We are delighted to announce the completion of the research stage of our Jean Guild Award funded project about the WS Society’s school for orphans, John Watson’s Institution. Through this generous Old Edinburgh Club funding, we have been able to catalogue and analyse our important holdings of early archive material from the school, which we plan to rehouse to modern conservation standards in the course of the new year.
The project took its origins from the University of Edinburgh’s 2015 MESH (Mapping Edinburgh’s Social History) conference organised by Professor Richard Rodger. The conference drew on mapping and archival work in Edinburgh that sought to use historical data to create a multidimensional model of the city’s history as had already been attempted by earlier European projects such as 2012’s Venice Time Machine. The Signet Library’s holdings of John Watson’s Institution material were a good match for the MESH project because they were known to contain information not only about the children who the Institution took in but of the social networks that surrounded them and were considered to have relevance and responsibility for them.
The project was led by Dr. Kit Baston and Jo Hockey, who created searchable databases of two separate collections of material: a set of application forms (and accompanying material) to the school extending from 1828 to about 1840, and papers documenting the administrative life of the school as it went from being a proposed building on empty land to the west of Edinburgh to a busy educational establishment and indeed home for hundreds of girls and boys.
It is unsurprising that the big themes to emerge from an archive of a school for orphans are about the great disturbances of the social fabric. The project’s case studies show how in the background of every pupil is something that has gone terribly wrong. Industrial accidents; the destruction of a family unit through the father’s debt or abandonment; the impact of disease. The early years of the school saw the advent in Edinburgh of cholera and other endemic diseases, and at one point it looked as though the school itself would house a ward for cholera patients.
More cheerfully, the project was also an opportunity to digitize and make available the Signet Library’s archive of The Levite, the magazine for former pupils founded in 1903. The school had been a home as well as a place of education for its pupils and the warmth of affection and gratitude in which it was held by those who remembered it shines out from every page.
The John Watson’s archive at the Signet Library is not the only collection of material relating to the school. The single largest collection and the principal one is held at the Edinburgh City Archives, with material also held by the Museum of Childhood on the Royal Mile. A collection of material held by the archives of the Erskine Melville schools has recently been catalogued, and the National Library holds a scrapbook relating to the John Watson Club for former pupils.