Craig’s Close

Craig’s Close (now 249 High Street), Edinburgh EH1 1DF

First mentions of Indians in Edinburgh appear in newspapers. In May 1753, a reward is offered for John Samson ‘East-Indian […] Moletto [Anglo-Indian] Boy’ servant/slave ‘run off from his master in Edinburgh’, possibly with a missing silver watch. In 1769, advertisements are published for Mercury, ‘East India black boy about 13’. 1771, Caesar, a trained Indian chef (16), escaped a stately home near Dingwall and was searched for here. In the 1870s, basket weaver Khuda Baksh, and tobacco pipe seller Roshan Khan, his Scottish wife and five children, lived in the High Street. Others, often Lascars (sailors), lived in Leith.

Plaque remembering Craig’s Close.

Advert in the Caledonian Mercury, 4th October 1769.

Find out more

• Edinburgh India Institute: Edinburgh’s Nabobs
• University of Glasgow: Runaway Slaves in Britain – Bondage, freedom and race in the eighteenth century