Dr Kate Gibson, Centre for Research Collections Fellow 2022, has blogged for Care Experienced History Month about the fascinating history of the first national home for orphaned children in Scotland – the Orphan Hospital. This research forms part of her wider IASH project, Fostering and Care Work in Britain, 1700-1840.
This year, I came to Edinburgh to do some research at the National Records of Scotland. Like thousands of other people, I arrived at Waverley station.
On my day off, I walked through the city to spend an hour or two at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, housed in a beautiful and imposing early nineteenth-century building on a hill above Dean Village. I did all these things, without knowing that I was walking on the two sites of the first national home for orphaned children in Scotland – the Orphan Hospital. Millions of people pass through Waverley station and thousands wander the galleries of ‘Modern Two’ without knowing the history of these places.
In 1733 a group of Edinburgh merchants and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge hired a house in Bailie Fyfe’s Close, under the present-day North Bridge, to house 30 children. A commemorative pamphlet published for the Hospital’s anniversary in 1833 reported that the founders were moved to act by ‘the number of orphan children in Edinburgh and other parts of Scotland, who were left in very destitute circumstances, and exposed to all the evils inseparable from a state of idleness and ignorance’. The foundation of the Hospital was part of a wave of philanthropic initiatives across Europe in this period, prompted by growing beliefs that children required special care and attention separate to adult charities, and that the increasingly affluent middle-classes should use their new wealth for charitable causes to demonstrate their virtue and piety. A home for the most deserving of Scotland’s poor – orphaned children – was an ideal cause for Edinburgh’s merchant elites...
You can read the full blog at https://www.careexperiencedhistorymonth.org/blog/edinburgh-orphan-hospital and follow Kate on Twitter @KateGibson22.