponding to Virginia Street. The area between Virginia Street and the present harbour-front is the old Shorelands, a muddy inter-tidal zone once inhabited mainly by crabs, but reclaimed from the mid-C.18th and since occupied by Commerce Street, Mearns Street, James Street, Water Lane and the lower end of Marischal Street.

The view up Mearns Street is dominated by the shining tower of the Castlehill flats. Virginia Street used to be a narrow and meandering cobbled thoroughfare, but is nowadays yet another urban motorway, wider than it really needs to be and at the expense of much of the old toun. It is an unpleasant experience to walk the narrow footpath as between the Shore Porters’ building and the monster trucks charging straight into the permanent traffic gridlock of Guild Street and Market Street. Back along Shore Lane, across the foot of Marischal Street and past Theatre Lane – an almost subterranean link to Virginia Street and well worth exploring. But not today.

Contributed by Alex Mitchell.