The story of Britain’s whale hunters is to be broadcast across the UK in a new 2-part documentary on BBC Four on Monday 9 June and Monday 16 June. The documentary has been produced by ‘KEO films’, and in the second episode some material from the Salvesen Archive will appear. The collection had been given […]

A few days ago I gave a talk to the Friends of William Soutar in Perth on the friendship between Soutar and his fellow Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid, as illustrated by letters in Edinburgh University Library’s C. M. Grieve Archive (MS 2960.18). Soutar, confined to bed with a debilitating disease for the last 13 years […]

A new online guide to some of our major collections of Scottish literary papers is now available on the Centre for Research Collections website. It provides an overview of fourteen of our most significant twentieth-century collections, covering the literary manuscripts and correspondence of poets George Mackay Brown, Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir, Sydney Goodsir […]

A recent enquiry about a benefactor has thrown up an interesting set of connections within and beyond the University. The son of Robert Irvine, manager of The Scotsman newspaper, Robert Irvine was born in Edinburgh in 1839.  By 1871 he was married to Margaret Sclater and living in a large house in Baltic Street, Leith, […]

The mathematician, statistician, writer, composer and musician, Alexander Craig Aitken, was born in Dunedin, New Zealand on 1 April 1895. He was of Scottish descent. He attended Otago Boys’ High School from 1908 to 1912. On winning a university scholarship in 1912 he went on to study at the University of Otago in 1913, enrolling […]

Clerk Ranken was born in 1880, Edinburgh.  Educated at George Heriot’s School, he then went to Edinburgh University, graduating BSc (Pure Science) in 1902, then DSc in 1907. He was recipient of both the Hope Prize and Mackay Smith Scholarships. At the age of only 21 he read a paper before the Royal Society of […]

Last weekend I was in Leuven at the Annual Conference of the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE), where I’d been invited to give a paper on translations of Walter Scott in our Corson Collection. While there, I took the opportunity to display two images from another University Collections item which vividly illustrates […]

One of our earliest group photographs of female medical graduates depicts the MBChB class of 1906.  It shows 13 women and bears their signatures. Alice Meredith BURN, New Zealand Agnes Marshall COWAN, Scotland Jessie Handyside GELLATLY, Scotland M Deborah HANCOCK / Marjorie DUAKE-COHEN * Olive TREDWAY-LEONARD, India Meher Ardeshir Dadabhai NAHOROJI, India Agnes Ellen PORTER, […]

We just answered an internal enquiry for colleagues in or Law School who asked us about numbers of students and staff in the Law Faculty in the early 1950s. The answer stands in contrast to today’s student numbers: Matriculated students (Law) 1952/53 Ordinary Men 275 Women 37 Termly Men 8 Women 0 Total 320 (out […]

We recently acquired a number of interesting geology-related items via the Cockburn Geology Museum. The Murchison Chair of Geology was instituted with the Faculty of Arts (there was then no Faculty of Science) in 1871. Archibald Geikie held the Chair until 1882 and was succeeded by his brother James, Archibald having been appointed as Director […]