Hand

to mouth

12 FEATURE

income of households in the stufy was just under

25s (£1 5/-) a week, about £122 in 2023.

The make-up of each household was corrected

for age and sex of occupants to turn it into a

standardised equivalent number of adult men,

based on the understanding at the time of the

relative dietary requirements of men, women and

children of different ages. For instance an adult

Study of the Diet of the Labouring Classes in Edinburgh: Andy Arthur takes a look

at what the poor living in the Canongate’s slums were eating and drinking in 1901

Traditional Scottish mutton was largely lacking in

the diet, even though it was cheaper and offered

more protein per unit cost than beef

I

n 1901, the Public Health Committee of

the Town Council of Edinburgh paid £

to commission a then remarkable and

pioneering bit of research: they asked

three doctors to go out into the working

classes and poor of the city and find out

what they actually ate. The study took

place in the Canongate and followed the food

purchased and eaten over a week by 15 families, a

total of 94 mouths. It meticulously catalogued

everything that was consumed and discarded in

great detail and then analysed it for its equivalent

nutritional contents in a laboratory.

The authors were Dr. Diarmid Noël Paton, a

pioneer in physiology and its links with nutrition;

Dr. James Craufurd Dunlop, a paediatrician,

pioneer of combined medical and social research

and later Superintendent of Statistics, then

Registrar General, of the Registry Office for

Scotland and; Dr. Elsie Maud Inglis, one of the

first female doctors in Scotland; a specialist and

pioneer of the medical care – and medical

education – of women; a leading suffragist and

later founder of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals

in World War One.

A Study of the Diet of the Labouring Classes in

Edinburgh was published the following year

(1902). It runs to 104 pages, but I have read it and

summarised some of its key findings so that you

don’t have to. So lets go find out what people in

the city ate 120 years ago

The 15 subject families were categorised

into three classes:

1. Workmen’s families with irregular wages
   under 20s (20 Shillings or £1, approximately
   £98 in 2023) per week


2. Families with regular wages from 20-23s
   per week


3. Families with men in “good” trades and
   regular wages from 28-40s per week.
   There were 15 adult men, 17 adult women and
   62 children in the study. Two of the test
   households were notable for having no man in the
   house – as a result these were by far and away the
   financially worst off of the group. The average