Janet Henderson
Portrait of Janet with her late husband Mac and arts impresario Ricky Demarco CBE, sitting chatting in front.
The photo was taken at the Launch of the Janet and Mac Gallery in 2008.
Janet Henderson was born Janet Millar in Glasgow 's West End , the daughter of one of the city's leading architects, whose three sons also went on to have distinguished careers, in the worlds of journalism, broadcasting and the diplomatic service.
She was educated at St Leonard 's, although in truth she was in no way academically inclined. The formative influences on Janet's life came during the 1930s. Having 'come out' as a deb - albeit the most reluctant deb of the season - Janet spent the pre-war years travelling through Germany , Austria and Switzerland . There she encountered approaches to health and diet quite at odds with those then prevalent in this country, and she brought many of these ideas home with her.
In 1937 she married former Scottish rugby internationalist 'Mac' Henderson, and the couple settled down to farm at Spittalrig in East Lothian . The couple were to have seven children, and after the youngest, Oliver, went to school, Janet found herself in search of new challenges. The East Lothian farm switched from using the standard methods of the time to producing what were termed 'compost-grown' vegetables, a precursor of organic farming. These proved extremely popular and, seeing this, Janet conceived the idea of what we would today call a 'farm-shop', and in 1962 Henderson 's was born.
Having run a cafe below the shop, Janet shortly afterwards opened a restaurant in a derelict basement in Hanover Street , a restaurant which was in a few short years to acquire a national, and indeed international, reputation. This was then be followed by a bakery making brown and wholemeal breads to combat the tasteless and nutritionally deficient products of the time. From the beginning Henderson's was imbued with Janet's own personality: relaxed and informal with an abhorrence of elitism, a place where the owners were not afraid to get their hands dirty alongside the staff, a business willing to take risks, to take bold and far-sighted decisions. Janet died in 1973 of an illness contracted while travelling in the East: her legacy is a restaurant that has become an institution, and one of the city of Edinburgh 's best loved institutions at that.
