Deacon Brodie's Tavern & Brodie's Close: The Double Life

Why is it significant?

On the corner of Bank Street, find the old pub called Deacon Brodie's Tavern, and then look a few steps west for the narrow passage of Brodie's Close dropping away from the Lawnmarket. This is where William Brodie grew up, and where he lived both of his lives.

Key Facts

Open the walk

On the corner of Bank Street, find the old pub called Deacon Brodie's Tavern, and then look a few steps west for the narrow passage of Brodie's Close dropping away from the Lawnmarket. This is where William Brodie grew up, and where he lived both of his lives.

By day, Brodie was a pillar of the community. He was deacon, the elected head, of the guild of wrights and masons, a member of the town council, and a skilled cabinetmaker who fitted furniture and locks in the best houses in town. Which meant he knew exactly where the keys were kept. He pressed them into putty, made copies in his workshop, and came back at night.

Behind the respectable face was a gambler with two mistresses, several children and very expensive habits. With a small gang, Brodie robbed shops and houses for years, while the council he sat on puzzled over the crime wave. In 1788 the gang broke into the Excise Office on the Canongate, in a courtyard you will stand in later. It went wrong, one accomplice turned King's evidence, and Brodie fled to Amsterdam. He was arrested there before he could sail for America, brought home, tried, and hanged outside the Tolbooth beside St Giles' in October 1788.

Legend adds the perfect twist. The story goes that Brodie had helped improve the design of the very gallows that hanged him, and that he hoped a steel collar hidden under his cravat, and a doctor waiting nearby, would let him survive the drop. If that was the plan, it failed. Even Muriel Spark's Miss Jean Brodie, that most respectable of Edinburgh schoolmistresses, boasts of being descended from the Deacon.

Almost a century later, a boy who had grown up with a Brodie cabinet in his bedroom wrote a play with his friend William Ernest Henley: Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life. Henley, a one-legged poet Stevenson had first met at his bedside in the Royal Infirmary, where Joseph Lister was treating him, later gave Stevenson the idea for Long John Silver. Then in 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson published Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He set it in London, but many readers have always felt that Hyde's foggy streets smell of the Old Town. Now walk down Bank Street, turn right along Market Street, and climb the steep steps of Fleshmarket Close, where a famous fictional detective is waiting.