20 FEATURE WEST END LOVE TOKEN
Tale with a
It’s a...
Twist
Above, a recent photo
of 1 Belford Road and,
inset, interesting artistic
details on the propertyT
he thread about a curious house,
its short, scandalous and
unhappy life as a matrimonial
home, its place in a small
community of eminent artists
and the hidden civic building
lurking within its walls
I spotted a property listing of historical
interest - a flat in the curious Victorian,
mock-Tudorbethan house at 1 Belford Road at
the head of the road above the Dean Village (or
as it would have been known at the time, the
Water of Leith village).
The insides of this flat were almost entirely
modern, all plasterboard walls and mod cons, so
not much to write about, but the views are
pretty, well, pretty spectacular!
The house is now split into three separate
flats/offices. It is quite a remarkable (and more
than a little bonkers) structure, a fantasia of
different styles all cobbled together into one
reasonably coherent structure.
One of the most intriguing features is a band
of stucco around the lower courses of the
building, impressed with the motif of an H, an
eagle and a thistle along with love hearts in the
original cast iron window bars.
This house was built in 1891 as Lynedoch
House, by the architect Sir George Washington
Browne (1853-1939), who would go on to
design Edinburgh’s Caledonian Hotel.
Lynedoch was a local place name applied in
honour of Thomas Graham, Baron Lynedoch, a
hero of the peninsular war, by the landowner in
the 1820s Major James Weir RM.
It was built for Charles Martin Hardie, RSA,
(1858-1916), a native of East Lothian and a
fashionable and successful artist known for
paintings of Scottish life and also portraits of
Robert Burns and Walter Scott. Hardie built the
house as a family home and his studio.
The “H” impressed in the render is Hardie’s
initial. The thistle is for Scotland. The eagle is for
America, from where his first wife – Mary Lewis- hailed. They had married in 1889 and the love
heart was a symbol of their matrimonial bond.
DIVORCE
It didn’t work. He divorced her in 1895 after she
ran off with an actor. The case, heard by Lord
Moncrieff in the Court of Session, caused a
minor sensation in the papers at the time and
was so heavily attended at court that his
Lordship had to have the public ejected to make
room for all the junior lawyers and reporters
who had attended.
Charles Hardie alleged that after the birth
of their second child – who did not live to see
his first birthday – his wife had become weak
and had spent a lot of time in London staying
with friends to recuperate. He was too busywith his work to either accompany her,
or care for her himself.
On one of these visits he decided to go to
London to find her and could not do so. She
turned up later in Sydney, Australia. It transpired
that she had gone there with an actor and opera
singer, Mr Courtice Pounds, and “she admitted
misconduct with him in his rooms“, where the
hotel manager testified that she had been playing
the part of his wife, that the room had but one
bed and that they had occupied it overnight. On
this evidence alone, the judge granted Hardie his
divorce, and custody of the couple’s daughter.
Courtice Pounds soon abandoned Mary andAndy Arthur relates the story of a curious old Edinburgh house, which
although built as a love token failed initially as a happy matrimonial home