Citadel Arts Group have a new show coming up, The Ghosts of North Leith. Imagine their surprise when they discovered a connection between one of the main characters in their forthcoming show, Lily Gladstone, and the star of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon!
Lily Gladstone came from Montana and was of Blackfeet Indian stock but on her mother’s side she is descended from the great-great grandfather of a first cousin of the 19th century UK Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstone’s grandmother is Nellie Gladstones (the family later dropped the final ‘s’) who features in Citadel Arts Group’s The Ghosts of North Leith. Nellie was a feisty businesswoman who, in Hilary Spiers’ section of the play, reprimands her son John for using slave labour on his plantations, whose sugar crop end up in Leith.
Writer Hilary Spiers says “The Sugar Boycott was a way for middle class women to show their abhorrence of the slave trade by refusing to buy slave-produced sugar. Little is known of Nellie’s life which allowed me to give free rein to my imagination. My play portrays her as something of a radical and an early feminist at odds with her family who derive much of their wealth from slavery.”
When slavery was abolished in 1833, Nellie’s son John Gladstone received the largest payment from the Slave Compensation Commission amounting to over £10m in modern currency, money that likely paid for the fine family gravestone in Coburg Street cemetery.
With slavery as a central issue in The Ghosts of North Leith, the play is based on the stories behind seven of the graves in Coburg Street Burial Ground. One gravestone, raised by his sister Mary who was still living in Jamaica, commemorates a Jacob Stoney who died in Leith in 1820 but was born in Jamaica on the family plantation. Citadel’s writers have woven a story around these bare facts using detailed historical research and some inspired guesswork.
The figure who links all the stories is Robert Nicoll, who became a radical activist and newspaperman until his early death in 1837 aged only 33. Nicoll is the conscience of the play, pointing out the hypocrisies of the other characters, all stuck in North Leith, regretting their unfulfilled lives. The play uses pathos, humour and music to add another chapter to the rich history of the port of Leith which Citadel has been celebrating for almost thirty years.
The Ghosts of North Leithwill be performed at North Leith Parish Church, 51 Madeira Street EH6 4AU on 14th, 15th and 16th November at 7.30pm
Tickets £10/£9 from jamesellison@blueyonder.co.uk/07770 623 924
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 