There’s a building on Causewayside, at 27-29 Ratcliffe Terrace to be precise, that you may well have seen and yet have probably also overlooked. So unremarkable is it that nobody ever troubled to list it and there’s currently a proposal to demolish it and replace it with a substantial block of student flats. But look closer at this place and you’ll find out it was once the Causewayside Lads Institute and look even closer at its origins and you’ll begin to unravel the life story of the enigmatic Victor James de Spiganovicz; architect, philanthropist, author organiser and self-described Mystery Man. But the story of the Institute is just one part of what was a fully-lived life that ended up a subject on This is Your Life.

Victor was born in 1881 in Odessa, modern day Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. He was the son of a Polish-Lithuanian father (Julian James de Spiganovicz), a circuit court justice of a renowned old family who traced their heritage back to the 13th century, and an Anglo-Italian mother (Lyudmilla Elizabeth Prout) who was related to the Russian officer class. His father retired in 1886 when Victor was a boy owing to blindness and died in 1892. At this juncture Lyudmilla moved Victor, his four older brothers (John Raphael, Edgar Victor, Arthur Julian and Paul Ambroise) and sister Mary Catherine to the UK (her father was an English doctor in Russian service) and settled the family at number 1 Seton Place, Newington in Edinburgh.

For the sum of £5, Lyudmilla was able to regain her British citizenship and naturalise her children as British. Lyudmilla styled herself Baroness Spiganovicz and the family were independently wealthy; the 1901 census records her as “living on own means” in the substantial villa at 1 Seton Place. Victor completed his education at the Royal High School and went into training as an architect. In 1898 was articled to Robert Wilson, the architect to the Edinburgh School Board a man responsible for many a Collegiate Gothic educational establishment in the city. He was kept on by Wilson’s successor, John Alexander Carfae, when the former died in 1901.

Victor’s mind seems never to have really settled on architecture and soon began to wander; this is something that will occur again and again over the thread of his life. He became increasingly interested in the welfare of the city’s youth, whom his work with the School Board brought him into contact with, and he would wander the poorer districts gathering his thoughts about how the social problems of the time might be practically tackled. He wrote and published a number of pamphlets on the subject of “friendless lads” of the street; those boys beyond school age who were without family support, who were falling through the cracks of the rudimentary social security net of the time and whose lack of opportunity often misdirected their lives down paths of crime.

Victor was not content to just write his pamphlets though and so with his own finances and the support of a number of influential city fathers, including Bailie John Lang (a senior magistrate) and Judge Richardson, he founded the Causewayside Lads Institute in 1903 in his home neighbourhood. Such institutes were a novel idea at the time, a response to the problem of what to do for and about those friendless lads. Many of you will be intimately familiar with one such building thanks to the album cover of a certain Mancunian band.

Spiganovicz’s institute was initially housed in temporary premises on Duncan Street and was one of three that sprung up in Edinburgh around this time; there was also the New College Settlement Boys Club serving the Dumbiedykes and St. Leonards district (and later moved to Arthur Street) and the Fountainbridge Institute run by the Reverend T. Struthers Symington of the United Free Church. The “chief object of [the] institute [was] to keep lads from loafing in the street and night” and getting themselves into trouble. To these ends it offered recreation, physical activities, practical training in skills, lectures and education. There was also a moral aspect to these institutions and all boys were expected to attend a non-denominational Sunday service. Within the first 6 months, 50 boys had been signed up and a committee was formed to try and raise funds for a permanent home. By 1906, this money was largely in place and a location was secured around the corner on Causewayside (a section now known as Ratcliffe Terrace). A design for the club was roughed out by Spiganovicz’s friend, with whom he shared a draughtsman’s desk, James Linton Lawrence. Victor gave up his position with the School Board to complete the detailed work by himself and later that year the foundation stone was laid by Lady Dunedin. The project cost £1,500 to build and the institute was ready to be opened in mid-1907.

It comprised refreshment room, kitchen, lavatories, gymnasium, reading room, lecture hall, a workshop and a games room. It was hoped the building would “enable the boys to become good and useful citizens worth of the beautiful old city in which they lived“. The building also included a small number of lodgings in the attic for those who found themselves homeless. The lads themselves subscribed 6d each to the running costs (which were about £200 a year) and also led the fund-raising activities. Membership grew to 200 in the new buildings and Victor, “Spiggy” to the lads, described it as “a busy place. Night after night it was full of merry boys, some doing carpentry or playing at games, reading or having a jolly good time. It would take endless chapters to describe all that took place“. He would recall later in life in one of his endless letters to newspaper editors that Governor Campbell of the Calton Gaol, a man enlightened enough to realise the perils of exposing boys charged with petty crimes to the hardened criminals of his facility, would try divert them instead to “some occupational channel” if Spiggy would accept them into the Institute. But with the permanent home secured, the restless man would not stay settle down. Instead he took himself off to British Colombia, the Edinburgh Evening News reporting his departure in March 1908 and that the lads had presented him with a pocket book and writing case.

On his return to England later that year, Victor passed through Liverpool and found himself with time to spend awaiting his express train back to Scotland. And so like many a bored traveller, he bought some cheap reading matter at the station kiosk. Fatefully for him, it was the recently published Scouting for Boys by Robert Baden-Powell. Reading the book on the train back to Edinburgh he realised that the Scouting movement was what he had been looking to funnel his energies into. The “bands of irresponsible boys” on the streets of the city he reasoned were simply “playing at Scouting” but were without leadership or organisation. Scouting, he thought, would give a focus and purpose to those gang-like traits that the boys of the street were exhibiting but would allow grown-ups to steer them towards a more meaningful and wholesome purpose.

On arriving back in Edinburgh he presented the book to his collaborator James Linton Lawrence and suggested that they should set about forming a troop of Boy Scouts. And so it was that the 4th (Midlothian) Troop, one of first in Scotland, was formed in the Newington District at 15a Duncan Street. The pair also set up the Newington Rifle Club and a range on Duncan Street at this time – Scouting and shooting were useful ways to prepare boys for a potential military career. The 1909 Post Office directory lists Spiggy as the treasurer and Lawrence the organising secretary of the Midlothian Division of the Scottish Baden-Powell Boy Scouts Organisation, with the former also the district inspector of the South Division. The newspapers at this time named the two men as being “owed much” by the movement in Scotland and that as a result the country possessed an “excellent organisation, in fact it is believed now to be in advance of England. Edinburgh is in the van“. James Linton Lawrence would go on to become the Organising Secretary for Scouting in Scotland.

Spiggy now devoted himself to the movement, while continuing to work as an architect to pay the bills. In March 1910 he was master of No. 1 Kilted Company of Scouts in Edinburgh, a group who were among 300 that joined a parade of Territorial Forces in the city. On this occasion, Spiggy’s company exhibited a multi-purpose rescue cart of their own design and construction. Modelled on a fire brigade rescue ladder, it doubled as a transport for stretchers and first aid wagon and carried a pump, hoses and array of rescue tools. In Scout Camps it could also serve as a drinking water pump.

Spiggy was admitted to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1911. He is credited with additions to the Residence for Scottish Naval and Military Veterans at this time, including the conversion of Whitefoord House. In July that year he was the 5th most senior Scout leading a parade of 2,300 from all across Scotland as part of the wider military manoeuvres to mark King George V’s first visit to the country as monarch. He also found time to publish a pamphlet called “Modern Humanity“.

He was at this time the Assistant Organising Secretary for Scouting in Scotland, but his restless nature once again came to the fore and he quit work as an architect to “go tramping” in the romantic country of the Borders, a part of the world he had been drawn to after experiencing it in numerous camps and route marches with the Institute and the Scouts. He settled down there the following year and became the County Scout Organiser for Berwickshire and Roxburghshire, a position he credited to meeting Baden-Powell in Hawick when the latter was being presented with the freedom of the Burgh. He roved the counties (and the wider country) on a speaking tour to promote the movement. The following year he was put in charge of establishing a new venture at Harrietfield near Ancrum; a training centre for Scoutmasters. This was aimed at older boys to try and equip them for leading Scouts of their own.

Harrietfield was a working farm where the students undertook most of the running of the establishment, both to instil teamwork and discipline and also help the place pay its way. The facility was up and running by the summer of next year and was opened on the ominous date of 4th August 1914 – it was the day that Britain declared war on Germany and entered WW1.

Spiggy’s patriotic urges saw him immediately trying to sign up for the war effort by joining the 13th Royal Scots but he was rejected on account of his rheumatoid arthritis. He was dejected and at a loss; he would write of his feelings that his fellow men were judging him, looking down at him as a “shirker” because a “real man” would sign up for the war. But it would take more than a rejection like that to repress a spirit like that of Victor de Spiganovicz for long. Determined to find a way to contribute to the national effort, he converted his (or was it actually his brother’s?) De Dion car into a Boy Scout Ambulance and offered it (and himself) to the Red Cross.

The ambulance took Spiggy to the harsh realities of war far quicker than he might have imagined; on September 5th 1914 the cruiser HMS Pathfinder was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat off St. Abb’s Head. It was the first ship sunk in Scottish waters in the war and the first ever sunk by locomotive torpedo fired by a submarine. The ship went down within minutes, taking 259 of her 279 crew with her. The Boy Scouts Ambulance was the first on the scene and did what it could for the 20 or so half-drowned men who were brought ashore by the Eyemouth and St. Abbs fishing fleet. But mainly Spiggy and the other attendants they had to deal with the dead.

Although the ambulance proved its utility and had brought a piece of the the war to him, Spiggy still craved “real” action. His restless and imaginative mind saw him driving the car through the Borders by night, chasing imaginary Zeppelins in the sky or trailing imaginary spies and saboteurs. These activities and his foreign-sounding name temporarily marked him out as a potential spy himself until his credentials could be established. The following year, 1915, he finally managed to get himself accepted into the Royal Flying Corps and got as far as Farnborough before the medical officer there identified his rheumatoid arthritis once more and he was sent home again. He recalled the only service he managed with the RFC was “washing pots and pans“. Back with his beloved Boy Scouts again, later that year he found himself in Oban helping organise the local boys as volunteer coastguards to relieve the regulars for war service.

But he still wouldn’t give up trying to join the forces and the following year he eventually managed to get the Army to accept him; the Royal Scots signed him up as a recruiting sergeant in January for home service. This didn’t get him action but at least it got him a rank and uniform and the resulting respect from others that he craved. By June 1917 the Army was desperate enough for new men for the front that it lowered its standards sufficiently to accepted the arthritic little Spiggy’s request for a demotion so that he could be posted to the front in Belgium. And so it was that Private Victor de Spiganovicz of the 9th Royal Scots finally went to war.

From the front he would write a correspondence home to the Hawick News, a short story entitled The Draft in which he compared a romanticised, fictional account of the recruiting parade ground to the grim reality of the front. Much of this piece was directed towards defending those men on “Home Service”, urging his readers not to criticise them as “shirkers in cushie jobs“. “Every man and woman must do something for the nation” he said, whether it be on the foreign or home front. This is undoubtedly the direct result of his own experiences; and how he felt the scorn and contempt others had for him when he was in mufti (imagined or not).

In his short memoir, Mystery Man Again, he recounts that much of his service at the front was spent on a horse as a messenger and that saw all the terrible sights that you might imagine Flanders had to offer in 1917. After 4 months at the front the Army felt it had a better use for the well-educated 37 year old than dodging shells on a pony and he was given a wartime commission in the Army Service Corps with the 21st Divisional Train. He was promoted to act as Adjutant but was invalided home in October 1918. While he was not specific about the reasons for this, he describes a long recover in a Borders cottage afterwards. His mother died a month later, having long been living in convalescence in North Berwick. The war clearly changed his character. In his writing he is clearly reluctant to detail his direct experiences but says “Modern warfare in all its sordid hellishness cannot really be truly depicted on paper, not even by the cleverest of word-artists“. He was also horrified at the mass slaughter of young men, particularly those who had passed through his Institute, his Scout Troops or who he had directly recruited. “Roy, Barclay, Pringle, Hume, Mabon…” he wrote, listing the names of those Lads who never made it home. “The European War in all its hideousness cannot be erased from our minds when that wanton destruction of human beings is interlocked with the names of the best of manhood.” A photo he shares in his memoir shows some of the kads and staff of the Institute. Mr Smellie, the caretaker (front right) was killed in the war, as was James Mcphie (back row, 2nd right) who received the Victoria Cross for repairing a floating bridge while under enemy fire, an act that cost him his life. Other Lads were decorated with the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and Distinguished Service Medal (DSM).

The war had also claimed the Institute itself; it suddenly found that there were no more young lads in need of gainful occupation and recreation as they were all off to war or found jobs in the war machine. As a result it had been forced to close and would not reopen until 1919 when the YMCA took it over. Spiggy clearly seems to have had trouble settling down again after he was demobbed. He fired off many letters to newspapers on all varieties of topics and tried to promote a “peace by wireless” scheme. He set up a number of businesses, which appear to have prospered, but also seemed to have sold his share in them to finance his next philanthropic scheme as soon as he could. In 1924 he helped launch a scheme in Edinburgh as part of Scout Week to offer assisted emigration for lads to Canada to work on farms. This was part of the Farm Receiving Home and Distribution Centre for Scotch Boys scheme that had been established in Glasgow by Doctor Cossar. He published his Mystery Man Again memoir that year. I have been lucky to source a copy of this, and it is a somewhat vague and rambling account of his life from the Institute up to the end of the war, with some clearly spurious tales and no clear narrative. He spends much time in the pages name-dropping his connections, perhaps a form of self validation, but also repeatedly self-corrects for writing about himself too much. This is a somewhat odd criticism considering the book is meant to be about himself!

He continued to worked variously as a self-published writer of childrens’ stories and promoter of various schemes. In 1930 he launched a “holiday centre for young fellows amongst the hills” scheme in the Borders, an area that repeatedly recalled him from Edinburgh. But I don’t think he could ever escape the lasting effects of the war that he had been so desperate to join however. He advocated that ex-soldiers should preach to congregations on the “real meaning of war” and wrote the below letter on Armistice day 1930 to the Edinburgh Evening News.

He writes that when he had money he “tramped on wheels” (i.e. in his car) and when he didn’t, he went on foot. In 1938 he established a hostel for students and youths at Greenlaw “for those wishing an occasional avenue of escape from city life“. The outbreak of another war shut this operation down before it ever got going. During that conflict he was engaged by the SYHA as a roving architect to report of the condition of its property estate that found itself falling into disrepair during wartime.

After another war, he seems to have retired largely from public life, contenting himself to write books that would never be published, screenplays for the BBC that would never be broadcast and endless letters to the newspapers offering advice on any number of subjects. But he was not forgotten and in November 1960, the 79 year old was surprised at BBC Television Centre by Eamonn Andrews; he was to be the subject of an episode of This is Your Life.

Spiggy wrote that the best way to feel young was to “surround yourself with youth“, something he spent a lifetime practising. He died aged 88 in Aberdeen on June 20th 1970 and was cremated in Edinburgh on August 27th that year. He left little to no money, having spent it all on his various ventures, but a lifetime of possessions and curios was distributed amongst his many friends and correspondents. One interesting curio appeared on a militaria saleroom website a few years ago, a child’s kindjal, the ancient form of dagger used in the Caucasus region. This is in the style of a Russian Military issue officer’s weapon of the Black Sea Cossacks and is believed to have come into Spiggy’s possession via his great uncle, General Pavel Liprandi, a hero of the Crimean War who held the Russian line at the Charge of the Light Brigade.

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}