Crossing, Princes Street
https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/54503145572/in/dateposted/

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#ViewFromABus : Princes Street and the Scott Monument at dusk this evening.

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From shadow into light https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/54443871279/in/dateposted/

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Bar + Block at night. Not somewhere I'd visit (not a carnivore), but made for an interesting night shot as I was passing.

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Johnny Walker Whisky Experience at night (in what used to be Fraser's Department Store for many years)

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Taken this day, 2024, #BlueHour , Princes Street https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/53481335489/

Yes, you get views like this in #Edinburgh when you're just leaving the pub...

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Taken this day, 2022, trams that pass in the night https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/51802656990/

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"Sale now on" https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/54237766812/in/dateposted/

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The thread about Edinburgh’s public Christmas trees; from Victorian commercialism to symbols of international friendship

The Christmas tree on the Mound is one of those annual Edinburgh institutions you kind of take for granted. It always seems to have appeared there each year and you expect that it always shall. But as I passed it by the other week it inevitably got me thinking about just how this tree came to be and just how far back the tradition of public Christmas trees goes in Edinburgh. Even more inevitably this led me straight down a rabbit hole or two in the old newspapers and the clippings that I found down there have threaded themselves into a festive story for your amusement.

Christmas trees in Edinburgh pre-date considerably their public display. It was likely Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, who introduced the German tradition into British society but it’s generally accepted that it was Prince Albert who helped popularise them and lead to their widespread introduction into the homes of the Victorian upper classes in the 1840s. In the sketch below by Jemima Wedderburn, we see a posed scene of an upper class Scottish family around their Christmas tree in 1853. It is remarkably similar to the popular Christmas prints of the Royal Family at that time.

The earliest advert I can find for the sale of a Christmas Tree in Edinburgh is in 1849, when they were for sale alongside “Chinese Sweetmeats and Fancy Boxes of Tea” in Maclean & Son’s French and Italian Warehouse at 27 Princes Street. Adverts for the sale of this “favourite German amusement” are increasingly common throughout the 1850s and it’s clear higher end shops were making them a feature attraction to draw in customers. In 1856, Knox, Samuel & Dickson’s establishment at 15 Hanover Street was advertising a “Grand Spectacle to be seen during the Christmas holidays” which included “The Model Christmas Tree“. They were also selling trees with prices ranging from 5s (about £25 in 2024) through to £65 (around £7,000 these days!) if you wanted one complete with “many hundreds” of ornaments.

It’s clear from the newspapers that the city’s retail proprietors were vying with each other throughout the middle Victorian period to have the biggest and most elaborately decorated tree displays. Having a tree and its decorations would have been unaffordable to most, so people would instead have settled for visiting a tree. Clearly Christmas was a profitable commercial enterprise, but it would take over 80 years from their introduction to get these trees out of the department stores or New Town parlours and on to the streets. It seems to have been St. John’s Episcopal Church on Princes Street which was first to do this when in 1936 they got permission from the Cleansing & Lighting Committee of the City Corporation to erect a 25ft high tree at the end of Princes Street; on the proviso that it had no flashing lights as part of its decoration.

The introduction of this tree may have been in response to the public display of a pair of large trees outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. These were the gift of the King and Queen from their Sandringham Estate and were already an established tradition, but they were quite widely reported in 1936 owing to the death of King George V and the brief accession of Edward VIII. The pair of trees the new monarch sent arrived at St. Paul’s on December 12th, two days after he had abdicated… Perhaps as something of a public charm offensive following the intense public embarrassment of the abdication, in 1937 the new King and Queen extended the tree donation to Edinburgh. Two trees were thus sent down from the Balmoral Estate, the newspapers reporting that one was for display outside St. Giles High Kirk, long a Royal place of worship in Scotland, and the other was for the Canongate Kirk, in which parish the Palace of Holyroodhouse is located. Their arrival in town on December 17th got the attention of the Evening News’ cameraman.

Confusingly though, the newspaper photos on December 21st show two trees at St. Giles and described the King as having send two for display there. So maybe he actually sent three trees in total? The St. Giles pair were floodlit each night during the festive season.

The other great “public” Christmas tree in Edinburgh was that of Jenners department store, one which undoubtedly has a lot of nostalgia values for multiple generations of the city’s residents.

Jenners had long run a “Christmas Bazaar”, the original Kennington & Jenner store was advertising this back in the 1870s, stating it contained “a hundred thousand toys and trifles” and “gifts of slight cost” (mass market Christmas was a thing back then too), but their tree tradition only seems to have begun in the late 1930s, with adverts in 1938 being the earliest I can find. It’s no coincidence that large public Christmas trees began to be a thing in the UK during this period. Punitive tariffs on post-WW1 Germany included 2d per lb on cut Christmas trees. Far-sighted English landowners started commercial planting of them in 1922 and by the mid-30s large, home-grown trees had reached maturity and were widely available. It made commercial sense to raise Christmas trees to maturity in the south and west of England, closer to the London market, but many, if not most, were reported by the late the 1920s as having started life in Scotland on Forestry Commission plantations, before being transplanted south when old enough to move. In 1932 the Great Western Railway transported 60,000 trees from Herefordshire alone to London. That year the Scotsman reported that at Covent Garden a 1ft tall domestic tree would cost you 6d (c. £1.50 in 2024), a 25ft tree was £15 (~£885) and the average 3-4ft tree was £1 (~£59). The home producers dominance of the market was assured completely the next year due to the Importation of Elm Trees and Conifers (Prohibition) Order 1933 by the Ministry of Agriculture. This banned elm and all pine-type tree imports into the country to slow the spread of diseases.

This new industry and tradition did not last long however, World War 2 largely cancelled Christmas trees as there were obviously no European imports and domestic plantations were earmarked for more important purposes than mere festive ornamentation. A tree sent to the Canongate from Balmoral in December 1941 seems to have been the last. There are occasional reports of trees in Churches and Hospitals in Edinburgh during wartime, one imagines they must have been locally sourced from gardens before being turned over to the war effort. A public tree did not return to the city until 1945 when the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) erected a 20ft high specimen in Waverley Station. It was this company that had instituted the idea of railway Christmas trees back in 1933 at Newcastle Central and before the war they had become a feature south of the border at mainline stations, but this was the first example north of the border.

In 1946, Waverley had two such trees and these were collection points for presents for children who were stuck in hospitals over the Christmas period. It wasn’t until 1950 that Edinburgh’s other mainline station, at Princes Street, got a tree, by which time the railways were nationalised.

All Christmas trees at this time were still domestically sourced, a wartime ban on imports was ongoing. The nation could hardly afford to import timber for construction, yet alone for disposable ornaments. The Forestry Commission granted a special licence to import a single 48ft tree from Norway to Trafalgar Square in London in 1947 as a gift from nation to nation. It was not until 1949 that this privilege was extended to other towns and cities. That year, as a symbol of wartime solidarity and postwar friendship, the St. Andrew Society of Denmark sent a 63ft tree over the North Sea to Edinburgh and it was erected in the now traditional spot on the Mound. But disaster struck on December 15th when despite (or perhaps because of?) the combined efforts of the men of four different Corporation Departments, the tree snapped in two under the weight of the lighting display. It took two Burgh Engineers to come up with a solution to stick it back together again.

Fortunately the tree was grafted back together in time for the official lighting-up ceremony the next day. The Lord Provost, Sir Andrew Arbuthnot Murray, gave an address which was broadcast over telephone link to a concurrent ceremony in Copenhagen. In his speech he quipped:

Everyone knows that Edinburgh is renowned for its surgery, but I did not know it also applied to tree surgery. Now the tree is stronger than ever and I am sure the same can now be said about the friendship between Denmark and Scotland.

The Royal Danish Consul attended and had Santa Claus hand out Christmas crackers presented to the children’s choir who had serenaded the tree with carols.

Each year after this, a tree would cross the sea from Denmark to Edinburgh, destined for the Mound. Disaster struck again in 1962 when the tree blew down in gales before Christmas while still being decorated. On the night of Sunday December 16th a storm hit Scotland and 100mph gusts in Dumbarton destroyed a distillery under construction. The tree was fortunately saved and re-erected in time for the lighting up ceremony on the 19th.

While its commonly held locally that the Mound tree has always been a gift from the people of Norway, it actually came from Denmark until the 1970s. The ceremony of 1973 is the last time it reported in the newspapers, when its lights were switched on by Miss Ellen Larsen of Copenhagen who was long associated with the St. Andrew’s Society of Denmark’s annual gift. An additional dynamic that year was the political and economic situation in the UK at the time; because of the Oil Crisis and Three-Day Week, the Government had decreed that public trees and Christmas light displays could only be illuminated for three evenings; Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and either the Saturday or Sunday beforehand and for three hours during the lighting up ceremony. After that year, the Danish tree was replaced by a locally grown one from the Duke of Buccleuch’s estate at Bowhill.

The confusion over the tree’s origins may have occurred because the species has always been a Norway Spruce. The Scandinavian connection was re-established again in 1986 when the tree was gifted to the city by the county of Hordaland and city of Bergen in Norway; although it was still sourced locally to cut down on transport costs. The Norwegian friendship tree was first lit on Monday 1st December by councillor Lesley Hinds, Santa Claus and children from Graysmill School. The Mound tree is still gifted by Hordaland and Bergen to this day, and the tradition will be 40 years old in 2026. You can see photos of the 2024 tree being decorated in this article at the Edinburgh Reporter.

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These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

#Canongate #Christmas #PrincesStreet #Royalty #StGiles #Victorian #Written2024

Taken this day, 2016, shopping after dark, Princes Street https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/30564967780/

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Homeward view from the bus

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Edinburgh this evening, as I awaited the bus home

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Princes Street at night

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Taken this day, 2022, Princes Street after dark https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/52325554409/

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The Metropole Hotel which stood on the corner of Sackville (O'Connell) Street and Princes Street, Dublin, Ireland. c1890s. The National Library of Ireland. No known copyright restrictions.

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#ViewFromABus : a couple of quick snaps from the upper deck on the way home this evening.

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Five or six police cars and vans, and multiple officers around the Balmoral and Waverley Market as bus home passed by. No idea what's happened, seems to be a lot of police talking to various people.

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