South Side Memories
“Do you like whisky? Whisky and quaichs are inseparable partners, woven together in the fabric of Scotland.
Long before I became aware of the existence of the quaich, whisky played a significant role in my family. My grandfather and my uncle, on my mother’s side, were both coopers to trade, and worked in Usher’s brewery in Edinburgh’s South Side, a few yards from their respective abodes in Parkside Street and Henry Street.
After my grandfather passed away, my uncle Alex continued to work in the brewery, and my first taste of beer as a very young lad came when he organised one of his cloth capped workmates to bring a foaming glass out to the side door in Henry Place, where I was encouraged to haltingly quaff this strange and bitter brew!”
Thus began my first ever Quaichshop blog, back in July 2018, after the launch of the new quaichshop.co.uk site. The blog went on to recount the move my uncle, Alex Edwards, made from the brewing of beer at Ushers to the distilling of fine malt whisky at Auchentoshan Distillery in Dalmuir, near Glasgow.
We’ve recently been engaged in the task of clearing the flat of an elderly family member, salvaging as many pieces of family history as we can along the way. This has been a strange process, as we sift through what had previously been regarded as private things. We were keen, however, to ensure that no items of family memorabilia, or other things of historical interest, slip away to be lost forever.
The salvaged items include many photographs, some dating back into the 19th Century, and the time of my great grandparents, right through to the birthdays and other special occasions involving our own children, over the last 20 years or so.
Amongst these is a beautiful photograph of my grandfather, Alexander Willox Edwards (third from right, back row), and his workmates, holding the tools of their trade. The group photo was captured in the yard of Ushers Brewery at the end of Parkside Street, where my mother’s family lived when I was a child and young adult. From memory, the yard faced on to Henry Street, which is now long gone, and the large gates to the yard form the background to this photograph. The image is difficult to date, but I guess it is early 1900s.
The picture stirs dim memories of standing in the yard as a small child, waiting to see my uncle. As is often the case with such memories, the visual ones are hazy, but the picture helps evoke the smells of a working brewery in Edinburgh’s South Side in the 1960s, which are a much more powerful aide in transporting one back 50 odd years. The only other feeling it evokes is of coming into a hard working, exclusively male environment, where dray horses were still employed to pull carts laden with the results of the coopers’ craft, alongside the railway sidings which then lay over the wall from Parkside Street. Although Ushers, and Usher Vaux as it became, is now long gone, and its footprint is now occupied by a mixture of housing and student accommodation, it lives on in people’s memories.
The recent opening of the lovely Holyrood Distillery, a short distance down the Pleasance from Parkside Street (see the September 2018, October 2019, and January 2020 blogs) is therefore even more welcome, as it provides a link to the past, as the distillery draws its water from the same “charmed circle” as Ushers Brewery did in its own time. Holyrood Distillery has just opened its coronavirus-conscious external courtyard for socially distanced drinkers, in line with the Scottish Government’s Coronavirus Route Map – I think a visit is in order!