Keeping the spirit of city arts hero Helen Crummy alive

How one of the capital’s great pioneers continues to inspire lives today

The statue to Helen Crummy in Craigmillar

Today is International Women’s Day, and if you are a regular reader of the Inquirer you'll know that Edinburgh still has more statues of animals (for the record 15 of them) than of women – surely a poor state of affairs in a city which boasts around 200 monuments and statues.

There are eight statues of women in Edinburgh, with just five of them named; Queen Victoria stands in bronze in Leith, and three of the 12 poets immortalised in Edinburgh Park are Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and Naomi Mitchison. Finally, in Craigmillar, a statue depicts social organiser Dr Helen Crummy MBE, crouching to speak to her son who is holding his violin.

This statue depicts the story that sparked decades of organisation and regeneration in one of Edinburgh's poorest neighbourhood - and a community development approach that had influence across the world.

A dream of music

Born in Leith, Helen Prentice moved to the new council housing estate in Craigmillar in 1931 - she was 11 years old at the time. Dreams of becoming a teacher were cut short when she left school at 14 to work in a shop, and after serving in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) during the World War, she married Larry Crummy and the couple moved into a home in Greendykes, close to where she had grown up.

In 1961, Crummy asked the headmaster of her son’s primary school if he could learn violin - her father had been an accomplished fiddler so no doubt she wanted to continue his legacy. But Crummy was told that this couldn’t be included in the curriculum, claiming that the teachers were busy enough teaching the children “the three Rs”. Often painted as the villain in this story, the headmaster became one of Crummy’s greatest allies.

Helen Crummy: Pic Wikipedia

Crummy’s first allies, though, were the women of the Mother’s Association of Peffermill Primary School. Crummy had transformed the Peffermill mother’s group from a small-scale fundraiser to a strong-willed campaign group which had debated, and convinced, local teachers of the need for a comprehensive school for their area.

Faced with the belief that it was simply impossible to introduce music to the children of Craigmillar, Crummy and the Mother’s Association rallied the local community to put on a display of the musical and theatre talent of the area. The first Craigmillar People’s Festival was born. In her book, Let the People Sing! Crummy lists over five hundred people who helped put the festival together, but it was Crummy who acted as Organising Secretary until 1985.

The Craigmillar People’s Festival ran from 1962 to 2002, with an offering of music and drama made by and for the local community. As its popularity grew it attracted the attention of celebrity performers including Sean Connory and Billy Connolly. But the Craigmillar Festival Society (CFS) was far more than a drama club; on top of a yearly festival, the society ran a community newspaper, organised playgroups to alleviate the hundreds-long waiting list for local nurseries, ran lunch clubs for the elderly, and even attracted funding for job creation programmes in the area.

A community inspired

The CFS, and the local mothers who ran it, often lacked support from the local authority. But their independence from the council allowed them the freedom to make impressive and witty political commentary through their art: when the community discovered that 600 homes were lying empty in the council estate, they wrote and performed “Castle Cooncil and Curse” following the story of a homeless family in the area. When a motorway was planned through the neighbourhood, “The Time Machine” expressed the community’s concerns for the future, while the festival society’s prestige connected them with New York artist Pedro de Silva, who created a huge mermaid sculpture to lie in the path of the planned motorway.

The “Craigmillar Formula” was exported across the world, attracting academics to learn from this excellent success story in community empowerment and regeneration. What was the key? Community leadership. Years before community-led development would become part of British policy, Crummy found herself before a room full of European diplomats asking for funding for a model of “the poor looking at the problems of the poor, the remedies and changes needed.”

“What she achieved was amazing, with her actually coming from the community and making sure she had a voice… the legacy that she’s left in Craigmillar [shows in] Craigmillar’s image, and in the kind of spirit of it,” says Jo Timmins, founder of a younger, but equally innovative, arts charity in Craigmillar.

Founded ten years after the last Craigmillar People’s Festival, Lyra takes the same approach and focuses on young people. Lyra runs ArtSpace, Scotland’s only arts venue which is exclusively for children and teenagers. With support from staff, Lyra’s young people choose the programme of performances at their theatre, and run a commissioning process for new pieces of work, interviewing artists and deciding who they will work with and what subjects they want to work on.

The statue of Queen Victoria in Leith

“Initially, it was a scary thing to hand over that power… but [the young people] just always make brilliant, really intelligent, clever and surprising and brave choices.” says Timmins.

In the past young people have chosen to work on everything from the revolutionary spirit of sleepovers, to grappling with the issue of death in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The impact of this arts experience on the young people of the community is much broader than simply performance. While several young people have gone on to work in the arts, one former Lyra teen recently approached the organisation to thank them for getting her into medical school- the young woman said she would never have had the confidence to apply without her experience at Lyra.

Cultural crumbs

Over half a century after Crummy founded the CFS, the political paradigm is sadly parallel - decision-makers sacrifice arts funding in the name of providing for basic needs. While this is understandable for cash-strapped councils, it’s jarring to think that versions of the conversation between Crummy and her son’s teacher are still repeated all the time. “Edinburgh is the festival city, and Edinburgh is a very rich city. We're one of the richest cities in Europe, and so to say that communities like Craigmillar Niddrie can't have culture and the arts and a good standard of living just isn't good enough,” says Timmins.

For Timmins, the beginning of the solution is in distribution of funding - while she thinks that all of the arts, from the Fringe to community and children's theatres, should get more funding; she does believe that the current distribution of funding is unfair. “The community organizations in the city get crumbs in terms of funding that's available, and bigger organizations, the festivals institutions, get the biggest slice of the pie,” she says. As ever, the issue comes down to the priority of citizens in the outskirts compared with tourists in the city centre. I wonder what Helen Crummy would have done with tourist tax revenues.