The Ragged School Minister
Thomas Guthrie 1803 - 1873
Thomas Guthrie grew up in what is now the county of Angus but used to be called Forfarshire. He studied in both Edinburgh and Paris and pursued an interest in medicine as well as theology but chose to become a minister, though he would undoubtedly have excelled at either profession. He became minister of Arbirlot parish in Angus and was soon involved in a project to start up a savings bank, one of those Friendly Societies that so characterised the industrious and thrifty Scottish cultural identity the 19th Century.
In 1837 he moved to Edinburgh and became minister at Greyfriars. At the Disruption of 1843 he came out of the Church of Scotland and became minister of St John’s Free Church, now St Columba’s Free Church, close to Edinburgh Castle on Johnston Terrace.
When he arrived in Edinburgh, he was appalled by the squalor and poverty in which so many people lived in the Old Town of Edinburgh at the time. He wrote “bloated and brutal figures…. fierce looking women, and many a half clad mother, shivering in cold winter, her naked feet on the frozen pavement, a skeleton infant in her arms….dashing in and out of the closes careering over the open ground engaged in rude games, arrayed in flying drapery here a leg out and there an arm, are crowds of children; their faces tell how ill they are fed; their fearful oaths tell how ill they are reared.”
Whilst George Heriot, goldsmith to James VI, had founded a school or hospital to provide an education for “faitherless bairns” just over the wall from Greyfriars in 1628, that school, whilst still able to provide a free education to many orphaned children was increasingly being used for the education of the well healed of Edinburgh society.
Education, health and social improvement were at the heart of Guthrie’s passion and he was inspired by the ragged School movement to establish a Ragged School in Edinburgh that provided a square meal, education and a moral framework to many young people in the slums of Edinburgh’s Grassmarket, Lawnmarket and Cowgate.
Today, Greyfriars continues to be engaged in the support of the most vulnerable and the work of the Grassmarket Community Project is Greyfriars contemporary expression of this commitment to the poor and the marginalized.
