writing
The rolled-up message contained a list of people who had worked on the theater's construction.
During a tour of the historic King’s Theater in Edinburgh, photographer Mike Hume was perched atop scaffolding some 40 feet above the stage. From this position, he had a close-up view of an ornamental red-and-gold crown, the centerpiece of the theater’s proscenium arch.
As Hume studied the plaster decoration, he noticed a gap behind it. Naturally, he stuck his hand in it— “an impulse any history nerd can understand completely,” as the History Blog writes.
“It really was like a scene out of Indiana Jones,” Hume, who is also a donor to the theater, tells BBC News’ Angie Brown. “It was a bit damp, and there was all this crumbly plaster and stuff in there. Then my hand stumbled on this solid object, and I pulled out this glass bottle.”
Mike Hume
Mike Hume, who discovered the bottle, poses with John Robb, director of the renovation project
Smeared with paint and sealed with a glob of plaster, the small glass bottle contained a rolled-up piece of paper, marked with inky writing. As Hume wrote on Instagram, he couldn’t make out much of the message. But he could see a handwritten year: 1906, the year the theater opened.
Hume took his tour during a large-scale renovation of the King’s Theater, which is located in Scotland’s capital and nicknamed the “Old Lady of Leven Street.” “The auditorium is a space of operatic magnificence—a glorious extravaganza of lush Viennese Baroque,” according to the Theaters Trust. Lining the stage is “astonishingly three-dimensional plasterwork” depicting scrolls, cornucopias and the famed crown.
After making the discovery, Hume handed off the message in a bottle to experts. The Scottish Conservation Studio removed the bottle’s plaster seal and top in December, though they found they couldn’t recover the scroll without harming it, per a statement from the theater.
arch
The plaster crown is the centerpiece of the theater's proscenium arch, which frames the top of the stage.
Experts were stumped until February, when Laura Clair, a glass technician from the Edinburgh College of Art, carefully removed the bottle’s base. After retrieving the scroll, which had become “glued together with age,” experts used chemicals to safely unfurl it, according to BBC News.
The scroll contained a list of contractors who worked together to build the King’s Theater, including draftsmen, architects, plasterers and apprentices. The first name listed is William Stewart Cruickshank, who owned the building company that made the theater. Below him are the architects John Daniel Swanston, James Davidson and John Tulloch. The list even featured a father-and-son team of plasterers.
“The significance of the message is that the list of names ranges from managers and directors to draftsmen, architects and plasterers—people working on the site who were so proud of what they had built,” says Abby Pendlebury, the King’s Theater’s heritage engagement manager, in the statement. “There is pride and ownership in this note.”
As Pendlebury tells BBC News, the bottle was “an absolute fluke find,” and the handwritten note’s preservation is “incredibly impressive.”
It’s a timely discovery, as the King’s Theater is about to launch an online repository of more than 2,700 artifacts representing the Edwardian theater’s history. While the theater’s renovation won’t be completed until 2026, the archive will launch this spring. It will contain old playbills, programs, costume designs and the message in the bottle.
“This is the sort of discovery everyone hopes for on a project of this scale,” Hume says in the statement. “When the builders of the King’s Theater placed this special trinket at the very center of it, they intended to honor the local people who built the theater. It’s astonishing to think that this time capsule of history has been hidden in plain sight for nearly 120 years, silently bearing witness to the countless famous faces—and Edinburgh community performers—that have graced the stage of the King’s.”