A Journal of the Deacon Brodie Summer:

The Diary of George Sandy 1788

George Sandy’s later life

George Sandy became a Writer to the Signet in 1798, and in 1805 published his pioneering Catalogue of the Signet Library. Shortly afterwards, he took up the post of Secretary to the Bank of Scotland, where he would serve out his career, playing a significant role in the recoinage of 1816-1817 where his intervention undoubtedly preserved the savings and livelihoods of many in the north of Scotland in the face of currency upheaval. Although no other examples of Sandy’s own journals or writings survive, much of his professional correspondence remains in Scottish and British archives and we are fortunate to inherit two independent accounts of him in adult life.  

The earlier of these is by the great Victorian scholar of Robert Burns, William Scott Douglas (1815-1883), written as an accompaniment to a reprint of Benjamin Crombie’s series of character engravings Modern Athenians. This was published in 1882 and was one of Douglas’s final publications before he was found tragically drowned off the East Pier at Leith the following year.  

Douglas beings by describing Sandy as “A ponderous man, with honesty and singleness of purpose beaming from his countenance…” It is the only revelatory moment. The rest of his account is as follows:

Mr George Sandy, born about the year 1777, passed as a WS in 1798, and was very soon thereafter, by his ready handling of the pen, and generally active and methodical habits, commended himself to the notice of the Commissioners of the Society he had recently entered. He was entrusted with the compilation of their first regular Catalogue of Books, which some thirty years previously they had commenced to collect, with the view of forming a library worthy of so important an institution. Mr Sandy completed his Catalogue and superintended the printing thereof, his Preface bearing date 15th May 1805, and the work forming a goodly quarto volume, highly creditable to the young compiler (..) Shortly after completing the Catalogue mentioned, Mr Sandy received the appointment of Secretary to the Bank of Scotland, in which capacity he acted for about thirty years. He died at the age of seventy-six, on 8th April 1853.

George Sandy’s interest in and affection for the Edinburgh Old Town is clear from his youthful diary, and unlike many lawyers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, he would reside south of the old Nor’ Loch for the rest of his life. He died in 1853 living at no. 3 Buccleuch Place in Edinburgh’s Southside. It was during his residence in Buccleuch Place that the incident occurred that led to his featuring in a remarkable passage in Josiah Livingston’s short history Our street : memories of Buccleuch Place which was published by James Thin in 1893. Forty years after George Sandy’s passing, Livingston’s narrator recalls:

In No. 3, at the foot of the street, some doors down from "the King," lived a man who was regarded as a mystery. That he was a man of untold wealth every boy knew, in fact he was our impersonification of Crœsus, for was his name not written on all the notes of the Bank of Scotland, as the George Sandy to whom or to bearer the bank promised to pay one pound sterling or one hundred pounds sterling as the case might be? How rich must he be to whom the bank owed all this untold sum of money? It was said that he was a miser, and certainly he spent little of his fabulous wealth on dress, for at a time when one of the glories of a man lay in his ruffled shirt and display of linen, he was always seen in a shirt which appeared to have served him for a week for wear both by day and by night. Nobody ever went with him. Nobody was seen to enter his house except his one servant, an old woman, compared to whom for temper the minister's Peggy was a saint. Then it was said he was an Atheist, and we looked at him with bated breath as he passed going to or coming from the Bank. A boy's bonnet had been thrown into his area, and the old woman took it prisoner, and there was nothing for it but to beard the mystery in his den, and ask him to give the boy back his bonnet. Two boys accordingly rang the bell and asked to see Mr Sandy, and were shown into a room round which were ranged on shelves books so many, and so valuable as the boys believed were never seen in a private library before. As they stood in fear and trembling waiting for the dreaded man, he opened the door and pleasantly asked them what he could do for them. They told him their errand, when he rang the bell, ordered the bonnet to be given them, and courteously requested that they would avoid ruffling the temper of his servant, who was somewhat old and easily annoyed.

After this the boys maintained that he was neither Miser nor Atheist, but a man who had sustained a disappointment in love, and whose life had been made a blank, throwing him for companionship on his books alone. Some said he was a Misanthrope. What that meant we had no conception, but we thought it must be something dreadful, and we could not think so hardly of him as all that.

Against this it must be said that shortly after David Laing took over the Librarianship of the Signet Library in 1837, George Sandy was invited to stand in whilst Laing travelled abroad. He was received back in his old haunts with delight and acclamation.