‘A MAN WHO LIVED THROUGH INTERESTING TIMES’

Born in 1508 to a tenant farmer who had a plot of land near Rotten Row in Leith, the boy worked the land with the rest of his family to feed themselves and pay the rent.

He eventually became a journeyman tailor, got married in 1535 and had six children, although one was stillborn and two died of measles.

In 1544, he was sitting at dinner with his wife and children when they heard shouting in the street. Thousands of English troops were entering the town and had begun to loot it, looking for anything of value – and destroying everything else, including the tailor’s shop, which was set ablaze.

Bitter months of hunger were followed by an outbreak of pestilence among the weakened population, claiming the lives of his pregnant wife and two of his remaining children.

The man had to have a tooth pulled out due to an abscess, his back became increasingly stiff, his eyes became strained with the amount of work he was doing by candlelight and he could no longer stitch finely.

Two years after he inherited it, he was about to get the old tailor’s shop back in business when the English army visited again, destroying everything that had been rebuilt.

He and his daughter had to resort to camping out in the ruins of their house and he died that winter of a fever, with his daughter by his bedside. The Tailor’s Guild of Edinburgh paid for his coffin and funeral.