Curious Edinburgh - Curious Edinburgh

Lauriston Gardens

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Oct 192020

Lauriston Gardens, Edinburgh EH3 9HH

Herbert Christian Bankole-Bright, founder member of the National Congress of British West Africa, lived at Lauriston Gardens while he studied medicine in Edinburgh. Bankole-Bright was born in Okrika (now part of Nigeria) in 1883. He was from a “Krio” (“creole”) family; his grandfather had escaped from a recaptured slave ship in 1823, landed in Sierra Leone, and was then baptized and educated by the Church Missionary Society. His parents, Jacob Galba Bright and Letitia Bright, belonged to Freetown’s African social elite. In 1905, Bankole-Bright enrolled at the Edinburgh Royal College of Surgeons. At the time, the College was autonomous from the University of Edinburgh, but students took some courses at the University. During his five years Bankole-Bright practiced at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. He took an active interest in politics as a student, writing letters to Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour Party in Britain, and engaging in debates organized by the Afro-West Indian Association. He was academically successful, achieving marks between 60 and 75 in all of his final examinations. In 1927, 17 years after he had returned to Sierra Leone, Bankole-Bright was named Honorary President of the Edinburgh African Association.

Edinburgh College of Art

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Oct 192020

Edinburgh College of Art, 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh EH3 9DF

Records of Finandra Nath Bose’s time at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) exist from 1908, and he was awarded his diploma in 1911. Born in Calcutta, India, Finandra Nath Bose trained as a sculptor at ECA under Percy Portsmouth. Portsmouth recalled that, “Bose excelled in small sculpture; he had a phenomenal control of minutiae […] he was an excellent craftsman, a true artist, showing delicacy and taste in everything he did.” After completing his studies at Edinburgh, Bose moved to Paris to work under Auguste Rodin. He became part of the “new sculpture movement” in Britain, whose small figurative statues focused on realism, movement, and symbolism. Bose’s sculptures can be seen in multiple locations across Scotland, including a War Memorial (1925) on the Main Street of Ormiston, East Lothian, as well as ‘St John the Baptist,’ designed for St John’s Church, Perth. He has been described as the first Indian to achieve recognition in Britain and was one of the first international artists to become a member of the Royal Scottish Academy.

Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

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Oct 192020

Royal College of Physicians, 11 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JQ

When Kadambini Ganguly received her BA from the University of Calcutta in 1883, she became the first woman to graduate in India. This was monumental, since Calcutta Medical College had initially refused to admit her because of her gender. In 1893, she travelled to Edinburgh and studied for the Scottish Triple at the Royal College of Physicians. At the time, travelling to the UK to study was limited to a small but growing wealthy elite in India. At the college, she took courses in medicine, therapeutics, surgery, anatomy, midwifery, and medical jurisprudence. Ganguly continuously challenged society’s expectations of her. Her decision to study medicine abroad as a married woman provoked backlash from the upper-caste Bengali community, and when she received her diploma she was the only successful woman candidate in her cohort. When Ganguly returned to India, she practiced obstetrics and gynecology at Lady Dufferin Hospital in Calcutta, combining her medical work with political activism. She was one of six women delegates to the fifth session of the Indian National Congress in 1889, and organized a Women’s Conference in Calcutta in the aftermath of the 1906 partition of Bengal (which separated the majority Muslim East from the largely Hindu West).

Assembly Hall

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Oct 192020

Assembly Hall, Mound Place, Edinburgh EH1 2LX

In 1952, Assembly Hall was the location of protest meetings against the Central African Federation (CAF), where Edinburgh alumni Julius Nyerere and Hastings Banda, later Presidents of independent Tanzania and Malawi respectively, spoke. The CAF was a colonial federation of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) between 1953 and 1963. Those in favour claimed the territories were economically interdependent and thus vulnerable individually. However, Afrikaners and Black Africans were vehemently opposed to a white minority rule of a few Europeans over millions of Africans. In Scotland, Nyerere and Banda mobilized opposition to the Federation. In February 1952, they spoke out against the Federation at Assembly Hall. The Scotsman newspaper described Banda’s claims “that the federation of these territories was not in the best interests of the people…They would lose the right to form their own Government within the Commonwealth.” Nyerere condemned the Federation as “another example of white domination over Africans.” The meeting at Assembly Hall passed a unanimous resolution against the Federation and resulted in the Scottish Council on African Questions, “set up to combat racism and colonialism in Africa.” The CAF was dissolved when Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia gained independence in 1963.

Phrenological Museum

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Oct 192020

Crown Office, 25 Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1LA

25 Chambers Street, site of the former Phrenological Museum

25 Chambers Street used to be the site of the Edinburgh’s Phrenological Museum. Phrenology emerged in the eighteenth century and used the human skull to determine personal character and development. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, the pseudo-science became increasingly racialized and Edinburgh’s students used it to both promote and refute racist theorizations. For example, in Ethnology and Phrenology, Edinburgh graduate John William Jackson claimed that “contemplated through the medium of Comparative Anatomy, a Negro is but the embryonic, and a Mongol the infantile form of the Caucasian or perfect man.” Equally important, however, were the medical students of colour who have historically resisted these ideas and created their own counter-narratives. James ‘Africanus’ Beale Horton was born in Sierra Leone in 1835 and graduated from Edinburgh in medicine in 1859. In his book West African Countries and Peoples, Horton labelled racist phrenologists as “men of science with restricted observation.” Theophilus Scholes was born in Jamaica in 1856 and completed his medical degree at Edinburgh two years early. In Glimpses of the Ages, he attacked the claim that a “Caucasian brain” weighed 200 grams more than an “African brain,” asking “is a greater travesty of scientific research possible?”

Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh

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Oct 192020

Royal College of Surgeons, Nicholson Street, Edinburgh EH8 9DW

In 1937, Hastings Banda, who became the first President of independent Malawi in 1966, travelled to Edinburgh to study medicine. At the time, the Royal College of Surgeons was one of Britain’s only non-university institutions providing a respected medical qualification, the Scottish Triple. Taking his final examinations in 1940, Banda passed all his courses except Surgery and Midwifery. He passed on his fifth attempt, however, and was finally awarded his diploma in July in 1941. In 1977, President Banda donated £350,000 to the College, receiving an honorary fellowship in return. A plaque commemorating Banda was erected outside, but during the campaign for multi-party democracy in the early 1990s, Banda came under widespread criticism. He was an absolute ruler who had outlawed all other political parties and owned 45% of Malawi’s GDP. Despite this, the College refused to take a political stance when asked to return Banda’s donation to Malawi. Dr. Paul Reece noted that no “donations should have been made by the President to a royal college in the UK when there are all the problems in Malawi itself. When I was there we were having adults admitted with starvation.” The College refused, but the plaque has been removed.

Hastings Banda (left) and Julius Nyerere (right).

Teviot Row House

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Oct 192020

Teviot Row House, 13 Bristo Place, Edinburgh EH8 9AL

Opening its doors in 1889, Teviot is the world’s oldest and purpose-built Student Union. Home to Edinburgh University Students’ Association (EUSA), it reflects a long history of student politics in Edinburgh. Amongst those involved in EUSA’s history is Grenadian David Pitt, who graduated in Medicine and Surgery in 1938. In 1936, Pitt became first Junior President of the Students’ Representative Council, the co-founding body of what is now EUSA. Whilst participating in Edinburgh University and UK national politics, Pitt never lost sight of Caribbean politics. The years in which he graduated and returned to the Caribbean islands were fundamental for Trinidadian politics, and saw a sustained campaign for universal adult suffrage, finally awarded by the British Parliament in 1945. David Pitt himself contributed to this campaign, co-founding the West Indian National Party (WINP), a socialist party dedicated to the emergence of political autonomy across the Caribbean. In 1947, Pitt led a group of WINP members to Britain to lobby the Government for Commonwealth status for a Federation of the West Indies. Pitt made history again in 1959, becoming the first parliamentary candidate of African descent in a UK general election as Labour candidate for the north London constituency of Hampstead.

Edinburgh Indian Association

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Oct 192020

11 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD

The Edinburgh Indian Association (EIA), founded in 1883, was one of the first Indian Associations in Britain. Between 1911 and the 1950s, the EIA rented rooms at 11 George Square, which “contained a debating hall for 100 people, a dining-hall serving Indian dishes, a library, a billiard room with two full-size tables and one ping pong table.” Containing members from across India and its diaspora, it radicalized students who later became key leaders in the British Guiana East Indian Association, the Non-European Unity Movement in South Africa, and the Indian National Congress itself. Edinburgh alum Kesaveloo Goonam Naidoo recounts that the EIA: “had the unique privilege of listening to the Nobel Laureate, Sir CV Rama. His speech went over my head, but heck, it felt good just being there. Another illustrious visitor was the Right Honourable Srinivasa Sastri, who […] was very unpopular among the Indian students [for his pro-British oratory] and became even more so when he came to Edinburgh to receive the freedom of the city at a time when thousands of Indian freedom fighters languished in British jails.” As the Home Rule movement grew in India, the EIA “became active in this field” and was monitored by Scotland Yard for revolutionary discussions.

Emblem of the Edinburgh Indian Association in January 1920.

15 Buccleuch Place

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Oct 192020

15 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LN

Dr. Agnes Yewande Savage was born at 15 Buccleuch Place in 1906. Her father, Richard Akinwande Savage, had been vice president of the Afro-West Indian Society at Edinburgh and, in 1900, attended the first Pan-African Congress in London. Savage was probably the first West African woman to qualify in medicine. She graduated with a first, winning awards in skin disease and forensic medicine. In 1929, she was awarded the prestigious Dorothy Gilfillan Memorial Prize for the best woman graduate. Savage nevertheless faced huge institutional barriers due to her race and gender. When appointed in 1930 as a junior medical officer in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Savage was paid discriminatory wages and lived in servants’ quarters. Andrew Fraser, headmaster at Achimota College, recruited her as a teacher and a medical officer in 1931. Savage also supervised the establishment of the Nurses Training School at Korle Bu, Accra, where a ward is now named after her. Finally, in 1945, Savage was given the same terms of employment, salary, and retirement as her white colleagues. Historian E. Keazor asserts that Savage “left one of the greatest legacies for Nigerian women. […] Her life shows that hard work and self-belief can allow one to break barriers.”

Richard Savage Sr. with the Students Representative Council

15 Melville Terrace

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Oct 192020

15 Melville Terrace, Edinburgh EH9 1LY

Born in 1886, Jung Bahadur Singh was an advocate for marginalized colonial subjects in British Guiana (now Guyana). While his time at Edinburgh is poorly documented, we know that he lived with his wife, Alice Bhagwandy Singh, and their children at 15 Melville Terrace. After the abolition of chattel slavery, Britain began to recruit indentured labourers as a substitute. Indentured labourers were paid to work in the Caribbean but were expected to return to South Asia after a 5 year period. Singh had close and personal experiences with indenture – both of his parents were indentured labourers in British Guiana, and between the ages of 16 and 28, he had worked as a medical dispenser on immigration ships. As a result, he became dedicated to representing the plight of diasporic Indians, and when he enrolled to study medicine at Edinburgh in 1914, he became a prominent member of the Edinburgh Indian Association. When Singh completed his studies and returned to British Guiana, he fought for the rights of the Indo-Guyanese to participate in their own governance, to have their non-Christian rites legally recognized, and to receive better pay.

Jung Bahadur Singh and Alice Bhagwandy Singh

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