📍176 Fountainbridge, Edinburgh EH3 9QF, UK
1930 – 1953“I was born Thomas Connery in 1930 in a tenement at 176 Fountainbridge, Edinburgh, near the brewery, the canal and the rubber works where my father worked. My mother, Euphemia, was a cleaner, and we lived in a top-floor flat with one bedroom, a kitchen that was also the living room and a shared toilet outside. As a baby I slept in a drawer. It was poor, but Fountainbridge was a real community, where everyone knew everyone and you learned to stand up for yourself. I learned to read at Bruntsfield Primary, before most children, and books stayed with me all my life. Later I went to Darroch School. I took my first job at nine, and at fourteen I left school to work for St Cuthbert's Co-operative, delivering milk with a horse and cart. During the war, when classes were moved to a big house in Morningside, the lady of the house refused to let me in because she recognised me as her milk boy. I never forgot that. I was big for my age, and people around Fountainbridge called me Big Tam. I served in the Royal Navy, then worked as a lifeguard, a bricklayer, a coffin polisher and an artist's model, and played football and built my body before I heard about auditions for the chorus of South Pacific. James Bond, The Untouchables and a knighthood followed. However far I went, I was proud to be a Fountainbridge boy, and I supported Scottish causes for the rest of my life. A plaque on Fountainbridge now marks the site of my childhood home, and Edinburgh still claims me as one of its own.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today