Lot 200
Edinburgh Heather Club
Collection of manuscript minute books, 1891-1940
£404
Auction: 19 September 2024 from 10:00 BST
Description
4 volumes, 4to (27.5 x 21.5cm) or folio (33 x 29cm), half leather bindings with black cloth sides and canvas jackets with sections cut away from front covers to reveal red morocco labels, respectively covering 1891-1904, 1907-23, 1924-32, and 1932-40, first and third volumes paginated 480 pp., 478 pp., the remaining volumes unpaginated but of similar extents, with a large quantity of printed ephemera (laid, tipped or pasted in), including programmes for annual outings (booklets in decorative card covers incorporating a photographic portrait of the club captain), dinner menus and notices (including a notice of a dinner in honour of Sir Harry Lauder, 1933), lists of committee members, abstracts of accounts, correspondence, etc., notable contents including an account (with a printed notice and related newspaper cuttings including photographs) of Muriel Spark's receipt of the Heather Club Coronet for her poem ‘Out of a Book’ submitted for the club's poetry commemoration in commemoration of the death of Sir Walter Scott, 1932 (‘… the young poetess rose and made her way to the throne, placed above the stage. Here, Miss Esther Ralston the famous screen star and variety artist … placed the coronet on the head of Muriel Camberg, and kissed her …’). Together with an Edinburgh Heather Club manuscript ledger book of members, outings, etc., c.1898 (partly filled, contents water-stained) and an attendance book for the 1960s-70s (6)
Footnote
The Edinburgh Heather Club was founded in 1823 by Joseph Sutherland, a local merchant, originally as a walking club focused on outings in the Pentland Hills. The scope of the club's expedition expanded with the advent of the railway, and in time they also assumed a variety of social and charitable responsibilities, including a yearly poetry competition of which the 1932 edition was won by a young Muriel Camberg, known to posterity as Muriel Spark, who recalled the occasion in her 1992 autobiography Curriculum Vitae: ‘It was 1932, the year of the centenary of the death of Sir Walter Scott. A poetry competition was launched among the schools of Edinburgh by the Heather Club, a men’s club founded in 1823 (for what purpose I do not know, except that it was very Scottish). I won first prize with my poem about Sir Walter Scott, and another girl at Gillespie's got third prize. The school was doubly jubilant; everyone was delighted … I felt like the Dairy Queen of Dumfries, but I endured the experience and survived it'. An Edinburgh Heather Club captain's baton was sold by Lyon & Turnbull in our Scottish Works of Art and Whisky sale on 21 August 2021 (lot 243).
