On This Day 27th June 2014.

HB-JVF, Fokker 100, Helvetic Airways, turning towards the terminal after landing on Runway 05 Right at Manchester Airport, 27th June 2014, as seen from one of the South Side mounds.

#Manchester #MAN #EGCC #Runway05Right #SouthSide #Fokker #F100 #Helvetic #OnThisDay
#AvGeek #aviation #planespotting #photography

The thread about the Salisbury Arms and the famous literary association that never was https://threadinburgh.scot/2025/06/27/the-thread-about-belleville-house-and-how-the-famous-literary-association-that-never-was/ #ConanDoyle, #House, #Newington, #Pub, #Pubs, #Southside, #Usher, #Written2025

The thread about the Salisbury Arms and the famous literary association that never was

Here’s an eye-catching headline one one of those sites that passes itself off as local news from today. “First Look at transformed Edinburgh boozer visited by Arthur Conan Doyle“.

The piece goes on, “Once a favourite watering hole of the iconic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle“. Stop the bus! Arthur Conan Doyle was a regular in the Salisbury Arms? That’s news to me! Now, I’ll readily admit that I don’t know everything about Edinburgh, but something here feels a bit off.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, Arthur Conan Doyle

But let’s be fair, not everyone spends quite so much time poring over local history as I do, and not everyone will be irked enough by something that troubles them to look more into it. But I’m not everyone and I was sceptical and so in the best spirit of Sherlock Holmes I set out to do a little deduction of my own. To paraphrase the great detective, when it comes to Edinburgh history “it is my business to know what other people do not know!”

The first indicator that something isn’t quite right is that the website of the Salisbury Arms itself doesn’t trouble to mention its famous literary association. The game is afoot! Delving a bit deeper, a quick tap of the keys in a search engine traces the Conan Doyle claim back to an advertorial piece from the Scotsman in June 2011. In this it is stated – without reference – “Apparently Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle used to frequent the hostelry now known as The Salisbury Arms in Dalkeith Road.” That word apparently is key here and from it we should suspect that the author was well aware that their claim was without evidence. Wind the clock forward to January 2017 and we find in the sister publication, Evening News, a repetition and reinforcement of the claim: “The most intriguing connection the Salisbury Arms has is with the fictional private detective Sherlock Holmes” it gushes, before quickly contradicting itself; “Whether Conan Doyle was ever a visitor… is unclear” and then instantly trying to get itself out of jail with “but it is thought he dropped by on a few occasions“. Once again I think our author was very aware that there was nothing to back up the claims they were making. By this point I’m willing to stake a round of drinks on the fact that my initial cynicism is well founded.

I could stop there, but I like to be both firm and fair in my debunking and come to an argument armed with the facts, so I shan’t.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

A Scandal in Bohemia, Arthur Conan Doyle

So let us take a proper look into the history of the Salisbury Arms, after all history is probably why you are reading this in the first place! Along the way I can attempt to keep my reputation intact by offering a well evidenced counter argument, I can demonstrate the sort of readily accessible sources that you a I can turn to for investigating a case such as this and and hopefully we can all learn something more of the history of the place in question and write it down for the benefit of others (particularly writers of local news!). Looking at the building in question itself, it doesn’t need an expert eye make a sure guess that it probably began life as a Georgian villa.

A quick search through the online Book of The Old Edinburgh Club – one of my frequent first ports of call for local history queries – brings us to Volume 24 and pages 152-197, “The Lands of Newington and Their Owners“, by W. Forbes Gray. In this piece we find that a house and plot here was seised (officially registered) to Francis Nalder, merchant, in 1812. Referring to a map of the area around this time – Kirkwood’s Town Plan of Edinburgh of 1817 is a reliable source, freely accessible from the National Library of Scotland – we see Mr. Nalder’s name appears as landowner here too.

From Forbes Gray’s we learn that this plot was one of just many such others which were feued from the Newington Estate in the early 19th century to create a new suburb. Newington’s lands were an irregular rectangle defined by the Gibbet Loan (now Preston Street) to the north, East and West Mayfield to the south, Dalkeith Road to the east and the turnpike road south to Selkirk and Carlisle (now Minto Street) to the west. There was a large house, Newington House, in the southeastern quarter. This estate was an old one but had been split into six lots by the city back in the 16th century. Over subsequent centuries, five of the plots were acquired and combined by the Lauder of Fountainhall family, from where they passed to John Henderson of Leistoun. Henderson’s grandson bought the sixth and final plot in 1733, reuniting the estate and taking for himself the title Henderson of Newington.

At this time the Newington House on the above map had not yet been built and there was instead an older mansion located in the northwest corner at the end of what is now West Newington Place. It is shown on the Ordnance Survey 1849 Town Plan as Old Newington House. After Henderson the lands were acquired in 1751 by a saddler, Patrick Crichton. The financial problems of his son Alexander in the 1780s saw loans taken out, secured against the estate, which were defaulted on. One of the major creditors came to an agreement in 1803 whereby Benjamin Bell of Hunthill, surgeon, bought Newington for £5,000 thus settling the debt.

Bell, “the first Scottish scientific surgeon” and “father of the Edinburgh school of Surgery” built the new Newington House but died in 1806, before he had a chance to settle in and enjoy it. It so happens that he was the great grandfather of Joseph Bell, the surgeon and lecturer known as the inspiration from which Arthur Conan Doyle formed Sherlock Holmes. So finally we arrive at a kernel of a grain of truth in at least one aspect of our story. Bell’s eldest son, George, sold Newington House to Sir George Steuart of Grandtully in 1807 and Steuart bought up more of the land shortly thereafter to form gardens around the house, but also with a farsighted view that he could feu this land himself, and his own charter indeed allowed him to do so after a period of time had elapsed.

In due course, his estate-within-an-estate would later be developed into the planned suburb of the Blacket Estate (where, ironically, Joseph Bell was an early resident, at number 44). Thank you to Hugh Mackay of the Blacket Association for pointing this out.

Having sold the house, George Bell and his brothers began the process of feuing the rest of their land here into plots for fashionable new suburban villas. To distinguish theirs from Steuart’s holding, they gave his district an on-trend new name which also happened to be a pun on their own: Belleville. On the 1826 feuing plan on the NLS maps site, both names are given:

This new name for the district stuck for a short while in the newspapers, but old habits can die hard and it soon reverted back to being just plain old Newington. But two houses kept the former name alive; Belleville Lodge on South Blacket Place (now Blacket Avenue) and Belleville at 58 Dalkeith Road – which is that house which would much later become the Salisbury Arms. The first record of that name being used in connection with the house that I can find is on the 1855 valuation roll over on Scotland’s People, with the owner and occupant being listed as William Donaldson, Grocer. By 1865 he has been replaced by Miss Mary Duncan as “William Donaldson’s Representative“. She is still the owner in 1875, but the occupant is one James M. Watters, Captain.

Come 1885 there is once again a new owner and occupier; William Nelson of Salisbury Green. This latter house you can see on the 1817 map above of the Newington Estate is directly to the east of Belleville, it’s the baronial pile opposite which now forms part of the Pollock Halls complex. Confusingly the same valuation rolls show William also owned and occupied Salisbury Green at this time, it’s not clear why he needed both! He was a wealthy publisher of the family firm Thomas Nelson & Sons, whose vast Parkside Works lay just across the way, and who is known for restoring St. Bernard’s Well at Stockbridge and St. Margaret’s Chapel in Edinburgh Castle.

Ownership of Belleville never seemed to stay with one person for long. By 1895 the valuation rolls show it was Robert Inch, a well known and prosperous seed merchant who ran his business from the Timberbush in Leith. He died there in 1912, after which it was bought by its next door neighbour, Mrs Jane Binning Burn Murdoch of Arthur Lodge . Regular listeners might be familiar with the Burn Murdoch name, she was the wife of the artist and explorer WG Burn Murdoch who was so involved in helping Edinburgh Zoo acquire its first polar bears, at the same time as indulging in his passion for trophy hunting them. The house was let out and an advert at this time gives us a description of its accommodation and features:

Mrs Burn Murdoch’s maiden name was Usher, she was a daughter of Andrew Usher of that distilling dynasty which financed and lends its name to the Usher Hall. Belleville by 1930 was in the hands and occupation of her sister, Elizabeth Usher Cunningham and in turn by 1935 it was Elizabeth’s son, Howard, who was there. Howard Usher Cunningham served with the Royal Irish Regiment during World War 1 at Gallipoli, in the Balkans and in Palestine, being awarded the Military Cross in the last theatre. He was in the fertiliser business with the family firm of J. & J. Cunningham of Leith, which was one of the five constituent companies of the Scottish Agricultural Industries conglomerate which formed in 1928. He was appointed director in 1929, rising to Managing Director in 1947. During World War 2 he was the Ministry of Supply Fertiliser Controller for the country, which earned him a knighthood.

In 1942 the house of Belleville was turned over to the Edinburgh Home for Babies and School of Mothercraft, a charitable maternity home and training establishment for both midwives and young (often single) mothers. This organisation had lost its base on Colinton Road to the Civil Defence for the duration of the war and at first had been evacuated to the countryside, but returned to the city in 1942 once the immediate threat was passed where it could better undertake its work. Usher Cunningham returned to the house briefly after the war but by 1948 it had been taken over by the Relief Society for Poles in London as the Polish House, a Polish community centre for exiles and a headquarters for organisations such as the Polish YMCA and Scottish-Polish Society.

The Polish House was transient and soon moved on as Poles in Edinburgh either emigrated or integrated, it relocated to Drummond Place where it joined the Polish Press Agency. In 1950 the Edinburgh Corporation looked to acquire the building as a remand school but it was instead opened as the Davidson Clinic, to treat young adults and children with “anxiety illnesses“. The Clinic took its name from the Davidson Church in Eyre Place, where the idea for it had been formed by the minister. It practised what we would now call psychotherapy and had been established in the city in 1941 as a charitable institution. Under its lead doctor, GP Dr Winifred Rushforth, it took a pioneering approach to dealing with nervous and anxiety conditions.

The Davidson Clinic remained a charity and closely associated with the Church of Scotland for its existence. Never part of the NHS it relocated from Belleville in 1968 and was closed in 1973. Key members of this organisation, including Winifred Rushforth, would go on to find the similar Wellspring clinic. Belleville was now acquired again by the Usher family, this time by Thomas Usher & Sons, the brewing branch of the dynasty. Ushers successfully applied for a licence to turn it into a modern roadhouse type pub and restaurant. Despite local objections it opened as such in 1970 as the Commonwealth-games inspired Gold Medal Tavern. The Gold Medal found its way into the Alloa Brewery’s portfolio, who refurbished it in 1986 and renamed the restaurant to Waffles. With a trendy open plan dining area and kitchen, it offered “pizzas, pasta, hamburgers, steaks and chicken“. No mention was made of waffles, but traditional pub food could be had in the lounge bar.

Roll forward the clock to 1994 and the pub was acquired by the Firkin brand of Allied Domecq who renamed it The Physician & Firkin, despite it having no obvious connection to medicine. When that chain folded in 2001 it was passed to Bass who branded it as one of their yellow-liveried, sticky-floored It’s a Scream student discount pubs with the new name of The Crags. Come 2011, the pub was re-branded and repositioned once again, becoming the more upmarket Salisbury Arms.

This has all been a very long winded way to say that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930 and there was not a pub on the site of the Salisbury Arms until 1970! The original claim is demonstrable nonsense – he definitely never drank in, never mind frequented, this establishment. Furthermore, the association of the Bell family with the house ended in 1807 when it was sold to its first owner, some 30 years before the birth of Joseph Bell. So the chance that he or Conan Doyle have any further connection with it is slim to nil.

So why is any of this important? Am I just showing off about being right about something? Shouldn’t I be magnanimous and attribute this to an innocent journalistic error? Well, you’re probably reading this page because you have an interest in Edinburgh and local history, so I will try and explain why I think that it matters and why you too should be bothered.

The first problem is that despite the best efforts of their owning companies to try and destroy all trust in them over the last 20 or so years, faith is still put by many in local newspapers as they trade on past reputations and a lack of alternatives. They and their websites are still held as being reliable places to find things out and they still command a wide local reach; people will read what they write and there’s a good chance they will accept it. Why shouldn’t they? The Evening News even has a strapline at the top of every page which says “News you can trust since 1873“, it invites you to believe it. So when it publishes historical facts without substantiation, they will inevitably become accepted as facts. The irony is not lost on me that a lot of what you will read on this very website has been arrived at by trawling through previous generations of these very local newspapers. I too have to trust that what was being printed in the pages of the Evening News or the Scotsman at the time was an accurate and factual record.

But this shouldn’t be a problem I hear you say, people have the sum of the world’s knowledge at their fingertips these days and can just check a search engine to verify a fact. So let’s do just that and perform a quick experiment by doing what many people do these days to adjudicate a point: let’s ask Google “which pub did Arthur Conan Doyle drink in?”.

Oh, so it was The Salisbury Arms. Mea culpa, if it’s on Google it must be true, right? But give the result a second glance, that’s not actually a search result. That’s an answer automatically generated by Google’s AI Overview and presented above and before the actual search results. It’s what some might call machine generated slop, an approximation of what looks like a plausible answer arrived at by a statistical analysis of a very large data set. It is the year 2025 and the problem of the Evening News presenting theory as fact is no longer confined to the reach of its own readership. Local news websites are now constantly crawled and trawled as the training material for the Large Language Models that are commonly referred to as AI. Local news is the factual foodstuff, chewed, digested, reconstituted and regurgitated by the LLM. And as the old saying goes, if you put garbage in you’ll get garbage out.

Give the above result a third glance and you see a little vague link symbol at the end of the word soup of that first paragraph. Click that link and it will suggest to you the source from which it came to its conclusions. So I did this and what should we see but two “references”, the oldest of which is only a day old and is the very same article which got me started! The second is a copy-and-paste effort of the first, barely hours old on the internet at this time.

And here is the big problem I’ve been trying to get at. We’ve just got a complete worked example of Google inventing itself a new fact about an important figure in Edinburgh local history, and people will believe it, because it is Google and that is were a huge number of people turn to for information, and because it is substantiated by links to local news websites, which many people still put trust in. That fact is now out of the bag and once it’s out, it is very hard to put it back in. Check in on the above search in a few months, weeks, or even days and you will undoubtedly see the fact has replicated itself across multiple other sources like a virus. And those sources will now in turn be consumed once again by Large Language Models, which will spit out the same result in future with ever more confidence. We are all of us going to have to get used to accepting a lot less of what is presented to us as fact and doing a lot more of our own verification if we want to find a reliable answer…

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

#ConanDoyle #House #Newington #pub #pubs #Southside #Usher #Written2025

Morgen, 15 Minuten #Southside, und 15,04 Minuten #hurricane im #NeoRoyale??

Yellowcard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu_ig8IRhBA
#youtube_arteconcert #ARTE #Autre #rock #alternative #southside #southside_festival #hurricane #hurricane_festival #punk #punkrock #yellowcard

Rise Against
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pommhewwnrA
#youtube_arteconcert #ARTE #Autre #rock #alternative #southside #southside_festival #hurricane #hurricane_festival #rise_against #punk #punkrock

Mural of San Antonio Spurs NBA draft prospect unveiled at South Side restaurant https://www.rawchili.com/nba/122768/ #Basketball #Mural #NBA #NBADraft #SanAntonio #SouthSide #spurs

Photo of the Day 22nd June 2025.

G-RJXG, Embraer ERJ-145EP, BMI Regional, taxiing out to Runway 23 left at Manchester Airport, 5th July 2018, as seen from one of the South Side mounds.

3 photos behind the link.
https://mancavgeek.co.uk/blog/photo-of-the-day-22nd-june-2025/

#Manchester #Man #EGCC #Runway23Left #SouthSide #Embraer #ERJ145 #BMIRegional
#AvGeek #aviation #planespotting #photography

Spannend #Swiss geht ja LIVE durchaus gut ab. #Southside

Beispiel: #Southside Festival, es wird alles für SWR und ARTE aufgezeichnet und es liegt auch sowieso alles LIVE im Playout an. Aber im Programm selbst nicht mal eine zeitweise Ausstrahlung.

Auf #arteConcert singt gerade #OlliSchulz. 😌

#arte #Southside #SouthsideFestival

Als genüge es nicht dass #arte #hellfest und #southside Festival streamt, Magenta Music ist mit dem #hurricane dabei.

HÄTTE AUCH RUHIG MAL 1 SAGEN KÖNN DASS #SOUTHSIDE IM ARTE STREAM LÄUFT!!!!1!

Böhmi politisiert mit Hilfe des fantastischen RTO im Regencape gerade alle auf dem #Southside Festival.
Großartig!!!! 🤩🤣😉

Eigentlich eine clevere Kleidungsauswahl - so isser für alles gewappnet!

@janboehm

Mannheimer Sounds auf dem Southside – Southside Festival

Noch bevor das Festival offiziell beginnt, legt die Mannheimer Band ok.danke.tschüss die Latte ganz schön hoch. Und im…
#Mannheim #Deutschland #Deutsch #DE #Schlagzeilen #Headlines #Nachrichten #News #Europe #Europa #EU #Baden-Württemberg #DonaldTrump #ElonMusk #Fronleichnam #Germany #Kultur #Southside #SouthsideFestival #Tuttlingen
https://www.europesays.com/de/203891/

Später am Tag kann man auf #arte beim #hellfest dabei sein und ab morgen beim #southside ,
jetzt aber geben wir dem Tag erst einmal etwas Würde.
#stream #music #metal #classicalmusic
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/033282-000-A/alfred-brendel-claudio-abbado/?utm_source=ios&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=033282-000-A

As there's much going on, a little #Music #Festival #Livestream list for this weekend:

#Hellfest 2025 (Thu-Sun)
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/RC-014483/hellfest/
There might or might not be more streams available here: https://www.youtube.com/@arteconcert/

#FreakValley Festival 2025 (Thu-Sat)
https://www1.wdr.de/fernsehen/rockpalast/events/freak-valley-2025-uebersicht-100.html

#Southside Festival 2025 (Fri-Sun)
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/RC-014816/southside-festival/
There might or might not be more streams available here: https://www.youtube.com/@arteconcert/

#Hurricane Festival 2025 (Fri-Sun)
https://www.magentamusik.de/hurricane-2025-livestream

#Punk #PunkRock #Rock #StonerRock #PostRock #IndieRock #AlternativeRock #Metal #SludgeMetal #DoomMetal

On This Day 12th June 2014.

G-OOBL, Boeing 767-324ER, operated by Thomson in First Choice colours, lining up on Runway 23 left at Manchester Airport, 12th June 2014, as seen from one of the South Side mounds.

#Manchester #MAN #EGCC #Runway23left #SouthSide #Boeing #B767 #FirstChoice #Thomson #OnThisDay
#AvGeek #aviation #planespotting #photography

@KimPerales unlabeled masked #Snatchers were recorded in #Southside #Bethlehem #PA this morning. It wasn't until much later when local police showed up to assist the armed vigilantes that anyone could be sure these #Terrorists were #FederalOfficals BPD came in to run cover for masked kidnappers when the community attempted to protect their own against #UnknownAssailants

#ICE descends on the #LehighValley Wednesday morning in #Southside #Bethlehem The community is already taking to the streets in protest

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKw22YNRGeN/?igsh=MWk0aTB6c3Z1aTB2dg==