I’m in two minds about writing this. Two minds, because I don’t want to look foolish, and the thing I thought for a while is not the thing I think now. Two minds, because advertising a mistake seems like a stupid thing to do. Two minds because there exists in the corner of my mind the ghost of a suspicion that I was right all along.
Here is what happened. I saw a postcard for sale on eBay. Actually, not a postcard, a cabinet card. Or, more likely than that, a cartes de visite, meaning a small Victorian photograph mounted on thick card. The description of the picture was scant. It was, more or less, “distinguished gentleman, North Berwick.”
The reason I happened upon the gentleman was a question of geography. I am interested in old postcards of North Berwick. It’s the town I grew up in. Because it’s a resort town, the changing geography of the area is catalogued, idealised, framed over the decades.
This is a trick of geography. If you grow up in a resort town, you find yourself caught between an ideal and a reality. This is why I always planned to do a photography project called North Berwick in Winter. In the end, I took a handful of pictures, and they exist as a blunt shorthand for the off season. The resort town is different when the tourists aren’t there. There is a bleakness, a sense of absence. But there’s also something extra. The off season is a time of solitude, of peace, of regeneration.
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The postcards are not the same as my memories, but they share some qualities. If I scroll backwards through the postcards, the beach, the golf course, and the Bass Rock are all familiar. Then there are the postcards of the open air swimming pool and the Harbour Pavilion, and you start to wonder. Why did they have to go?
Not all of the postcards feature demolished memories. All are freighted with nostalgia. The first North Berwick postcards I bought came from the shop at the railway station. The station is still there. The building has gone. It’s a car park and a portacabin now. The station of old was a substantial building with a daggerboard roof. The shop had an endless supply of antique Dennis postcards in packets of 12, showing local scenes enhanced by a process known as “Photoblue”.
Photoblue is like pop art before pop art was invented. It is enhanced reality, a sales pitch. In Photoblue world a splash of colour is dropped onto monochrome to create a blameless summer sky. Photoblue stains the waters of the harbour with an impossible azure.
There are no dates on the Photoblue postcards. The clothes and the cars suggest the 1950s, or earlier. The golfers are smartly-attired. One golfing lady wears a Photoblue dress. The geography is familiar, though some of it has changed. It is a sign of ageing that I identify with what used to be, and not what is there today. It’s not that it’s better. It’s just what I knew.
I have postcards that are older, postcards that are newer. All exist in the past tense. (“Having lovely time, weather glorious today. We have never been kept in since we came,” writes Kathie on 29 August 1933). The agenda of the Photoblue cards is the timeless freezing of a moment. Photoblue North Berwick is a collage of golf, harbour, beach, pool, Marine Hotel, with the Law glowering over the town. If you’re lucky, a kitten will be added. (On one such feline postcard, the sender has written: “Johnnie goes back to Hospital on Wed., but don’t know if they’ll keep him.”)
In this sense, the Photoblue images are no different from the regular postcard, by Valentine and Sons of Dundee, or M&L, or JB White, or that great holiday propagandist of the 1970s, John Hinde, whose colours are Eggleston-bold and arranged with the saturated certainty of totalitarian fun. There are folds of repetition. There is a set menu, an itinerary, a checklist. The sights are the sights. There may be a view of the town through the whalebone on the summit of the Law, a leafy glance down Quality Street; or over the Firth to the Bass Rock, a Covenanters prison now colonised and whitewashed by gannets. The landscapes are largely unpeopled - human figures appear only for scale, gulls for atmosphere, and - in the absence of cats - dogs for luck. That is tourism. That is the nature of a holiday town. It is a fantasy based on a wish. It is the marketing memory of the place, the unthinking thing that says “I was here, thinking of you”. The postcard is an afterthought, a fond contract of absence (“enjoying the change immensely,” writes EJ Milne in August, 1956, “weather improving daily.”)
The distinguished gentleman, though, is something else. What was I thinking? I was thinking it was Robert Louis Stevenson in repose. Ridiculous, I know. Why would I think that? It’s not as if my North Berwick childhood was filled with Stevenson. I read Kidnapped, absorbed Treasure Island. I was also aware, more or less, that RLS had taken summer holidays in the town. I understood that the islands in the Firth with their winking lighthouses - Stevenson lighthouses - were places of mystery and romance. Beyond that, there is Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a tale of Edinburgh disguised as London, a story which celebrated its centenary in 1986, when I was at an impressionable age.
Somehow, somewhere, Stevenson rented rooms in my mind. A few summers ago, I took a picture of a mural in the passage which runs between the High Street and Forth Street. In the great game of what-used-to-be, it’s a vennel to the back door of John Menzies, where I used to report for my paper round. It runs through to what used to be the Ben Sayers golf club factory (and before that, a lemonade warehouse). The mural was childishly rendered, almost graffiti. It wasn’t a masterpiece. But it was clearly RLS. There are a limited number of photographs of the author. The features fall in familiar patterns. Memory is a PhotoFIT; childhood is the crime.
I was aware of a particular photograph of Stevenson in a studio setting, looking louche in a velvet smoking jacket. When I saw the distinguished gentleman in identical clothes, photographed in North Berwick, my imagination was sparked. It wasn’t him, quite. But the more I looked, the less certain I was. In his fiction, Stevenson uses the photographic phrase “the mind’s eye, as clear as a transparency”. This would have been a fresh metaphor when photography was a novelty. The mind, Stevenson suggests, is capable of fooling itself.
I bought the picture. I looked up J Abbot. James Abbot was one of Scotland’s earliest photographers. He built his own cameras, making his first lenses by grinding down glass tumblers. He set up in Dundee in 1858, billing himself as a calotypist on the back of the carte-de-visite mounts he produced from his studio. His son James was the earliest professional photographer in North Berwick, and rented rooms in the Dalrymple Buildings in 1883.
The limited information I could find about the Dalrymple Buildings came from The Story of North Berwick, an online resource which tracks the development of the Royal Burgh in surprising depth. To me, Dalrymple was the name of the sympathetic garage used by dad to get his car MOT’d. When I inherited my mum’s old Mini Clubman - a rustbucket in harvest gold - they agreed to overlook the car’s obvious failings. But - it says here - Sir Hew Dalrymple (Lord North Berwick, 1652-1737) was the owner of much of the town, buying the North Berwick estate in 1694, acquiring Tantallon Castle in 1699, and the Bass Rock in 1706.
The Dalrymple family is still around. A small sign of their influence can be found in the two streets I lived in as a child. Both were newly built estates. Lady Jane Gardens, we may surmise, was named after Lady Jane Dalrymple-Hamilton, the eldest daughter of Admiral Adam Duncan, 1st Viscount Duncan of Camperdown. In 1800, Lady Jane married the fourth Sir Hew Dalrymple-Hamilton, Baronet of Bargany. Her portrait - a watercolour on ivory - painted by Anne Mee can be found in the Royal Archives, part of a “Gallery of Beauties”. In her diary, Lady Jane recalls sharing a sofa with the Duke of Wellington before he set off for the battlefield. It’s a grand name for a pebbledash terrrace.
My second North Berwick address was Keppel Road. I always assumed it was named in reference to Alice Keppel, the favourite mistress of King Edward VII. There is a certain symmetry to this, as Alice was great-great grandmother to the current Queen, Camilla, and she was having an affair with the great-great grandfather of the King, Charles. More parochially, in 1954, Lady Ann-Louise Keppel married Major Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th Baronet. Maybe she was the Keppel in Keppel Road.
This is the velvety fabric of North Berwick that doesn’t appear on the postcards. The further back you go, the fewer houses there were. Just as the town was saved by the fact that the railway escaped the Beeching closures of the mid-1960s, so it was made by the laying of the track. At first, the railway came to Drem. (Every morning at school, we would recite the Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into Drem station”.) Before that, the only connection to Edinburgh was on a coach with two horses. Again, I am grateful to the Story of the Royal Burgh for the glorious detail that the outward trains carried fish, grain, potatoes … and guano from the Bass Rock. The Prince of Wales visited North Berwick in 1859, and returned as King Edward VII in 1902. In between times, the railway company ran a promo offering free travel to anyone building a cottage or villa on the links, and the campaign hit some kind of biting point in 1889, when Edmund Yates, editor of the society journal The World, coined the term “Biarritz of the North”.
Distinguished gentleman, North Berwick. There were, it turns out, many. But let’s stick with AJ Balfour, who was prime minister from 1902-1905. Presumably, Balfour Street in North Berwick is named after him. I don’t know. I grew up in North Berwick and never heard a single declaration about AJ Balfour. Posterity is a harsh mistress. But let’s see. Balfour was born in Whittingehame House, a Grecian mansion (10 miles south of NB), designed for his grandfather James Balfour by architect Sir Robert Smirke, who also designed the British Museum. Visitors to Whittingehame included HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and King Edward VII.
AJ Balfour lived at Whittingehame during the summer and parliamentary recesses. A keen golfer, he took lessons from Ben Sayers, and when he played on the West Links he would be followed by a couple of armed detectives. And here I quote from the official history of North Berwick Golf Club.
“It is recorded that on a certain day in 1903 there were, in course of play at the same time on the West Links, ‘the Prime Minister, the Speaker of the House of Commons, four Members of Parliament, two Bishops of the Church of England, three eminent Professors, a Field Marshal, two generals and a famous Tibetan explorer’.”
Distinguished gentleman, North Berwick. Where does this get us? Ultimately, to a family snap of the Stevenson family in the days before family snaps were invented.
And there it is, a glass plate photo of the Stevensons at (the now demolished) Anchor Villa at 19 West Bay Road). There are three generations of them. Robert is a child, and the photograph is said to date from 1862. What did the young RLS do on his holidays? He played a smuggling game around a small cave at Point Garry, he rode a donkey on the beach, he climbed the Law with his frilly-collared cousins. He carved his initials on a rock.
Stevenson’s childhood visits to North Berwick clearly made an impression. Fidra, “a strange grey eyelet of two humps and one mind that the sea peeped through” is often suggested as the inspiration for Treasure Island, and the prison on the Bass Rock appears in Catriona. But the most concentrated impression of North Berwick appears in his essay The Lantern Bearers, which was published in 1888 in Scribner’s Magazine. He recalls a place “seemingly created for young gentlemen”.
The essay is essentially an extended postcard from “a fishing village with drying nets, scolding wives, the smell of fish and seaweed and the blowing sands” in which a group of boys “tasted in a high degree the glory of existence”.
“A street or two of houses, mostly red and many of them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about the manse and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady alley; many little gardens more than usually bright with flowers; nets a-drying, and fisher-wives scolding in the backward parts; a smell of fish, a genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at the street-corners; shops with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks (that remarkable cigar) and the London Journal, dear to me for its startling pictures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive names: such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of the town. These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with villas … a haven in the rocks in front: in front of that, a file of grey islets: to the left, endless links and sand wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping rabbits and soaring gulls: to the right, a range of seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and ancient fortress on the brink of one; coves between - now charmed into sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and southernwood, the air at the cliff’s edge brisk and clean and pungent of the sea - in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-geese hanging round its summit like a great and glittering smoke.”
There is more, all of it beautiful, all of it recognisable, not least Stevenson’s description of the “flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically call our summer”. He observes the whale’s jawbone on the Law, the surf, the habit of “Crusoe-ing” (“a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air”).
(“Having a nice time,” writes Jimmy in 1951. “Quite good weather. Been seeing old friends & old place.”)
The Lantern Bearers is a postcard in the form of an essay. It is about a particular place, but it is more about the memory of that place, and the way the details sift like sand into something more splendid than the present. Photography spared the rest of us the need to evoke that picture in words. Transparent as it is, Stevenson’s mind’s eye is photographic. So is it him in the picture? I thought so, then I didn’t. Then I found another picture in which he looks more like my postcard than the louche roué you find on the back of his books.
The distinguished gentleman is just that. He appears as an idealised reminder of a better past. He is a sailor, home from the sea. He is a trick of the light, a sepia dream, a postcard from forever. At home, he feels like a tourist.
This is beautiful. It makes me want to visit. If I’d had an inkling of the closing line I’d have guessed that you found that essence rare.
Thank you so much for this very thoughtful essay. I particularly enjoyed this line which I have never come across before:
Lead us not into Drem station.