It’s a lot to put on young shoulders, but that lassie Mary is responsible for all that has been good in Leith for almost half a millennium.

Born in Linlithgow, she was Queen at a week, old when her father died. Her French mother shipped her off to Fontainebleau, to be fetched up in the lap of French luxury. She married the heir to the French throne, and widowed at the age of 19.

Of tender years though she was, in the year 1561 she came to Scotland to claim her crown. It was a quick journey and she arrived in Leith ahead of schedule. Many said there was a Scotch haar that day, others said it was a Presbyterian fog. But not Mary. She said she was pleased to be in sunny Leith.

She stayed “an hour” at Lamb’s House, the only place with a floor to speak of. She wasn’t used to lifting her skirts over the mud. If the shoreman, humping stuff on and off the ships, understood what she said they would have laughed. Or worse. Was it not on her account that the bloody Englishman Hertford had besieged the town these last ten years, burning the much-needed pier on his way out? It was no time for this French lassie to be telling pretty lies about the weather.

But that’s when she said it. Or didn’t. If she did, she said it in French. Whatever, it stuck. And from 1561 Leith has been a sunny place. It is reported that Mary was the first woman to play golf on the Links of Leith. Nice if it’s true. A wider perspective on the reports suggest that the story was being put about to demonstrate that Mary was unladylike and unfit for queen.

Nobody can say Mary had it easy. She was twice widowed, and banged up in prison for 19 years, before her English cousin had her head chopped off. It was a messy business. The executioner, as was expected of him, showed off his workmanship by hanging her head up by the hair, only for the assembled company to gasp in horror as it turned out she was wearing a wig, her bald head falling to the floor.

But it’s that throw-away remark that lives longest. Leith is home to the first, biggest, best and the sunniest.

Leith Links is home to an astonishing collection of golfing firsts: in order, the first recorded game, the first club, the first written rules, the first competition for a prize, the first international challenge match, the first club house, the first professional tournament. Golf is Leith’s gift to the world.

John Sime built Scotland’s first dry dock, the shape of it still intact on the west side of Shore running to the back of Sandport Street. John Rennie’s wet docks were later the first of their kind in Scotland, but now filled in and used as car parks in front of the Scottish government building. The Imperial dry dock is the biggest on the east coast of Scotland, and Leith docks is the biggest area of enclosed water (ie behind lock gates) in Scotland.

The first hydraulic crane in Scotland was built in Albert dock, and when Queen Victoria opened the blue swing bridge in 1874 it was the biggest of its kind in Scotland. Before the foundation of the welfare state in the late 1940s, South Leith parish church had one of the most generous welfare funds in Scotland.

The Leith-born singing twins, the Proclaimers, in a plane as it banked to the left on approach to the airport saw the sun shining on Leith, giving rise to the best-known modern revival of Mary’s remark: the song and the musical “Sunshine on Leith”. There’s no doubt that Irvine Welsh took it further, naming Sick Boy’s pub in the film T2 Port Sunshine.

And in the sunny summer solstice month, our thanks are especially due to John Stewart of Laverockbank who donated the huge sum of £1,000 to begin the building of Leith Hospital on Mill Lane. Every June it was supported by the whole community, with a Gala Day and a week of fundraising events.

There’s a picture of the bakers with their Gala Day float, the banner reading: ‘We knead the dough. So do the nurses’. After WW2 it was one of the few hospitals in the country with a healthy bank balance, and it was seriously proposed at board level that there was no need to join the new-fangled National Health Service. But, of course, it did.

In 1981 I took my wee boy there for a small operation. He had the professional care I expected of the NHS, but there was something else. When they gave him back to me, I thought he had been marked, like a branding: ‘This boy’s a Leither’.

In 1987 it was deemed surplus to requirements, and it was closed. Ron Brown, MP said “They can’t do that. It’s our hospital”. He was wrong on both counts.

But good habits die hard. The present Leith Festival is a direct continuation of the fund-raising week for the hospital. It’s a showcase for all the talent and diversity of the new Leith. It’s up to us to keep it that way – amateur and community – oriented, accessible, affordable, and fun. And sunny.

We now see that history falls into two parts. Before 1561 the world lay in ignorance and confusion. Since then the world has understood that whatever the weather, it’s always sunny in Leith.

Cover: Tom Manley Photography: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommanley/