Wonky cobbles, Pembroke Place, Edinburgh

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 17 Dec 2022

This is one of several streets round here that seem to take their names from random British places. Many of them, including this one, were built in the 1860s to house employees of James McKelvie, a coal merchant, so if we could travel back in time he would probably provide an answer. McKelvie wasn't just a coal merchant, however. He was also involved in the West Lothian shale mining industry, which was very big business at the time. This is because he was - mostly it seems - a 'cannel coal' merchant, and cannel coal is best described as a hybrid of coal and shale. It looks like coal, and is as pure as coal (shale contains a significantly lower portion of fossils than coal); the fossils it does contain though, are of the same type as those found in shale, meaning that shale oil can be extracted from it. Brief research has led me to two interesting findings about Mr McKelvie. The first is that he burnt to death in his mid-70s, having fallen into an open fire at his main office in Haymarket (he was obviously quite successful as two branch offices are also listed in Post Office directories of the time). This was presumed to be as a result of an epileptic fit, which he reportedly starting having increasingly in his later years. Secondly, though the details are a bit sketchy, he seems to have entered into a venture with the Norwegian-owned and Edinburgh-based Salvesen shipping company around the time of the housebuilding. The idea was smart and ambitious, and put into place extremely quickly (whilst there were obviously downsides to the lack of regulations in times gone by I often wonder if today's industries could move as quickly as they did back then whether things would pan out better). They weren't quick enough though, due largely to the inflation of the cannel coal price. The idea had been to export the coal from Benhar, one of West Lothian's lost mining villages, to Norway. Christian Salvesen, who was running the business at the time, planned to build an oilworks on the coast of Norway to capitalise on the fact that the patent for the method of shale oil extraction - which was the one you had to use at that time if you were going to compete - only extended to Britain. Anybody familiar with NorthWest Edinburgh will recognise the name Salvesen, as it appears in a number of street names in West Granton. Entirely coincidentally I presume, they provided the money for a lot of housebuilding too, albeit nearly a hundred years later. A lot of their profits were due to the company being the biggest whaling company in the world (their large ships at that time are described as 'portable whaling factories' a lot online), and they built houses for injured servicemen and retired lighthouse-keepers, which makes sense if you think about it. There are plaques on a lot of the house walls, attached by the council of the day no doubt as a form of thankyou, and, having delivered stuff there over the years, I'm positive that some mentioned the company employing blind people. Because Edinburgh history is so rich and long, I always notice a lot of gaps which, even online in smaller places, would be filled in a lot more. One day...!

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0