Heave Awa' House, High Street

Image: © kim traynor Taken: 3 Jun 2009

An elaborately decorated ornamental scroll over the entrance to Paisley Close in the High Street commemorates an incident following a tenement collapse in 1861 which claimed numerous lives. During the rescue operations a voice was heard shouting, "Pull awa' lads, I'm no deid yet!" It came from a boy called John Geddes who was pinned under the debris but subsequently saved. One of the onlookers was Charles Dickens who happened to be visiting the city at the time. The seven-storey tenement had been occupied by twenty-five families with lodgers. Of the estimated 100 people who had been asleep in the building, thirty-five were killed and many injured. Within a year the Council had appointed Edinburgh's first Medical Officer of Health who was asked for an immediate report on sanitary conditions in the city and proposals for improvement. The scroll, with its slightly anglicised wording, "Heave awa' chaps. I'm no' dead yet", was added to the new building erected a year after the disaster. Image

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