25 South Clerk Street—six flats over three shops, built in the mid-19^th century on the site of a dye works, part of a stretch of new tenements that connected Clerk Street to the southern suburb of Newington.

Former residents include:

1961—Michael Usher, who saw a letter in The Scotsman from a woman who said that she had been wary of spiders since seeing her mother bitten by a large brown one forty years before, but that, instead of killing them, she used a spoon to remove them from her house. He sent in a reply, writing: “With reference to Mrs Elektorowicz’s letter to-day, headed ‘Remove with a spoon’, may I suggest that the brown spider which bit her mother 40 years ago was one of the very common house spiders, Tegenaria atrica or T domestica?” He concluded by offering his credentials for approval: “I have been bitten by at least three British species of spiders and by a few foreign ones. All my bites have come from representatives of two families: Agelenidae, of which Tegenaria is a member, and Argiopidae, which spin orb webs.”

1956—Charles Hastings Irving, a seemingly lifelong scofflaw. In 1930, at the age of thirty-eight, he was jailed for embezzling £25 and stealing £80-worth of goods from a firm that employed him as a canvasser and collector. He told the sheriff that he had given in to temptation because he was paid only £1 a week.

In 1946, he was fined for driving in South Queensferry “under the influence of drink to such an extent to be incapable of having proper control of the car.” A repeat of the offence in 1951, this time in Edinburgh’s Cowgate, saw him disqualified from driving for twelve months. The loss of his licence would have hampered the black market trade that he was conducting under the cover of his employment as a commercial traveller in chemicals. Earlier in the year, he had been caught transporting pig carcases from a piggery in Turnhouse to buyers in Edinburgh, and, on another occasion, he was arrested for selling tens of thousands of smuggled cigarettes to shopkeepers in Stirlingshire at bargain prices. He was fined £35 for the pork sales and £30 for the cigarettes.

He soon resumed his business, stopping only when excise officers watching his house saw him loading a van with cases that turned out to contain fake whisky—grain alcohol to which water and colour had been added—and he was sent to prison for two years, being unable to pay the fine of £813.

Charles had a weak heart and was subject to fainting spells, which prison wouldn’t have helped. A year after his release, he dropped dead while visiting a friend in Rankeillor Street, aged sixty-four.

1943—Andrew Marshall, a twenty-three-year-old RAF sergeant who flew in a Lancaster bomber in the week-long incendiary attack on Hamburg, which created a firestorm that killed around 37,000 civilians and destroyed more than half of the city’s housing.

He was killed during the fifth raid on the city, when his plane was hit by gunfire from an enemy fighter. The surviving crew jettisoned their bombs over a rural area and returned home. Andrew’s body was shipped back to Edinburgh and buried in the family plot in Liberton cemetery.

1935—Alphonse Francois Jules Favarger, a Swiss chef in a city hotel who, as a member of the Edinburgh Astronomical Society, gave lectures on the cosmos in the observatory on Blackford hill and whose wife, as a member of the Edinburgh French Circle, gave lectures on Switzerland.

1931—Annie Yovanoff, a widow twice over. She had lost her first husband to tuberculosis when she was twenty-three, pregnant and married less than a year, and her second—Constantine George Yovanoff, a Greek engineer—to liver cancer when she was fifty-four.

She lived alone in the tenement for the last years of her life, dying at the age of sixty-five, poisoned by an untreated infection of her uterus and fallopian tubes.

1916—Charles Grant, who was driving along the esplanade in Aberdeen when the wind, “which was blowing with hurricane force”, dashed his car through the railings and down the 20ft embankment to the beach below. Charles was unharmed, the car undamaged.

1915—Cecilia Budge, a widow whose twenty-five-year-old nephew David Henderson, 25, died in a hospital in France after being wounded in battle while serving with the Scots Guards, and was moved to write a verse for inclusion in the paper in his memory:

“His battle fought, his warfare o’er.

Now he rests on foreign shore,

Where shot and shell can harm no more.”

1913—Alexander Muir, a sixty-year-old baker, who visited the Russian steam bath in Infirmary Street at half past six one October evening and was found dead at half past seven, his heart having failed. His wife went to live with their daughter in Ealing, London, and died there in 1931.

1901—Jane and Helen King, unmarried sisters, daughters of a colour sergeant in the Highland Light Infantry—as a consequence of which Jane was born in Canada, Helen in Ireland—who ran a dress-making business from their flat from the 1890s until they died in the 1920s. The flat passed to their younger brother, Francis Reynolds, a commercial clerk—born to their mother and her second husband, an orchestral musician—who had come to live with them when his wife died. He lived there until 1947, when he died of cancer of the mouth, aged sixty-nine.

1889—Napoleon Scipio Monnier, a medical student from Madhupur, India, whose railway engineer father had seen fit to bless, or burden, him with the names of two of the greatest generals in history.

While at the university, he married Agnes Spence, who lived around the corner in Montague Street. After he graduated, they set up home in Calcutta, where Agnes died of fever, in 1902, aged thirty-one. Within a year, Napoleon, who was by this time the personal assistant to the city’s health officer, had married again—another “Scotch lady”, who joined him in his home in the upper-class European suburb of Entally.

Three months after the wedding, he was persuaded by a neighbour, Mr Ford, to join him for a swim in a large water tank in his compound. Napoleon was “not much of a swimmer” and sank in in 8ft of water, 50ft from the tank’s edge. His body was retrieved by a diver the next day.

1896—Amor Spoor Donnison, a commercial traveller selling Acme Roller Composition, a substance made of pure egg albumen used by printers, bookbinders and card makers.

He was in a Dublin train station at the start of a two-week sales trip when his tin travelling box fell on one of his big toes, crushing it. He waited until his return to Edinburgh to go to the doctor, by which time he was suffering from gangrene, which killed him.

His insurance company refused to pay compensation on the grounds that his death “was accelerated by his own carelessness in failing to attend to his injuries.” His widow, Elizabeth, took them to court, and was awarded the full amount, £1,000, and expenses.

1888—Andrew Smart, a retired baker who fell from a rear fourth-floor window while checking to see whether it might rain later. The downstairs neighbours heard a thud and “found the unfortunate man transfixed through the breast on several of the railings” in the back green.

1871—John Turnbull, a wool merchant who bought land in the area around South Clerk Street and built many of the tenements in Lutton Place in the 1850s. His wife having died young, his sister, Elizabeth, kept house for him and looked after his son and daughter.

John died of typhoid in 1882, leaving Elizabeth only £100 in his will. The children, both adults by then, agreed to give her £1,300. The daughter gave her £800 but the son, who had moved to London, had second thoughts. Noting that he had a wife and child to maintain, he gave her nothing.

Elizabeth took him to court to secure the money she was due, and he offered to give her £26 a year for the rest of her life. It turned out to be a good deal for him, as Elizabeth—who had suffered from tuberculosis for more than twenty years—died one year later, aged fifty-four.

1861—James Ledingham, a tailor, the earliest known owner of the tenement.

He bought the entire building for £700 (all the money he had saved over his career) selling it four years later for £832—a profit of only £32 after subtracting the £100 he had spent on improvements, but a profit nevertheless.

He used the money, along with some loans, to buy a shop in Cockburn Street—“central and commodious premises with an Entirely New and Fresh Stock of GOODS”—in a prime corner property at the top of Fleshmarket Close (now the Laila restaurant).

Over the subsequent year, he struggled to repay the loans he had taken out, ran up debts amounting to more than £900 and was declared bankrupt—the first instance of bad luck associated with 25 Clerk Street but, as we have seen, far from the last.