Question. What links the house with the blue door, a Victorian gas meter collector and an Irish cultural legend? Your answer will probably be “well, I never knew that!“

The Irish legend to which I am referring is none other than Molly Malone, that most Irish of folk ballads, sometimes also called Cockles and Mussels.

While there are actually quite a few earlier songs and ditties featuring an Irish lass called Molly Malone, the tune and words that are now recognised the world over can be traced back no further than James Yorkston (no relation), who almost probably was its original composer. James was a gas meter collector and part time music teacher from Edinburgh who would have been living at what was 24 Maryfield Place in the Abbeyhill Colonies at the time it was written.

From what I have read, most Irish musical historians will agree that the tune of Molly Malone is neither musically or lyrically related to Irish street tunes and isn’t recorded anywhere in 19th century Irish music. It is however closely related to the music hall style of the time and the tragicomic themes that were popular, such as “Oh My Darling, Clementine“. It first appears in print in 1876 in Boston, Massachusetts, in a collection of Student Songs of the English and German Universities . The earliest printed credit for it goes to James Yorkston, in an 1884 London publication by Francis, Brothers & Day, where it is by courtesy of Ernst Köhler & Son – despite the name, a very Edinburgh company. By reference to reprints, the earliest publication by Yorkston is thought to be in a copy of Köhler’s Musical Treasury which is now lost to even the National Library of Scotland. The oldest surviving Scottish copy is from 1891 in the Scottish Student’s Songbook.

James Yorkston is one of the most widely credited writers of the music and words in contemporary sheet music and is also the earliest credit for it; so who was he? James Yorkston was born in 1839 to Alexander Yorkston (a “practical engineer”) and Catherine Phair in the Greenside district of Edinburgh, a fairly humble place which would later degenerate into slums. Yorkston is an old Midlothian name.

The Yorkstons have seven children, 5 boys and 2 girls, five of whom survive infancy; James is the 3rd son. His father dies when he is 10 of consumption (TB), in Stead’s Place off Leith Walk. This leaves Catherine Phair to raise the family. They moved to the area known as Maryfield, now the top of Easter Road in tenementland, but in the 1860s a mixture of villas and farm and quarry cottages on the edge of the city, clinging on to a rural setting. In 1867, the Edinburgh Cooperative Building Company started putting in their “colonies”-style terraced housing to the east.

If you don’t know what “colonies” refer to, it’s a peculiarly Edinburgh type of model workers housing, built by a workers cooperative. They look at first hand rather like English terraces in that they are long, two-storey rows of workers housing, but they are actually upper and lower flats, accessed from separate sides of the block by characteristic external staircases. Their finish of dressed stone was also characteristically Scottish and was as a result of them not being cheap, mass-housing thrown up by factory owners, but high-quality workers housing, built by skilled workers themselves, for themselves and others of their class.

Some of, if not the first residents of what was then number 24 Maryfield Place (now called just Maryfield and with all the doors since renumbered, if you’re looking for it) was Catherine Phair, her son James and two of her daughters – one a young widow. The 20 year old James Yorkston is a “Gas meter company collector”; he would have gone door-to-door to collect the money you were due for your domestic lighting gas. Initially this was a fixed rate per gas light jet you had, it later became metered and after that coin-operated and the collector would check the meeter and empty the coin box.

It is likely that James had been apprenticed to become an engineer, like his father was, but perhaps the latter’s early death prevented that. He is recorded in official documentation as a “gas collector” for the rest of his life. But he was quite clearly a man of some musical talent, and for many decades he is also listed as a teacher of music and singing. This is both from the family colony at 24 Maryfield, a flat in Montgomery Street nearby, and also in commercial premises in the New Town.

But this still doesn’t explain how a part-time Edinburgh music teacher comes to write Molly Malone. This is where Ernest Köhler comes in. Frederik Ernst emigrates from Germany to Edinburgh around 1800 and marries in the city in 1817. He is a maker of violin strings. Ernst’s sons Ernest and Philip become involved in the family business and throughout the first half of the 1850s it slowly but surely grows in size and renown. Frederik Ernst and Ernest die in 1857 and 1859, leaving Philip to continue the business, which he does in their name.

By the 1870s the business had outgrown a succession of premises and was not just importing and repairing violins, but making their own. Apparently they were rather good too; an 1871 model went for £1,200 at Bonham’s recently. But where the Köhler’s really come into our story is with their sheet music business. They amassed a massive library of sheet music to serve the burgeoning Victorian market for musical entertainment; both professional, social and hobbyist. Their advert states they have over 10,000 compositions available – Victorian Spotify. They dealt in both traditional (stave) music notation and the then recent craze for “Sol-fa” notation.

“Sol-fa” notation is what you might also call doh-ray-me and is used to teach singing to people who don’t read music. It was all the rage and people couldn’t get enough of it. Indeed, Köhlers published a monthly magazine of it called Musical Star; basically the Smash Hits magazine of its day, a blend of the latest pop music and news. And just who was editing Musical Star and helping Köhler bring popular music to the masses? None other than a certain Sol-fa teacher, James Yorkston. In amongst collecting the gas rates, teaching singing and editing Musical Star, he somehow also managed to fit in writing and arranging music to be published by his employer.

Köhlers really were quite important in the Victorian popular music scene – serving the British market by mail order – and would have given the aspiring James Yorkston a ready outlet for his talents. He would have been intimately familiar with a wide range of popular tunes and ditties (probably including the earlier tunes featuring Molly Malone) and although it’s not exactly clear how he came about it, at some point in the early 1870s he wrote the definitive Molly Malone and it was published by Köhler, quickly finding its way to the London and Boston music scenes.

James Yorkston married Elizabeth Henry in 1872 and they moved in together at 53 Montgomery Street. Note that if you go looking you will not find a flat at 53 Montgomery Street; much of this part of the street was demolished and rebuilt in the late 1880s as tenements, and parts had to be renumbered in the process, with some gaps appearing in the sequence as a result. Appropriately however, if you look on Google Streetview there is a Scottish Gas van approximately where the old number 53 was.

Elizabeth sadly died just 6 years later and James returned to Maryfield Place and his mother. He married again in 1883, to Agnes Hunter, a widow. They must have been relatively comfortably off and moved to 17 West Preston Street, a flat far removed from where he was born in Greenside. In 1889, the 50 year old James was still teaching singing from his house. He was also the precentor (the leader of congregational singing) and choirmaster at South College Street United Presbyterian Church, a position of some standing in his community, and was praised in The Scotsman for his contributions to the church’s music during the unveiling of the its new organ .

About 1894, the James and Agnes retired to a flat at 3 Grange Road, although for a while he was still offering singing lessons. He died from complications after kidney surgery in the Chalmers Hospital in April 1906, aged 66. Agnes lived out her days at number 3, passing away in 1923.

James Yorkston probably never had any idea quite how popular and renowned the song he wrote was, and he probably never made much or any royalties from it. He didn’t even come up with the name Molly Malone but his music hall hit had a sufficiently powerful and memorable story contained within its three short verses that an entire back story and cult would be built around it and the tragic titular figure. People have embarked on Holy Grail-like quests to try and find the “real Molly Malone;” some have claimed she was a mistress of Charles II and you can guess what the Cockles and Mussels refer to…

The song has been adopted by the Irish across the globe as a song of their own which is surely the greatest compliment that it could be paid? For better or worse, the City of Dublin officially claimed the figure of Molly Malone as its own and erected an inappropriately busty statue of her in 1988 as part of its millennium celebrations.

So there you go. That is the story of how one of the worlds most famous Irish songs was written by a Scottish gas meter reader from Abbeyhill and was brought to the attention of the world by its German immigrant publisher.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

---

_{These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur}