| Department of Mathematics and Statistics |
A Necessary Balance: Alec and Harry Aitken 1920-1935
P.C. Fenton
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4. Arrival
Aitken arrived in Edinburgh on 26 September 1923 and within a week had found lodgings at 1 Bruntsfield Terrace. Edinburgh’s low life and public drunkenness, and its high, sunless tenements, depressed him.
Edinburgh is a grey-skied place, and nearly always has a pall of smoke hanging over it, or else mist. The buildings are historic and sooty. The views of row after row of symmetrical and dingy grey buildings and yellow chimney-pots are not very romantic … I would much rather dispense with all that “junk”, as the Americans call it, and have clean streets and no slums, for parts of Edinburgh are as filthy as the native quarters of Egyptian towns. Also there is considerable begging in the streets (four or five on one bridge!) and what is worse, singing for money.33
Its provinciality recalled the Presbyterian pretensions of his home town, which he loathed with all his love for his father’s Methodist humility.
You should see them ganging to the kirk o’Sundays wi’ braw top hats and a’ the rest! And don’t they think Edinburgh is the most beautiful city in the world and Princes Street the finest street, whereas I have seen ten towns and twenty streets very much finer!
But he also encountered the Edinburgh that was truly European. He called on Whittaker, a towering figure in mathematics, at his home, bumped into the Astronomer Royal and attended lectures by such luminaries as C.G. Darwin and C.G. Barkla. He attended concerts, and at a musical evening at Bevan Baker’s, one of the mathematics staff and an accomplished pianist, played his violin. A visit to R.J.T. Bell’s mother at Hamilton in Lanarkshire, not ten miles from Clarkston and New Monkland where his grandparents grew up, joined his familial and academic histories to the new environment. The university, music with friends and the landscape: all that would eventually bind him to Edinburgh.
| 33 | ACA to Harry, 12 December 1923. |
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