Slavery on our street

There's a project you may have seen that is mapping the links to slavery and specifically the compensation paid to slave owners in the 1830s following the abolition of slavery. The compensation, totalling £20million, was 40% of the national budget of the time and equivalent to something like £16billion today. Scotland in general and Edinburgh in particular is well represented on the map which, as I understand it, seeks to link individuals who benefitted from the slave compensation payouts to location-specific census information from the middle of the nineteenth century two or three decades later. And one of the addresses is further up our street. An Elizabeth Baillie Dallas was a lodger in this house (in whatever configuration it was) in 1861, described as a 'fundholder'. I think that means she was living off her investments. Investments that presumably included her share of the slave compensation for the Breteche and L'Anse La Roche estate in Grenada and its 117 slaves. If I'm reading the data correctly Elizabeth and two others shared £3000 compensation for her late husband's estate. She missed out on a claim over another estate where her husband had been acting as agent for an English doctor who had inherited it from his father. I wonder if her neighbours in Portobello knew where her money had come from?

In the evening went along to the Scottish Press Photography Awards. Had put a few entries in but wasn't that hopeful. Sure enough, nothing even got into the top five in any of the nine categories, let along being ranked in the top three. As usual I don't seem to get what makes a good picture :-(