David Ainslie: Honouring Memory and Intention
In 1870, David Ainslie, the man who gave us the Astley Ainslie Hospital in one magnificent donation, joined with his nephew and young heir, John Astley Ainslie, in erecting a monument to their family in South Leith Churchyard. The stones are inscribed: ‘Erected by D. Ainslie, Esq, of Costerton and J. A. Ainslie, Esq. of Huntington 1870’ and they detail the sad loss of family members. A further plaque then commemorates the death of John Astley Ainslie himself at the age of 26 in March 1874, in Algiers where he was buried in the English cemetery, and further details the death of his older brother, William, in Ramsgate in 1858.
This brief listing is an inadequate account of David Ainslie’s grief for his adopted son, his ‘nephew and heir, to whom he was deeply attached’, – a grief that persisted through his life, and prompted his generosity in founding the convalescent hospital to perpetuate the boy’s name and memory.i
The website on the Leith churchyard has photographs of the monuments (here), but these needed improvement, and last autumn, I realised that we needed better images for our own use. I asked my old allies, Robin and Marjory Gillanders, if they would kindly undertake this. They set off in a thick haar, which was rolling in off the Forth, carrying the camera. The photographs should have rivaled Alvin Langdon Coburn’s atmospheric views of the City, taken in honour of Robert Louis Stevenson.
But the pictures could not be taken. Robin and Marjory circled carefully round the graveyard in the fog, and could not find the memorials. They were not there. Marjory spotted the answer – bizarrely, there was an entire wall of the churchyard missing.
What had happened?
Those who have lived in Edinburgh for the last decade will not be surprised to hear that the trams had been routed this way. The builders of the tramway decided in the summer of 2019, that the A-listed wall of the graveyard on Constitution Street, built in 1790, should be dismantled, because its foundations ‘were not strong enough to withstand the tram construction works’.ii The application ‘to improve the stability and safety of the wall’, also cheerily talks of enabling ‘an improved view of the churchyard’, which suggests that it is unlikely to be rebuilt as it was.
The Gillanders met a workman in the graveyard, who told them that the wall and the memorials have been dismantled, all the stones numbered and put in store. In the context of a World Heritage site, this decision is melancholy, and the replacement of the memorials inevitably has a question mark over it. Where are they now? Will they be put back? Will the reverberation of the trams damage them further? You may recall the history of Edinburgh’s Trinity College Chapel, one of our finest pieces of gothic architecture, which was demolished in 1848 to make way for a railway goods yard behind Waverley Station. The stones were carefully numbered for rebuilding, and then dumped on Calton Hill, where they lay for fifty years. Whatever had not been stolen by then – and the decorative stones were substantially missing – was reassembled into a travesty of the original building, which is now scarcely visited and certainly little admired.
The question of the South Leith memorials is important for us. One of the promises made by the government, when the National Health Service took on the Astley Ainslie Hospital, was that:
The Board shall provide for the upkeep in all time coming of the burying ground in the cemetery of South Leith of the family of David Ainslie of Costerton and of the memorial tombstone to the said David Ainslie in Crichton Churchyard Midlothian. iii
This would seem to have been a small enough promise.
The specific undertaking to protect the Ainslie memorials was part of a far more serious undertaking. The National Health Service Act of 1947 constituted a Hospital Endowments Commission. This group negotiated with the many bodies currently tackling health, such as the Royal Infirmary and the Astley Ainslie Hospital. Their remit was broad and respectful: ‘To frame and submit to the Secretary of State schemes for the governance and management of endowments transferred to Boards of Management [according to the Act which] enjoined us to have special regard to the spirit of the intention of the founder or donors of endowments and in particular to conditions intended to preserve the memory of any person or class of persons, and to the extent to which the original purpose of endowment was sufficiently provided for by a public service or otherwise.’iv This obligation was repeated in the 1978 National Health Service (Scotland) Act.
So what was the ‘spirit of intention’ behind the Astley Ainslie Hospital?
David Ainslie did not expand on the intention in his will, beyond proposing a convalescent hospital with a ‘Garden and Policy and Recreation Ground’.v The institution was designed to support the patients of the Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary, which was ‘open to all the “curable distressed” from whatever corner of the world they come, without restriction’. The Infirmary served the poorer members of society, and was substantially funded by charitable donations. David Ainslie and his nephew are both recorded as making donations to the Infirmary at an earlier stage. Since David made his first will expressing his intention in 1876, the year his nephew died, it is evident that he was then moved by grief for the loss of a lad just starting his career. David had no children of his own, and John was in effect his own son.
The scale and nature of David Ainslie’s intention is seen in the word ‘policy’ used in the will, which means ‘the pleasure grounds of a country mansion’.vi He felt that the health of the poorest members of society justified the restorative impact of a country estate, allowing the patients time, in good air, in peaceful, natural and beautiful surroundings – indeed, transforming their lives. The intention was handsomely supported by the Royal Botanic Garden, which provided not just professional assistance but plants and seeds of plants, from trees to giant Himalayan lilies to grace the Astley Ainslie gardens.
This was an impressive and socially admirable intention. Many people have recovered from severe illness and injury through the active pleasures and benefits of the hospital’s green landscape, both in the early years of the hospital and under the NHS management, and in the course of a hundred years – an impressive history.
In the meantime, however, the NHS are now proposing to sell the land itself.
The rationale behind this is a consolidation of resources on other sites; leaving buildings which are no longer fit for purpose; and, of course, the raising of cash from a site which could be used for private building.
How does this mesh with the intention laid down by David Ainslie and his Trustees, and with the experience of the medical staff who ran the Astley Ainslie Hospital for thirty years? Is the decision to sell this green land good for our health?
Most importantly, this is a living site with open access to the people who own it. There are public rights of way through the land, but the public ownership is more important to us than simply allowing us to pass through. For a hundred years, people have enjoyed the natural setting, visiting patients, walking, playing, climbing trees, feeding birds, planting flowers, picnicking - giving the Astley Ainslie a connection to the world of ordinary life, and improving the health of the world at large. The impact on the patients themselves is beyond calculation. Extensive recent research has confirmed our need for green life and exercise in the open air, in the simplest possible way. For example: ‘It is impossible to overstate the health benefits of walking. If someone invented a drug that did what walking does, they would be a billionaire overnight. Changing from 1,000 steps to 10,000 per day halves your chances of death in any given year. There are huge, huge benefits.’vii A tree outside a hospital window gives a pleasure and health, which allows a patient to recover more readily. Open spaces and sky are calming and relieve depression. The oxygen generated by trees is constant, growing year by year; while air conditioning plants can break down, overheat, require patients and staff to be sealed into the wards, and they can be contaminated, with sometimes fatal results.viii In a country with a temperate climate in which plant life grows phenomenally well, all we need to do is surround our hospitals with green life and open the windows.
The intention behind the Astley Ainslie Hospital – improving health in a city context – is not a failed or obsolete experiment. This hospital led in the successful fight against tuberculosis, rife in the closed environment of the Old Town. It recognised the immense virtue of good air and sunshine, with the cheering view of long distance into the hills. It led in the development of occupational therapy, to activate people’s minds and physical talents. In the immediate context of the Covid virus and the appalling concept of ‘lockdown’, which has been designed to imprison us indoors on the grounds of our own safety, the open spaces and the natural world are all the more clearly necessary to our mental and physical health. Nature is not separate or decorative – it is essential to our lives as natural animals; we are not machines.
Even viewed in elementary fiscal terms, the land could sustainably be kept as a green space. It exerts an active influence on our health and happiness, and it can be developed in those terms: gardening, improving, even re-wilding parts of the land, using the old and distinguished buildings for good purpose. Should it be sold for commercial development – for cash - its current status as a source of health will be not just damaged but lost.
Has the health impact of that potential loss been costed out?
It would be good if the National Health Service could consider a partnership with the direct public interest represented by the community, which would connect our mutual interest in health and happiness. The NHS Lothian’s own Sustainable Development Framework and Action Plan, published in December 2020, lays out as its first three strategic objectives:
NHS Lothian will have zero carbon emissions by 2045
NHS Lothian will contribute to enhancing our natural environment
NHS Lothian will promote climate resilience and ensure that its services are adapted to climate change.
These objectives offer an excellent basis from which a positive partnership could develop.
As the people at large, we are necessarily responsible for our own good health – we need the conditions and the space to keep it and improve it, not the high expense of drugs to mend it. The NHS has a responsibility for our health, observably when it fails. But this is not a simple idea. Health is not a business. We are immensely complex animals, and we are all different – this is how we have been so successful in the surprisingly short time that we have dominated and overrun the world. But we need, urgently, to maintain our own health in harmony with the natural world – we may not be able to articulate or even prove scientifically how this works, but we can say: Fresh air feels good; a view of the clouds in the sky and the distant hills reduces our sense of oppression or claustrophobia; the company of occasional strangers encountered in a park is pleasing; a quietude without cars and lorries roaring past, the possibility of hearing a small bird singing, are all good for us. We need time, space, calm and beautiful surroundings to be healthy, to be human, and to be a viable society.
This understanding should be public property, and this was David Ainslie’s intention.
‘There is no wealth but life.’ix
Sara Stevenson, February 2021
i Alexander Miles [Convenor of the House and Works Committee] ‘The Astley Ainslie Institution’, University of Edinburgh Journal, vol 3, 1929-30, pp139-144]
ii Edinburgh Evening News, 23 August 2019.
iii Statutory Instruments 1972, Issues 318-678, London, HMSO, p. 1474, which reiterates this undertaking.
iv Report, for the Secretary of State for Scotland, 1955. The Commission was constituted by the NHS Act, 1947.
v David Ainslie’s testament, Scottish Record Office SCOO7000001-00.
Sadly, he made research into his private life difficult by instructing that all his private letters should be ‘handed over to the law agent employed by him at his death, who should decide whether to destroy or keep’, but future research should discover more.
vi Definition given in Chambers Scots Dictionary, 1911.
vii ‘Dr Xand Van Tulleken: Fighting for Air, BBC radio interview, 10 January 2018.
viii Air conditioning plants are a major source of pollution. ‘Chief among [the dangerous materials and chemicals] are the manmade hydroflaurocarbons currently residing in the world’s refrigerators and air conditioners. If these were released from machines at the end of their life, they would add the equivalent of 100 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in greenhouse gases’, David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future, Witness Books, 2020, p. 206.
ix John Ruskin, Unto This Last