Book review: Edinburgh, A History of the City, by Michael Fry

Published on Thursday 16 July 2009 16:44

Edinburgh, A History of the City by Michael Fry Macmillan, 522pp, £25 Review by ALLAN MASSIE

THERE ARE PROBABLY FEW READ-ers of this newspaper who don't possess a few books about Edinburgh, whether these are historical, topographical or anecdotal. Many will have bookshelves well stacked with them. There are few cities which have inspired so much literature, perhaps none of comparable size. So why buy another?

The first reason is the author. Michael Fry was not born a Scot, but has chosen to become one; you might say that he is now a Scot by habit and repute. He has played his part in the public life of Scotland and Edinburgh, first on the staff of this newspaper as a journalist known for his trenchant and often unfashionable opinions, then as a member of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, several times a parliamentary candidate who attempted unsuccessfully to persuade his colleagues of the need for devolution, and finally as a historian, author of controversial books on Henry Dundas and the Clearances, and also of a magisterial study of the Scottish role in the British Empire. In these books he combined the clarity and vigour of good journalism with a capacity for research equal to that of any holder of an academic chair.

All there qualities are evident in this book, which must be one of the fullest accounts of Edinburgh ever written. It displays both a mastery of detail and a willingness to provocatively challenge received opinion. No-one interested in the history of Edinburgh, and indeed Scotland, should fail to read it.

While much of the book is devoted to the physical development of the city it is impossible to divorce the story of Scotland's capital from that of the nation. This is particularly evident in Fry's treatment of the 16th century, in the middle years of which the Reformation was effected, the Auld Alliance with France was broken and replaced by a Protestant alliance with Tudor England. Fry's account of these years does not lack irony. When the Protestant Lords of the Congregation sought help from England to expel the French troops brought to Scotland by the Regent Marie de Guise, we are told that "out of the goodness of her heart Elizabeth felt bound to intervene".

The account of the relations between John Knox, treated with admirable if now unusual sympathy, and Mary Queen of Scots is fascinating. One reservation is necessary, however. Fry accepts, uncritically, Knox's accounts of his conversations with the Queen, without considering to what extent these are inventions, post-facto self-justifications. Certainly they are, understandably, designed to show Knox triumphant and always in the right.

Like most writers, Fry is brutally dismissive of Darnley – "a stupid, sottish, sex-crazed lout, vacuously handsome and doubtless without belief in anything much". He also subscribes, like any romantic novelist, to the belief that Mary fell "head over heels in love" with Bothwell, not a view shared by the Queen's best biographer Antonia Fraser. I am not, by the way, convinced Mary's sonnet, "pour lui aussi je jette manteltree", refers to Bothwell.

Yet in general Fry's history of this turbulent century is excellent, and full of nice observation: "James VI grew up not just queer but peculiar: an example of how Presbyterianism, for all the virtues it instils, can warp personalities. The king may stand as the first of the cranks and crackpots who, as they lurch between amiable eccentricity and tortured schizophrenia, enliven the history of modern Edinburgh." Fair enough: nevertheless he was one of the most able and effective of Scottish kings.

Inevitably Fry makes Edinburgh's Golden Age, the 18th century, the focal point of his book, and to emphasise its importance, starts each chapter with what he calls "an enlightened episode". Cockburn, whom Fry admires less than many do, disapproving of his Whig determination to assimilate Scots Law to English and achieve political uniformity throughout the United Kingdom, called that century "the last purely Scotch age" and looked back on it with nostalgic regret – the "aye, but" characteristic of much unionist nationalism.

Fry, like many who love Edinburgh, now regrets the Union of 1707. In doing so he evades the question whether 18th-century Edinburgh would have flourished as it did but for that Union, which gave Scotland an inestimable blessing: freedom from politics.

Of Walter Scott, Fry rightly observes that "his compatriots admired him most for saying things about them nobody else had ever put into words" and notes his determination to heal the rift in Scottish history and society by re-uniting Highlands and Lowlands. He may go too far in suggesting that Scott sought to bring this about "on Highland rather than Lowland terms". a view which cannot sensibly be sustained by anyone who has read and understood Rob Roy. But unquestionably Scott's portrayal of Highland Scotland was to colour the nation's image from then on.

Fry tackles the 19th century – Scotland's greatest, as I have heard Alex Salmond say, though not Edinburgh's – with less enthusiasm, the waning of the Enlightenment signified by Carlyle's decision to remove to London, making him arguably the first man of genius who, unlike Hume, Smith, Ferguson, Burns and Scott, found Edinburgh and Scotland insufficient. But in writing about this time, he remarks how the feuing system ensured a high quality of building and architectural design, so that its tenements "still stand and even today house about a third of the population. They are above all what makes this a Scottish city (or indeed a European city, for Paris and Vienna have the same). The development was different from that in England, where workers came to be housed in terraces made of brick. The tenement created common interests and shared responsibilities; the terrace brought neither because it conveyed separate territorial rights". This is nicely said and points towards the 20th-century divergence of Scottish from English political attitudes.

Coming to the second half of the 20th century, the journalist in Fry vies with the historian. He gives an excellent account of the rise in importance of the financial services industry to Edinburgh – with a very clear account of the struggle to maintain the independence of the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1981-2. It is unfortunate that the story of last autumn's banking crisis, inserted perhaps at a late stage, even when the book was in proof, should be perfunctory.

Unfortunate, too, that he subscribes to the common perception of mid 20th-century Edinburgh as a dull "washed-out place". Intellectually it was at least as vigorous as it is today – and perhaps more fun too.

Likewise it is sad that he gives only a couple of vapid pages to the Edinburgh Festival and trots out the old myth that, apart from what he calls "some ritual fawning", "the people of Edinburgh continued to ignore the Festival". All audience surveys have shown this to be arrant nonsense.

So there is much to cavil at as well as to admire, but this is as it should be. Edinburgh has always been a vigorously argumentative place, the key word of discourse identified, justly, by Muriel Spark as "nevertheless". Fry indeed is a "nevertheless" man himself, one who can rarely encounter received opinion without questioning it. This makes his rich and detailed story of Edinburgh wonderfully stimulating. No shelf of Edinburgh books will be complete without it, though one might add, that shelf is never likely to be complete, such is the fascination Scotland's capital holds for those who live there and those who visit.

&#149 Michael Fry is at the Edinburgh book festival on 31 August.