THIS week, the team from the Live Borders Museum and Gallery, Tweeddale Museum, enlightens us on the history of lighting in Peebles.

IT is hard to imagine not having light at the flick of a switch and being constrained to the hours of daylight for all our tasks. 

So, even before the installation of electricity, coal gas was a welcome and relatively safe method of heating and lighting.

The hazards of domestic fires and lighting by ‘crusie’ lamps were considerable – especially in houses which were huddled together and often thatched. 

At a meeting of the Peebles Burgesses on January 9, 1829, it was resolved to form a company to be known as the Peebles Gas Company.

The management committee included Sir John Hay, Provost Turnbull, John Paterson (later Provost), John Welsh, James Spalding and Alexander Wilkie. 

The capital of the Gas Company was £700 and the site for the gasworks, or ‘guffie’ was west of Castlehill near to where the swimming pool is now.

Originally, coking coal was brought in by cart from the Lanarkshire coalfield. Gas was only made for ten months of the year and the public street lamps were only lit for 119 nights, the cost of lighting each lamp being 14s (70p) per lamp.

By 1849, the annual consumption of gas was 736,000 cubic feet, and with the arrival of the railway, trade improved, and the gas consumption rose to 903,000 cubic feet.

In 1898, Peebles Town Council bought out the Peebles Gas Company following a huge increase in the use of gas for lighting and cooking. 

By 1900, the output of the gas works reached 13.5 million cubic feet and demand was shortly to outstrip production, requiring a greatly increased plant capacity. 

Since the original site was constrained from expansion by its situation, the new gasworks were planned and built at Eshiels in 1905.

At the time of its transfer to the town council, a director of the Peebles Gas Company was William ‘Paraffin’ Young of Priorsford House.

It was he who demonstrated the distillation of oil shale in vertical retorts with the consequent production of paraffin oil and ammonia.

His original theories were adapted to the carbonisation of coal to produce illuminating gas. 

Indeed, his ideas spread far beyond the West Lothian shale-fields and his home in Peebles.