Free Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders by Allan Massie

been.
    The explanation is simple and instructive. Edinburgh turned away from its port. It never developed into a great trading or industrial city. Leith has never been a focus, but at best an annexe.
    This failure of development, is not immediately easy to account for. The nineteenth century saw a general turning away from the narrow seas that give on the Continent in favour of the West, the Atlantic and the Cape routes. The result was the growth of Glasgow and Liverpool, cities that grew out of their river and waterfront. Only London among eastern ports grew comparably. That was not the only reason of course: Edinburgh’s industrial hinterland did not compare with Lanarkshire. There was simply nothing of the same magnitude to pass through the port. Leith’s trade continued to be in timber and grain, and there was a steady East Coast carrying trade, but it was all small stuff.
    As a result Leith always remained to some degrees detached from the city it served, while Edinburgh itself developed as a legal, banking and professional city. The dominance exercised by the professions has no parallel elsewhere in the United Kingdom and probably nowhere in Europe either. The 1841 Census for example recorded 7,463 Bankers, Professional Men and Capitalists out of a population of 163,726. It is safe to say that the Capitalists contributed only a small share of the total. If we give each of these four dependents - a reasonable figure considering the size of Victorian families we find a total of almost 40,000, or something between a fifth and a quarter of the entire population of the city. And this estimate of course neglects the number of domestic servants dependent on them.
    So Leith Walk never achieved the splendour implicit in its conception. The whole trend of development led away from it, as the failure of Playfair’s eastern extension of the New Town also demonstrated. The proliferating middle class were rather to be found in the New Town’s western extension between Charlotte Square and the Haymarket, or in the Victorian suburbs soon to be built south of the Meadows Bruntsfield or Morningside - or to the west of Leith Walk in Inverleith and Trinity. Leith Walk itself began to decline soon after being built. By the late eighteen-sixties, when Robert Louis Stevenson was a student, its Edinburgh end was known for its taverns and brothels; it was a place you could go `to see life’.
    But the whole area became what it has never ceased to be, one favoured by immigrants. Today they are Pakistanis. Earlier this century they were Italian; before that, the Irish. The east end football club, Hibernian, with its ground at Easter Road, has an Irish name and Catholic associations; even today, though the bigotry has never reached Glaswegian proportions, supporters of the quintessentially Edinburgh Heart of Midlothian have been heard to address the Hibs as `Fenian bastards’.
    Not all Irish immigrants were Catholic however. That flood began after the Great Famine of the 1840s. Earlier arrivals were likely to be Ulster Protestants. William Bennison, bigamist and murderer, and keen member of a Wesleyan chapel, was one of those. The degree of religious enthusiasm he displayed is in fact one of the elements that makes his case and career interesting, for his crime was clumsy and mean, and his conduct crass. Yet the gap between preaching and practice, which strangely mirrors Leith Walk’s failure to achieve what it promised, the existence of incompatibilities in the one character and the revelations of working-class culture which the case offers, combine to make even this story profoundly interesting.
    We know nothing of Bennison’s life in Ireland beyond the fact that he married a girl called Mary Mullen. The wedding took place in Portadown in November 1838 and was celebrated in a Presbyterian kirk. There was later to be much tedious argument as to the validity of the marriage, for Bennison had been baptised a member of the Church of Ireland,