Back in 1950, Norton Park School teachers made a short movie that captured how kids of the day played together and sang traditional songs.
Featuring a cast of 60 pupils - mostly girls - the Singing Street follows the children as they hop, skip and jump around the city’s streets whilst singing traditional rhymes, many of which are now all but forgotten.
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The piece, which can be viewed in full on the National Library of Scotland website, contains 18 minutes of footage offering a fascinating glimpse of a bygone Edinburgh.
Starting around Bothwell Street near the Norton Park school, we are taken on a whistle stop tour through 1950s Edinburgh, stopping off at famous landmarks such as Salisbury Crags, Victoria Street and Leith Street before ending up at Sandport Place at the Shore.
Groups of girls can be heard singing traditional children’s songs that were well-known in the 1950s, including Weary, weary, waiting on you, Sweet Jenny and Bluebells and dummy shells. The songs were collected by James T R Ritchie, a science teacher at Norton Park.
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Captured on film is the audible evidence of an oral tradition which has all but vanished in the decades since the Singing Street was released.
Norton Park said at the time that the film’s purpose was to simply show “how the singing games are played in their natural setting. Beginning in the morning and ending with the dusk”.
The footage, according to a contemporary publicity leaflet, was filmed “in six Easter days of boisterous weather”, and features whistling from celebrated Edinburgh-born poet Norman MacCaig and a cameo from Councillor Pat Murray.
An avid collector of children’s toys, Councill Murray is credited as being behind the establishment of the Museum of Childhood, which opened back in 1955 and is still going strong on the Royal Mile today.
Formerly an annexe to Leith Academy, Norton Park secondary school has since been transformed into office accommodation for local social welfare charities.
