Apr 2021 – The Bohemian Waxwing

To us medical students in Edinburgh in the late 1970s the Astley Ainslie Hospital (AAH) was known as the ‘Ghastly Astley.’ This was mostly for the satisfaction of the rhyme rather than any particular horrors it held. It was a rehabilitation hospital, one of the first of its kind, set in the majestic wooded grounds of a number of grand villas and a nine hole ‘ladies’ golf course. The oldest villa, Canaan House, dates from 1805 and I attended medical management meetings in it. There are mementoes of the Ainslie family there; paintings and agricultural trophies. Like many other properties ‘owned’ by NHS Lothian it was donated to the people of Edinburgh by a public-spirited benefactor long before the inception of the NHS. It is now being sold off and the money chucked into the black hole of NHS financing – where it will disappear without trace. Many other Edinburgh medical institutions funded by public subscription, such as Leith Hospital, have already been disposed of despite protests.

The history of the place is interesting. Lost in the mists of the sixteenth century is the chapel of St Roque. It was dedicated to a French saint who survived the plague and was fed by a hunting dog who brought him bread. He is usually depicted lifting his robe to display the bubo of the disease on his left thigh. A dog bearing a loaf is often alongside him. He is the patron saint of the sick and of dogs. His tomb and a church dedicated to him are in Venice.

King James IV of Scotland was very keen on St Roque (or Roch or Rock or even San Rocco) and his supposed powers of intercession with the plague. After assembling his doomed Flower of Scotland army on the Burgh Muir in 1513, King James prayed in St Roque’s Chapel which stood in what is now the Astley Ainslie grounds. The chapel is long gone. As it was being demolished in the late eighteenth century on the orders of its then owner, scaffolding collapsed killing several workmen. Work was delayed for fear of further punishment from God or the saint. Nothing now remains of the chapel and no one knows exactly where it was. There is a modest modern educational building near the spot. I briefly worked with Brian Pentland at the Northern General Hospital in 1980.

The area around St Roque’s Chapel was a refuge for many of Edinburgh’s plague victims and there are burial sites in the hospital grounds. Nobody is exactly sure where these are either. Also scattered around the campus are bits of ecclesiastical masonry including bosses from the roof of a church or chapel. One of them depicts Christ’s wounds with nails piercing disembodied hands and feet. Over the years these interesting architectural fragments have been pillaged – presumably for garden ornaments – and few remain. There is a theory that says the stones are from the dismantled Trinity Church which stood on the site of Waverley Station. However they could well be from St Roque’s itself. There are also a number of medieval wells in the grounds.

The fine nineteenth century villas that still make up parts of the hospital occupy one of the best locations in the city. Their huge south-facing gardens contained many rare plants and trees because several of the occupants had an interest in botany. The villa of Millbank was the home of Professor James Syme the famous surgeon. Born on Princes Street, his father was a lawyer and landowner. As a student Syme discovered a process for waterproofing textiles using rubber but didn’t bother developing it further leaving Mr Macintosh to make his fortune from it and achieve eponymous fame. If he had bothered, people would be donning their ‘Syme’ to go walking in the rain.

Syme rose to occupy chairs of surgery in London and Edinburgh. His home of Millbank was demolished and replaced by one of the AAH ‘butterfly pavilions’ but some photographs of it exist. Millbank had a huge garden with extensive glass houses growing exotic fruits; bananas, figs, grapes and pineapples. The professor enjoyed serving these to his dinner guests. In the morning Syme would inspect his ‘glass’ with his gardener before heading off to the Royal Infirmary to operate. The Infirmary was in Infirmary Street at this time.

There is an eponymous Syme foot amputation, preserving the heel, which he developed. He was a quarrelsome man, thought to be ‘correct in the matter but not in the manner of his disputes’. One of the people he quarrelled with was his former friend James Young Simpson, professor of obstetrics and the inventor of anaesthesia. Syme did not believe in anaesthesia feeling that it weakened the patient. The quarrel was only made up after Syme operated on Simpson for an abscess in his armpit that Simpson developed after he cut his hand during an operation. They were the two colossi of Edinburgh medicine, at a time when Edinburgh Medical School was a world leader. One of the arguments Syme did win, albeit posthumously, was over the siting of the last-but-one Royal Infirmary on the northern edge of the Meadows, inaugurated in 1879. The ‘Battle of the Two Sites’ centred around whether to build a new infirmary on the existing site or on the 11 acre grounds of George Watson’s Hospital off Lauriston Place. Syme died following a stroke in 1870.

Millbank

Syme’s eldest daughter Agnes shared her father’s interest in botany. She married her father’s assistant Joseph Lister, the future Lord Lister, who developed antisepsis and saved countless lives. Experiments into suitable sterilising substances took place at Millbank and Agnes assisted with these. The couple were married in the living room of the house, apparently in deference to Lister’s Quaker religious views, and a modest plaque on the side of the boarded-up Millbank Pavilion commemorates the event. Lister operated on my great grandmother.

John Astley Ainslie inherited a vast fortune on the death of his brother. An orphan, he and was taken under the wing of his uncle David Ainslie who had a house called Costerton near Fala south east of Edinburgh. It is now a roofless ruin. The two men were very close. John had already donated money to the construction of the new Royal Infirmary at the time of his death. The year after he graduated from Oxford he died in Algiers of unknown causes aged 26.

The family fortune passed to his uncle David who wished to do something to commemorate the life of his nephew. When David died in 1900 he left £800,000 for the founding of the ‘Astley Ainslie Institution’. This sum would be around £30 million in today’s values, apparently the largest bequest in Scottish history. He stipulated that the money should be invested for 15 years after his death so that its value might increase. World War One intervened and in the end the hospital was constructed in the 1920s to a very high architectural standard. The trust bought up adjacent properties to incorporate them into the Institute.

The parkland around Millbank included a nine hole ladies’ golf course and fine specimen trees. The hospital gardens were laid out by experts from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. ‘Butterfly pavilions’ were constructed so that invalids could take the air out of doors on their beds. The site eventually covered nearly 50 acres.

George Bald memorial bench: 45 years a gardener at AAH.

This brings us to the current sorry state of affairs. NHS Lothian is moving off most of the site to new premises in the grounds of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Morningside. Several of the splendid AAH pavilions have already been boarded up and local vandals have moved onto the site. The buildings have been aerosol sprayed and re-sprayed in a delinquent palimpsest of graffiti ‘art’ and windows have been broken to gain entry to the abandoned premises. Discarded bottles and cans and burnt-out fires litter the grounds. A former pigsty in the pine woods (an abandoned Christmas tree scheme apparently) has been interestingly redecorated several times but the pavilions just look grim. Tennis courts to the west of the woods have long since been taken over by self-seeded sycamores. My wife Catherine and I are very familiar with the site. We live nearby and have walked our dog there for 5 years. Catherine has painted several views of AAH.

We are told that a large part of the site has been sold for residential development which is likely to mean there will no longer be any access to the lovely grounds for responsible locals. The physician superintendent’s house has already been demolished and replaced by a row of high specification terraced town houses by Malcolm Fraser. Goodness knows what the fate of the architectural remains and the listed 1920s buildings will be. There is an Astley Ainslie community trust and a campaign to keep some sort of communal access. Ian Rankin whose son stays in the adjacent Royal Blind accommodation has become involved.

If an area with this degree of historical significance and beauty ends up as just another anonymous overpriced, over-crammed, group of apartment blocks similar to others nearby it will be a great loss to the city and to the people David Ainslie imagined his bequest would benefit.

The Lantern of St Roque by Catherine Stevenson

In the Midlands and north of England wasps are commonly known as jaspers. No one seems to know exactly why. Is it a phonetic corruption of ‘vespa’ or a just the similarity in colouring to the mineral jasper? Maybe it’s a reflection of the wasp’s perceived character – like a moustachioed Victorian bully called Jasper. This presumed nastiness is reflected in our usage of ‘waspish’ as an adjective for unpleasant things – like a sarcastic sense of humour or a prickly personality. In America wasps are known as yellowjackets. Wasps exhibit aposematism, a warning coloration. Having noticeable jazzy colours helps other animals avoid being stung and the wasps avoid being eaten.

The Italian for wasp is vespa. Anatomically they are sharply divided into head, thorax and abdomen with only the slimmest ‘wasp waist’ connecting the latter two segments. Close examination of their black and yellow exoskeleton makes you feel that they are actually more evolved than we are. They are perfect, tiny, armoured flying machines carrying sophisticated weaponry. When aircraft manufacturer Enrico Piaggio saw the first post-war prototype of the scooter his company would take to world-renown, he exclaimed ‘Sembra una vespa!’ – ‘It looks like a wasp!’ – naming his product instantly.

Now is the time the vespal queens over-wintering inside our houses start to emerge from their torpor spent in the folds of our curtains and pelmets. We have had fewer dormant queens in the house than usual this year; just the one in fact, found clinging to the curtains in the drawing room a couple of days ago. I trapped her using a glass tumbler and a postcard and released her from the bedroom window. She cleaned her antennae briefly before zooming off over the garden.

Having emerged, the queens seek a site to build their grey papier mâché nests. The legend is that the Chinese invented paper after observing wasps chewing wood to make their nests. The rasp of their jaws on dead wood is audible to us. Typically they use old fence posts and decaying garden sheds as substrate. Wasps nests are called bykes in the North of Britain. They build them in hollow trees or in animal burrows and sometimes in the roof spaces of our houses. As a boy I can remember my father getting one of the men on the farm to destroy a wasps’ nest by pouring petrol down the burrow and igniting it – a tricky operation.

During the winter, as logs are brought into the house, sleeping queens come with them. Roused by the heat of the room they appear without warning, cruising around the Christmas cards and tinsel. They are magnificent insects and I never have the heart to kill them. I return them to the biting cold of the log store with no great expectation of their survival after this premature end to their suspended animation. I suspect they burn up too much of their stored fat in the false hope of refuelling from spring flowers.

Wasps are social insects related to ants and are said to exhibit reasoning (New Scientist 8 May 2019). In Britain there are about 9,000 species of wasp but we are only really familiar with the common wasp (Vespula vulgaris) and the German wasp (V germanica). They are very difficult to tell apart. The german workers have three black spots on the face. Wasps are pollinators and also useful predators of insect pests such as caterpillars and aphids and they should be left in peace.

The vigorous cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) familiar from shrubberies contains toxic amounts of prussic acid – hydrogen cyanide – which is the reason the cut leaves and stems smell faintly of almonds. Crushed leaves in a jar can be used to kill insects. It is said to be too slow a method to use on butterflies and moths who damage themselves as they struggle in their death throes. An artist friend of mine, Jim Dalziel, has an interest in entomology and once spent a summer afternoon capturing wasps and putting them in a jar with shredded laurel leaves. Once they keeled over he was able to use a magnifying glass to work out which were the german ones and which the commoner vulgaris variety. When we came round later that evening for supper he was keen to show off his new skills and invited me into his studio. Retrieving a folded-up piece of drawing paper from the bin, he opened it, promising to show me the key identifying features. It was immediately apparent to both of us that the numerous wasps had only been anaesthetised and were now quite annoyed to find themselves trapped in a paper prison. We rushed to return them to the garden before they attacked the unsuspecting company.

Unlike bees, wasps can sting as often as they please using their un-barbed tail-mounted weapon. The sting contains an alkaline form of venom, unlike bee stings which are acidic. This is the supposed logic behind our mothers putting bicarbonate of soda on bee stings and vinegar on wasp stings. In my mind, the hot-poker pain of a wasp sting is forever associated with the pungent smell of the vinegar my mother used. It was never effective as far as I could tell.

Once, on holiday at a villa in Umbria, I was stung by a hornet, the splendidly-named Vespa crabro, a much larger relative of the wasp. I was relaxing on my back on a Li-Lo in the swimming pool, contemplating the evening sky after a hot day driving around southern Tuscany. Paddling myself about I managed to trap a floating hornet between my upper arm and the side of the Li-Lo. The hornet, already distressed by its imminent death by drowning, stung me immediately. The pain was intense and persistent and a large indurated area developed around it which lasted for days.

Apivorus means ‘bee-eater’ but the European honey buzzard (Pernis apivorus) eats far more wasps than bees and is actually called the Wespenbussard in German. It’s not even a true buzzard as in the familiar Buteo group. Honey buzzards are secretive summer migrants and mainly breed in central and southern Britain. There are several breeding pairs in Scotland too but you are very unlikely to see them. Birds perch in mid-canopy to scout for prey. The claws are blunt for a raptor – rather like a vulture’s – and it uses its powerful feet to excavate wasps nests from burrows to get at the grubs. It has dense scaly feathers over its face to protect it from attack and the feathers are thought to contain a wasp repellant. The European bee-eater (Merops apiaster) also eats a lot of wasps. It is adept at knocking out the stings of bees and wasps on its perch before consumption.

Adult worker wasps are female and only live for an average of 2 weeks. Once the queen has begun the nest and produced the first few workers she becomes flightless and confines her activities to egg-laying. The workers are actually capable of laying haploid eggs that produce male wasps. The workers feed the larva on masticated caterpillars and aphids. In return, the larvae secrete a sugar-rich fluid which is the main food of the workers who cannot digest solid food. The colony expands to a maximum of about 10,000 individuals.

At the end of summer, sexual larvae, queens and drones, are produced which will mate before the queens seek out their winter quarters. When these sexual forms pupate the supply of sugary secretions runs out and the workers start looking for alternative sources of energy from any unharvested fruit such as plums and figs – or from picnics. The old queen dies and the social structure of the nest disintegrates. The workers start to succumb to starvation and cold and this is the time of year when we must beware the groggy, moribund Jaspers who still pack a punch.

Monthly Archives: Apr 2021

The Ghastly Astley

Jaspers

Share this:

Share this: