A house in Morningside Road

Think Derek Jacobi in The Kings Speech and you get a fairly reasonable idea of the very controversial and fairly unlikeable character of Cosmo Gordon Lang. Lang was the Archbishop of Canterbury during the Abdication Crisis.

He had been Archbishop of York at the outbreak of World War 1, and he concluded that the conflict was righteous. Younger clergy should be encouraged to serve as military chaplains, but it was not their duty to fight. Then at a meeting in York in November 1914 he caused offence when he spoke out against excessive anti-German propaganda, and recalled a "sacred memory" of the Kaiser kneeling with King Edward VII at the bier of Queen Victoria. These remarks, perceived as pro-German, produced what Lang termed "a perfect hail of denunciation". The strain of this period, coupled with the onset of alopecia, drastically altered Lang's relatively youthful appearance to that of a bald and elderly-looking man. His friends were shocked; the king, meeting him on the Royal train, apparently burst into guffaws of laughter - which was undoubtedly cruel, but maybe also reflected something of the hard time that Lang had given to all those round him through the years.

Lang was brought up in this house from the age of 4 till 9.

Remarkably his brother became Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1935. The two top ecclesiastic posts in the UK went to boys from this suburban house.