135 years old: Message in a bottle found under the wooden floor of a mansion

Scotland
“That’s priceless” – 135-year-old message in a bottle from a Victorian mansion inspires historians

You’d expect a message in a bottle to be in the ocean, but in this case it served more as a time capsule: a stunning find in Edinburgh provided a glimpse into the past.

It’s a fantastic story: A small treasure hid in a Victorian house in Edinburgh for many years, and has now been recovered by sheer coincidence. The finder is a plumber. He had been making repairs to the plumbing in the old mansion and had to remove a piece of the floorboard to do it. And just under that little piece of wood that the man removed was a – message in a bottle.

Yes, one normally expects such a find more in the ocean, where the message in the bottle is washed from one shore to another, far away. But even so, hidden in the wooden floor, the message in a bottle served its purpose: it conveyed a message from a distant time. The letter inside the message in a bottle was written 135 years ago and is now being read for the first time.

Edinburgh: A plumber found the bottle

The message was written by two men: carpenters named John Grieve and James Ritchie. They helped build the house. They report how they helped build several houses on the same street in 1887 and now hid this message in an old whiskey bottle here – which they would not have drunk up themselves. The two craftsmen ended their message with a sentence that probably sounded funny and overly dramatic to them at the time, but which actually gives them goosebumps today: “Whoever finds this bottle may remember how our dust blows across the streets.”

For a British genealogy service, “Findmypast”, the find was reason enough to trace the history of the house and the two carpenters. And so we know today that John Grieve lived with his family in Edinburgh’s old town. With his wife Isabella he had six children: John, James, Bessie, Annie, George and Andrew. He died of illness in 1906 at the age of 62. James Ritchie lived in nearby Liberton with his wife Mary and the couple had five children named Rosana, William, James, Mary and Helen.

The two craftsmen had a total of eleven children

And the Victorian mansion on which the two craftsmen worked was occupied by Robert and Mary Finlayson a year after construction was completed – in 1888. Robert was a merchant in oils, preserved foods and paints. The couple had four children, James, John and twins Mary and Robert. The family seemed to be doing well financially: they had a maid and a nurse for the little twins who lived in the house with them. The message in a bottle was probably lying under the floor of one of the staff rooms.

Local historian Jamie Corstorphine says: “To get a glimpse into the past lives of ordinary people is priceless. That we now know about all the children, and the people who walked that floor with the bottle laid under. All those Memories made in this house!” He wonders, “I wonder if they ever imagined being remembered like this – like nobles, with articles in the newspaper. Immortalized by a little message in a bottle.”

Source: BBC