Political sectarianism and redoubtable mothers: the thread about the Sciennes School Strike of 1925

As often seems to happen, I start off reading a little bit about one thing and then fall unwittingly yet compliantly down a deep rabbit hole with all kinds of unexpected tangents. So let’s unravel a bit of the Sciennes School Strike of 1925.

Sciennes, if you don’t know, is a neighbourhood in Edinburgh. You pronounce it to rhyme with machines (it’s a Scottish corruption of Sienna, after a convent that long ago stood here) and it is home to a school of the same name. To get to the root of our story we go back to 1872, when the Education (Scotland) Act of that year brought responsibility for mandatory schooling in Scotland under the control of local School Boards. For the Burgh of the City of Edinburgh (the formal name of the city) this was the Edinburgh School Board.

The roundel of the Edinburgh School Board, “the female figure of education” dispensing knowledge to the young. Dean Public School, one of the ESB’s first new schools after the 1872 act. © Self

Most of the existing schools at that time were either church, parish or charitably provided and those of the Presbyterian churches (that is the majority of all churches in Scotland at that time) and parishes were transferred directly to the School Boards. Most of these facilities were too small and found to be inadequate as teaching spaces for modern methods, so a crash building programme was initiated. Sciennes School was a product of this program, completed in 1892. Other public schools in the Southside of Edinburgh at the time included the 1877 Bristo School on the long demolished part of Marshall Street, Causewayside School on that street and later Preston Street school of 1896 on the east part of that street.

Sciennes Primary School, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Stephencdickson

Board schools, while largely Protestant in outlook, were strictly speaking non-denominational and there was no direct church control (although the churches had a reserved seat in the board’s membership). Crucially to what would happen in the future though, Catholic schools were not covered by the 1872 act and remained in control of that church, with the Scottish Episcopal Church also choosing to remain independent at this time, fearing the erosion of their denominational, religious education. To provide for a Catholic education in central Edinburgh therefore that Church set up a school, St. Columba’s. It moved around a bit, repeatedly outgrowing a series of unsuitable premises, before settling in a converted townhouse at 81 Newington Road. You can still see where the sign once was.

81 Newington Road, you can see where the sign would have been above the central window.

Edinburgh’s Catholic population was growing quite rapidly at the time with immigration into the city centre from both Ireland and Italy. And then came the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act, which brought the Catholic schools into control of the state sector, with the School Boards rationalised into larger local Education Authorities, with wider responsibilities. Like the old School Board, the Edinburgh Education Authority (EEA) was directly elected by popular ballot and was outwith direct control of the City Corporation or any church; although a system of proportional representation meant a balance of Presbyterian, Episcopal and Catholic members had reserved places on its board. The new authority was unimpressed by the size and quality of the facilities it had inherited off the R. C. Church (actually, it bought them off them under the provisions of the 1918 act) so set about trying to find a better home for St. Columba’s.

The post-WW1 economic slump meant there wasn’t the money to go around to build a new school – particularly a minority school – so the EEA looked to rationalise its public schools in the Southside, which it found had an excess of capacity, and make one of them into a new Catholic school. The plan seemed simple enough; move St. Columba’s to the half-empty Causewayside School and transfer that school’s roll to Sciennes, Bristo or Preston Street schools, whichever alternative was closest to children’s homes.

Causewayside School, architectural elevation by Robert Rowand Anderson, which would later become St. Columba’s

After the numbers were crunched, 154 children were to be relocated from Causewayside to Sciennes, 101 to Preston Street and 66 to Bristo. 291 children were to transfer in turn from St. Columba’s into its new home and 81 Newington Road would be disposed of. All simple enough and making better use of the Authority’s resources, so it should be relatively uncontroversial administrative change, yes?

No. What happened next was the emergent Scottish Protestant League decided to wade into things and try and make it a wedge issue – stirred up in part by local lawyer, political dabbler and green inker, Robert Sterling Craig Esq SSC, known as Sterling Craig. Sterling Craig was nominally a Liberal and therefore opposed to any place for religious education in schools, but it seems clear from his writing and speaking on the subject that he also had a clear anti-Catholic bent. When the Authority announced its decision towards the end of the school term in June 1924 he and a local parish councillor, Mrs Inglis Clark, organised a public meeting in protest “in the strongest way“.

What followed next was a rather predictable series of conflicting arguments by Sterling Craig and Clark, which began to descend into the disingenuous, e.g. the alternatives would be too far, causing 2 or 3 mile walks to school (Sciennes and Preston Street were less than 500m away). The EEA was accused of inflating the roll of St. Columba’s by “stuffing” it with children from the Catholic Home (an orphanage), a claim the Authority flat out denied: they claimed 477 children were being displaced – the Authority said it was 321. Sterling Craig simultaneously claimed that Causewayside was a non-denominational school (it was) but also “Protestant” (it wasn’t, although likely much of the school roll was). His loud and authoritative voice drowned out the views and representations of the parents and children impacted by this. He had previously sat on the Edinburgh School Board and was standing for the upcoming Edinburgh Education Authority election and decided to make this issue a key plank of his campaign. His letters to the Scotsman refer to “the Roman Catholics” and “the Roman Catholic Children” in a very othering tone – they are quite unpleasant to read in places with retrospect.

Sterling Craig was upset that a “central” school (i.e. one serving a wide rather than strictly local catchment) was being located in the Southside of the city; that children would be bused-in (actually, trammed) at the Authority’s expense and that they would be given school meals at the EEA‘s expense (at this time most school children went home for their lunch time) – despite these all being provisions in line with the 1918 act and therefore a legal obligation for the authority. To boil his arguments down to a single sentence, they would be: I’m not anti-Catholic, but can’t they just go some place else? To this extent he suggested wholly inadequate facilities at Old St. Patrick’s in the Canongate (the Authority pointed out that they didn’t own these and so would have to buy and renovate them at its own expense). It was all very not from round here and he and his allies in Mrs Inglis Clark and others began to go rather seriously down the route of sectarian scaremongering. However the EEA, to its credit, stuck to its plans and even managed to get most of the parents would would be impacted by the changes on side. The nay-sayers were not placated however and together with the nascent Scottish Protestant League (SPL) under Alexander Ratcliffe and a number of local Presbyterian churchmen, they organised a “Great Protestant Rally” at the Livingstone Hall on South Clerk Street in January 1925, which was attended by around 500.

Advert for the Great Protestant Rally, Edinburgh Evening News, 3rd January 1925

The meeting denounced the Education Authority as “traitors” and as a result the SPL – which claimed itself apolitical – and Sterling Craig agreed on a platform of trying to take over the Education Authority at the upcoming elections and campaign for repeal those provisions of the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act that they disliked; namely the state provision of R. C. education. Sterling Craig’s words were reported as “the only thing that prevented ‘the Catholics’ walking back to St. Columba’s and the old school going back to Causewayside was the laziness of the ratepayers” (if only people would turn out and vote for him, he would sort it out).

1935 reprint of The Protestant Advocate in Ratcliffe’s own newspaper, the Protestant Vanguard

In case you didn’t realise it by the way – 1920s and 30s Edinburgh local politics was quite a hotbed of anti-Catholicism. The Protestant League stood seven candidates in the 1925 Authority election, Sterling Craig stood himself as an independent. Just one of the those candidates – Alexander Ratcliffe (who styled himself “Scotland’s Modern John Knox” and went as far as to refer in public to St. Columba’s as “the now misnamed St. Columba’s“) – was elected, as was Sterling Craig. Ratcliffe soon turned his ire to the opening of a Carmelite Convent in the city before getting altogether a bit bored of Edinburgh local politics. He would move to Glasgow where he made some inroads with the SPL in that Corporation’s elections of 1931, exploiting and stoking that city’s long-standing sectarian tensions. In Edinburgh it was to be the Protestant Action Society under John Cormack that would later take up the anti-Catholic political mantle. As a party held together purely by a common hatred, it was inevitable that the SPL would eventually become unstable. It split with the Ulster Protestant League in 1933 when Ratcliffe’s wife Mary and another SPL member attacked and defaced a (factually correct) painting in the Northern Irish parliament that showed the Pope celebrating William of Orange’s victory at the Boyne

William III, the Duke of Schomberg, and the Pope (top left, blessing the Protestant monarch from a cloud), by Pieter van der Meulen, c. 1690

After falling out with the UPL, the SPL itself fell apart due to irreconcilable internal divisions. The Scottish protestant mainstream distanced itself from the increasingly extremist and unpredictable Alexander Ratcliffe. The man who had started his political life at the Edinburgh Education Authority moved on to dabbling with the Scottish fascists, who in turn kicked him out as being too extreme for even them. He has been described as “one of the very first Holocaust deniers in the country and perhaps even the world“. He was an extreme anti-Catholic and anti-Semite to his core who thought that Hitler and Mussolini were in league with the Pope to smash Protestantism… This conflicting and thoroughly distasteful man died at his home in Glasgow in 1947.

A wartime anti-Semitic pamphlet issued by Alexander Ratcliffe

But back to Edinburgh and back to 1925, when St Columba’s opened its doors after the summer holidays, the former pupils of Causewayside School instead made their way to Sciennes, Preston Street and Bristo schools. How did this end up in a strike? Well what happened was that – in true local authority style – after winning parents over to its controversial plans the Education Authority went back on its assurances and rightly aggrieved a lot of parents. Sciennes, it said, was actually too full and so 150 or so children who had just recently been settled in at Sciennes would instead need to go to Bristo School.

Bristo Public School on Marshall Street. © Edinburgh City Libraries

This poured salt on a wound that had not yet had any chance to heal and the mothers of the Southside were having none of it. Official phraseology such as “arriving at a more equitable distribution of scholars” just made things even worse. The problem was not just the repeated relocation of children, it was where they were to be moved to. Bristo was notoriously small and dark and dingy on the inside and as you can see from the aerial photo below it had a tiny playground that was penned in on all sides by tall tenements. Furthermore, it was fundamentally on the wrong side of the (tram) tracks for many parents.

Bristo Public School from the air – it is the building in the centre with the flat roof to the rear and the corner tower. You can see how penned in the playground at the back was, and how many of the school windows were in the shadow of neighbouring tenements. From Britain From Above

Without the distraction of Sterling Craig or Mrs Inglis Clark and their anti-Catholic agenda, the mothers of the affected children quickly formed themselves into an effective deputation to the Education Authority. They literally marched strait there and beat on the door – turning up at its offices on Castle Terrace on September 2nd 1925 to demand an audience. For good measure, a flying squad was also send to the home of the Authority’s chairman – Councillor P. H. Allan – to wait for him in case he was there. When it became clear that the Authority was not for budging the mothers organised a public meeting on September 4th, packing out the Nicolson Square public hall. Councillor Mrs Adam Millar tried to cool things down but only inflamed the situation by saying it was not the Authority’s fault but the fault of parents as they had voted for the same EEA (or hadn’t bothered; turnout for the previous election was only around 20%). At the meeting the mothers of around 110 of the affected children agreed to stop sending them to school entirely if they could not send them to Sciennes. The Sciennes School Strike had begun.

Councillor P. H. Allan, Chairman of the Education Authority

On September 8th it was reported there were rumours that the strike would spread as a result of some children from Craiglockhart, Roseburn and Gorgie schools being dispersed to Dalry in the name of a “more equitable distribution of scholars“. The strike did not end up spreading but neither did it go away. The Authority tried to offer an olive branch and say children from the Buccleuch Street area could stay at Sciennes, however those from George Square would still have to go to Bristo. Whether this attempt at strikebreaking was a deliberate ploy to divide and conquer their opposition is unclear, but it failed. By September 15th, the 3rd week of the strike, it was still ongoing with 55 children remaining out of school. The mothers caused uproar in the Authority board room by turning up en masse with their children in tow and “infants in their arms“. But they did have sympathisers on the Authority and Mrs Swan Brunton* spoke out in their favour. At a deadlock, the Authority did what Authorities do best when they don’t know what to do and conceded to set up a Special Sub-Committee on School Congestion to look into the matter further.

Janet Swan Brunton 1882 – 1932. * = The redoubtable Mrs Swan Brunton JP, a suffragette of the Scottish Cooperative Women’s Guild. In 1928 she became only the 5th woman elected to the Corporation of Edinburgh, as a Labour member. She died suddenly in 1932 aged 50, in Glasgow at a meeting of the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society, and was buried in North Merchiston Cemetery

September 21st. No resolution was in sight, 58 children were on strike from Sciennes and in total 86 across the city were. On September 24th the Scotsman reported that the Education Authority declared the strike had been broken and most of the children had returned to the schools it had allocated them to. The next day, September 25th, they had to print something of a retraction; the children had not in fact gone back to school and were still on strike. At a public meeting of ratepayers it had been agreed that a general strike of children should be called for in the Central District. Come September 26th the Authority remained unmoved, issuing a statement that it had acted in accordance with its statutory obligations and that if the 42 children on strike were not sent to school then they would start taking legal action to enforce it. But still the strike was not broken and so one month into the walkout, on October 6th, the Authority held an exceptional meeting. Mrs Swan Brunton implored her colleagues to use their common sense and allow the 40 children to go back to Sciennes as they had been promised, with Mrs Mclaren speaking in support. Unfortunately, Mrs Swan Brunton’s motion, seconded by Mrs Mclaren, was voted down. Alexander Ratcliffe blamed the Catholics as usual.

October 14th, five weeks in and the strike dragged on. It was suggested at an Authority meeting that if only the Corporation would repave the street outside Bristo School with wooden setts that the noise of traffic that affected it would be reduced sufficiently to entice the strikers to attend. Chairman Allan tried to force through a resolution to this effect but Mrs Swan Brunton challenged the count on the grounds that it had not reached a quorum of three quarters of members. She prevailed this time and the meeting then collapsed into farce and had to be adjourned. The Authority tried again the next week. One typically bureaucratic proposal that came out of this was to set up yet another sub-committee – the Special Committee on School Areas. Alexander Ratcliffe yet again agitated against “the Catholics” and also this time the Episcopalians, supported by Sterling Craig as seconder. It was agreed to set up the sub-committee and spent the rest of the meeting was spent listening to the extremist ramblings of Ratcliffe .

Eight weeks in on October 26th another meeting was held by the Education Authority. It lasted precisely two minutes before again collapsing into chaos when the chairman over-rode Mrs Swan Brunton’s motion for resolution. He left to the mothers in the gallery crying “Shame!” November 2nd. Week 9. The Chairman called a private meeting restricted to a sub-set of members of the Authority, with the mothers forced to wait outside the offices. The Authority could not bring itself to publicly concede but fundamentally capitulated when it agreed that the 46 children who had been moved from Sciennes to Bristo could instead have their pick of Castlehill, Preston Street, Tollcross or St. Leonard’s schools.

Castlehill School, now offering a very different sort of education as the Scotch Whisky Experience

The mothers decided as one that they would send their children to Preston Street. They were true to their word, and 37 mothers and 46 children arrived at the school door the very next day, November 3rd, exactly 2 months from the start of the strike. The strike was over. Almost: the Authority meeting had ended so late in the day that nobody had bothered to write to the Headteacher at Preston Street to inform them of the decision! The school refused to admit the children and sent them away. It was not until November 4th that the Head was satisfied with the paperwork and the children were admitted to Preston Street School. The Great Sciennes School Strike of 1925 was finally over.

Preston Street School, CC-BY-SA Kim Traynor

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The Society: the thread about the vanished district of brewers and the 1908 Rectorial War

I started the morning with a little animated “Now and Then” image transition of an image in the National Galleries Scotland collection. So where are we this morning?

“Now and Then” animated image transition

We are on the Edinburgh street that was then called Lindsay Place, a southward extension of George IV Bridge in the neighbourhood of Society. Not heard that one before? Well it’s an extinct placename now, but at one time Society referred to the Fellowship and Society of Ale and Beer Brewers of the Burgh who were chartered in 1598 to have the supply monopoly for “good and sufficient ale” for the burgh. They were granted land on this site to do just that. Although The Society didn’t last particularly long, the placename did and we can see it below on an 1893 Town Plan of the city as a district name. If you move the slider you can compare the neighbourhood in 1893 with 1765. The major changes over that time is the new roads of Chambers Street running in from the right, the George IV bridge and Forrest Road running north-south and the demolition of much of the old City Walls here, which are the darker line in the 1765 map entering on the right, before turning downwards along the street marked Bristow (sic) Port.

Comparison of Edgar’s 1765 and OS 1893 Town Plans of Edinburgh. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Water was supplied to The Society from the Boroughloch (or South Loch, now drained and landscaped as the Meadows park) from where it was pumped by a windmill to a water cistern at Society. The presence of the windmill is still marked by the names of a number of rather unremarkable-looking lanes opposite the Appleton Tower and we can see the water cistern in the below 1649 birds eye map of the city. Although The Society only lasted about 20 years (in which time they significantly lowered the level of the loch through abstraction), brewing carried on in this neighbourhood until the late 1960s.

The neighbourhood of Society in 1649, from Gordon of Rothiemay’s birds eye map of the city. The gate is the Bristo Port into the city and we can see the walls running in from the right. The large rectangular structure in the courtyard is the water cistern. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

We can see what some of the older buildings of the area looked like in the below 1856 photograph.

“The Old Buildings of The Society”, 1856 photograph by Thomas Keith. © Edinburgh City Libraries

The copper kettles of the Society were melted down in 1639 to be cast into artillery for the Covenanter Army during The Bishop’s War. The Scots at this time favoured curious, lightweight, copper cannons reinforced with outer layers of iron hoops, rope and leather. These were mounted on wheel-less frames and were inspired by their Swedish practice in the Thirty Years War in which many Scottish soldiers fought. It was found that these designs were suited to the local conditions where there were few roads passable by a gun carriage outside of the towns.

The streetline of Lindsay Place was built up in the 1840s after the formation of George IV Bridge but before the wide Victorian boulevard of Chambers Street was driven through the Georgian Brown and Argyle Squares from the direction of the Old College of the University. Stuart Harris suggests that the street was named for Thomas Lindsay, a shoemaker resident at the site.

1849 OS Town Plan of Edinburgh. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

By 1893, the Town Plan records that the Analytical Laboratory & School of Medicin was” on the site, handily located for the University medical school which had moved just down the road to Teviot Place in 1888. If we zoom right in on our photo from the National Gallery, we can see a sign corresponding to this:

EDINBURGH. SCHOOL of MEDICINE. CHEMICAL LABORATORY

The Post Office directory also records it as the Headquarters of the Scottish General Hospital, Royal Army Medical Corps., R.A.M.C T.F. That abbreviation stands for the Royal Army Medical Corps Territorial Force, i.e. a military reserve medical force. Again we can see this sign in the photograph:

EDINBURGH. GENERAL HOSPITAL. RAMCTF. HEADQUARTERS

The photo has all the usual fascinating details of an Edinburgh gone by. And as usual, the obligatory Paw Broon characters in bunnets make an appearance. The pair are exchanging news and gossip outside the weel kent Edinburgh institution that was James Thin’s bookshop.

JAMES THIN BOOKSELLER

Lawrie’s Tobacco Store on the street has a stocktaking sale on. Tobacco and its advertising always seem to be super prominent in old photos of Edinburgh neighbourhoods, a consumer luxury that nearly all could afford.

Lawrie’s TOBACCO STORE

Next door at David Allan’s shop you can buy all the latest branded foodstuffs like Van Houten’s Cocoa, HP Sauce, Bovril and Splendo Margarine. Alongside tobacco, tea and chocolate usually occupy top spots for advertisements in these old photos. Again, little luxuries that could be bought for a few pence to take the edge off the fairly tough and frequently grinding living conditions in the city.

GROCER. DAVID ALLAN. PROVISIONS

At No. 7 is Donald Mackay’s Territorial Bar, one assumes taking its name from the military establishment above and the Queen’s Edinburgh Rifles volunteer drill hall over the road on Forrest Hill.

WINES. DONALD MACKAY. SPIRITS

The skyline is dominated by the usual ramshackle 17th and 18th century tenement rooflines and their arrays of chimneys of the Old Town. I’m not sure that the external chimney extension would be passed by a HETAS certified installer these days!

Quite the lum!

But that’s not what caught my eye about this photo or why I thought about sharing it in more depth. This photo has something far more intriguing – and rare – lurking in it, whether by design or by happy accident. Anyway, let’s zoom in a bit. Can you see what it is yet?

Can you see what it is yet?

How about now if we up the contrast?

How about now?

And what if we get the crayons out and highlight it a bit? Yes, that’s right, someone’s been up there on that parapet and daubed the building in rather cryptic graffiti!

OSL. VOTES FOR WOMAN.

I assume the perpetrators were wither cut off midway through the word “Suffrage” or ran out of paint.

VOTE FOR SUFF…

Let’s keep looking! It appears like like it was “Down with something”, and perhaps the word “Movement” above OSL FOREVER?

DOWN. OSLER FOR EV…

And all the way to the end, it’s definitely OSL(ER) FOR EVER!

OSL FOR EVER

You can take my word for it when I say that I’ve looked hard at lots and lots of photos of Edinburgh from this period, and this is the first time I’ve seen anything like this. Chalked graffiti, yes, but only a name or lovers’ initials here and there scratched into a doorway. Nothing on this scale, nothing this apparently political and nothing on a government building too. Although this photograph is part of a series in the neighbourhood, I do wonder if the graffiti was a particular attraction to the photographer?

Looking back, I now think what we’ve got is at least 2 layers of graffiti that may have been partially washed off and/or painted on top of each other .

OSL. VOTES FOR WOM. VOTE FOR OSL. VOTES FOR WOMAN

Don’t just take my word for these interpretations, you can zoom right in on the image on the National Galleries website here and look for yourself. What is more remarkable about this grafitti, and the paint that it was daubed in, is that it was still clearly legible 40 years later!

Lindsay Place, 1952. From The Scotsman Publications Limited, provided by Scran

And looking the other way, Capital Collections also has a picture and again we can see the graffiti, this time as late as 1958.

Lindsay Place, 1958. © Edinburgh City Libraries

I assumed that OSL might have been some sort of suffragette organisation until it became obvious it was the first three letters of OSLER. So I asked around and was quickly pointed me in the right direction OSLER was Sir William Osler, and the WO of WOMEN was actually his initials – W. O. – which somebody had altered. William Osler was a Canadian doctor, he created the first residency program for speciality training, was the first to bring medical students to the bedside for clinical training. He has been described as the Father of Modern Medicine and one of the greatest diagnosticians ever to wield a stethoscope“. Osler also just happened to be a rectorial candidate for the University shortly before this photograph was taken in 1908, having been invited to run by the medical students.

Osler campaign ephemera, from a presentation by the 33rd Annual Meeting of the American Osler Society, Edinburgh, 2003

You see it turns out that Lindsay Place was the HQ for the Conservative1 rectorial candidate that year, the Rt. Hon. George Wyndham. Osler stood against him an independent and on the subject of allowing women into the university was “not in favour of mixed classes… under existing conditions“. A rectorial war between the different candidates’ supporters followed, common enough high jinks for the time, but particularly hard fought on this occasion. Osler supporters ransacked the HQ of the Liberal Candidate (some guy named Winston Churchill, maybe you’ve heard of him) but they were unable to breach the defences of the Conservative HQ and the police resorted to protecting it. And so some brave Oslerites resorted to daubing graffiti all over the outside instead; what we were actually reading was “Down with Wyndham. Osler forever“.

At this time, the ancient Scottish universities had a number of parliamentary constituencies and elected two MPs, one from the pair of Edinburgh and St. Andrews and another from Glasgow and Aberdeen. For this reason, rectorial candidates were politically aligned. ↩︎

On the night of Saturday 10th October, the Liberals decided to attack the Wyndamists too. After a fundraising concert on Princes Street, a 100 strong contingent bearing torches marched to Lindsay Place, intent on pelting the building with paint powder “and other missiles” (which included rotten tomatoes). But it was a ruse, as here they met the Wyndhamists and the two forces momentarily put their differences aside and quickly moved to Drummond Street Court to jointly attacked instead the Oslerite HQ. This was in revenge for the graffiti and the ransacking of the Liberal HQ. The police were summoned but stood back, content to let the students fight it out and just keep the general public out of it. The Oslerites HQ was in the loft of a paper store, and the bales of paper were used as a makeshift wall to barricade themselves in. From the loft windows they rained down soot and water on their attackers, who somehow procured a telephone pole to use as a battering ram. The wooden doors of the building were breached, but the paper walls held firm. The fighting petered out after midnight after it became clear that the leader of the Oslertite defence had been injured by the battering ram.

On voting day, Saturday 24th October, in the Old College quadrangle the university authorities took the sensible precaution of boarding up the windows, colonnades and the central fountain. Sensible because a predictable pitched battle ensued in the quadrangle between the three rival campaigns:

…the battle of paint and soot raged most fiercely. The Liberal citadel was first of all attacked by the Oslerites, but very soon the non-political candidate’s supporters had their flag torn from its stick, while even the stick itself was eventually captured. The Wyndham contingent, with their blue flag, were last to arrive at the quadrangle. With a chorus of cheers, they formed up for a grand assault on the Liberal stronghold. The Oslerites, however, intercepted them on the way, and an extraordinary scramble ensued.

Powder, paint and soot were flung about in clouds and the marvel was that any man escaped with his sight. As may be imagined, the figures presented a most grotesque spectacle… Eventually the Wyndham and Osler parties seemed to join forces in an attempt to drive the Churchill men from their stronghold. Even then, however, the Liberals continued steadfast and the battle was raged with undiminished fury.

Edinburgh Evening News, Saturday 24th October 1908

The Oslerites were confident of victory but their man was trumped by Wyndham the Conservative, with that Winston Churchill fellow coming in second and Osler trailing in third. By that evening, all the differences had been set aside and a good natured fancy-dress pageant and torchlight parade took place from the Old College quadrangle to the Castle Esplanade.

Now understanding the sequence of events which took place, my final analysis of the layers of graffiti we can see is thus:

• The Conservative HQ was daubed with pro-Osler, anti-Wyndham graffiti (Vote for Osler; Down with WO; Osler Forever)
• An attempt was made to washed it off, but despite the best efforts it was still clearly legible.
• To remedy this, some bright spark in the Conservative campaign takes a paintbrush themselves and alters the lettering to challenge William Osler (WO) for not being sufficiently vociferous in his anti-coeducation statement, enough by inserting a few extra letters. (Vote for Osler, Votes for Wom[e]n; Osler Votes for Suffrage)
• It is probable that this attack and counter-response happens at least twice, which explains the overlapping of the words.

They certainly made long-lasting paint back in 1908 given it survived the next 50 years in the wet and windy elements and relentless air pollution of Auld Reekie.

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