Coconut Tam and the secrets of Royal Mile

HIS hump-backed figure and unmistakable street cry made him one of the most familiar figures to roam Edinburgh's Royal Mile in the mid-19th century.

But precious few visitors to Scotland's most famous street will ever have heard of Coconut Tam, or the many other characters of his time who made their living on the cobbles.

Now the contribution they made to the fabric of the capital's daily life is to be celebrated in a major exhibition consisting mainly of photographs never before shown in public.

Organisers believe it will lift the lid on the "hidden history" of the famous thoroughfare. Home to some of the city's best-known thinkers, the Royal Mile also housed some of its most notorious slums and poorhouses, suffered serious overcrowding problems and has seen many of its landmarks demolished.

The Scottish Storytelling Centre exhibition, Hidden History: The Lost Lives of Edinburgh's Old Town, is billed as the biggest-ever showcase of archive photographs of the Royal Mile. Everything on display is taken from the 100,000-strong archives held by the Edinburgh City Libraries Collection, which recently went online for the first time.

There was little mistaking Thomas Simpson, better known as Coconut Tam, bent over his barrow outside John Knox House, barking out: "Cocky nit, cocky nit, come and buy, ha'penny the bit."

Accounts record him as Edinburgh's best-known street character in the 19th century. The picture of Simpson, who was born in Strichen's Close in the High Street and died in nearby Potterrow, aged 71, dates from 1870.

An archive picture has been unearthed of the celebrated fiddler Herbert Parkin, from 1912, who performed with the Brighton Theatre Orchestra in his heyday. Also featured are a 1900 fortune teller with her cage of love birds, the Royal Mile's celebrated "Hokey Pokey" ice-cream seller from 1896, and an 1885 image of a "Buckie wife", one of the Newhaven fishwives who would sell seafood.

Other photographs show children outside the former poorhouses at Riddle's Court and Milne's Court, the shop owned by the writer Allan Ramsay, who went on to found Britain's first lending library, and an early picture of the Heart of Midlothian, which marks the site of the former Tolbooth Jail.

Alison Stoddart, heritage projects officer at the library service, said: "The exhibition not only brings to life the poverty and overcrowding in the Old Town, but gives a unique insight into the day-to-day lives of ordinary people who lived in this area.

"Most of the 40-odd pictures in the exhibition will never have been displayed publicly before."