This is the oldest house in Edinburgh ever used as an inn, but must not be confused with that other “White Horse,” long since demolished, made famous by Doctor Johnson.
It was in 1773 that Johnson reached Edinburgh. He put up at the “White Horse” in Boyd’s Close, called, even in those uncleanly times, “that dirty and dismal” inn, kept by James Boyd. The great man immediately notified his arrival to Boswell in this short note:—
“Saturday night.—Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being just arrived at Boyd’s.”
When Boswell arrived, falling over himself in his eagerness, he found the Doctor furiously angry. Doubtless he had been conducted to his room, as was not unusually the case, by some dirty sunburnt wench, without shoes or stockings, a fit object for dislike; but the chief cause of his anger was the waiter, who had sweetened his lemonade without the ceremony of using the sugar-tongs. He threw the lemonade out of window, and seemed inclined to throw the waiter after it.
“Peter Ramsay’s” was a famous inn, situated at the foot of St. Mary’s Wynd, next the Cowgate Port. To it came travellers along both the east and the south roads. Ramsay advertised it in 1776 as being “a good house for entertainment, good stables for above one hundred horses, and sheds for about twenty carriages.” In 1790, he retired with a fortune of £10,000. But in the best of these old Edinburgh inns the beds well merited a description given of them as “dish-clouts stretched on grid-irons.”
First among the innkeepers of this unsanctified quarter to remove from it into the New Town was James Dun. He was a man notable among his kind, having not only been the first to call himself an “innkeeper” instead of a “stabler,” but the greatly daring person who first used the outlandish word “Hotel” in Edinburgh. He began “hotel”-keeping in the flats above the haberdashery shop of John Neale, who, two years before, in 1774, had built the first house in the New Town. Neale himself was a pioneer of considerable nerve, for although the New Town had been projected and building-sites laid out on what is now the chief ornament of it, Princes Street, prospective tenants were shy of so bleak and exposed a situation as this then was. They preferred to live in the dirty cosiness of the old wynds and closes, and so the New Town seemed likely to be a paper project for years to come. At this juncture the Town Council made a sporting offer of exemption from all local taxes for the first who would build a house there. Neale was this pioneer, and he built the house that still stands next the Register House, the most easterly house in Princes Street.
Dun, to whom he had let the upper part, immediately displayed a great gilded sign, “Dun’s Hotel,” whereupon the Lord Provost, representing public feeling, wrote objecting to the foreign word “Hotel,” saying that, whatever might be the real character of his establishment, he might at least avoid the scandalous indecency of publicly proclaiming it!
XXXIV
These concluding pages of a book on the road to Edinburgh form no fitting place to attempt the description or history of so ancient and historic a town. Our business is to reach the northern capital, leaving the story of Edwin’s Burgh to be told by others. Yet we cannot leave it thus without some brief survey.
