The Signet Library is delighted to announce that it has been awarded one of the 2025 round of Jean Guild Award grants from The Old Edinburgh Club to fund research, conservation and publication of its archive of the Society’s former school for orphaned children, John Watson’s Institution (1828-1975).
John Watson’s Institution opened in the autumn of 1828, paid for by a fund set up by the last will and testament of a wealthy Scottish lawyer, the Writer to the Signet John Watson (d. 1762). The school building, overlooking the banks of the Water of Leith and now home to the National Galleries of Scotland Modern One , was the work of the WS Society’s architect William Burn. Over the course of the next 150 years, it became for its pupils not just a school but a home and an anchor for life. It closed in 1975, and is remembered now by the members of the John Watson’s Club and in the form of the modern charity John Watson’s Trust. In 1982, John Watson’s Club published John Watson’s School: A History by a long-serving teacher at the school, Isobel Wallis.
This project takes its origins from a seminar at the University of Edinburgh in 2015 which centred on Professor Richard Rodger’s MESH (Mapping Edinburgh’s Social History) initiative. MESH had emerged from the 2008-2011 Visualising Urban Geographies project (which pioneered the combination of geo-referenced digital maps with historical spatial data), and deployed the new OpenStreetMap database and facilities.
The core of the WS Society’s holdings for John Watson’s Institution are the records of applications for entry to the school. These applications contain a vast amount of astonishingly rich information about the children, their families and familial networks, their networks of responsibility and affiliation, and about the circumstances, accidents and misfortunes that could derail these networks in late Georgian and early Victorian Edinburgh.
We have known for a long time that these records are ideal for a study along the lines laid out by Professor Rodger and MESH, and we are grateful to the Old Edinburgh Club for opening up this marvellous opportunity for us.
