Readers may remember that I contributed a blogpost to the EAERN website (Eighteenth-Century Arts Research Network) back in 2017. I wrote about boarding school proprietress Mrs Jane Bertram, who owned a school in St Andrews (St Leonard’s, near the ruined Cathedral) until 1826, and then another at Newington House in Edinburgh. My primary interest was in her music borrowing from St Andrews’ University Library.
Whilst I was in St Andrews today, I went for a brisk, sunny but bitingly chilly walk at lunchtime, to establish just where St Leonard’s was. I knew that the present highly-esteemed private school is not in any way a direct descendant of Mrs Bertram’s establishment, albeit on the same site, but I made some more discoveries that pleased and surprised me, nonetheless.
I had never looked for the school before – and I had been unaware how close it was to the cathedral and the harbour. I was therefore equally unaware how close it was to the Lambert’s family home on the south side of South Street. However, whilst the families probably knew each other, “my” Miss Elizabeth Lambert would have been an adult by the time I estimate Mrs Bertram bought her school in the second decade of the nineteenth century, so any momentary excitement that Elizabeth might have been taught there, soon evaporated!
What I did discover on my walk was that St Leonard’s was later home to two university professors during some of the intervening years, before the present school was founded by professors anxious that a good quality school should be founded in the town. Not pertinent to Mrs Bertram’s story in the slightest, but it was nice to know a bit more about the property!
Anyway, I took some photos, so I’ll share them here for your enjoyment! First, the walk to St Leonard’s and a plaque outside the grounds …
And next, into the courtyard and a view of the old St Leonard’s Chapel, and the old school building with its plaques about the former professorial occupants!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 