It’s a week since I brought the daily posts to an end, and the seven days since have been slightly weird as I’ve resisted the urge to open up the laptop and write something here. The game of the foot and the ball has helped divert my attention, which is a good thing. In the interim I’ve done a bit of writing, taken the self-publishing process a bit further, and begun research for the novel(s) after the current work in progress.
Yesterday I did something that I’ve taken to enjoying. Its about a mile and a half along the old railway track past the golf course to the nearest tram stop. Using my travel pass I can get from there to various places for free, do a bit of shopping, or wandering, then get back to the same stop and walk home. I get three-plus miles of walking in and enjoy the surroundings. I went out to the Gyle shopping centre yesterday. We lived nearby when it opened, and the scrawny trees the planted then have matured nicely, and I must be one of the few who can remember it being opened by the late Stratford Johns in front of no crowd at all.
Anyway, the tram line goes through the Gyle Business Park, once thriving but now, I think largely thanks to Covid and working from home, plastered with ‘To Let’ signs. For decades developers were pushing for more office space in Edinburgh, and a lot of institutions, such as pension funds, invested as landlords. It’s a bit soon to say for definite, but I suspect substantial changes to come in the pattern of development (see bullet point 6 here from last March).
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Part of the research I’ve been doing was to track down a copy of The Short Arm of the Law, the autobiography of William Merrilees OBE, a former Chief Constable of Edinburgh. Whatever Merrilees’s merits, undue modesty wasn’t one of them. The short book is notably unreflective on his later life, being based around a succession of his ‘successes’. The success that was his springboard to promotion was the prosecution of the proprietors of the Kosmo Dance Club in 1933, on the basis that the club was a front for prostitution.
Subsequently, he was fixated on cleaning pre-WW2 Edinburgh of the scourge of homosexuality, a task at which he claimed he succeeded, although all the evidence is to the contrary. I should add in fairness that the chapters on his early life in Leith are far more interesting and considered.
His crusade on vice, in conjunction with the then Procurator Fiscal in Edinburgh James Adair (so much for separation of duties), crosses all the lines you might imagine between prosecuting the organised commercial exploitation of prostitution (the Kosmo Club) and punishment of anything that people appear to be enjoying (it is no coincidence that Adair was a long-standing elder of the Church of Scotland). Along the way, by accident, Merrilees drops tantalising hints about pre-WW2 Edinburgh, from the brothel that almost exclusively employed married women hoping to earn some extra cash, to his regret that there is no law under which he can prosecute the two lesbians who are obviously enjoying themselves (a very Edinburgh attitude to pleasure).
Our mysterious ‘lady’ proved to be an active pervert in a big way, a Lesbian of strongly masculine tendencies, and a woman of great wealth. She appeared to enjoy her unnatural relations with young women…Curiously enough, however, this practice between women is not an offence in law. (p.108/9)
Interestingly, to me at least, aside from the Kosmo case, which was widely reported at the time, he offers few details of other cases he mentions, and rarely mentions names, although the prosecutions must have been a matter of public record. I suspect names were removed pre-publication when the manuscript was reviewed for approval. I’ve identified one case, I think before he was promoted to sergeant, as that of the Commercial Hotel in Leith (1928), again in connection with prostitution, of which details are available in the Scotsman archive. Another, relating to Maximes Palais de Dance and its links to homosexuality, of concern as it exploited its position on the tramline to and from an Army barracks, was harder to track down. I think that it was the prosecution of Peter Allan Ogg in 1938 (a partially successful appeal against his conviction is reported in the the Scottish legal records) who is described as, amongst other things, a dancehall proprietor. A second defendant, whose name appears in one brief reference in the Scotsman, has disappeared into history–I can’t find him on the usual genealogy sites either. In this case, the homosexuality itself was the crime (acts of gross indecency with other male persons). So far as I can tell, neither the Scotsman nor the Evening News reported the trial.
I note that counsel for the defence in all three cases was Daniel Blades, later Lord Blades, a senator of the College of Justice. Coincidence?
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