The Perth Flood of 1993
Manuscript receipt held in a private collection
A very high tide met rapid snow melt one Saturday in January 1993. The Tay spectacularly burst its banks and flooded the whole of central Perth. Houses were evacuated and backed up, contaminated water caused huge damage. My legal office, previously the British Linen Bank with a cavernous strong room in the basement, did not escape even though the strong room door was kept closed until the flood waters receded.
Experts arrived from the National Archives at 9 am on Monday morning as they were aware of previously archived material, which they located in the strong room and took away for rapid freezing. In due course, the papers were removed from the freezers and dried under controlled conditions, a process first used to save records in Venice.
Over the following days a mass of wet paperwork (mostly historic ledgers and other records of the legal practice) was removed and confidentially destroyed. Anything which had been stored higher than the water line was saved and recorded. Dozens of metal boxes were placed in the various offices. Four boxes on which “Kilgraston” had been written in white chalk arrived in my room and, after several weeks of prevarication, I spent a weekend emptying the contents, most of which had been neatly tied in bundles with pink ribbon: old title deeds, some written in Latin and dating from the sixteenth century; hundreds of leases and mortgage documents and handwritten notes. As Kilgraston estate had been broken up and sold some 75 years earlier I surmised that the boxes had not been opened since.
Casually looking through a small bundle of papers my attention was drawn to a small, folded handwritten note, perhaps six or seven inches wide and three or four inches long. It was dated 15 May 1787 and clearly showed £22,280-4 shillings, a significant sum in the eighteenth century. Undamaged by the flood water and preserved in the centre of a tight bundle of documents, this was the manuscript receipt from the Bank of Scotland for the price paid for Kilgraston estate on behalf of the Chief Justice of the Island of Jamaica.