John Watson’s Institution opened in 1828, funded by the legacy of Writer to the Signet John Watson. Originally, this legacy had not been of any exceptional size, but under the brilliant and energetic management of a later Writer to the Signet, Vans Hathorn, the investment grew to the modern equivalent of over nine million pounds. Vans Hathorn had also led the fight for the funds to be used in the foundation of a school in the face of rival projects, and he is now generally felt to be the founding individual not only of the magnificent School in Edinburgh’s West End but of the modern John Watson’s Trust that now stands in its place.
The records we hold cover the first thirty years of the School’s existence, and cover every imaginable aspect of the life of an institution. The largest part of them consists of applications to the school, and the core of the project is the creation of a database of the information these densely-packed applications contain. John Watson’s Institution being a school for orphans, these are necessarily records of people of relatively humble birth who are otherwise often entirely lost to history. In these instances, records can often be heartbreakingly brief, affording little information about the lives led by those they concern. But the application forms to John Watson’s Institution provide information of a completely different order.
Here is information about the child for whom the application was being made, but in addition to that is also information parents, grandparents and other relatives who were at the time assumed to have some kind of duty of care towards the child. The letters of reference that accompany the application form give hints as to the structures of relationship and friendship that pertained within a society possessed of only the most limited welfare systems.
At the start of the project, we’d only expected the applications to concern inhabitants of Edinburgh, but in fact the effective catchment area of the school has proven to be much wider – there are children coming in from all over Scotland, from England – Newcastle is richly represented – and even from overseas.
Inevitably, the events that led to a Georgian child being in need of the protection of a place like John Watson’s Institution were unhappy ones. Throughout the project there has been no getting away from the relentless difficulty and suffering that the applications make present. This is the lives of ordinary people, but at times of crisis rather than normality: the first cholera epidemic is recorded here, the perils of life at sea, the vagaries of small business life and the dangers of even minor accidents in an age without modern medicine. Our database of these records is now almost complete and we expect to have a new section of our website devoted to the project up and running by the end of the year.
In addition to the work of conservation, transcription and digitization, the project team, consisting of Dr. Kit Baston and Jo Hockey, have also visited the former school buildings – now part of the National Gallery of Modern Art – viewing the little burial ground for pupils in Cauldron Wood and, through the kindness of the gallery staff, seeing behind the scenes to a part of the building still carrying wallpaper of the early school era.
At the start of the project, we made an online appeal through our WS Society online channels and through those of the Old Edinburgh Club for any information about the current whereabouts of the historic portrait of the Father of John Watson’s Institution, Vans Hathorn WS which was painted for his retirement by Sir John Watson Gordon in 1838. The portrait hung in the College chapel for almost 140 years and would have been a familiar sight to thousands of pupils over the decades. Since the closure of the School in 1975 the whereabouts of the picture have been unknown. Happily, the painting turns out to have been in the care of descendants of Vans Hathorn who have had the picture restored and reframed.
This article was originally published by Dr Kit Baston, Jo Hockey and James Hamilton in the genealogical magazine Who Do You Think You Are (November 2025).