William Nelson A Memoir 4
His more intimate relations with Kinghorn, as he states, terminated with
the death of his grandmother; but his fondness for it remained through
life. In 1885 his eldest sister, Mrs. George Brown, returned from
Canada, and I am indebted to her for some interesting early
reminiscences recalled by more than one visit made in his company to
their mother’s birthplace. “It was there,” she writes, “he spent all his
holidays as a boy; and so eager was he to get to the place that the very
afternoon of the breaking up of school often saw him on board the
ferry-boat on his way across the Forth, fishing-rod in hand and
fishing-basket on back. For fishing he had a perfect passion. At
Newhaven, Kinghorn, Crail, North Berwick, and Oban, he was well known
and greatly liked by all the fishermen, although frequently their
patience must have been pretty well put to the test when they were taken
out in rough weather by William, and they knew there were no fish to be
had.
“When a boy at Kinghorn, late and early he might be seen either putting
his tackle in order, or down on the beach digging for bait, or on the
rocks, now on one and now on another, according to the state of the
tide, contented to spend hours and hours together so that he only caught
fish or even got what he called good nibbles. On many occasions he was
so successful that he was able to keep the poor pretty well supplied
with fish during his visits.
“It was not only during the holiday months that William occupied himself
in fishing or in preparation for it. All through the winter he and his
brothers spent a good deal of their time in manufacturing lines for the
next summer’s campaign. It is amusing to remember where materials for
these fishing-lines sometimes came from. There was an old piano in the
house which had seen better days, and the strings of it afforded a good
supply of wire for fastening the hooks on the lines; the tail of any
horse unfortunate enough to come in the way was put under contribution
for a supply of hair. To the end of his life, his interest in and his
love for Kinghorn never waned; and by the occasional visits he continued
to pay, his acquaintance with the few remaining companions of his
boyhood was kept up.
“The second last visit he paid was in 1886. My sister Jessie and I were
with him. Leaving Edinburgh early in the day, we crossed to Burntisland;
and getting a carriage there, we drove to Pettycur. His recollections
were all of his boyhood. He showed us a part of the beach where he used
to dig for cockles and sand-eels, and the rocks where he and his
companions made a fire to roast potatoes. He pointed out the place where
Alexander III. is said to have been killed; and recalled the old times
of pinnaces and open boats before steamers were heard of. Leaving
Pettycur, we drove to the loch, a lovely, sequestered place, where
William caught his first pike. To show his love for fishing, my brother
Tom recalls the fact that on one occasion, when the holidays were over
and the day had come for William to return to Edinburgh, after he had
finished his preparations for starting, he looked at the clock, and
saying he had still time to run up to the loch before the boat sailed,
rushed off with his fishing-rod. Whether he came back with an empty
basket or not tradition does not say. From the loch we made our way to
the beautiful sandy beach; then up to the Braes, where he used to
scamper about, and on which there still stands an old hawthorn tree, by
the side of which, he told us, he fired his first shot. He loved
evidently to linger in memory over these days and recall his friends and
playmates, the remembrance of whom brought tears to his eyes.”
CHAPTER III.
_SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMATES._
William Nelson was a pupil in the High School of Edinburgh when one
great cycle in its history was completed. It had occupied the site of
the old Blackfriars’ Monastery for upwards of two hundred and seventy
years. In 1555 the town house of Cardinal Beaton, at the foot of the
Blackfriars’ Wynd, which continued to be one of the most interesting
historical buildings in Edinburgh till its demolition in 1871, was
rented by the city for the use of the Grammar School, while a building
for its permanent occupation was “being biggit on the east side of the
Kirk-of-Field,” the scene, a few years later, of Lord Darnley’s
mysterious assassination. Its rector was David Vocat, a prebendary of
the neighbouring collegiate church of St. Mary-in-the-Field; and under
his rule the cloisters of the Dominicans, built for them in 1230 by
Alexander II., gave place to the halls and playground of the High School
boys. But it was a turbulent age, and before the century closed the
Yards became the scene of a tragic event which retained a prominent
place among the traditions of the school so long as it remained on the
old site. In 1598 Bailie Macmoran, one of the city magistrates, was shot
in a barring out of the schoolboys by William Sinclair, a son of the
Chancellor of Caithness. The contemporary diarist, Birrel, notes that
“there was ane number of scholaris, being gentlemen’s bairns, made a
mutinie;” and on the poor bailie interposing, the schoolboy revolt ended
in dire tragedy.
Great as were the changes that time had wrought on the locality where
the old monastery of the Black Friars gave place to the City Grammar
School, a flavour of historic antiquity pervaded it to the last. The
episcopal palace of the Beatons, where the school work had been carried
on for a time, still stood at the foot of the High School Wynd; and near
by was the site of that of Gawain Douglas, who, while still provost of
St. Giles’s collegiate church--
“In a barbarous age
Gave to rude Scotland Virgil’s page.”
It was probably due to the vicinity of their lodgings that the poet
interposed on behalf of the militant archbishop when, after the famous
street feud of “Cleanse the Causeway,” Beaton had vainly sought
sanctuary behind the altar of the Blackfriars’ Church, and, but for the
interposition of the poet, would have been slain. His vigorous
translation of the Æneid into the Scottish vernacular was a favourite
with William Nelson in later years. But the associations of the locality
in his school days were for the most part of more recent date.
The High School Yards had been the playground of Hume, Robertson,
Erskine, Horner, Jeffrey, Cockburn, Brougham, and Scott, and of many a
notability before them. The memory of its gentle, scholarly rector, Dr.
Adam, author of “Roman Antiquities” and other works, was still fresh;
and the old school seemed a link between past generations and the living
age. But neither the site, with its picturesque surroundings, nor the
building, accorded with the ideas of civic reformers who had organized a
crusade against whatever was out of keeping with the brand-new town. The
age had not then reverted to the mediæval models which have since come
into vogue. Classic art was regarded as most suited to academic
requirements; and so a beautiful Grecian building--the finest specimen
of Thomas Hamilton’s architectural skill, in the designing of which his
artist friend, David Roberts, was understood to have contributed
valuable aid,--had been erected on the southern slope of the Calton
Hill, as a more fitting home for the city Grammar School.
The migration from the antiquated building at the head of the High
School Wynd to this splendid edifice in the New Town was an important
change in many ways besides the mere removal to more commodious and
sightly halls. It brought to an end a host of old customs and
traditions; and, among the rest, to the hereditary feud between the
Cowgate “blackguards” and the High School “puppies.” A grand civic
ceremonial marked this transfer of the school to its new domicile. On
the 23rd of June 1829--a bright, auspicious day--William Nelson, the
head boy of his class, with his schoolmates, under the leadership of the
rector and masters, walked in procession, each bearing an osier wand,
with music, military escort, and all the civic glories that the Lord
Provost and magistrates could command, to do honour to the occasion. It
was a memorable epoch in schoolboy life. But it seemed to the old boys
as though they never were quite at home in their stately New Town
quarters. Old “Blackie,” with her famous “gib” or toffy stall, was out
of place there; and as for Brown’s famous subterranean pie-shop in the
old High School Wynd, it necessarily tarried behind, to the inevitable
ruin of a once flourishing business. Not the building only, but the
entire scholastic system carried on within its walls, soon after
underwent a complete revolution; and the work of the venerable Grammar
School of Prebendary Vocat, the classic arena of Adam, Pillans, and
Carson, has since devolved on Fettes College, a creation of the present
century.
But the old classic system still prevailed in William Nelson’s time;
and, notwithstanding some glaring defects, was turned by him to good
account. As to the school itself, it must be owned that it stood in need
of reform. The class of Mr. Benjamin Mackay, under whose training
William Nelson remained for four years, numbered upwards of a hundred
boys. Those in the two front forms worked with more or less persistency
under a somewhat coercive system; the remainder idled in the most
flagrant fashion, and not a few of them looked back in later years on
those dreary hours with an indignant sense of wasted time. But William
Nelson was foremost among the studious workers. The same quiet, resolute
perseverance which marked his later career in business characterized him
as a schoolboy. He maintained his place as the dux of his class, carried
off the chief prizes of the school, and at the close of his course under
the rector, Dr. Carson, he passed to the university with the highest
honours, as classical gold medalist.
Among the carefully preserved papers of his early years are a bundle of
old letters from schoolmates, enclosed in an envelope addressed to his
mother, with an endorsation begging her to see to their safe keeping.
They furnish pleasant glimpses of the affectionate relations already
established with more than one of the friends of later years. The solemn
protest of the learned Principal, Dr. Lee, against “that most
objectionable and pernicious practice of making balls of snow,” is
humorously commented on, along with graver matters, such as pertained to
the themes and discussions of the Juvenile Literary Society, and the
more ambitious debating societies of the university. His own sense of
humour found free play both in early and later years; but above all, his
youthful letters are full of pleasant gossip of the old sailors of
Kinghorn, who told him yarns of the victories in which they had shared
in the great French war, and the pranks they indulged in when flush with
prize-money. Old Charlie Mackenzie had been in the _Mars_ in her action
with the _Hercules_, one of the bloodiest naval conflicts of the war.
Another of the Kinghorn story-tellers--Orrock, who died in 1836, upwards
of ninety years of age--claimed to have known the man who acted as
drummer at the Porteous mob, and to have learned from him some details
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