Historic lights

“The Robert Douglas Memorial Institute in Scone still has gas-lights,” writes a Craigie regular. “They don’t work and the lighting throughout the halls is electric, but these wall-fittings are left-overs from the 19th Century when the buildings were new.

“The two I saw in the hallway are quite delicately made, with chains hanging down on either side of the gas mantle, presumably to turn the lights on and off. I am sure collectors and antique dealers would be interested.

“The institute is about to undergo a radical refurbishment of its lighting and heating. Perhaps these last remnants of bygone days will disappear in the renovations.

“As I gazed at them, I remembered the old Dundee tenements of my childhood when I used to wander the length and breadth of the city visiting our many relatives and later when I delivered groceries up gas-lit closies.

“One great-aunt lived in Dens Road and, to the end of her life in the 1950s, she had gas lighting and a gas ring on the hearth for heating kettles, while her cooking and baking were done on an open range with a girdle and side oven fuelled by coal.

“Her laundry was done in a communal wash-house out the back where the boiler was fuelled by coal.

“Another great-aunt who lived in Strawberry Bank, on the Perth Road, had similar arrangements in a tiny flat, yet she still managed to have big family gatherings ben-the-hoose. She was a tailoress working for D.M. Brown’s.”