The real Ned Holt: the thread about the darker side of a colourful Victorian street artist

In preparation for writing up some summaries of the caricatures of “Old Edinburgh Worthies” by Ned (Edmund) Holt, I decided to dig a bit deeper into the life of this mysterious Victorian street artist. Not much is known of his life, and much of that is popular legend. Sources will tell you he was a street artist of some talents, a familiar and well loved character of Old Edinburgh and one who was limited in life only by his love of a drink. A “boon companion in the common lodging houses and in public houses.” However, with a little work digging through newspaper clippings and Scotland’s People, I hope that I am able to add a few details to his story, but also find to offer a different, and ultimately less favourable, interpretation of his character.

“A Few Old Edinburgh Characters”, by Ned Holt. I have corrected the yellowing of the original image. City Art Centre collection, © Edinburgh Museums and Galleries .

While he illustrated profusely -usually to earn his beer money – he never seems to have turned his attention on himself, so we known not what he looked like (although a newspaper article of 1922 claims that a likeness was published at the time of his death). Capital Collections (the wonderful online image gallery of the collections of the Edinburgh City Libraries, Museums and Galleries) uses a self portrait of John Kay to represent any artists for which they do not have a likeness. Kay is one of the best known caricaturists of old Edinburgh, leaving behind an amusing and invaluable visual and written record of the worthies of the Georgian city. Collections of his works are still reprinted and are a must-have on any self respecting bookshelf of Edinburgh local history.

John Kay, a self portrait, 1786

At the other end of the social spectrum and 70 or so years later, we have Holt. His work is certainly cruder than Kay’s, but as an observer of the human condition he is an equal. For two good reasons, his ouvre is particularly valuable. Firstly, he painted in bright colours, which pop out when compared with the faded sepia of old photographs or the monochrome of Kay’s engravings, vividly capturing that Victorian life was much brighter than we might imagine. Secondly, where Kay lampooned Lords and Gentlemen, Holt painted almost exclusively the people of the street, men and women, and in a much more sympathetic manner. These were folk who were well known in their time but who would otherwise have slipped from popular memory but for a few sentences in old newspapers (much like the artist himself).

So who was Ned Holt? The National Galleries of Scotland embarrassingly say he was English – he was definitely a son of Edinburgh, probably born in St. Cuthbert’s parish as Edmund Holt, to Jean Mitchell and Robert Holt, a master chimney sweep. He may have been born in 1830 if we believe his entry on the register of deaths, or 1836 if we believe his census entries. Holt also goes by the names Edmond and Edward. Many accounts will tell you he signed his work E. P. Holt – I think if they looked closer they will see it is ED. HOLT, with the D raised above the full stop in the fashion of Victorian typography. His obituary in the Dundee Courier confirms his works bear the “well known signature Ed. Holt“.

Edmund Holt’s signature: EḌ HOLT.

It would have been expected for Holt to follow his father’s trade, but perhaps on account of the early death of the latter this did not happen. Apprenticed to a baker, he never settled to that trade and in 1851 is recorded on the census as a “carrier”. He is aged 15, living with his grandmother in Gilmour’s Close off the Grassmarket, probably the property he is described as inheriting. Three years later, still living at the same address, he married a woman from a neighbouring close by the name of Jane Black, the daughter of a coal miner from Ayrshire. At this time his occupation was “artist” and the anecdotes of town Bailie (magistrate) Wilson Mclaren recall that at this time he kept a street booth in the Grassmarket where he exhibited various attractions for a penny-a-view, including a “petrified mummy”, claimed to be 4,000 years old but actually a skeleton he had procured and doctored. Street entertainment and showmanship is a recurring feature of Holt’s life, he was known to act at the “penny gaffs“, cheap theatres where popular, raucous edits of Shakespeare would be performed. By 1855 he had moved to a small shop on Lothian Road where he traded as an artist. Two years later, he took out a newspaper advert in the North Briton that he would teach the “whole art of photography” on application to an address on Haddington Place, Leith Walk. He is reputed to have joined the Edinburgh City Artillery at this time, a volunteer militia regiment raised in the wake of the Crimean wars that included an unusually high proportion of artists in its ranks. He was a favourite of the officers, who would summon him to the mess to amuse them with his antics.

Uniforms of the Edinburgh City Artillery.

In 1860, Holt announced in the North Briton that he had taken “these large photographic rooms, no. 3 Catherine Street, [part of Leith Street] where he is carrying on a First-Class business“. In the census of the following year he is recorded as a “photographic artist” but is to be found boarding with the Reilly family in Selkirk. His wife Jane is living at the Catherine Street address with their children – Edmond (age 2) and baby Georgina – along with an older relation of Jane’s, a lodger (Holt’s assistant) and his daughter. In 1866 Holt re-appears in Edinburgh, performing as a clown in Price’s Spanish Circus with “considerable success”. But he is back to being a photographer in Selkirk in 1868 when one David Mcdonald is fined £5 (or 30 days prison) for assaulting him with a walking stick. The same year, a spinner by the name of William Jeffrey was found guilty of assaulting him in the Salmon Inn public house in Galashiels by hitting him and biting off the end of one of his fingers. He was sent to prison for 60 days.

Holt, it was said, “was known everywhere; he mixed in all classes of society, high and low“. This included the landscape artist Sam Bough, who lived in Edinburgh from 1855 until his death in 1878. It was because of his connection with Bough that his work survived and found its way into the ownership of the City of Edinburgh. Holt had presented Bough with a bound copy of 22 of his sketches, which was inherited by Bough’s sister on his death. A collector later bought them from her estate, from whom Councillor Gorman acquired them and presented them to the city to prevent them being sold to an American.

Sam Bough by Daniel Macnee, 1878

At 1870, the story of Holt’s life begins to take a different, darker path. In May that year it is reported in the North Briton that he was convicted at the Sheriff court and sentenced to 60 days hard labour for having assaulted his wife “by seizing violent hold of her by the hair of the head, dragging her from a place upon which she rested, and kicking her when upon the ground to the effusion of blood.” Come the 1871 census, he is aged 36 and living with his son at no. 41 North Richmond Street off of the Pleasance. There is a servant girl, Annie Shields, living with them but of his wife and daughter Georgina, there is no sign. His occupation remains as a photographic artist. One of his obituaries will recount that “he could not rest with his family” and that “in the course of time he took to a wandering life“. This it would seem is a somewhat economical view of the truth. A decade later the census finds him in Glasgow, with a new “wife” – Annie Shields; he has run off with his servant, 16 years his junior. They have a 9 year old daughter Margaret, a 6 year old son Joseph and an 11 month old daughter Selvester. Jane Holt, aged about 36 is living in the City Poor House at Craiglockhart, working as a seamstress.

Former City Poor House at Craiglockhart, ironically it is now exclusive residential properties.CC-by-SA 2.0 Kim Traynor via Geograph

By 1885, he has returned to Edinburgh and is practising as a photographer from his address at 27 Canongate, White Horse Close. He was convicted in September of that year at the Police Court and sentenced to 30 days imprisonment for “having offered for sale obscene drawings and paintings in Princes Street.” The prosecutor was not specific as to what the depicted, but “said the pictures were very disgusting“. Sadly Jane remains in the Poor House. She was still there 6 years later for the 1891 census, by then working as a laundress.

White Horse Close in 1891, by Sir David Young Cameron. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

Holt died on Tuesday 20th September 1892 in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, having been knocked down and fatally injured by a horse cab near Joppa on his way home from the Musselburgh horse racing. His death was mourned across the Scottish regional newspapers. Despite being obviously estranged from his wife on unfavourable terms for decades, his death certificate was witnessed by her. She sadly died of bronchitis and heart disease as an inmate of the Poorhouse just two months later, described simply as a hawker and a widow. Ann (or Annie) Shields (also known as Holt or Spaven) was left to a similar life of poverty by Holt. In 1891 she was a hawker, lodging in Penicuik. She died in 1908 in the Govan Poor House, having spent the final years of her life flitting from poor house to poor house, debilitated by neuralgia and rheumatism.

The implications are clear from newspaper writings that while Holt was publicly convivial, well liked and had certain artistic talents, he was too partial to drinking to ever make a success of himself. Obituaries describe his “great failing was a love for liquor, which in course of time, mastered him so completely that he sunk from one degree to another till he was down in the very gutter of society“. A mark of the popular mourning of his death is the story of the confectioner in Leith, who decorated a cake in his honour with a sugarwork representation of one of his illustrations and placed it in his shop window alongside the following verse:

Poo, old Ned has gone to rest,
We know that he is free
Disturb him not, but let him rest
Way down in Tennessee

Edmund Holt may have lived the life that he chose for himself happily enough, but the same cannot be said of his wife, who never shared in his popularity or any of his occasional financial successes, and quite clearly suffered at his hands. She spent the best part of half her life as an inmate in the poor house for which it would not be unreasonable to blame the actions of Holt. When he died without a penny to his name, friends and admirers raised enough to pay for a respectable burial and the newspapers made sure he did not pass forgotten. A well-curated exhibition of his work at the City Art Centre in 2014 enhanced the favourable, lovable rogue version of his character by commissioning pen poems to accompany his work. We cannot say the same privileges were accorded to Jane, who has been entirely written out of the story – until, hopefully, now.

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