The Edinburgh Orphan Hospital

In 1733 a group of Edinburgh merchants and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge hired a house in Bailie Fyfe’s Close, under the present-day North Bridge, to house 30 children. A commemorative pamphlet published for the Hospital’s anniversary in 1833 reported that the founders were moved to act by ‘the number of orphan children in Edinburgh and other parts of Scotland, who were left in very destitute circumstances, and exposed to all the evils inseparable from a state of idleness and ignorance’. The foundation of the Hospital was part of a wave of philanthropic initiatives across Europe in this period, prompted by growing beliefs that children required special care and attention separate to adult charities, and that the increasingly affluent middle-classes should use their new wealth for charitable causes to demonstrate their virtue and piety. A home for the most deserving of Scotland’s poor – orphaned children – was an ideal cause for Edinburgh’s merchant elites.

The Hospital was not large; at its height it housed only 200 children, brought from across Scotland. Admission was difficult. It was theoretically open to any child who could demonstrate that they had no one to care for them. Petitions for admission survive in the National Records of Scotland from the families of children who had lost one or both parents, who had been living with grandparents, aunts, uncles or siblings who could no longer care for them because of their own old age or ill health, or children from large families who were simply too poor to care for so many siblings.

In practice, though, the governors placed strict limits on admission because they did not have enough money to take all those who applied. Children had to be aged between 7 and 11 years old, and petitions asking for admission had to be signed by their parish minister and elders, to testify to their moral character and the truthfulness of their account. Their parents had to have been married; illegitimate children were not included in the governors’ understanding of a deserving object of charity. If their petition was satisfactory, the child was then summoned to Edinburgh to be interviewed by the governors and to undergo a medical examination, to check that they carried no infectious diseases that could endanger other children in the Hospital, and that they were fit to work. On the backs of the successful petitions, in which families poured out the circumstances of their poverty and inability to care for their children, the governors wrote the words ‘a proper object of pity’.

Right from the beginning the Hospital was motivated by religious ideals which connected hard work, good citizenship and Christian piety. Its aims were to take children whose parents could no longer care for them and provide them with food, clothing and shelter, but also a basic education and training in linen and woollen manufacturing (for the boys) and housework (for the girls). This trained children in the habits of morally-improving hard work, and prepared them for future life in apprenticeship and domestic service. The author of the 1833 Historical Account of the Hospital congratulated its governors on their success ‘in the rearing and establishing creditably and usefully in the world a great number of children who might otherwise have become the prey of idleness, misery, and vice, and, as the chief means of securing that end, of early instilling into their minds the principles of religion.’ The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were periods of great upheaval, including growing religious debate, recurrent cycles of war and famine, and the growth of working-class political movements. By inculcating these middle-class values of industriousness and piety in the children of the poor, the governors felt that they were saving these individual children from a life of sin and distress, but also contributing to the security of the nation by producing obedient workers who would not fall into criminality or question authority.

By 1734, the original building in Bailie Fyfe’s Close was deemed too small, and the governors raised a subscription to pay for a new, purpose-built Hospital nearby, at the junction of Princes Street, under the present Waverley Station. At this time the New Town had not yet been built, so ‘the whole space to the west and north was a free and unbroken line of fields’. The building slowly grew, with new east and west wings added, a spire, wash house, laundry, schoolroom and infirmary. The governors built a chapel in the grounds for the children to attend on Sundays and where they could hold annual sermons by guest preachers to raise money for the Hospital. By the early nineteenth century, though, the governors became worried about the health effects of the urban expansion of Edinburgh. The Hospital was now surrounded by smelly and polluting industries such as a farrier forge, tar boilers and a slaughterhouse. ‘That which had originally been a clear, detached, and airy situation, as the site of every such Institution ought to be, became, comparatively, a close and confined spot… surrounded almost on all sides by lofty buildings, with the drains from the New Town passing under the very walls of the house.’