114 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, six flats in the stair over two main-door flats. Built around 1860 on the site of an old timber yard.

Former residents include:

1951—Alexander Thompson Cowie, who would “walk into a shop, pretend he was considering buying an article, and persuade the owner to give him the goods until the following day, when they would be paid for.” However, “on no occasion was payment made.”

At his trial, his solicitor said he was “staggered by the gullibility of the shopkeepers”, and offered in mitigation the fact that Alexander—who had sold the stolen goods for £82—was in poor health and had been having “a pretty thin time” since his taxi business failed. Nevertheless, he was given six months in jail. Naturally enough, he continued to have a thin time after completing his sentence and, the following year, he was imprisoned for another eighteen months for fraudulently obtaining £228-worth of car tyres, golf clubs, cameras and wireless sets from gullible shopkeepers throughout the Lothians and Fife.

A year after his release, he was in a motorbike accident and spent several weeks in hospital. When he returned to Lauriston Place, he found that his wife had left him. He searched the country for her (without success), supporting himself through his usual frauds.

The year’s misfortunes, which included being struck on the head by a piece of falling masonry while walking along a pavement in Edinburgh, culminated in his arrest when he tried to sell an electric shaver to a Banffshire hotelier who doubted its provenance and called the police.

Found guilty of fraudulently obtaining (and thereafter selling) six electric shavers, two cigarette lighters, a picnic set, a shirt and a fireplace, Alexander was sentenced to twenty-one months in jail.

He appears to have gone straight for some time after his release in 1958—at any rate, he wasn’t arrested again until the autumn of 1966, when, described as a 55-year-old marine engineer of no fixed address, he was fined £10 for defrauding a shop in Aberdeen of a £6 drill.

That may have been Alexander’s last crime, or it may not. It was, however, his last appearance in the newspapers. He died in 1985, aged seventy-three.

1944—Edward Brannan, a butcher who was fined £5 for selling a hundredweight of manufacturing pork (rationed during wartime) that he had ‘dishonestly appropriated by theft’ from his own butcher’s shop across the road from the tenement.

1944—Robert Ormiston, a twenty-one-year-old pilot officer who was awarded the distinguished flying cross for “displaying the highest standard of efficiency and playing his part worthily” in a perilous night-time bombing raid on a train station in Givors in eastern France. He served as a meteorologist in the Air Ministry for a few short years after the war, before dying of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six.

1943—Violet Phillips, a seventeen-year-old girl who was living with her mother (a former ballerina) and her step-father when, in the fourth summer of the war, she met and fell in love with an American airman, Roger S Lindsay.

As a member of the crew of a B-17 Flying Fortress named ‘The Fightin Bitin’, stationed in the south of England, Roger had bombed U-boat yards and aircraft factories across northern Germany. (He’s second from the right in the picture below).

He was in town on a week’s ‘flak leave’, recovering from the stress of having nearly died on a recent mission. He’d taken a trip to Edinburgh because someone told him it was like his hometown of Boston, and had been there only a day or so when—in a dancehall, we may imagine—he met Violet.

Things moved fast. By the time Roger got on the train to return to his base at the end of the week, he had proposed to Violet, and Violet had accepted. They were married in the autumn, as soon as Roger had finished his allotted number of bombing raids and was, therefore, less likely to be killed.

They rented a house in Golders Green, an hour from Roger’s airbase. Violet was a couple of months pregnant by the following summer, when flying bombs started to strike London, and five months pregnant by the time Roger was able to arrange for her to sail to the safety of America.

She was ill for most of the crossing and fainted when she saw the Statue of Liberty. On shore she bought an ice cream—her first in years. She ate it covertly, ashamed of her gluttony, but it soon became clear that no one cared; they’d been eating ice cream all through the war.

Roger joined her in Boston in the winter of 1944, and she gave birth during the worst snowstorm she had ever seen. Her labour took place mostly in a taxi and then, when the taxi stalled, in the cab of a tow truck. Roger Jr was born minutes after she arrived at the hospital.

After the war, Roger got a job with American United Life Insurance. Violet had three more children and, at some point, appeared on—and won!—‘Queen for a Day’, a game show on which women competed for cash prizes by sharing stories of their financial or emotional difficulties.

As the winning contestant (selected by audience applause) Violet would have been placed on a throne, wearing a sable-trimmed velvet robe and a crown and holding a dozen long-stemmed roses, while the host, former Vaudeville performer Jack Bailey, announced her prizes.

(There is no record of what Violet won, but, as well as being given whatever help they had specifically requested, Queens for a Day were usually given all-expenses-paid family vacations, modern kitchen appliances, fashionable clothes and so on.)

Violet died in 2012, aged eighty-six. Her obituary noted that she was “a good cook, an avid reader and gardener, a knitter of sweaters, blankets, and hats, and also the feeder of football Sunday visitors.”

1909—Alexander Bateman, a drapery salesman, and Grace, his wife, a dressmaker, who raised a family in the tenement before moving across the Meadows to Spottiswoode Street, after Alexander was taken on as a clerk in the Ministry of Labour, which had vastly expanded during the war.

On 30 December 1943, at 11 o’clock, he said goodnight to Grace, then went to the kitchen and put his head in the oven. She found his body at half past eight the next morning, a Sunday, the last day of the year. He was sixty-three.

Grace died a year after the end of the war, aged seventy-one, while visiting her son in Giffnock, and was buried beside Alexander in the Grange cemetery.

1893—Rev W C Trevelyan Parker, a Primitive Methodist minister from Manchester, whose “tall gentlemanly figure always arrested attention in any gathering”. He was active in the early trade union movement, and spent his years in Edinburgh raising money to support striking miners.

The easternmost main-door flat, no.112, was the home of Anna Leslie, who, as a baby, had been taken to Jamaica by her father, Rev Thomas Leslie, “the first Presbyterian missionary to the heathen from the Synod of Ulster”.

They arrived in Montego Bay in May, 1835, and her father died four months later, “owing to the unhealthy nature of his residence among swamps”, leaving his wife, Eliza, “alone in a land of strangers, in which her fatherless infant is her only relative.”

Eliza married an Englishman named Watson, with whom she had more children. Anna returned to Britain when she was an adult, settling in Lauriston Place, where, in the spring of 1873, at the age of thirty-eight, she died of an untreated disease of the kidneys.