Hiding in Plain Sight

We finally know exact location of John Muir’s first school! Read all about how this discovery came about in this research article by the fantastic David Anderson.

Even before John Muir’s Birthplace Museum opened in 2003, we had a bit of a puzzle that wasn’t then solved. John Muir himself recalled that his first school was near ‘the Dawell Brae’ (all quotes from The Story of My Boyhood and Youth unless otherwise specified). But although we knew Dawell Brae is now Victoria Street, try as we might we couldn’t firm up an exact location for the school. Apart from the Methodist Chapel on the corner of Victoria Street and Castle Street, every nearby building standing today is younger than the Muir period! Or so we then thought.

To set the scene, John Muir attended two schools in Dunbar before the family emigrated to Wisconsin in 1849. At the age of ‘seven or eight‘ John left the first to become a student at the Burgh School under ‘Mr. Lyon, our able teacher and thrasher … when for every mistake, everything short of perfection, the taws was promptly applied. We had to get three lessons every day in Latin, three in French, and as many in English, besides spelling, history, arithmetic, and geography. Word lessons in particular, the wouldst-couldst-shouldst-have-loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing’. The ethos of the two was significantly different, as John noted. Whereas the second was marked by heavy application of the tawse (a leather strap), John remembered his first teacher as ‘auld Mungo Siddons … the good dominie’ who was with free with the ‘gooseberries or currants’ from his garden.

But where was the dratted place! Part of the problem lies with the teacher himself. Mungo Suddon (his given name) is well recorded in Dunbar but never owned property and never held a post at the official burgh schools. Instead he was a freelance teacher, running his own preparatory, or infant, school, drilling fee-paying pupils in the 3Rs before they attended the ‘official’ Burgh Grammar or Mathematical Schools. There were several such teachers in Dunbar at the time operating from family homes or rented rooms. These schools tended to be of short duration and sometimes peripatetic. Hard to trace!

In later years Mungo gave up teaching and sustained himself with a number of clerical posts, frequently boarding with his sisters-in-law after he was widowed; as time went on he had a bigger presence in the records, particularly as the secretary and treasurer of the Dunbar Mutual Assistance & Savings Society (which lasted until the 1980s by which time the formal name had been forgotten & it was simply ‘the Siddons Society’ to one and all)!

But where was his school? Glimmers of the answer came via another query which came with a will of 1838*. The will mentioned:

‘that large dwelling House consisting of three stories and Garrets above the same lying in the east side of the High Street of the Burgh of Dunbar’ … ‘together with the west half of all and whole that small piece of ground or area in front of said dwelling house’; further detail defines the building marked in red on the plan below. In 1838 ‘Mr Suddon’ owed £2 10/- in rent to his deceased landlady’s estate, the greatest amount due of the five named tenants. This building, then, housed Mungo’s then apartments and schoolroom. It is close to the Dawell Brae – the exit was to the east (right hand side) where John and his schoolmates would take a left turn in Church Street and another left turn at the Dawell Brae junction to head up to the welcoming lights of the High Street. All that survives today is the lower part of the wall marked in yellow.