Scandal & Society · Edinburgh, Midlothian
17 Danube Street (Dora Noyce's establishment)
Behind a genteel Georgian door in respectable Stockbridge, Dora Noyce ran Edinburgh's most celebrated house of ill repute for over thirty years — twinset, pearls and Conservative Party membership, greeting the fleet with 'business is always good when the Navy's in'. She preferred the term 'YMCA with extras'.
The story
Dora Noyce ran the most famous brothel in Scotland from an elegant terraced house at 17 Danube Street, in the genteel heart of Edinburgh's New Town, from just after the Second World War until her death in 1977. She was born Georgina Hunter Rae in 1900 in poor, rough Rose Street, went into prostitution young, and reinvented herself with a manufactured Morningside accent, a fur coat, a twinset and pearls — the very picture of Edinburgh respectability, which was rather the point.
She hated the word "brothel". Her house was a "house of leisure and pleasure", or a "YMCA with the one little difference", and her staff were "business girls". Customers were greeted upstairs with coffee, sandwiches, biscuits and dry white wine; the basement was divided into small cubicles. She kept fifteen women in residence and could call up to twenty-five more from Glasgow by taxi when trade surged — and it surged, she claimed with a straight face, during the Edinburgh Festival and the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
The famous story is the USS John F. Kennedy in the Firth of Forth in 1970, after which the house was said to have done "£4,000 of business in one night" with a queue round the block — a tale every source hedges with "reportedly", and so should you. She was charged exactly forty-seven times, usually just paid the fine, and served real prison only rarely. The police tolerated her by arrangement: a raid every six months, information passed the other way. A Conservative who hung party posters in her windows at election time and attended Kirk, she understood publicity perfectly, reminding reporters to print the correct address because there was "no such thing as bad publicity". She died in 1977; the house is now flats, and in 2020 sold for £1.57 million — worth what its respectable neighbours are.
More stories at this spot
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Cambridge University Press / Edinburgh University Press (Roger Davidson chapter) (paywalled)
- The Scotsman, "Lost Edinburgh: 17 Danube Street" (paywalled)
- The Scotsman, "Danube Street brothel: From sex-starved sailors to the Capital's establishment" (paywalled)
- Planet Edinburgh, "17 Danube Street: What Your Parents Never Told You"
- Edinburgh Evening News
- Scottish Daily Express (2020 sale price)
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Documented historySpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.