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The famous literary association that never was: the thread about the Salisbury Arms
Here’s an eye-catching headline one one of those sites that passes itself off as local news from today. “First Look at transformed Edinburgh boozer visited by Arthur Conan Doyle“.
Edinburgh Live headline, 25th June 2025. “First Look at transformed Edinburgh boozer visited by Arthur Conan Doyle”.The piece goes on, “Once a favourite watering hole of the iconic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle“. Stop the bus! Arthur Conan Doyle was a regular in the Salisbury Arms? That’s news to me! Now, I’ll readily admit that I don’t know everything about Edinburgh, but something here feels a bit off.
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, Arthur Conan DoyleBut let’s be fair, not everyone spends quite so much time poring over local history as I do, and not everyone will be irked enough by something that troubles them to look more into it. But I’m not everyone and I was sceptical and so in the best spirit of Sherlock Holmes I set out to do a little deduction of my own. To paraphrase the great detective, when it comes to Edinburgh history “it is my business to know what other people do not know!”
Sherlock Holmes statue in Edinburgh, erected opposite the birthplace of Conan Doyle. CC-by-SA 3.0 Kim Traynor via WikimediaThe first indicator that something isn’t quite right is that the website of the Salisbury Arms itself doesn’t trouble to mention its famous literary association. The game is afoot! Delving a bit deeper, a quick tap of the keys in a search engine traces the Conan Doyle claim back to an advertorial piece from the Scotsman in June 2011. In this it is stated – without reference – “Apparently Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle used to frequent the hostelry now known as The Salisbury Arms in Dalkeith Road.” That word apparently is key here and from it we should suspect that the author was well aware that their claim was without evidence. Wind the clock forward to January 2017 and we find in the sister publication, Evening News, a repetition and reinforcement of the claim: “The most intriguing connection the Salisbury Arms has is with the fictional private detective Sherlock Holmes” it gushes, before quickly contradicting itself; “Whether Conan Doyle was ever a visitor… is unclear” and then instantly trying to get itself out of jail with “but it is thought he dropped by on a few occasions“. Once again I think our author was very aware that there was nothing to back up the claims they were making. By this point I’m willing to stake a round of drinks on the fact that my initial cynicism is well founded.
“Historic Salisbury Arms to undergo major renovation work”, Evening News, January 14th 2017.I could stop there, but I like to be both firm and fair in my debunking and come to an argument armed with the facts, so I shan’t.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
A Scandal in Bohemia, Arthur Conan DoyleSo let us take a proper look into the history of the Salisbury Arms, after all history is probably why you are reading this in the first place! Along the way I can attempt to keep my reputation intact by offering a well evidenced counter argument, I can demonstrate the sort of readily accessible sources that you a I can turn to for investigating a case such as this and and hopefully we can all learn something more of the history of the place in question and write it down for the benefit of others (particularly writers of local news!). Looking at the building in question itself, it doesn’t need an expert eye make a sure guess that it probably began life as a Georgian villa.
The Salisbury Arms, Edinburgh, 2015. © Paul Farmer, CC-by-SA 2.0 via Geograph.A quick search through the online Book of The Old Edinburgh Club – one of my frequent first ports of call for local history queries – brings us to Volume 24 and pages 152-197, “The Lands of Newington and Their Owners“, by W. Forbes Gray. In this piece we find that a house and plot here was seised (officially registered) to Francis Nalder, merchant, in 1812. Referring to a map of the area around this time – Kirkwood’s Town Plan of Edinburgh of 1817 is a reliable source, freely accessible from the National Library of Scotland – we see Mr. Nalder’s name appears as landowner here too.
Kirkwood’s town plan of Edinburgh, 1817. Showing “Nalder” on the site of the house which is now the Salisbury Arms. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandFrom Forbes Gray’s we learn that this plot was one of just many such others which were feued from the Newington Estate in the early 19th century to create a new suburb. Newington’s lands were an irregular rectangle defined by the Gibbet Loan (now Preston Street) to the north, East and West Mayfield to the south, Dalkeith Road to the east and the turnpike road south to Selkirk and Carlisle (now Minto Street) to the west. There was a large house, Newington House, in the southeastern quarter. This estate was an old one but had been split into six lots by the city back in the 16th century. Over subsequent centuries, five of the plots were acquired and combined by the Lauder of Fountainhall family, from where they passed to John Henderson of Leistoun. Henderson’s grandson bought the sixth and final plot in 1733, reuniting the estate and taking for himself the title Henderson of Newington.
1817 Kirkwood town plan of Edinburgh, highlighting the lands of Newington. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAt this time the Newington House on the above map had not yet been built and there was instead an older mansion located in the northwest corner at the end of what is now West Newington Place. It is shown on the Ordnance Survey 1849 Town Plan as Old Newington House. After Henderson the lands were acquired in 1751 by a saddler, Patrick Crichton. The financial problems of his son Alexander in the 1780s saw loans taken out, secured against the estate, which were defaulted on. One of the major creditors came to an agreement in 1803 whereby Benjamin Bell of Hunthill, surgeon, bought Newington for £5,000 thus settling the debt.
Benjamin Bell by Sir Henry Raeburn (c. 1780-90). From “Raeburn to Redpath” booklet by Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh, via Wikimedia.Bell, “the first Scottish scientific surgeon” and “father of the Edinburgh school of Surgery” built the new Newington House but died in 1806, before he had a chance to settle in and enjoy it. It so happens that he was the great grandfather of Joseph Bell, the surgeon and lecturer known as the inspiration from which Arthur Conan Doyle formed Sherlock Holmes. So finally we arrive at a kernel of a grain of truth in at least one aspect of our story. Bell’s eldest son, George, sold Newington House to Sir George Steuart of Grandtully in 1807 and Steuart bought up more of the land shortly thereafter to form gardens around the house, but also with a farsighted view that he could feu this land himself, and his own charter indeed allowed him to do so after a period of time had elapsed.
Newington House in the 1880s, with the family of Lord Provost Duncan McLaren (in top hat) assembled on the lawn. SC1224483 via Trove.ScotIn due course, his estate-within-an-estate would later be developed into the planned suburb of the Blacket Estate (where, ironically, Joseph Bell was an early resident, at number 44). Thank you to Hugh Mackay of the Blacket Association for pointing this out.
1817 Kirkwood Plan of Edinburgh centred on Newington House, showing land owners as Sir George Stewart (sic) of Grandtully, Bart. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandHaving sold the house, George Bell and his brothers began the process of feuing the rest of their land here into plots for fashionable new suburban villas. To distinguish theirs from Steuart’s holding, they gave his district an on-trend new name which also happened to be a pun on their own: Belleville. On the 1826 feuing plan on the NLS maps site, both names are given:
“Plan of the Lands of Newington and Belleville, 1826”. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThis new name for the district stuck for a short while in the newspapers, but old habits can die hard and it soon reverted back to being just plain old Newington. But two houses kept the former name alive; Belleville Lodge on South Blacket Place (now Blacket Avenue) and Belleville at 58 Dalkeith Road – which is that house which would much later become the Salisbury Arms. The first record of that name being used in connection with the house that I can find is on the 1855 valuation roll over on Scotland’s People, with the owner and occupant being listed as William Donaldson, Grocer. By 1865 he has been replaced by Miss Mary Duncan as “William Donaldson’s Representative“. She is still the owner in 1875, but the occupant is one James M. Watters, Captain.
Belleville Lodge. A gate pier carries the name “Belleville Lodge” painted on it and also on a brass plaque, complete with a sign to the right saying “Belleville Lodge. Mansfield Care”.Come 1885 there is once again a new owner and occupier; William Nelson of Salisbury Green. This latter house you can see on the 1817 map above of the Newington Estate is directly to the east of Belleville, it’s the baronial pile opposite which now forms part of the Pollock Halls complex. Confusingly the same valuation rolls show William also owned and occupied Salisbury Green at this time, it’s not clear why he needed both! He was a wealthy publisher of the family firm Thomas Nelson & Sons, whose vast Parkside Works lay just across the way, and who is known for restoring St. Bernard’s Well at Stockbridge and St. Margaret’s Chapel in Edinburgh Castle.
Salisbury Green house, a 3-storey mansion in the Scottish Baronial Revival style.Ownership of Belleville never seemed to stay with one person for long. By 1895 the valuation rolls show it was Robert Inch, a well known and prosperous seed merchant who ran his business from the Timberbush in Leith. He died there in 1912, after which it was bought by its next door neighbour, Mrs Jane Binning Burn Murdoch of Arthur Lodge . Regular listeners might be familiar with the Burn Murdoch name, she was the wife of the artist and explorer WG Burn Murdoch who was so involved in helping Edinburgh Zoo acquire its first polar bears, at the same time as indulging in his passion for trophy hunting them. The house was let out and an advert at this time gives us a description of its accommodation and features:
Newspaper advert for the lease of “Belleville” house. “Entrance hall, cloak room, 3 public rooms, billiard room, 8 bedrooms, 2 dressing rooms, 2 bathrooms, laundry and ample servants’ accommodation” plus stables and garaging. The Scotsman – 19 March 1913Mrs Burn Murdoch’s maiden name was Usher, she was a daughter of Andrew Usher of that distilling dynasty which financed and lends its name to the Usher Hall. Belleville by 1930 was in the hands and occupation of her sister, Elizabeth Usher Cunningham and in turn by 1935 it was Elizabeth’s son, Howard, who was there. Howard Usher Cunningham served with the Royal Irish Regiment during World War 1 at Gallipoli, in the Balkans and in Palestine, being awarded the Military Cross in the last theatre. He was in the fertiliser business with the family firm of J. & J. Cunningham of Leith, which was one of the five constituent companies of the Scottish Agricultural Industries conglomerate which formed in 1928. He was appointed director in 1929, rising to Managing Director in 1947. During World War 2 he was the Ministry of Supply Fertiliser Controller for the country, which earned him a knighthood.
In 1942 the house of Belleville was turned over to the Edinburgh Home for Babies and School of Mothercraft, a charitable maternity home and training establishment for both midwives and young (often single) mothers. This organisation had lost its base on Colinton Road to the Civil Defence for the duration of the war and at first had been evacuated to the countryside, but returned to the city in 1942 once the immediate threat was passed where it could better undertake its work. Usher Cunningham returned to the house briefly after the war but by 1948 it had been taken over by the Relief Society for Poles in London as the Polish House, a Polish community centre for exiles and a headquarters for organisations such as the Polish YMCA and Scottish-Polish Society.
Scotsman article, 29 January 1948, showing a picture of the dining room of 58 Dalkeith Road under the title “Polish Centre in Edinburgh”, with two columns below of description.The Polish House was transient and soon moved on as Poles in Edinburgh either emigrated or integrated, it relocated to Drummond Place where it joined the Polish Press Agency. In 1950 the Edinburgh Corporation looked to acquire the building as a remand school but it was instead opened as the Davidson Clinic, to treat young adults and children with “anxiety illnesses“. The Clinic took its name from the Davidson Church in Eyre Place, where the idea for it had been formed by the minister. It practised what we would now call psychotherapy and had been established in the city in 1941 as a charitable institution. Under its lead doctor, GP Dr Winifred Rushforth, it took a pioneering approach to dealing with nervous and anxiety conditions.
Dr Winifred Rushforth (1885–1983) by Victoria Crowe. © Victoria Crowe. Credit: Museums & Galleries EdinburghThe Davidson Clinic remained a charity and closely associated with the Church of Scotland for its existence. Never part of the NHS it relocated from Belleville in 1968 and was closed in 1973. Key members of this organisation, including Winifred Rushforth, would go on to find the similar Wellspring clinic. Belleville was now acquired again by the Usher family, this time by Thomas Usher & Sons, the brewing branch of the dynasty. Ushers successfully applied for a licence to turn it into a modern roadhouse type pub and restaurant. Despite local objections it opened as such in 1970 as the Commonwealth-games inspired Gold Medal Tavern. The Gold Medal found its way into the Alloa Brewery’s portfolio, who refurbished it in 1986 and renamed the restaurant to Waffles. With a trendy open plan dining area and kitchen, it offered “pizzas, pasta, hamburgers, steaks and chicken“. No mention was made of waffles, but traditional pub food could be had in the lounge bar.
Newspaper advert “We’ve pulled a fast one” on the refurbishment of the Gold Medal tavern. Edinburgh Evening News – 15 May 1986Roll forward the clock to 1994 and the pub was acquired by the Firkin brand of Allied Domecq who renamed it The Physician & Firkin, despite it having no obvious connection to medicine. When that chain folded in 2001 it was passed to Bass who branded it as one of their yellow-liveried, sticky-floored It’s a Scream student discount pubs with the new name of The Crags. Come 2011, the pub was re-branded and repositioned once again, becoming the more upmarket Salisbury Arms.
This has all been a very long winded way to say that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930 and there was not a pub on the site of the Salisbury Arms until 1970! The original claim is demonstrable nonsense – he definitely never drank in, never mind frequented, this establishment. Furthermore, the association of the Bell family with the house ended in 1807 when it was sold to its first owner, some 30 years before the birth of Joseph Bell. So the chance that he or Conan Doyle have any further connection with it is slim to nil.
So why is any of this important? Am I just showing off about being right about something? Shouldn’t I be magnanimous and attribute this to an innocent journalistic error? Well, you’re probably reading this page because you have an interest in Edinburgh and local history, so I will try and explain why I think that it matters and why you too should be bothered.
Arthur Conan Doyle in 1914, photograph by Walter Benington. Via WikimediaThe first problem is that despite the best efforts of their owning companies to try and destroy all trust in them over the last 20 or so years, faith is still put by many in local newspapers as they trade on past reputations and a lack of alternatives. They and their websites are still held as being reliable places to find things out and they still command a wide local reach; people will read what they write and there’s a good chance they will accept it. Why shouldn’t they? The Evening News even has a strapline at the top of every page which says “News you can trust since 1873“, it invites you to believe it. So when it publishes historical facts without substantiation, they will inevitably become accepted as facts. The irony is not lost on me that a lot of what you will read on this very website has been arrived at by trawling through previous generations of these very local newspapers. I too have to trust that what was being printed in the pages of the Evening News or the Scotsman at the time was an accurate and factual record.
But this shouldn’t be a problem I hear you say, people have the sum of the world’s knowledge at their fingertips these days and can just check a search engine to verify a fact. So let’s do just that and perform a quick experiment by doing what many people do these days to adjudicate a point: let’s ask Google “which pub did Arthur Conan Doyle drink in?”.
Oh, so it was The Salisbury Arms. Mea culpa, if it’s on Google it must be true, right? But give the result a second glance, that’s not actually a search result. That’s an answer automatically generated by Google’s AI Overview and presented above and before the actual search results. It’s what some might call machine generated slop, an approximation of what looks like a plausible answer arrived at by a statistical analysis of a very large data set. It is the year 2025 and the problem of the Evening News presenting theory as fact is no longer confined to the reach of its own readership. Local news websites are now constantly crawled and trawled as the training material for the Large Language Models that are commonly referred to as AI. Local news is the factual foodstuff, chewed, digested, reconstituted and regurgitated by the LLM. And as the old saying goes, if you put garbage in you’ll get garbage out.
Give the above result a third glance and you see a little vague link symbol at the end of the word soup of that first paragraph. Click that link and it will suggest to you the source from which it came to its conclusions. So I did this and what should we see but two “references”, the oldest of which is only a day old and is the very same article which got me started! The second is a copy-and-paste effort of the first, barely hours old on the internet at this time.
And here is the big problem I’ve been trying to get at. We’ve just got a complete worked example of Google inventing itself a new fact about an important figure in Edinburgh local history, and people will believe it, because it is Google and that is were a huge number of people turn to for information, and because it is substantiated by links to local news websites, which many people still put trust in. That fact is now out of the bag and once it’s out, it is very hard to put it back in. Check in on the above search in a few months, weeks, or even days and you will undoubtedly see the fact has replicated itself across multiple other sources like a virus. And those sources will now in turn be consumed once again by Large Language Models, which will spit out the same result in future with ever more confidence. We are all of us going to have to get used to accepting a lot less of what is presented to us as fact and doing a lot more of our own verification if we want to find a reliable answer…
Ouroboros, the serpent consuming its own tail, a symbol for eternal cyclic renewalIf you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.
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The famous literary association that never was: the thread about the Salisbury Arms
Here’s an eye-catching headline one one of those sites that passes itself off as local news from today. “First Look at transformed Edinburgh boozer visited by Arthur Conan Doyle“.
Edinburgh Live headline, 25th June 2025. “First Look at transformed Edinburgh boozer visited by Arthur Conan Doyle”.The piece goes on, “Once a favourite watering hole of the iconic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle“. Stop the bus! Arthur Conan Doyle was a regular in the Salisbury Arms? That’s news to me! Now, I’ll readily admit that I don’t know everything about Edinburgh, but something here feels a bit off.
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, Arthur Conan DoyleBut let’s be fair, not everyone spends quite so much time poring over local history as I do, and not everyone will be irked enough by something that troubles them to look more into it. But I’m not everyone and I was sceptical and so in the best spirit of Sherlock Holmes I set out to do a little deduction of my own. To paraphrase the great detective, when it comes to Edinburgh history “it is my business to know what other people do not know!”
Sherlock Holmes statue in Edinburgh, erected opposite the birthplace of Conan Doyle. CC-by-SA 3.0 Kim Traynor via WikimediaThe first indicator that something isn’t quite right is that the website of the Salisbury Arms itself doesn’t trouble to mention its famous literary association. The game is afoot! Delving a bit deeper, a quick tap of the keys in a search engine traces the Conan Doyle claim back to an advertorial piece from the Scotsman in June 2011. In this it is stated – without reference – “Apparently Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle used to frequent the hostelry now known as The Salisbury Arms in Dalkeith Road.” That word apparently is key here and from it we should suspect that the author was well aware that their claim was without evidence. Wind the clock forward to January 2017 and we find in the sister publication, Evening News, a repetition and reinforcement of the claim: “The most intriguing connection the Salisbury Arms has is with the fictional private detective Sherlock Holmes” it gushes, before quickly contradicting itself; “Whether Conan Doyle was ever a visitor… is unclear” and then instantly trying to get itself out of jail with “but it is thought he dropped by on a few occasions“. Once again I think our author was very aware that there was nothing to back up the claims they were making. By this point I’m willing to stake a round of drinks on the fact that my initial cynicism is well founded.
“Historic Salisbury Arms to undergo major renovation work”, Evening News, January 14th 2017.I could stop there, but I like to be both firm and fair in my debunking and come to an argument armed with the facts, so I shan’t.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
A Scandal in Bohemia, Arthur Conan DoyleSo let us take a proper look into the history of the Salisbury Arms, after all history is probably why you are reading this in the first place! Along the way I can attempt to keep my reputation intact by offering a well evidenced counter argument, I can demonstrate the sort of readily accessible sources that you a I can turn to for investigating a case such as this and and hopefully we can all learn something more of the history of the place in question and write it down for the benefit of others (particularly writers of local news!). Looking at the building in question itself, it doesn’t need an expert eye make a sure guess that it probably began life as a Georgian villa.
The Salisbury Arms, Edinburgh, 2015. © Paul Farmer, CC-by-SA 2.0 via Geograph.A quick search through the online Book of The Old Edinburgh Club – one of my frequent first ports of call for local history queries – brings us to Volume 24 and pages 152-197, “The Lands of Newington and Their Owners“, by W. Forbes Gray. In this piece we find that a house and plot here was seised (officially registered) to Francis Nalder, merchant, in 1812. Referring to a map of the area around this time – Kirkwood’s Town Plan of Edinburgh of 1817 is a reliable source, freely accessible from the National Library of Scotland – we see Mr. Nalder’s name appears as landowner here too.
Kirkwood’s town plan of Edinburgh, 1817. Showing “Nalder” on the site of the house which is now the Salisbury Arms. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandFrom Forbes Gray’s we learn that this plot was one of just many such others which were feued from the Newington Estate in the early 19th century to create a new suburb. Newington’s lands were an irregular rectangle defined by the Gibbet Loan (now Preston Street) to the north, East and West Mayfield to the south, Dalkeith Road to the east and the turnpike road south to Selkirk and Carlisle (now Minto Street) to the west. There was a large house, Newington House, in the southeastern quarter. This estate was an old one but had been split into six lots by the city back in the 16th century. Over subsequent centuries, five of the plots were acquired and combined by the Lauder of Fountainhall family, from where they passed to John Henderson of Leistoun. Henderson’s grandson bought the sixth and final plot in 1733, reuniting the estate and taking for himself the title Henderson of Newington.
1817 Kirkwood town plan of Edinburgh, highlighting the lands of Newington. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAt this time the Newington House on the above map had not yet been built and there was instead an older mansion located in the northwest corner at the end of what is now West Newington Place. It is shown on the Ordnance Survey 1849 Town Plan as Old Newington House. After Henderson the lands were acquired in 1751 by a saddler, Patrick Crichton. The financial problems of his son Alexander in the 1780s saw loans taken out, secured against the estate, which were defaulted on. One of the major creditors came to an agreement in 1803 whereby Benjamin Bell of Hunthill, surgeon, bought Newington for £5,000 thus settling the debt.
Benjamin Bell by Sir Henry Raeburn (c. 1780-90). From “Raeburn to Redpath” booklet by Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh, via Wikimedia.Bell, “the first Scottish scientific surgeon” and “father of the Edinburgh school of Surgery” built the new Newington House but died in 1806, before he had a chance to settle in and enjoy it. It so happens that he was the great grandfather of Joseph Bell, the surgeon and lecturer known as the inspiration from which Arthur Conan Doyle formed Sherlock Holmes. So finally we arrive at a kernel of a grain of truth in at least one aspect of our story. Bell’s eldest son, George, sold Newington House to Sir George Steuart of Grandtully in 1807 and Steuart bought up more of the land shortly thereafter to form gardens around the house, but also with a farsighted view that he could feu this land himself, and his own charter indeed allowed him to do so after a period of time had elapsed.
Newington House in the 1880s, with the family of Lord Provost Duncan McLaren (in top hat) assembled on the lawn. SC1224483 via Trove.ScotIn due course, his estate-within-an-estate would later be developed into the planned suburb of the Blacket Estate (where, ironically, Joseph Bell was an early resident, at number 44). Thank you to Hugh Mackay of the Blacket Association for pointing this out.
1817 Kirkwood Plan of Edinburgh centred on Newington House, showing land owners as Sir George Stewart (sic) of Grandtully, Bart. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandHaving sold the house, George Bell and his brothers began the process of feuing the rest of their land here into plots for fashionable new suburban villas. To distinguish theirs from Steuart’s holding, they gave his district an on-trend new name which also happened to be a pun on their own: Belleville. On the 1826 feuing plan on the NLS maps site, both names are given:
“Plan of the Lands of Newington and Belleville, 1826”. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThis new name for the district stuck for a short while in the newspapers, but old habits can die hard and it soon reverted back to being just plain old Newington. But two houses kept the former name alive; Belleville Lodge on South Blacket Place (now Blacket Avenue) and Belleville at 58 Dalkeith Road – which is that house which would much later become the Salisbury Arms. The first record of that name being used in connection with the house that I can find is on the 1855 valuation roll over on Scotland’s People, with the owner and occupant being listed as William Donaldson, Grocer. By 1865 he has been replaced by Miss Mary Duncan as “William Donaldson’s Representative“. She is still the owner in 1875, but the occupant is one James M. Watters, Captain.
Belleville Lodge. A gate pier carries the name “Belleville Lodge” painted on it and also on a brass plaque, complete with a sign to the right saying “Belleville Lodge. Mansfield Care”.Come 1885 there is once again a new owner and occupier; William Nelson of Salisbury Green. This latter house you can see on the 1817 map above of the Newington Estate is directly to the east of Belleville, it’s the baronial pile opposite which now forms part of the Pollock Halls complex. Confusingly the same valuation rolls show William also owned and occupied Salisbury Green at this time, it’s not clear why he needed both! He was a wealthy publisher of the family firm Thomas Nelson & Sons, whose vast Parkside Works lay just across the way, and who is known for restoring St. Bernard’s Well at Stockbridge and St. Margaret’s Chapel in Edinburgh Castle.
Salisbury Green house, a 3-storey mansion in the Scottish Baronial Revival style.Ownership of Belleville never seemed to stay with one person for long. By 1895 the valuation rolls show it was Robert Inch, a well known and prosperous seed merchant who ran his business from the Timberbush in Leith. He died there in 1912, after which it was bought by its next door neighbour, Mrs Jane Binning Burn Murdoch of Arthur Lodge . Regular listeners might be familiar with the Burn Murdoch name, she was the wife of the artist and explorer WG Burn Murdoch who was so involved in helping Edinburgh Zoo acquire its first polar bears, at the same time as indulging in his passion for trophy hunting them. The house was let out and an advert at this time gives us a description of its accommodation and features:
Newspaper advert for the lease of “Belleville” house. “Entrance hall, cloak room, 3 public rooms, billiard room, 8 bedrooms, 2 dressing rooms, 2 bathrooms, laundry and ample servants’ accommodation” plus stables and garaging. The Scotsman – 19 March 1913Mrs Burn Murdoch’s maiden name was Usher, she was a daughter of Andrew Usher of that distilling dynasty which financed and lends its name to the Usher Hall. Belleville by 1930 was in the hands and occupation of her sister, Elizabeth Usher Cunningham and in turn by 1935 it was Elizabeth’s son, Howard, who was there. Howard Usher Cunningham served with the Royal Irish Regiment during World War 1 at Gallipoli, in the Balkans and in Palestine, being awarded the Military Cross in the last theatre. He was in the fertiliser business with the family firm of J. & J. Cunningham of Leith, which was one of the five constituent companies of the Scottish Agricultural Industries conglomerate which formed in 1928. He was appointed director in 1929, rising to Managing Director in 1947. During World War 2 he was the Ministry of Supply Fertiliser Controller for the country, which earned him a knighthood.
In 1942 the house of Belleville was turned over to the Edinburgh Home for Babies and School of Mothercraft, a charitable maternity home and training establishment for both midwives and young (often single) mothers. This organisation had lost its base on Colinton Road to the Civil Defence for the duration of the war and at first had been evacuated to the countryside, but returned to the city in 1942 once the immediate threat was passed where it could better undertake its work. Usher Cunningham returned to the house briefly after the war but by 1948 it had been taken over by the Relief Society for Poles in London as the Polish House, a Polish community centre for exiles and a headquarters for organisations such as the Polish YMCA and Scottish-Polish Society.
Scotsman article, 29 January 1948, showing a picture of the dining room of 58 Dalkeith Road under the title “Polish Centre in Edinburgh”, with two columns below of description.The Polish House was transient and soon moved on as Poles in Edinburgh either emigrated or integrated, it relocated to Drummond Place where it joined the Polish Press Agency. In 1950 the Edinburgh Corporation looked to acquire the building as a remand school but it was instead opened as the Davidson Clinic, to treat young adults and children with “anxiety illnesses“. The Clinic took its name from the Davidson Church in Eyre Place, where the idea for it had been formed by the minister. It practised what we would now call psychotherapy and had been established in the city in 1941 as a charitable institution. Under its lead doctor, GP Dr Winifred Rushforth, it took a pioneering approach to dealing with nervous and anxiety conditions.
Dr Winifred Rushforth (1885–1983) by Victoria Crowe. © Victoria Crowe. Credit: Museums & Galleries EdinburghThe Davidson Clinic remained a charity and closely associated with the Church of Scotland for its existence. Never part of the NHS it relocated from Belleville in 1968 and was closed in 1973. Key members of this organisation, including Winifred Rushforth, would go on to find the similar Wellspring clinic. Belleville was now acquired again by the Usher family, this time by Thomas Usher & Sons, the brewing branch of the dynasty. Ushers successfully applied for a licence to turn it into a modern roadhouse type pub and restaurant. Despite local objections it opened as such in 1970 as the Commonwealth-games inspired Gold Medal Tavern. The Gold Medal found its way into the Alloa Brewery’s portfolio, who refurbished it in 1986 and renamed the restaurant to Waffles. With a trendy open plan dining area and kitchen, it offered “pizzas, pasta, hamburgers, steaks and chicken“. No mention was made of waffles, but traditional pub food could be had in the lounge bar.
Newspaper advert “We’ve pulled a fast one” on the refurbishment of the Gold Medal tavern. Edinburgh Evening News – 15 May 1986Roll forward the clock to 1994 and the pub was acquired by the Firkin brand of Allied Domecq who renamed it The Physician & Firkin, despite it having no obvious connection to medicine. When that chain folded in 2001 it was passed to Bass who branded it as one of their yellow-liveried, sticky-floored It’s a Scream student discount pubs with the new name of The Crags. Come 2011, the pub was re-branded and repositioned once again, becoming the more upmarket Salisbury Arms.
This has all been a very long winded way to say that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930 and there was not a pub on the site of the Salisbury Arms until 1970! The original claim is demonstrable nonsense – he definitely never drank in, never mind frequented, this establishment. Furthermore, the association of the Bell family with the house ended in 1807 when it was sold to its first owner, some 30 years before the birth of Joseph Bell. So the chance that he or Conan Doyle have any further connection with it is slim to nil.
So why is any of this important? Am I just showing off about being right about something? Shouldn’t I be magnanimous and attribute this to an innocent journalistic error? Well, you’re probably reading this page because you have an interest in Edinburgh and local history, so I will try and explain why I think that it matters and why you too should be bothered.
Arthur Conan Doyle in 1914, photograph by Walter Benington. Via WikimediaThe first problem is that despite the best efforts of their owning companies to try and destroy all trust in them over the last 20 or so years, faith is still put by many in local newspapers as they trade on past reputations and a lack of alternatives. They and their websites are still held as being reliable places to find things out and they still command a wide local reach; people will read what they write and there’s a good chance they will accept it. Why shouldn’t they? The Evening News even has a strapline at the top of every page which says “News you can trust since 1873“, it invites you to believe it. So when it publishes historical facts without substantiation, they will inevitably become accepted as facts. The irony is not lost on me that a lot of what you will read on this very website has been arrived at by trawling through previous generations of these very local newspapers. I too have to trust that what was being printed in the pages of the Evening News or the Scotsman at the time was an accurate and factual record.
But this shouldn’t be a problem I hear you say, people have the sum of the world’s knowledge at their fingertips these days and can just check a search engine to verify a fact. So let’s do just that and perform a quick experiment by doing what many people do these days to adjudicate a point: let’s ask Google “which pub did Arthur Conan Doyle drink in?”.
Oh, so it was The Salisbury Arms. Mea culpa, if it’s on Google it must be true, right? But give the result a second glance, that’s not actually a search result. That’s an answer automatically generated by Google’s AI Overview and presented above and before the actual search results. It’s what some might call machine generated slop, an approximation of what looks like a plausible answer arrived at by a statistical analysis of a very large data set. It is the year 2025 and the problem of the Evening News presenting theory as fact is no longer confined to the reach of its own readership. Local news websites are now constantly crawled and trawled as the training material for the Large Language Models that are commonly referred to as AI. Local news is the factual foodstuff, chewed, digested, reconstituted and regurgitated by the LLM. And as the old saying goes, if you put garbage in you’ll get garbage out.
Give the above result a third glance and you see a little vague link symbol at the end of the word soup of that first paragraph. Click that link and it will suggest to you the source from which it came to its conclusions. So I did this and what should we see but two “references”, the oldest of which is only a day old and is the very same article which got me started! The second is a copy-and-paste effort of the first, barely hours old on the internet at this time.
And here is the big problem I’ve been trying to get at. We’ve just got a complete worked example of Google inventing itself a new fact about an important figure in Edinburgh local history, and people will believe it, because it is Google and that is were a huge number of people turn to for information, and because it is substantiated by links to local news websites, which many people still put trust in. That fact is now out of the bag and once it’s out, it is very hard to put it back in. Check in on the above search in a few months, weeks, or even days and you will undoubtedly see the fact has replicated itself across multiple other sources like a virus. And those sources will now in turn be consumed once again by Large Language Models, which will spit out the same result in future with ever more confidence. We are all of us going to have to get used to accepting a lot less of what is presented to us as fact and doing a lot more of our own verification if we want to find a reliable answer…
Ouroboros, the serpent consuming its own tail, a symbol for eternal cyclic renewalIf you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.
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If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
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The thread about the Salisbury Arms and the famous literary association that never was
Here’s an eye-catching headline one one of those sites that passes itself off as local news from today. “First Look at transformed Edinburgh boozer visited by Arthur Conan Doyle“.
Edinburgh Live headline, 25th June 2025. “First Look at transformed Edinburgh boozer visited by Arthur Conan Doyle”.The piece goes on, “Once a favourite watering hole of the iconic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle“. Stop the bus! Arthur Conan Doyle was a regular in the Salisbury Arms? That’s news to me! Now, I’ll readily admit that I don’t know everything about Edinburgh, but something here feels a bit off.
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, Arthur Conan Doyle
But let’s be fair, not everyone spends quite so much time poring over local history as I do, and not everyone will be irked enough by something that troubles them to look more into it. But I’m not everyone and I was sceptical and so in the best spirit of Sherlock Holmes I set out to do a little deduction of my own. To paraphrase the great detective, when it comes to Edinburgh history “it is my business to know what other people do not know!”
Sherlock Holmes statue in Edinburgh, erected opposite the birthplace of Conan Doyle. CC-by-SA 3.0 Kim Traynor via WikimediaThe first indicator that something isn’t quite right is that the website of the Salisbury Arms itself doesn’t trouble to mention its famous literary association. The game is afoot! Delving a bit deeper, a quick tap of the keys in a search engine traces the Conan Doyle claim back to an advertorial piece from the Scotsman in June 2011. In this it is stated – without reference – “Apparently Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle used to frequent the hostelry now known as The Salisbury Arms in Dalkeith Road.” That word apparently is key here and from it we should suspect that the author was well aware that their claim was without evidence. Wind the clock forward to January 2017 and we find in the sister publication, Evening News, a repetition and reinforcement of the claim: “The most intriguing connection the Salisbury Arms has is with the fictional private detective Sherlock Holmes” it gushes, before quickly contradicting itself; “Whether Conan Doyle was ever a visitor… is unclear” and then instantly trying to get itself out of jail with “but it is thought he dropped by on a few occasions“. Once again I think our author was very aware that there was nothing to back up the claims they were making. By this point I’m willing to stake a round of drinks on the fact that my initial cynicism is well founded.
“Historic Salisbury Arms to undergo major renovation work”, Evening News, January 14th 2017.I could stop there, but I like to be both firm and fair in my debunking and come to an argument armed with the facts, so I shan’t.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
A Scandal in Bohemia, Arthur Conan Doyle
So let us take a proper look into the history of the Salisbury Arms, after all history is probably why you are reading this in the first place! Along the way I can attempt to keep my reputation intact by offering a well evidenced counter argument, I can demonstrate the sort of readily accessible sources that you a I can turn to for investigating a case such as this and and hopefully we can all learn something more of the history of the place in question and write it down for the benefit of others (particularly writers of local news!). Looking at the building in question itself, it doesn’t need an expert eye make a sure guess that it probably began life as a Georgian villa.
The Salisbury Arms, Edinburgh, 2015. © Paul Farmer, CC-by-SA 2.0 via Geograph.A quick search through the online Book of The Old Edinburgh Club – one of my frequent first ports of call for local history queries – brings us to Volume 24 and pages 152-197, “The Lands of Newington and Their Owners“, by W. Forbes Gray. In this piece we find that a house and plot here was seised (officially registered) to Francis Nalder, merchant, in 1812. Referring to a map of the area around this time – Kirkwood’s Town Plan of Edinburgh of 1817 is a reliable source, freely accessible from the National Library of Scotland – we see Mr. Nalder’s name appears as landowner here too.
Kirkwood’s town plan of Edinburgh, 1817. Showing “Nalder” on the site of the house which is now the Salisbury Arms. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandFrom Forbes Gray’s we learn that this plot was one of just many such others which were feued from the Newington Estate in the early 19th century to create a new suburb. Newington’s lands were an irregular rectangle defined by the Gibbet Loan (now Preston Street) to the north, East and West Mayfield to the south, Dalkeith Road to the east and the turnpike road south to Selkirk and Carlisle (now Minto Street) to the west. There was a large house, Newington House, in the southeastern quarter. This estate was an old one but had been split into six lots by the city back in the 16th century. Over subsequent centuries, five of the plots were acquired and combined by the Lauder of Fountainhall family, from where they passed to John Henderson of Leistoun. Henderson’s grandson bought the sixth and final plot in 1733, reuniting the estate and taking for himself the title Henderson of Newington.
1817 Kirkwood town plan of Edinburgh, highlighting the lands of Newington. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAt this time the Newington House on the above map had not yet been built and there was instead an older mansion located in the northwest corner at the end of what is now West Newington Place. It is shown on the Ordnance Survey 1849 Town Plan as Old Newington House. After Henderson the lands were acquired in 1751 by a saddler, Patrick Crichton. The financial problems of his son Alexander in the 1780s saw loans taken out, secured against the estate, which were defaulted on. One of the major creditors came to an agreement in 1803 whereby Benjamin Bell of Hunthill, surgeon, bought Newington for £5,000 thus settling the debt.
Benjamin Bell by Sir Henry Raeburn (c. 1780-90). From “Raeburn to Redpath” booklet by Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh, via Wikimedia.Bell, “the first Scottish scientific surgeon” and “father of the Edinburgh school of Surgery” built the new Newington House but died in 1806, before he had a chance to settle in and enjoy it. It so happens that he was the great grandfather of Joseph Bell, the surgeon and lecturer known as the inspiration from which Arthur Conan Doyle formed Sherlock Holmes. So finally we arrive at a kernel of a grain of truth in at least one aspect of our story. Bell’s eldest son, George, sold Newington House to Sir George Steuart of Grandtully in 1807 and Steuart bought up more of the land shortly thereafter to form gardens around the house, but also with a farsighted view that he could feu this land himself, and his own charter indeed allowed him to do so after a period of time had elapsed. In due course, his estate-within-an-estate would later be developed into the planned suburb of the Blacket Estate.
1817 Kirkwood Plan of Edinburgh centred on Newington House, showing land owners as Sir George Stewart (sic) of Grandtully, Bart. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandHaving sold the house, George Bell and his brothers began the process of feuing the rest of their land here into plots for fashionable new suburban villas. To distinguish theirs from Steuart’s holding, they gave his district an on-trend new name which also happened to be a pun on their own: Belleville. On the 1826 feuing plan on the NLS maps site, both names are given:
“Plan of the Lands of Newington and Belleville, 1826”. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThis new name for the district stuck for a short while in the newspapers, but old habits can die hard and it soon reverted back to being just plain old Newington. But two houses kept the former name alive; Belleville Lodge on South Blacket Place (now Blacket Avenue) and Belleville at 58 Dalkeith Road – which is that house which would much later become the Salisbury Arms. The first record of that name being used in connection with the house that I can find is on the 1855 valuation roll over on Scotland’s People, with the owner and occupant being listed as William Donaldson, Grocer. By 1865 he has been replaced by Miss Mary Duncan as “William Donaldson’s Representative“. She is still the owner in 1875, but the occupant is one James M. Watters, Captain.
Belleville Lodge. A gate pier carries the name “Belleville Lodge” painted on it and also on a brass plaque, complete with a sign to the right saying “Belleville Lodge. Mansfield Care”.Come 1885 there is once again a new owner and occupier; William Nelson of Salisbury Green. This latter house you can see on the 1817 map above of the Newington Estate is directly to the east of Belleville, it’s the baronial pile opposite which now forms part of the Pollock Halls complex. Confusingly the same valuation rolls show William also owned and occupied Salisbury Green at this time, it’s not clear why he needed both! He was a wealthy publisher of the family firm Thomas Nelson & Sons, whose vast Parkside Works lay just across the way, and who is known for restoring St. Bernard’s Well at Stockbridge and St. Margaret’s Chapel in Edinburgh Castle.
Salisbury Green house, a 3-storey mansion in the Scottish Baronial Revival style.Ownership of Belleville never seemed to stay with one person for long. By 1895 the valuation rolls show it was Robert Inch, a well known and prosperous seed merchant who ran his business from the Timberbush in Leith. He died there in 1912, after which it was bought by its next door neighbour, Mrs Jane Binning Burn Murdoch of Arthur Lodge . Regular listeners might be familiar with the Burn Murdoch name, she was the wife of the artist and explorer WG Burn Murdoch who was so involved in helping Edinburgh Zoo acquire its first polar bears, at the same time as indulging in his passion for trophy hunting them. The house was let out and an advert at this time gives us a description of its accommodation and features:
Newspaper advert for the lease of “Belleville” house. “Entrance hall, cloak room, 3 public rooms, billiard room, 8 bedrooms, 2 dressing rooms, 2 bathrooms, laundry and ample servants’ accommodation” plus stables and garaging. The Scotsman – 19 March 1913Mrs Burn Murdoch’s maiden name was Usher, she was a daughter of Andrew Usher of that distilling dynasty which financed and lends its name to the Usher Hall. Belleville by 1930 was in the hands and occupation of her sister, Elizabeth Usher Cunningham and in turn by 1935 it was Elizabeth’s son, Howard, who was there. Howard Usher Cunningham served with the Royal Irish Regiment during World War 1 at Gallipoli, in the Balkans and in Palestine, being awarded the Military Cross in the last theatre. He was in the fertiliser business with the family firm of J. & J. Cunningham of Leith, which was one of the five constituent companies of the Scottish Agricultural Industries conglomerate which formed in 1928. He was appointed director in 1929, rising to Managing Director in 1947. During World War 2 he was the Ministry of Supply Fertiliser Controller for the country, which earned him a knighthood.
In 1942 the house of Belleville was turned over to the Edinburgh Home for Babies and School of Mothercraft, a charitable maternity home and training establishment for both midwives and young (often single) mothers. This organisation had lost its base on Colinton Road to the Civil Defence for the duration of the war and at first had been evacuated to the countryside, but returned to the city in 1942 once the immediate threat was passed where it could better undertake its work. Usher Cunningham returned to the house briefly after the war but by 1948 it had been taken over by the Relief Society for Poles in London as the Polish House, a Polish community centre for exiles and a headquarters for organisations such as the Polish YMCA and Scottish-Polish Society.
Scotsman article, 29 January 1948, showing a picture of the dining room of 58 Dalkeith Road under the title “Polish Centre in Edinburgh”, with two columns below of description.The Polish House was transient and soon moved on as Poles in Edinburgh either emigrated or integrated, it relocated to Drummond Place where it joined the Polish Press Agency. In 1950 the Edinburgh Corporation looked to acquire the building as a remand school but it was instead opened as the Davidson Clinic, to treat young adults and children with “anxiety illnesses“. The Clinic took its name from the Davidson Church in Eyre Place, where the idea for it had been formed by the minister. It practised what we would now call psychotherapy and had been established in the city in 1941 as a charitable institution. Under its lead doctor, GP Dr Winifred Rushforth, it took a pioneering approach to dealing with nervous and anxiety conditions.
Dr Winifred Rushforth (1885–1983) by Victoria Crowe. © Victoria Crowe. Credit: Museums & Galleries EdinburghThe Davidson Clinic remained a charity and closely associated with the Church of Scotland for its existence. Never part of the NHS it relocated from Belleville in 1968 and was closed in 1973. Key members of this organisation, including Winifred Rushforth, would go on to find the similar Wellspring clinic. Belleville was now acquired again by the Usher family, this time by Thomas Usher & Sons, the brewing branch of the dynasty. Ushers successfully applied for a licence to turn it into a modern roadhouse type pub and restaurant. Despite local objections it opened as such in 1970 as the Commonwealth-games inspired Gold Medal Tavern. The Gold Medal found its way into the Alloa Brewery’s portfolio, who refurbished it in 1986 and renamed the restaurant to Waffles. With a trendy open plan dining area and kitchen, it offered “pizzas, pasta, hamburgers, steaks and chicken“. No mention was made of waffles, but traditional pub food could be had in the lounge bar.
Newspaper advert “We’ve pulled a fast one” on the refurbishment of the Gold Medal tavern. Edinburgh Evening News – 15 May 1986Roll forward the clock to 1994 and the pub was acquired by the Firkin brand of Allied Domecq who renamed it The Physician & Firkin, despite it having no obvious connection to medicine. When that chain folded in 2001 it was passed to Bass who branded it as one of their yellow-liveried, sticky-floored It’s a Scream student discount pubs with the new name of The Crags. Come 2011, the pub was re-branded and repositioned once again, becoming the more upmarket Salisbury Arms.
This has all been a very long winded way to say that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930 and there was not a pub on the site of the Salisbury Arms until 1970! The original claim is demonstrable nonsense – he definitely never drank in, never mind frequented, this establishment. Furthermore, the association of the Bell family with the house ended in 1807 when it was sold to its first owner, some 30 years before the birth of Joseph Bell. So the chance that he or Conan Doyle have any further connection with it is slim to nil.
So why is any of this important? Am I just showing off about being right about something? Shouldn’t I be magnanimous and attribute this to an innocent journalistic error? Well, you’re probably reading this page because you have an interest in Edinburgh and local history, so I will try and explain why I think that it matters and why you too should be bothered.
Arthur Conan Doyle in 1914, photograph by Walter Benington. Via WikimediaThe first problem is that despite the best efforts of their owning companies to try and destroy all trust in them over the last 20 or so years, faith is still put by many in local newspapers as they trade on past reputations and a lack of alternatives. They and their websites are still held as being reliable places to find things out and they still command a wide local reach; people will read what they write and there’s a good chance they will accept it. Why shouldn’t they? The Evening News even has a strapline at the top of every page which says “News you can trust since 1873“, it invites you to believe it. So when it publishes historical facts without substantiation, they will inevitably become accepted as facts. The irony is not lost on me that a lot of what you will read on this very website has been arrived at by trawling through previous generations of these very local newspapers. I too have to trust that what was being printed in the pages of the Evening News or the Scotsman at the time was an accurate and factual record.
But this shouldn’t be a problem I hear you say, people have the sum of the world’s knowledge at their fingertips these days and can just check a search engine to verify a fact. So let’s do just that and perform a quick experiment by doing what many people do these days to adjudicate a point: let’s ask Google “which pub did Arthur Conan Doyle drink in?”.
Oh, so it was The Salisbury Arms. Mea culpa, if it’s on Google it must be true, right? But give the result a second glance, that’s not actually a search result. That’s an answer automatically generated by Google’s AI Overview and presented above and before the actual search results. It’s what some might call machine generated slop, an approximation of what looks like a plausible answer arrived at by a statistical analysis of a very large data set. It is the year 2025 and the problem of the Evening News presenting theory as fact is no longer confined to the reach of its own readership. Local news websites are now constantly crawled and trawled as the training material for the Large Language Models that are commonly referred to as AI. Local news is the factual foodstuff, chewed, digested, reconstituted and regurgitated by the LLM. And as the old saying goes, if you put garbage in you’ll get garbage out.
Give the above result a third glance and you see a little vague link symbol at the end of the word soup of that first paragraph. Click that link and it will suggest to you the source from which it came to its conclusions. So I did this and what should we see but two “references”, the oldest of which is only a day old and is the very same article which got me started! The second is a copy-and-paste effort of the first, barely hours old on the internet at this time.
And here is the big problem I’ve been trying to get at. We’ve just got a complete worked example of Google inventing itself a new fact about an important figure in Edinburgh local history, and people will believe it, because it is Google and that is were a huge number of people turn to for information, and because it is substantiated by links to local news websites, which many people still put trust in. That fact is now out of the bag and once it’s out, it is very hard to put it back in. Check in on the above search in a few months, weeks, or even days and you will undoubtedly see the fact has replicated itself across multiple other sources like a virus. And those sources will now in turn be consumed once again by Large Language Models, which will spit out the same result in future with ever more confidence. We’re all going to have to get used to accepting a lot less of what is presented to us fact and doing a lot more of our own verification if we want to find out the actual answer…
Ouroboros, the serpent consuming its own tail, a symbol for eternal cyclic renewalIf you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.
These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#ConanDoyle #House #Newington #pub #pubs #Southside #Usher #Written2025
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The Innocent: the thread about Scotland’s oldest railway tunnel and how it revolutionised the city
Writing on the topic of the Scotland Street Tunnel, it’s hard not to stumble into the rabbit hole of railway tunnels and look at another, older, rope-worked incline tunnel in Edinburgh – that of St Leonard’s – better known these days by the moniker The Innocent.
At 560 yards, it’s just a little over half the length of Scotland Street and its 1-in-30 gradient is a little less severe than the latter’s 1-in-27. It’s also less roomy, with a 19½ x 14¾ feet cross section vs. 24 x 24 feet. Like Scotland Street, it was worked by gravity downhill and by a static steam engine at the top of the incline to haul waggons uphill by rope. It has a reasonable claim to be Scotland’s oldest railway tunnel – Dundee’s 330 yard long Law Tunnel was completed over a year before it, but traffic started running through the Innocent a few months before that on the Dundee & Newtyle Railway.
Bartholomew Post Office Map, 1865, showing the Innocent Tunnel and St Leonard’s Station to the left. The colours represent municipal electoral wards. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandFirst things first – the formal name for the railway was the Edinburgh & Dalkeith Railway so what’s with it being known as the Innocent Railway ? One frequently repeated explanation is that nobody died, or was seriously injured, during the railway’s operational life. Let’s clear that up now – people did die and others were injured on this railway (more on that later), so that’s not where the name comes from. Rather, it comes from how “innocently” backwards the railway, with its plodding horse-hauled traction and ramshackle facilities seemed compared to the rival steam-powered “whizzing, whistling, sorting, buffing and blowing railways and having one’s imagination exasperated by their frantic speed“. It was in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal of January 1846 where the name first appeared in print, as a gentle nickname. By this time the railway was 15 years old but already belonged firmly to a previous generation and had recently purchased by the bigger and more modern North British Railway.
Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, No. 105, January 1846Oddly, even Chambers gets it wrong, sayings “[it] never breaks bones” and “a friend of ours calls it ‘The Innocent Railway’, as being so peculiar for its indestructive character“. Tell that to the young woman who fell between two waggons on Saturday 3rd March 1838 and had her skull fatally crushed! Or to the passengers of the Portobello stagecoach who, on Monday 10th August 1840, had an empty train of waggons collide with their conveyance on a level crossing, injuring a number of them.
FATAL ACCIDENT – Caledonian Mercury – 5th March 1838Construction wasn’t incident free either. Initial borings of the tunnel commenced at Duddingston in July 1827 and appear to have proceeded steadily and without hitch until February 1829 when a workman was killed and 8 received a variety of injuries – many serious – when 8 yards of masonry archwork, 30 tons of stone blocks, collapsed on them. Robert Inglis lost his life, leaving a widow and two young children; Robert Mercer had his right leg amputated by Mr Liston at the Royal Infirmary; James Gilmour suffered fractured ribs. So the Innocent may have had a lesser rate of incident than its competitors, but it’s evidently not true that there were none and that no serious injuries were incurred or lives lost during its operations. However they were obviously proud of their safety record, as its called out in an 1832 advert:
“Without the slightest semblance of accident”, The Scotsman – 1st September 1832The Innocent opened for business in 1831 and the Edinburgh Evening Courant reported in August that year that it was then “in full operation” with trains of waggons “re-issuing twelve to fifteen tons of coals, with the speed of a mail coach” as they came out of the tunnel on the haulage rope.
Coal was the reason the railway was built – to bring the black riches from the Midlothian pits around Millerhill, Sheriffhall and south of Dalkeith, and from a branch to Cowpits in East Lothian, into the city of Edinburgh, at a depot in St. Leonards. A further branch extended to the harbour at Fisherrow for import or export of coal – this harbour soon proved not to be a useful destination and so the route was extended on a new branch to the Port of Leith. To the south, the Marquess of Lothian would build an extension across the South Esk river as far as his pits at Arniston at significant personal expense and the Duke of Buccleuch took a branch from Dalkeith to his pits around Smeaton.
The 1825 survey of the route by its engineer, James Jardine, highlighted for clarity. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandIn the mid-1820s, coal could come into Edinburgh either from Lanarkshire – by the Union Canal – from Fife or Northumberland – through the Port of Leith – or locally from East and Midlothian – by cart. However, the winter weather frequently strangled supplies by all 3 of these channels and as a result the growing city frequently suffered from winter fuel shortages, as deliveries dwindled and prices increased. What was needed was a more reliable and cheaper way to bring local coal into the city – a railway was thought to be such a way. Interested gentlemen issued a prospectus for the Mid Lothian Railway from Newbattle to Edinburgh in the winter of 1824. They forecast the best Midlothian coal could be sold in Edinburgh at 8s per ton if brought in by the railway, 40% cheaper when compared with the then market rate of 11s 6d per ton. It was therefore unsurprising that the Lothian “Coal Lords” were all early supporters – Archibald Primrose, 4th Earl of Rosebery; Walter Montagu Douglas Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch; Sir John Hope of Pinkie, 11th Baronet; Francis Wemyss Charteris Douglas, 8th Earl of Wemyss & 4th Earl of March; and John Kerr, 7th Marquess of Lothian.
The Mid Lothian Railway soon became the Edinburgh & Dalkeith Railway of the above map. It re-used some of the trackbed of an even older horse-drawn railway, the Edmonstone Waggonway, which had opened for bsiness in August 1818. This line connected pits at Millerhill with a depot at Little France on the lands of Lt. Col. John Wauchope of Edmonstone & Niddrie Marischal. The Innocent threatened Wauchope’s older route and he successfully objected to its 1825 Parliamentary Bill. When a second Bill succeeded in 1826 he changed his mind and came to an agreement with the promoters. This allowed the use of some of his existing trackbed, to have his pits connected to the new railway and also to be paid a share of all the coal being carried across his lands. As a result, the Edmonstone Waggonway was surplus to requirements and was gone by 1831 when the Innocent commenced operations. Edmonstone Coal was soon being advertised for sale at St. Leonards, “direct from the pit head“.
Looking up the “Innocent Tunnel” in 2009, with the modern cycle path laid down its centre. CC-by-NC 2.0, Peter Reed via FlickrThe Innocent found itself a roaring success and was soon carrying over 300 tons of coal a day, all of it (except through the tunnel) by horse power alone. The colliers all provided their own horses and waggons, relieving the railway of having to oversee this aspect of operations. In 1836, a newspaper as far off as the Londonderry Standard reported that “the immense load” of a train weighing 54 tons was moved a distance of 6 miles by just 2 horses.
A Waggonway – at Tanfield on Tyneside. The horse provided the means to move the waggon on the level or uphill. Going downhill it was tethered at the rear and the waggonman would control the speed of descent using the large wooden brake lever. The Coal Waggon – Northumberland Archives Ref. ZMD 78/14But it wasn’t just a case of bringing the coal into the city, the railway also promised to revolutionise how the city’s fuel supply was sold and distributed. At this time, people bought their coal from a preferred merchant and would specify the quality and origin, which depended on the particular pit and seam it was cut from. Some coals produced more light, some more heat, some burned with less smoke, some were cheaper, etc. These were sold like brands, e.g. the Marquess of Lothian’s Great Main Coal or Sir John Hope’s Craighall Jewel Coal, but customers were reliant on the Carters to deliver it to them and had to trust that they were getting what they had paid for. The railway would break the stranglehold of the Carters, who were widely thought to be overpriced and dishonest, selling coal of dubious quality and volumes on the side, and selling direct to the public.
Banner of the Incorporated Trade of the Carters of Leith. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe railway promised only to supply coal from named and trusted pits (those of the Lothian Coal Lords who backed it, naturally) and hand-picked a selected number of coal merchants to handle the trade from its St. Leonards depot. Neither the railway nor their merchants actually had any stores of coal of their own at the depot, these were the property of the customer’s chosen Collier so it came direct from their stocks. However the company employed a “Weigher“, Robert Gibb, whose job it was to ensure that the weight and type of coal that left the yard matched the customer order; signed and sealed.
Notice in the Edinburgh & Leith Post Office Directory, 1832-33, explaining the operation of the Innocent’s coal sale operation to customers.oGibb soon proved that the Carters were indeed swindling customers and delivering inferior quality and underweight shipments, catching them red handed. He followed a Carter who had had accidentally left his paperwork behind at the depot and watched as a lady in Alva Street took delivery of the load. Making enquiries with her, he found that she had a receipt showing she had paid for 20cwt of the Duke of Hamilton’s Great Lanarkshire Coal from the canal, but he knew from his paperwork that the cart had delivered 18cwt of Sir John Hope’s Cowpits Coal from the railway: the Carter had swapped the paperwork over. The railway was quick to act and took out notices in the newspapers and the Post Office Directory to let it be known that their officers would be following and watching the Carters and that customers should only accept coals with a Weigher’s certificate signed and stamped by Gibb himself. They also let it be known that the dishonest Carter had been turned over to the Sheriff and that any others caught cheating would never again be allowed to transport railway coal.
Caution to the Public Against Fraud in Coals – Edinburgh Evening Courant, 31st March 1832To add further checks against fraud, the Weigher’s certificate would be marked with the time of dispatch and customers were to reject any coal delivered more than an hour after that time. This meant it was unlikely that there had been time to adulterate the load. Customers were also instructed to under no circumstances to allow the carter to keep the certificate after delivery, in case he should try use it again. Any one suspecting foul play was invited to inspect the Weigher’s register at the St. Leonards yard. The Railway was thereby guaranteeing both the quality and weight of the coal received, “to secure to the consumer what he has hitherto been little accustomed to, a knowledge of what kind of coal he buys, and of what price he really pays for it“. And with that, the Innocent Railway had totally disrupted the Edinburgh coal market – forever and for the better. The system was soon further improved, by contracting the management of the sale and delivery of coal to one Michael Fox, one of the line’s original engineers. He promised that all deliveries would be made in his own carts, “always being of the best quality and full weight“.
Michael Fox’s advert for railway coal. The Scotsman – 1st September 1832The railway – or rather Michael Fox again – was also quick to catch on that people would pay to ride along the rails as passengers and that they would bring in additional revenue. Starting in June 1832, he put a carriage on the rails and advertised it at 6d per passenger thus introducing the passenger train to Edinburgh. This was his own initiative and a runaway success, the Railway ended up buying it off him in 1836. His service carried 150,000 passengers in its first year and brought in revenue of £4,000. As a passenger railway, per track mile, this made it busier than the steam-hauled Liverpool & Manchester Railway. By September that year, Fox was advertising a timetabled service between St. Leonards, Sheriffhall and Fisherrow, with inside and outside seats (9d and 6d respectively) and that he had winter-proofed the former to “render them dry and safe from the effects of the weather“.
RAILWAY COACH – Edinburgh Evening Courant – 4th June 1832Michael Fox was obviously something of a serial entrepreneur – in 1835 he was advertising “swimmers’ specials”, trains from St. Leonards that would take bathers to Portobello or Seafield to take the waters. As far as I’m aware, nobody ever troubled to make an illustration of the Innocent Railway at work, so this double-decker horse-drawn rail carriage will have to do.
Engraving of a horse-hauled railway carriage crossing a riveroWhen the technically more advanced North British Railway pushed south from Edinburgh to Berwick, the Innocent at first objected then allowed itself to be bought for the princely sum of £113,000. The NBR ripped up the horse-drawn “Scotch Gauge” Innocent and relaid it as a Standard Gauge steam-powered railway in 1847. They also took on the Marquess of Lothian’s railway as far as Gorebridge and rebuilt this in a similar fashion, thereby adding the adding the first push south of the railway that would eventually become the Waverley Route to Carlisle. The Innocent remained open until 1968 as an important but overlooked branch line into the city for coal, brewery and warehousing traffic. It was steam worked until almost the end, the old J35 engines “manfully struggling up the gradient“, sometimes taking multiple attempts to reach the top. “If they avoided asphyxiation in the hell hole, the crews were rewarded with a good dram from the bond“. The route that they followed is now a popular walking and cycle route, officially known as the Innocent Railway.
A J35 locomotive making the run uphill for the Innocent Tunnel. This was its second attempt, having stalled on the first.As a footnote, the Innocent may not have been so deserving of that name if its plans to tunnel its way north into the city centre had ever come to anything. One option was a 900 yard tunnel emerging in Holyrood Park, running on the surface from there, the other a monster 2,200 yard bore emerging at Waverley Station from the south – a great “what if” of Edinburgh transport history.
Early Edinburgh railways. The Edinburgh & Dalkeith (Innocent) in light blue, the Edinburgh & Glasgow in green, the North British in brown and the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton in Yellow.Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
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The thread about the baffling naming of Leith railway stations; know your North Leith from your Leith North; which South Leith is which and whether Leith Walk West or Leith Walk East is westmost!
This thread was originally written and published in September 2019.
We went to visit Trinity House expecting to find some treasures of Leith maritime history, but we were surprised to find some local railway history hidden round the back too, a bench from South Leith Railway Station which closed way, way back in 1903.
South Leith station benchSo let’s go on a little #NowAndThen visual trip down memory lane to South Leith station. The view is taken from Constitution Street looking east along the trackbed, what is now Tower Street. The tall remnant of buildings behind were part of the first Leith gas works, before they moved to Granton with the Edinburgh gas works. The station building is on the right, with the single platform behind it.
Original source: Kenneth G. Williamson on FlickrThis was the first railway station in Leith, and was originally named as such when it opened in 1832 as an extension of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway. This line ran from St. Leonards in Edinburgh to Midlothian, Leith being accessed by a reverse junction near Niddrie. This was the so-called “Innocent Railway“, in Scotch Gauge of 4ft 6in and horse drawn throughout. Looking the other way towards the Shore (and a prime example of that dreadful noughties architectural fad for oversized and inappropriate corner rotundas) we see Leith’s old Tower in the distance down Tower Street. Notice that the railway was not quite aligned with the modern Tower Street, but parallel. This continuation of the line beyond Constitution Street gave access to the east side of the port and its industries.
Original source: Kenneth G. Williamson on Flickr.The station was on the sea front when it was built, with Leith Sands beyond and the high tide line beyond that. The railway providing a new boundary between land and shore as Leith crept northwards into the Forth. This station was handy for the Shore, where the steamers left from at the time, but was quickly swallowed up by seaward extensions of the docks and became increasingly inconveniently positioned. In 1845 the North British Railway bought over the Edinburgh & Dalkeith and set about converting their new possession into standard gauge and steam power. However, they were not interested in passenger traffic here – it was routes South from Edinburgh that had caused them to buy the E&DR – and closed South Leith to passengers in 1846. The line remained open for dock traffic, always it’s primary purpose as it had been built as a direct connection to the Midlothian Coalfield.
OS 1849 Town Plan. Tower Street (blue), Constitution Street (yellow) and South Leith Station (orange)The naming of Leith’s railway stations was always a bit confusing. For a relatively small place, it had a lot of various stations and they were often duplicated due to the competing nature of the North British (NBR) and Caledonian Railways (CR), who fought petulantly with each other for access to the lucrative docks and industrial traffic. To add confusion, when most of these stations were first named, Leith was two distinct municipal parishes; South Leith and North Leith. These are ancient names, referring to the banks of the river of Water of Leith on which they lie, geographically they are more east and westerly of one and other than south and northerly. At various times there were stations called Leith, Leith Central, South Leith, North Leith, Leith North, Leith Citadel, Leith East, Leith Walk, Leith Walk West and Leith Walk East! (And that’s not counting those stations in the Leith boundaries which don’t have “Leith” in their name.)
An animated timeline of railways and railway stations in Leith, from 1830 – 1990. Dock, mineral and private sidings omitted for clarity. © SelfThe next station to open in Leith was North Leith in 1846. It was opened as a branch of the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway, which ran from Canal Street Station (at right angles to the present day Waverley), through the Scotland Street Tunnel to Trinity and on to a rail ferry at Granton Docks. The NBR bought this railway too in 1862 and experimented with calling the station variously Leith Citadel or Leith North, before settling back on North Leith. They re-opened the old Edinburgh & Dalkeith Leith station in 1859 as a single platform called South Leith.
The next arrival was that of the Caledonian Railway, who opened a station called Leith in 1869 on a rather circuitous line around the North and West of the city from Princes Street Station via Roseburn and Newhaven. It would be renamed North Leith in 1903. To get around the confusion of two rival North Leith stations being a few hundred metres from each other on the same street, most maps stuck with Leith for the Caley station and North Leith for the NBR. To locals it would just have been the Caley and North British stations.
Railway Stations of Leith on the NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThe North Leith muddles would be solved in 1947 when the ex-NBR station, by now 24 years in the LNER grouping, was closed to passenger traffic. Rather pointlessly, 5 years later the ex-Caley North Leith was renamed Leith North, and the ex-NBR North Leith goods station once again became Leith Citadel!
The renaming of the Caley station was not the only change on the Leith railway map in 1903; this was the year the North British opened their (far too) vast station at Leith Central – which of course was well to the south of South Leith… It’s arrival resulted in the closure of the latter station for the second and final time. Leith Central was on a fairly short branch from Waverley via Abbeyhill, but could never match the electric tramway on speed, frequency, convenience and on proximity to destinations, so it always struggled for patronage. Leith Central was the last major railway terminus built in Scotland, and had a short life, closing in 1952 after a fairly unintense life. It had been built more as a symbol of the NBR‘s dominance and a blocker to the Caley opening a passenger station in the centre of Leith than anything else.
Leith Central Station at the bottom. NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThose grand Caley plans were the Leith New Lines, a very expensive and winding route around Leith to connect the eastern and western sides of the Docks. Large goods stations were opened at Bonnington, Leith Walk, Restalrig and South Leith; where it caused confusion with the NBR South Leith goods station. The Caley had wanted to provide passenger stations too; the platforms and some other structures for these were actually built, at Victoria Park in Trinity and above street level on Leith Walk on the Gordon Street railway arches. After Leith Walk, the intention was a costly branch to Princes Street station from a junction near Lochend via tunnels under Calton Hill and cut-and-cover tunnelling of Princes Street itself. None of these plans came to fruition though, the NBR‘s massive Leith Central meant it would have been a costly folly (which Leith Central admittedly also was).
The Leith New Lines. NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThe two parallel, neighbouring South Leith Goods stations of the NBR and Caley happily co-existed side-by-side into the 1950s, when British Railway in their wisdom renamed the ex-NBR station Leith South and ex-CR station Leith East. The latter closed in the 1970s, the former lasted into the 1990s, its yard (South Leith Yard) is still technically in use, but has not seen any traffic in the best part of 10 years.
The last set of Leith-named stations were those of Leith Walk – none of which are actually in Leith by any definition later than the 18th century! Leith Walk passenger station was opened by the NBR in 1869 when they built a diversionary line from Waverley station to Trinity via Abbeyhill to avoid the awkward Scotland Street tunnel. Passenger stations were added along the line, including where it passed under Leith Walk at Shrubhill. An enormous goods yard was provided on the east side of the Walk. When the Caley opened their Leith New Lines in 1903, they also provided a goods yard for Leith Walk, further to the north. Both were called Leith Walk (goods) so inevitably were referred to as the North British or Caley to differentiate them.
The Leith Walk. NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThe passenger station closed in 1930, another victim of competition from the electric tramway. After nationalisation, the ever wise British Railways decided to rationalise matters and renamed the ex-NBR station Leith Walk East and the ex-Caley station Leith Walk West. This makes perfect sense in principle to a naming committee in a far off office, except it results in Leith Walk East being more westerly than Leith Walk West on account of Leith Walk not running on a true north-south axis! Nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to the names of Leith’s railway stations!
If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.
These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur
#NowAndThen #CaledonianRailway #Caley #EdinburghDalkeithRailway #NorthBritishRailway #RailwayStations #Railways #transport #Transportation #Written2019
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The thread about the baffling naming of Leith railway stations; know your North Leith from your Leith North; which South Leith is which and whether Leith Walk West or Leith Walk East is westmost!
This thread was originally written and published in September 2019.
We went to visit Trinity House expecting to find some treasures of Leith maritime history, but we were surprised to find some local railway history hidden round the back too, a bench from South Leith Railway Station which closed way, way back in 1903.
South Leith station benchSo let’s go on a little #NowAndThen visual trip down memory lane to South Leith station. The view is taken from Constitution Street looking east along the trackbed, what is now Tower Street. The tall remnant of buildings behind were part of the first Leith gas works, before they moved to Granton with the Edinburgh gas works. The station building is on the right, with the single platform behind it.
Original source: Kenneth G. Williamson on FlickrThis was the first railway station in Leith, and was originally named as such when it opened in 1832 as an extension of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway. This line ran from St. Leonards in Edinburgh to Midlothian, Leith being accessed by a reverse junction near Niddrie. This was the so-called “Innocent Railway“, in Scotch Gauge of 4ft 6in and horse drawn throughout. Looking the other way towards the Shore (and a prime example of that dreadful noughties architectural fad for oversized and inappropriate corner rotundas) we see Leith’s old Tower in the distance down Tower Street. Notice that the railway was not quite aligned with the modern Tower Street, but parallel. This continuation of the line beyond Constitution Street gave access to the east side of the port and its industries.
Original source: Kenneth G. Williamson on Flickr.The station was on the sea front when it was built, with Leith Sands beyond and the high tide line beyond that. The railway providing a new boundary between land and shore as Leith crept northwards into the Forth. This station was handy for the Shore, where the steamers left from at the time, but was quickly swallowed up by seaward extensions of the docks and became increasingly inconveniently positioned. In 1845 the North British Railway bought over the Edinburgh & Dalkeith and set about converting their new possession into standard gauge and steam power. However, they were not interested in passenger traffic here – it was routes South from Edinburgh that had caused them to buy the E&DR – and closed South Leith to passengers in 1846. The line remained open for dock traffic, always it’s primary purpose as it had been built as a direct connection to the Midlothian Coalfield.
OS 1849 Town Plan. Tower Street (blue), Constitution Street (yellow) and South Leith Station (orange)The naming of Leith’s railway stations was always a bit confusing. For a relatively small place, it had a lot of various stations and they were often duplicated due to the competing nature of the North British (NBR) and Caledonian Railways (CR), who fought petulantly with each other for access to the lucrative docks and industrial traffic. To add confusion, when most of these stations were first named, Leith was two distinct municipal parishes; South Leith and North Leith. These are ancient names, referring to the banks of the river of Water of Leith on which they lie, geographically they are more east and westerly of one and other than south and northerly. At various times there were stations called Leith, Leith Central, South Leith, North Leith, Leith North, Leith Citadel, Leith East, Leith Walk, Leith Walk West and Leith Walk East! (And that’s not counting those stations in the Leith boundaries which don’t have “Leith” in their name.)
An animated timeline of railways and railway stations in Leith, from 1830 – 1990. Dock, mineral and private sidings omitted for clarity. © SelfThe next station to open in Leith was North Leith in 1846. It was opened as a branch of the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway, which ran from Canal Street Station (at right angles to the present day Waverley), through the Scotland Street Tunnel to Trinity and on to a rail ferry at Granton Docks. The NBR bought this railway too in 1862 and experimented with calling the station variously Leith Citadel or Leith North, before settling back on North Leith. They re-opened the old Edinburgh & Dalkeith Leith station in 1859 as a single platform called South Leith.
The next arrival was that of the Caledonian Railway, who opened a station called Leith in 1869 on a rather circuitous line around the North and West of the city from Princes Street Station via Roseburn and Newhaven. It would be renamed North Leith in 1903. To get around the confusion of two rival North Leith stations being a few hundred metres from each other on the same street, most maps stuck with Leith for the Caley station and North Leith for the NBR. To locals it would just have been the Caley and North British stations.
Railway Stations of Leith on the NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThe North Leith muddles would be solved in 1947 when the ex-NBR station, by now 24 years in the LNER grouping, was closed to passenger traffic. Rather pointlessly, 5 years later the ex-Caley North Leith was renamed Leith North, and the ex-NBR North Leith goods station once again became Leith Citadel!
The renaming of the Caley station was not the only change on the Leith railway map in 1903; this was the year the North British opened their (far too) vast station at Leith Central – which of course was well to the south of South Leith… It’s arrival resulted in the closure of the latter station for the second and final time. Leith Central was on a fairly short branch from Waverley via Abbeyhill, but could never match the electric tramway on speed, frequency, convenience and on proximity to destinations, so it always struggled for patronage. Leith Central was the last major railway terminus built in Scotland, and had a short life, closing in 1952 after a fairly unintense life. It had been built more as a symbol of the NBR‘s dominance and a blocker to the Caley opening a passenger station in the centre of Leith than anything else.
Leith Central Station at the bottom. NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThose grand Caley plans were the Leith New Lines, a very expensive and winding route around Leith to connect the eastern and western sides of the Docks. Large goods stations were opened at Bonnington, Leith Walk, Restalrig and South Leith; where it caused confusion with the NBR South Leith goods station. The Caley had wanted to provide passenger stations too; the platforms and some other structures for these were actually built, at Victoria Park in Trinity and above street level on Leith Walk on the Gordon Street railway arches. After Leith Walk, the intention was a costly branch to Princes Street station from a junction near Lochend via tunnels under Calton Hill and cut-and-cover tunnelling of Princes Street itself. None of these plans came to fruition though, the NBR‘s massive Leith Central meant it would have been a costly folly (which Leith Central admittedly also was).
The Leith New Lines. NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThe two parallel, neighbouring South Leith Goods stations of the NBR and Caley happily co-existed side-by-side into the 1950s, when British Railway in their wisdom renamed the ex-NBR station Leith South and ex-CR station Leith East. The latter closed in the 1970s, the former lasted into the 1990s, its yard (South Leith Yard) is still technically in use, but has not seen any traffic in the best part of 10 years.
The last set of Leith-named stations were those of Leith Walk – none of which are actually in Leith by any definition later than the 18th century! Leith Walk passenger station was opened by the NBR in 1869 when they built a diversionary line from Waverley station to Trinity via Abbeyhill to avoid the awkward Scotland Street tunnel. Passenger stations were added along the line, including where it passed under Leith Walk at Shrubhill. An enormous goods yard was provided on the east side of the Walk. When the Caley opened their Leith New Lines in 1903, they also provided a goods yard for Leith Walk, further to the north. Both were called Leith Walk (goods) so inevitably were referred to as the North British or Caley to differentiate them.
The Leith Walk. NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThe passenger station closed in 1930, another victim of competition from the electric tramway. After nationalisation, the ever wise British Railways decided to rationalise matters and renamed the ex-NBR station Leith Walk East and the ex-Caley station Leith Walk West. This makes perfect sense in principle to a naming committee in a far off office, except it results in Leith Walk East being more westerly than Leith Walk West on account of Leith Walk not running on a true north-south axis! Nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to the names of Leith’s railway stations!
If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.
These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur
#NowAndThen #CaledonianRailway #Caley #EdinburghDalkeithRailway #NorthBritishRailway #RailwayStations #Railways #transport #Transportation #Written2019
-
The thread about the baffling naming of Leith railway stations; know your North Leith from your Leith North; which South Leith is which and whether Leith Walk West or Leith Walk East is westmost!
This thread was originally written and published in September 2019.
We went to visit Trinity House expecting to find some treasures of Leith maritime history, but we were surprised to find some local railway history hidden round the back too, a bench from South Leith Railway Station which closed way, way back in 1903.
South Leith station benchSo let’s go on a little #NowAndThen visual trip down memory lane to South Leith station. The view is taken from Constitution Street looking east along the trackbed, what is now Tower Street. The tall remnant of buildings behind were part of the first Leith gas works, before they moved to Granton with the Edinburgh gas works. The station building is on the right, with the single platform behind it.
Original source: Kenneth G. Williamson on FlickrThis was the first railway station in Leith, and was originally named as such when it opened in 1832 as an extension of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway. This line ran from St. Leonards in Edinburgh to Midlothian, Leith being accessed by a reverse junction near Niddrie. This was the so-called “Innocent Railway“, in Scotch Gauge of 4ft 6in and horse drawn throughout. Looking the other way towards the Shore (and a prime example of that dreadful noughties architectural fad for oversized and inappropriate corner rotundas) we see Leith’s old Tower in the distance down Tower Street. Notice that the railway was not quite aligned with the modern Tower Street, but parallel. This continuation of the line beyond Constitution Street gave access to the east side of the port and its industries.
Original source: Kenneth G. Williamson on Flickr.The station was on the sea front when it was built, with Leith Sands beyond and the high tide line beyond that. The railway providing a new boundary between land and shore as Leith crept northwards into the Forth. This station was handy for the Shore, where the steamers left from at the time, but was quickly swallowed up by seaward extensions of the docks and became increasingly inconveniently positioned. In 1845 the North British Railway bought over the Edinburgh & Dalkeith and set about converting their new possession into standard gauge and steam power. However, they were not interested in passenger traffic here – it was routes South from Edinburgh that had caused them to buy the E&DR – and closed South Leith to passengers in 1846. The line remained open for dock traffic, always it’s primary purpose as it had been built as a direct connection to the Midlothian Coalfield.
OS 1849 Town Plan. Tower Street (blue), Constitution Street (yellow) and South Leith Station (orange)The naming of Leith’s railway stations was always a bit confusing. For a relatively small place, it had a lot of various stations and they were often duplicated due to the competing nature of the North British (NBR) and Caledonian Railways (CR), who fought petulantly with each other for access to the lucrative docks and industrial traffic. To add confusion, when most of these stations were first named, Leith was two distinct municipal parishes; South Leith and North Leith. These are ancient names, referring to the banks of the river of Water of Leith on which they lie, geographically they are more east and westerly of one and other than south and northerly. At various times there were stations called Leith, Leith Central, South Leith, North Leith, Leith North, Leith Citadel, Leith East, Leith Walk, Leith Walk West and Leith Walk East! (And that’s not counting those stations in the Leith boundaries which don’t have “Leith” in their name.)
An animated timeline of railways and railway stations in Leith, from 1830 – 1990. Dock, mineral and private sidings omitted for clarity. © SelfThe next station to open in Leith was North Leith in 1846. It was opened as a branch of the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway, which ran from Canal Street Station (at right angles to the present day Waverley), through the Scotland Street Tunnel to Trinity and on to a rail ferry at Granton Docks. The NBR bought this railway too in 1862 and experimented with calling the station variously Leith Citadel or Leith North, before settling back on North Leith. They re-opened the old Edinburgh & Dalkeith Leith station in 1859 as a single platform called South Leith.
The next arrival was that of the Caledonian Railway, who opened a station called Leith in 1869 on a rather circuitous line around the North and West of the city from Princes Street Station via Roseburn and Newhaven. It would be renamed North Leith in 1903. To get around the confusion of two rival North Leith stations being a few hundred metres from each other on the same street, most maps stuck with Leith for the Caley station and North Leith for the NBR. To locals it would just have been the Caley and North British stations.
Railway Stations of Leith on the NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThe North Leith muddles would be solved in 1947 when the ex-NBR station, by now 24 years in the LNER grouping, was closed to passenger traffic. Rather pointlessly, 5 years later the ex-Caley North Leith was renamed Leith North, and the ex-NBR North Leith goods station once again became Leith Citadel!
The renaming of the Caley station was not the only change on the Leith railway map in 1903; this was the year the North British opened their (far too) vast station at Leith Central – which of course was well to the south of South Leith… It’s arrival resulted in the closure of the latter station for the second and final time. Leith Central was on a fairly short branch from Waverley via Abbeyhill, but could never match the electric tramway on speed, frequency, convenience and on proximity to destinations, so it always struggled for patronage. Leith Central was the last major railway terminus built in Scotland, and had a short life, closing in 1952 after a fairly unintense life. It had been built more as a symbol of the NBR‘s dominance and a blocker to the Caley opening a passenger station in the centre of Leith than anything else.
Leith Central Station at the bottom. NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThose grand Caley plans were the Leith New Lines, a very expensive and winding route around Leith to connect the eastern and western sides of the Docks. Large goods stations were opened at Bonnington, Leith Walk, Restalrig and South Leith; where it caused confusion with the NBR South Leith goods station. The Caley had wanted to provide passenger stations too; the platforms and some other structures for these were actually built, at Victoria Park in Trinity and above street level on Leith Walk on the Gordon Street railway arches. After Leith Walk, the intention was a costly branch to Princes Street station from a junction near Lochend via tunnels under Calton Hill and cut-and-cover tunnelling of Princes Street itself. None of these plans came to fruition though, the NBR‘s massive Leith Central meant it would have been a costly folly (which Leith Central admittedly also was).
The Leith New Lines. NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThe two parallel, neighbouring South Leith Goods stations of the NBR and Caley happily co-existed side-by-side into the 1950s, when British Railway in their wisdom renamed the ex-NBR station Leith South and ex-CR station Leith East. The latter closed in the 1970s, the former lasted into the 1990s, its yard (South Leith Yard) is still technically in use, but has not seen any traffic in the best part of 10 years.
The last set of Leith-named stations were those of Leith Walk – none of which are actually in Leith by any definition later than the 18th century! Leith Walk passenger station was opened by the NBR in 1869 when they built a diversionary line from Waverley station to Trinity via Abbeyhill to avoid the awkward Scotland Street tunnel. Passenger stations were added along the line, including where it passed under Leith Walk at Shrubhill. An enormous goods yard was provided on the east side of the Walk. When the Caley opened their Leith New Lines in 1903, they also provided a goods yard for Leith Walk, further to the north. Both were called Leith Walk (goods) so inevitably were referred to as the North British or Caley to differentiate them.
The Leith Walk. NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThe passenger station closed in 1930, another victim of competition from the electric tramway. After nationalisation, the ever wise British Railways decided to rationalise matters and renamed the ex-NBR station Leith Walk East and the ex-Caley station Leith Walk West. This makes perfect sense in principle to a naming committee in a far off office, except it results in Leith Walk East being more westerly than Leith Walk West on account of Leith Walk not running on a true north-south axis! Nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to the names of Leith’s railway stations!
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The thread about the baffling naming of Leith railway stations; know your North Leith from your Leith North; which South Leith is which and whether Leith Walk West or Leith Walk East is westmost!
This thread was originally written and published in September 2019.
We went to visit Trinity House expecting to find some treasures of Leith maritime history, but we were surprised to find some local railway history hidden round the back too, a bench from South Leith Railway Station which closed way, way back in 1903.
South Leith station benchSo let’s go on a little #NowAndThen visual trip down memory lane to South Leith station. The view is taken from Constitution Street looking east along the trackbed, what is now Tower Street. The tall remnant of buildings behind were part of the first Leith gas works, before they moved to Granton with the Edinburgh gas works. The station building is on the right, with the single platform behind it.
Original source: Kenneth G. Williamson on FlickrThis was the first railway station in Leith, and was originally named as such when it opened in 1832 as an extension of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway. This line ran from St. Leonards in Edinburgh to Midlothian, Leith being accessed by a reverse junction near Niddrie. This was the so-called “Innocent Railway“, in Scotch Gauge of 4ft 6in and horse drawn throughout. Looking the other way towards the Shore (and a prime example of that dreadful noughties architectural fad for oversized and inappropriate corner rotundas) we see Leith’s old Tower in the distance down Tower Street. Notice that the railway was not quite aligned with the modern Tower Street, but parallel. This continuation of the line beyond Constitution Street gave access to the east side of the port and its industries.
Original source: Kenneth G. Williamson on Flickr.The station was on the sea front when it was built, with Leith Sands beyond and the high tide line beyond that. The railway providing a new boundary between land and shore as Leith crept northwards into the Forth. This station was handy for the Shore, where the steamers left from at the time, but was quickly swallowed up by seaward extensions of the docks and became increasingly inconveniently positioned. In 1845 the North British Railway bought over the Edinburgh & Dalkeith and set about converting their new possession into standard gauge and steam power. However, they were not interested in passenger traffic here – it was routes South from Edinburgh that had caused them to buy the E&DR – and closed South Leith to passengers in 1846. The line remained open for dock traffic, always it’s primary purpose as it had been built as a direct connection to the Midlothian Coalfield.
OS 1849 Town Plan. Tower Street (blue), Constitution Street (yellow) and South Leith Station (orange)The naming of Leith’s railway stations was always a bit confusing. For a relatively small place, it had a lot of various stations and they were often duplicated due to the competing nature of the North British (NBR) and Caledonian Railways (CR), who fought petulantly with each other for access to the lucrative docks and industrial traffic. To add confusion, when most of these stations were first named, Leith was two distinct municipal parishes; South Leith and North Leith. These are ancient names, referring to the banks of the river of Water of Leith on which they lie, geographically they are more east and westerly of one and other than south and northerly. At various times there were stations called Leith, Leith Central, South Leith, North Leith, Leith North, Leith Citadel, Leith East, Leith Walk, Leith Walk West and Leith Walk East! (And that’s not counting those stations in the Leith boundaries which don’t have “Leith” in their name.)
An animated timeline of railways and railway stations in Leith, from 1830 – 1990. Dock, mineral and private sidings omitted for clarity. © SelfThe next station to open in Leith was North Leith in 1846. It was opened as a branch of the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway, which ran from Canal Street Station (at right angles to the present day Waverley), through the Scotland Street Tunnel to Trinity and on to a rail ferry at Granton Docks. The NBR bought this railway too in 1862 and experimented with calling the station variously Leith Citadel or Leith North, before settling back on North Leith. They re-opened the old Edinburgh & Dalkeith Leith station in 1859 as a single platform called South Leith.
The next arrival was that of the Caledonian Railway, who opened a station called Leith in 1869 on a rather circuitous line around the North and West of the city from Princes Street Station via Roseburn and Newhaven. It would be renamed North Leith in 1903. To get around the confusion of two rival North Leith stations being a few hundred metres from each other on the same street, most maps stuck with Leith for the Caley station and North Leith for the NBR. To locals it would just have been the Caley and North British stations.
Railway Stations of Leith on the NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThe North Leith muddles would be solved in 1947 when the ex-NBR station, by now 24 years in the LNER grouping, was closed to passenger traffic. Rather pointlessly, 5 years later the ex-Caley North Leith was renamed Leith North, and the ex-NBR North Leith goods station once again became Leith Citadel!
The renaming of the Caley station was not the only change on the Leith railway map in 1903; this was the year the North British opened their (far too) vast station at Leith Central – which of course was well to the south of South Leith… It’s arrival resulted in the closure of the latter station for the second and final time. Leith Central was on a fairly short branch from Waverley via Abbeyhill, but could never match the electric tramway on speed, frequency, convenience and on proximity to destinations, so it always struggled for patronage. Leith Central was the last major railway terminus built in Scotland, and had a short life, closing in 1952 after a fairly unintense life. It had been built more as a symbol of the NBR‘s dominance and a blocker to the Caley opening a passenger station in the centre of Leith than anything else.
Leith Central Station at the bottom. NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThose grand Caley plans were the Leith New Lines, a very expensive and winding route around Leith to connect the eastern and western sides of the Docks. Large goods stations were opened at Bonnington, Leith Walk, Restalrig and South Leith; where it caused confusion with the NBR South Leith goods station. The Caley had wanted to provide passenger stations too; the platforms and some other structures for these were actually built, at Victoria Park in Trinity and above street level on Leith Walk on the Gordon Street railway arches. After Leith Walk, the intention was a costly branch to Princes Street station from a junction near Lochend via tunnels under Calton Hill and cut-and-cover tunnelling of Princes Street itself. None of these plans came to fruition though, the NBR‘s massive Leith Central meant it would have been a costly folly (which Leith Central admittedly also was).
The Leith New Lines. NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThe two parallel, neighbouring South Leith Goods stations of the NBR and Caley happily co-existed side-by-side into the 1950s, when British Railway in their wisdom renamed the ex-NBR station Leith South and ex-CR station Leith East. The latter closed in the 1970s, the former lasted into the 1990s, its yard (South Leith Yard) is still technically in use, but has not seen any traffic in the best part of 10 years.
The last set of Leith-named stations were those of Leith Walk – none of which are actually in Leith by any definition later than the 18th century! Leith Walk passenger station was opened by the NBR in 1869 when they built a diversionary line from Waverley station to Trinity via Abbeyhill to avoid the awkward Scotland Street tunnel. Passenger stations were added along the line, including where it passed under Leith Walk at Shrubhill. An enormous goods yard was provided on the east side of the Walk. When the Caley opened their Leith New Lines in 1903, they also provided a goods yard for Leith Walk, further to the north. Both were called Leith Walk (goods) so inevitably were referred to as the North British or Caley to differentiate them.
The Leith Walk. NBR (olive) and CR (blue) railways, later the LNER and LMS © SelfThe passenger station closed in 1930, another victim of competition from the electric tramway. After nationalisation, the ever wise British Railways decided to rationalise matters and renamed the ex-NBR station Leith Walk East and the ex-Caley station Leith Walk West. This makes perfect sense in principle to a naming committee in a far off office, except it results in Leith Walk East being more westerly than Leith Walk West on account of Leith Walk not running on a true north-south axis! Nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to the names of Leith’s railway stations!
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Coastal Evolution: the thread about a view of Leith’s disappearing Sands and their industrial past
It’s not easy to get your head around where the shoreline was in Leith at a given time, the natural coast has been altered beyond all recognition by human activity in the last 500 years. Slowly and gradually at first, and then it marched northwards into the Forth in ever-expanding dock building activity in the 19th and first half of the 20th century. The best way to visualise it is, naturally, with a visualisation.
The animated evolution of the shoreline at Leith, quoting source maps. © Self.The earliest view showing the shoreline and Leith Sands that I can think of is a beautiful sketch by John Slezer made around 1693. The sands are on the right where the figures are; notice that already by this stage there is a prominent and solid masonry breakwater. This defends the Timberbush from the sea. From the French word Bourse – for exchange – this was where imported timber was sorted, stored and traded. The stacks of timber can be seen and as this was a very valuable commodity, and the principal import source for Scotland, it had to be defended from nature. The harbour pier is a mixture of stone, turning into timber. The buildings of the Shore are on the left, the prominent tower belonging to the King’s Wark, which was brought down not long after this picture was made.
The Piere of Lieth by John Slezer, 1693. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.One hundred and fifty years after John Slezer’s sketch was made, Dominic Serres painted the scene. Here the artist is positioned alongside the pier, looking south towards the Shore with the Tower of the “Windmill” at its head. We can see that the pier itself has been reinforced in a rather ramshackle manner by timers and masonry. Small boats have been brought ashore, with the catch of the day being sold directly to assembled hawkers on the sands. And in he foreground we see a supply of timber; it was the old custom to float it ashore on the tides before storing it in the Timber Bush. Leith Sands ran off to the left (east) from here.
“Back of the Old Leith Pier”, Dominic Serres, 1855. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.While today the shoreline of Leith is almost entirely concrete and boulder breakwaters, with the little strip of sand strictly off limits behind the Dock security fences, it was not always this way.
Leith’s modern shoreline. A sad and now inaccessible industrial wasteland. “Leith Docks, Perimiter Road, Kate Downie, 1985. © Edinburgh City Art CentreOne hundred and fifty years prior to this, this spectacular 1886 photo by Begbie (no, not that one, I mean Thomas Vernon Begbie) shows the palisade retaining wall on the sands, formed to level the ground behind for the coming of the Edinburgh & Dalkeith Railway to South Leith in 1835. On the left we see the industrial chimneys and kilns of the glass manufactory, gas works and chemical works.
Thomas Vernon Begbie, 1886, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.It’s actually two photos, intended to make a panorama, and each was taken stereoscopically. I’ve joined them together and put them through a colourising app. Now, I usually avoid these apps as a matter of principle but on this occasion there is an obvious benefit in helping the features we see stand out.
Thomas Vernon Begbie, 1886, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.Let’s take a look up closer. On the left we can see the glass bottle kilns or “cones” of the Edinburgh and Leith Glassworks. Glassmaking arrived in Leith with the English occupation by Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate in the 1650s, establishing itself in the Citadel of that force. It really got going a century later when it moved across the river to South Leith. Beyond are the chimneys of the Leith Gas Works and the row of vertical tubes which were the condensers. The light coloured building on the right of those is the passenger building of South Leith Station. The various sidings for the goods yard fan off to the right.
Industries. Thomas Vernon Begbie, 1886, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.In the middle, the proud looking fellow in his pale work clothes and a waist coat stands amongst the shoreline rocks and the whins. Note that the chemicals used in camera plates at this time were often insensitive to certain blues, and working clothes often come out looking pure white but were more likely to have been pale blue-grey denims. We see the Tower down on the Shore on the left, peeping out between the chimneys. By this time it was used as a signal station for communicating with ships entering the port, the masts of which can be seen in the distance. Behind our fellow are the goods sheds, timber sheds, railway wagons etc. of the busy dockland. Another group pose behind the palisade on his left.
Poser. Thomas Vernon Begbie, 1886, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.To the right we see a family picnicking amongst the whins – this scrubby, bushy coastal rough ground of coastal grasses and gorse were the natural flora of the shoreline. Children, squatting down, are scratching about in the sand on the right. In the distance,”bathing machines” make their ponderous way in and out of the sea in the middle ground, and further away still is the dock breakwater and Martello Tower. The smudge of smoke might at first suggest that there is an occupant in the tower, but it was likely never armed or garrisoned at this time, and it’s probably a passing steamship.
Bathers on the sands. Thomas Vernon Begbie, 1886, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.The people of Leith have a long history of using the sands for leisure. The annual highlight of the Leith year (and a fixture in the Scottish calendar) was the Leith Races, which you can read about on their own thread.
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Causewayside Public School: the thread about the epicentre of a very sectarian Southside scandal
Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (1872-1918) have for some reason a particular fascination for me, one which is more profound where they are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about each of the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but rapidly snowballed into an intention to cover each, in alphabetical order, on its own and in rather more detail, but not so much that they can’t be posted quite frequently.
The fourth chapter of our series looking at the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” investigates Causewayside School. In 1875 Edinburgh School Board purchased the house of Grange Villa at 140 Causewayside for £3,218 13s 11d with the intention of erecting a new school. This half acre plot was a parallelogram in shape on account of its northern boundary being defined by an old drainage ditch that cut diagonally relative to the main road. Prior to this, schooling in the district was conducted at a school run by the United Presbyterian Church on Duncan Street, which moved with that church to the corner of Salisbury Place in 1864.
An overlay of the 1876 Ordnance Survey town plan of Edinburgh (Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland) and modern Google Earth aerial imagery showing the location of Causewayside School. Note the parallelogram shape of the building plot. The UP Church can be seen to the top of the map, its school building to the rear being marked as a Sunday School. Move the slider to compareThe Board had already held a competition in 1874 to find architects for its first batch of new schools and divided the work between the most successful applicants. Causewayside was awarded to Robert Rowand Anderson, who would rise to become one of Victorian Scotland’s most notable architects. He was also awarded the work for schools at West Fountainbridge and Stockbridge and the three shared a number of design and style features (“the dimensions of the various rooms repeat to within a few inches… and the ventilating and playground arrangements are also precisely similar“) but with significant variation in the layouts to make use of three very different sites, all of which had significant constraints.
Front elevation by Robert Rowand Anderson of the Causewayside School, dated 1875. University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections, Coll-31/2/EC.74Anderson set Causewayside back from the main road and spread it across two storeys, each with a large central school room with two smaller classrooms on either side at the rear, giving a roughly cruciform footprint. There was a single large gable projecting forwards whereas at Stockbridge (below) there was one on each flank. His early work designing churches translated easily to the Collegiate Gothic style much in favour at the time for schools except now the “steeples” did not contain bells, but hid an Archimedes screw ventilator to promote good air circulation through the buildings.
Stockbridge Primary School by Robert Rowand Anderson, sharing many design features with Causewayside. CC-by-SA 4.0, Drnoble via WikimediaThe construction contract was worth £7,974 11s 0d and work commenced in late June 1875. Progress by January 1876 was reported as “slow” but by June was “well advanced“. Although it was to be completed for 1st December that year opening did not happen until 9th January 1877. The chairman of the School Board, Professor Calderwood, performed the honours and at this time already 500 of its 600 spaces had been subscribed to.
Rear (left) and north side (right) elevations of Causewayside School, dated 1875. The pair of blocks to the back housed stairs, toilets and offices on intermediate floors, hence the extra sets of windows. University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections, Coll-31/2/EC.74An inspection in its second year of operation reported favourably on the quality of teaching at the school:
Report of HM Inspectors on the Edinburgh Board Schools for Session 1878-79.
Causewayside School.
Mixed School. — An extremely good tone pervaded this School, and the class movements were very orderly. As regards the work of the three lower Standards, some weakness appeared in the spelling and intelligence of the third Standard, but everything else was most satisfactory. Of the upper Standards, the fourth might have done rather better in arithmetic, and the fifth in composition, while both the fifth and sixth Standards answered unequally in history and geography. On the other hand, for grammar, general intelligence, and acquaintance with their specific subjects, all three Standards deserve praise. In judging of the School, it must, of course, be remembered that the staff is strong. Needlework and music are both carefully taught.
Infants’ School. — Discipline and instruction in this Department both deserve the highest praise. It is evident that the Mistress and her Staff exercise a most beneficial influence alike in quickening the intelligence and in regulating the behaviour of their young pupils.
A subsequent inspection in February 1885 by the local Superintendent, Colonel Campbell, “complained strongly” about the drawing examination at the school; the children were using their pencils as a measuring gauge when doing freehand work and that they were placing lined pages beneath their drawing paper as a further guide. The teacher protested that this was how she had been taught to draw but the Colonel demanded that the exam be cancelled: the matter was not dropped until representations in defence from both the Headmaster and Flora Stevenson of the School Board.
Flora Stevenson, a redoubtable figure on the Edinburgh School Board and in the Suffrage movement. 1895 photograph by G. Watson, from the Edinburgh & Scottish Collection of Edinburgh City Libraries.In common with the first wave of schools that the Board built, Causewayside was really too small to cope with demand and already by October 1878 it was over capacity, with 638 pupils. By 1883 it was so oversubscribed that an extension for 200 further children was authorised, widening the front of the building to the same width as the rear to add additional classrooms. In 1894 a further extension was approved but by the following year there were 250 vacant spaces on account of the recent opening in the district of Sciennes School. By 1901 the school was once again reported to be suffering form overcrowding – this was still a time of urban population growth.
1893 Ordnance Survey town plan centred on Causewayside School, with the original footprint (orange) drawn over the extended footprint which added additional classrooms either side at the front. The wall across the playground was to separate girls from boys, the structures with dotted outlines on the left (west) side being open play sheds. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandLocated as it was between the Grange and Newington, you could be forgiven for thinking this school as being in a middle-class catchment. However, like most Board schools at this time, it drew its intake largely from the working classes and its pupils were subject to a life in the harsh social environment of Edinburgh at this time. In a court case in February 1884 Helen Dick, or Taylor, was brought before Sheriff Rutherfurd and charged with “failing to provide elementary education for her children and also with failing to secure their regular attendance at school“. She told the court that “she could not do more than she had done” for her two children – Jessie (10) and George (8) – her husband had abandoned the family 6 years prior and to support them she worked anti-social hours at a laundry. She had to leave early in the morning and was not allowed to return home to wake her children and get them ready for school, so they inevitably did not go. The Sheriff ordered that they be made to go to school at Causewayside. Another example comes from an 1896 meeting of the School Board which heard that of the 722 children at the school only 21 had baths in their homes. 71 boys and six girls reported that they went – occasionally – to the Corporation baths to wash. In 1901, it was estimated in 1901 that 15 percent of the juvenile department of the school were working after their school day to help support their families.
Causewayside children, 1927, at Grange Court. The tall building with the Gothic window in the background is the UP Church where the Causewayside School was located prior to the opening of the Board school. Photograph by John Smith, via Edinburgh City Libraries.In 1905 the headmaster, Robert Mathewson, retired owing to ill health after 20 years in service. He was briefly replaced by James Clark, promoted from St Leonard’s Public School, who soon returned to the latter institution as its head to be replaced in turn by Thomas W. Paterson of North Canongate. Paterson had begun his career in 1879 at Causewayside and remained there until retiring in 1922 after 51 years in the profession, the pupils and parents presenting him with the gift of a typewriter for the occasion.
On October 1st 1913, pupils from Causewayside joined their compatriots from Davie Street, St Leonard’s and South Bridge in a spontaneous protest march through the district, a rumour having spread through the streets that they were to begin attending school on Saturday Mornings.
Evening schooling began at Causewayside only a month after it opened, when the Edinburgh School of Cookery was allowed by the School Board to run courses here which were open to the general public. This became known as Continuation Schooling; continuation of education for those who had left school (at 14) but had not qualified for a Higher Grade school (or could not afford to go to one). Causewayside became the principal such school for young women and girls in the city, offering both basic academic subjects and practical classes focussing on employable skills – cookery, millinery, laundrywork, dressmaking and needlework. While these classes were not free, in 1915 a term cost 5 shillings, an excellent attendance record could result in the fees being reimbursed. Completion of these classes could qualify women for the Edinburgh School of Cookery and Domestic Economy, where employers provided bursaries. In 1915, 177 pupils earned the return of their fees and forty qualified for the School of Cookery. Headmaster Paterson of Causewayside wrote to the editor of the Scotsman in 1917 that continuation classes were “to the better equipment for life’s battle for those children who leave school at 14 years of age without passing the qualifying examination.”
Advert for Edinburgh School Board’s Continuation Classes, including Causewayside, Musselburgh News, 21st September 1906An almighty brouhaha erupted at Causewayside in 1925 when the Education Authority announced plans to close the school, transfer its pupils to other nearby schools, and re-open it as a Roman Catholic school. The background is complex but stemmed from the fact that R. C. schooling in Scotland was not transferred from that church to the state until 1918 at which point the newly formed Education Authorities inherited a rather poor portfolio of school premises. Few, if any, of these had been purpose-built and almost none were really fit for purpose; St. Columba’s R. C. School, which served the Southside, was teaching 291 children (with a waiting list of 27) in a totally inadequate converted town house at 81 Newington Road. Causewayside’s school roll had slumped after WW1 due to urban depopulation and with only 321 children at less than half its capacity. The authority’s bean-counters were convinced that Sciennes, Preston Street and Bristo schools could comfortably accommodate Causewayside as they too had falling rolls and that nobody would have a problem with making the most economical use of their buildings.
81 Newington Road, former St Columba’s R. C. School.How wrong they were! Edinburgh, in case you didn’t know, was a hot-bed of radical, anti-Catholic political Protestantism in the first half of the 20th century and the nascent Scottish Protestant League, led by the rabble-rouser Alexander Ratcliffe, went all in on trying to use the school proposal as a wedge issue in their efforts to repeal the provisions of the Education (Scotland) Act 1918 that saw the state obliged to provide non-secular R. C. schooling. You can read the full details of the vitriolic campaign that they orchestrated to oppose this change in the thread about the Sciennes School Strike of 1925. Suffice to say, the Education Authority was unmoved by the accusations it was handing over a “Protestant school to the Roman Catholics” and “putting Rome on the Rates” in “the city of Knox“. It maintained its position that it had a legal obligation to meet and that its only other option was to build a new school in its entirety – which would add even further to the tax burden of the local rates! And so it was that Causewayside School closed at the end of the 1923-24 term and re-opened after the summer holidays as St Columba’s R. C. School.
Pupils and teacher nun of St. Columba’s R. C. School in 1925, the year after they moved – controversially – to Causewayside. Copy of photograph in “St Columba’s Edinburgh, Centenary Year” by Mark Dilworth OSB for St Columba’s Centenary Committee, 1989The Continuation School was unaffected by all this, a matter quietly and conveniently overlooked by those claiming the school was being “given” to the Catholic Church! The Scottish Protestant League were still publicly and vocally agitating against St Columba’s, well into 1925 – until the focus of their ire was drawn to the opening of a Carmelite Convent in Merchiston in September.
As St. Columba’s the school also became a Supplementary School, i.e. for children over the elementary age of 11 and below the leave age of 14 and who were not in High School education; what we might now call a Secondary School. It took children from other R. C. primaries in the city; St Mary’s on York Lane, St Patrick’s on St John’s Hill, St Ann’s in the Cowgate, St Peter’s in Morningside and St Ignatius’ at Tollcross, adding 300 students and 9 teachers to the school. This brought the school to over 600 pupils, but the effects of depopulation soon began to take their toll and by 1938 it had dropped to 409. There were only 190 children in the elementary department and so the following year it was closed, the pupils displaced to those other R. C. schools, and the girls’ supplementary department transferred to St Thomas of Aquin’s at Lauriston. St Columba’s was to be converted and expanded into a dedicated junior secondary school for boys aged 12 to 14 and the Education Committee authorised expenditure for this scheme. This coincided with the outbreak of WW2 and so no work ever took place. Evacuation caused a further drop in the remaining school roll, part of the school was requisitioned by the Auxiliary Fire Service and the remainder suffered from a lack of coal which caused the heating to stop working, pipes and toilets to freeze and then flooding when they thawed. In February 1940 the authorities called it quits and the remaining 150 boys were sent to other schools and it was closed permanently.
This was not the end for the building though and it was given a new lease of life by converting it into an emergency cooking centre, the work undertaken by John Kelly & Son (Kitchen Engineers) Ltd of Rose Street. What became “the largest kitchen in Edinburgh“, capable of cooking 10,000 meals at a time, was intended to help feed the populace in the event of a catastrophic air raid. Fortunately it was never required for this purpose and so was transferred to the Education Committee in 1942 as a central kitchen for producing school meals. Together with the existing centre at the former West Fountainbridge School, together they could produce 9,000 two course lunches daily, sufficient for every child in the city who wanted one. Its official opening took place on Friday 11th September, when Thomas Johnston MP, Secretary of State for Scotland, made a speech imploring the nation to double its consumption of home-grown oatmeal and potatoes. He also announced that school cookery classes would now focus on these ingredients and local and national schools competitions for their use.
Thomas Johnston in 1955 when chairman of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, by Sir Herbert James Gunn. © artist’s estate, via National Galleries Scotland.Closure of the Causewayside centre was proposed in 1952, both as an economy measure and also reflecting the fact that most schools now had their own kitchen facilities. Newspaper adverts from 1955 record the disposal of its cooking equipment to the highest bidders.
Adverts for staff at the Causewayside Cooking Centre. Edinburgh Evening News, 25th May 1943After this it lay vacant for a decade until in 1965 the newly formed Scottish Certificate of Education Examination Board (SCEEB) acquired and demolished it as a location for its new headquarters. A modern, three storey, brutalist office block by Alan Reiach & Eric Hall was built in its place, the only notable feature of an otherwise unremarkable building being an abstract concrete panel over the entrance by Charles Anderson. This includes the crest of the Board and their motto In Trutina Ponentur Eadem which, according to the Dictionary of Foreign Quotations, translates from Latin as “These Matters are to be Weighed in the Balance“. The SCEEB moved in during 1967 but lasted less than a decade, moving in 1975 to Dalkeith on account of needing more space. They were replaced in turn by the Scottish Law Commission but their coat of arms remained, the motto perhaps equally appropriate for both institutions.
Anderson’s relief above the entrance to the SCEEB buildingNo trace of the old school now remains and as of the time of writing (February 2026) the redevelopment in turn has been empty for a number of years and a full planning application for its demolition and replacement has been submitted to the Council. A previous plan for the site in 2023 was asked to consider the re-use of the sculptured panel but I the current developer has offered it as a gift to the Scottish Qualifications Authority – SQA, the spiritual successor of the SCEEB at Dalkeith. Thank you to Peter Gillett for this update on their future. The SQA of course now needs to follow through in accepting the gift and having it removed and appropriately relocated…
The previous chapter of this series looked at Castlehill School. The next chapter examines the Davie Street Schools.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
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An unlikely home for a King of France: the thread about the Palace of Holyroodhouse
This thread was originally written and published in September 2022.
Given that the Palace of Holyroodhouse was getting more attention than it is used to in the week that this thread was first written, it seemed like a good idea to take a brief delve into its history of royal residents and one who is highly remarkable but far less well remembered than others.
The Palace of Holyroodhouse, lithograph after J. D. Harding, c. 1850. CC-by-3.0 University of Edinburgh Walter Scott Image CollectionThe palace is well known to be the official residence of the British Monarch in Scotland, but that’s a role that it has only held for just over 100 years, with King George V conferring the status upon it in 1922. It’s also well known that it long served as a royal residence for the Scottish monarchy going back to medieval times, with this situation ending in 1603 when King James VI left it, Edinburgh and Scotland for London and the English throne. James was the palace’s longest term royal resident, being principally based there from his coming of age in 1579 until he left 24 years later. He had promised to return to Edinburgh every 3 years, but did not keep his word and would not return until 1617 (and then after that, never again). There is therefore a period of four centuries to be accounted for between James’ departure and George’s designation.
The young King James VI, painting by Adrian van Son from the collection in Pittencrieff House in FifeAfter James, Royal visits were infrequent. Charles I stayed here when he came to Edinburgh in 1633 for his showpiece Scottish coronation, the façade being remodelled in his honour. He returned to the palace in the turbulent year of 1641, and in 1646, conferred it to one of his principal Scottish supporters; James Hamilton, 1st Duke of Hamilton. The hereditary role of Keeper of the palace is one that the Dukes of Hamilton hold hold to this day. It was badly damaged in 1650 by the occupying troops of Oliver Cromwell after their defeat of the Scottish Army at Dunbar. The picture below shows the palace at it was in 1649 following the remodelling for Charles.
The west range of the palace drawn around 1649 by James Gordon of Rothiemay, prior to reconstruction in the 1670s.After the Restoration in 1660, repairs were made to the palace to allow it to be occupied by Charles II as required and to be a meeting place for his Scottish Privy Council. It was reconstructed between 1670-79 by and it is rumoured that funds and materials for this project were diverted towards the construction of Royston House. The King however did not intend to reside there himself, rather it was to be a seat of his power by proxy in the country, the seat of not just the Privy Council but also the residence of the Lord High Commissioner for Scotland. In 1679, this was James, Duke of Albany, the future King James VII (II of England). His daughter Anne, the future Queen Anne, was also resident with him. When James ascended to the throne in 1685, he set up a Jesuit college in the grounds. The following year he had the Protestant congregation that was worshipping in the Holyrood Abbey Kirk evicted and converted that building to a ceremonial Chapel Royal for his newly created Order of the Thistle. Both of these acts provoked outrage amongst the Edinburgh mob and in 1688 they would destroy the college and desecrate the chapel and its tombs following William of Orange’s taking of the throne.
Engraving after John Elphinstone esq. of the Palace and Abbey from the southeast around 1740. The roof of the Abbey Kirk would collapse in 1786 under its own weight. © Royal Collections Trust, RCIN 702898Following the abolition of the separate Scottish Privy Council on the Act of Union in 1707, the primary function of the palace as a centre of government ceased to be and it was increasingly turned over to grace-and-favour use by the Scottish nobility. This was interrupted briefly by a royal visit in 1745 when a certain man with claim to being a future King Charles III paid an uninvited visit – Charles Edward Stuart, better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
An imagined scene of Charles Edward Stuart holding court at Holyroodhouse during the occupation of 1745. A highly romanticised 1880 illustration by William Brassey Hole © Edinburgh City LibrariesJacobite excitement aside, for the next 100 or so years, British monarchs were uninterested in what was an increasingly decrepit old building in a bad neighbourhood in town; hemmed in on 2 sides by the increasingly undesirable tenements of the Canongate, on another by an irrigated meadow for the settling of sewage as fertiliser and all around by brewing on an industrial scale. It was not until 1822 that a reigning British monarch would visit, the first since Charles I in 1641; King George IV lodged in the far more comfortable surroundings of Dalkeith Palace, but was given a tour of the ancient seat of Royalty and held a reception there. The Palace would not begin to be rehabilitated until the reign of Queen Victoria, its resident nobility being slowly turfed out and it was gradually repaired, restored and improved. But no monarch or senior royal has made Holyrood a permanent home since James VI left over 420 years ago…
Scene Outside Holyrood Palace, the Arrival of George IV, watercolour sketch by Sir John James Stuart. CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandOr have they? When I say “no monarch or senior royal” I mean of the British royal family, because you may be surprised to learn that the palace’s 2nd longest royal resident was none other than Charles Philippe, Comte d’Artois, younger brother of King Louis XVI and later King Charles X of France! This future monarch would spend 7 years at Holyrood from 1796 to 1803 with his mistress, Louise de Polastron, following his flight from the French Revolution. When he arrived in Edinburgh, reputedly half the city turned out to welcome him, despite his wish for a low-key reception. He would find Holyrood’s legal status as a debtor’s sanctuary particularly suited to his lifestyle choices.
Charles X as Count of Artois in 1798. Portrait by Henri-Pierre DanlouxNearly thirty years later, he would return to Holyrood as the recently deposed King Charles X following the Second French Revolution, arriving in 1830 and staying this time for two years. He lived with his young grandson, Henri d’Artois, Count of Chambord and Duke of Bordeaux, who had very briefly spend a few days on the French throne as the last Bourbon king. Charles’ son Louis-Antoine, Duke of Angoulême and his wife Marie-Thérèse (who, as daughter of Louis XVI of France and Marie Antoinette was also Charles’ niece) also fled the wrath of the French republic and made their home in town, staying at 21 Regent Terrace (now 22), overlooking the palace. Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile, Duchess de Berry and sister-in-law of Louis-Antoine, lived a few doors down at number 11 (now 12) at this time.
22 Regent Terrace. CC-by-SA 4.0 SylviaStanleyWhile Edinburgh provided a safe retreat for the French royals, they reputedly found the Scots “tiresome and odd.” They kept themselves distant from their host city, snubbed offers from its institutions and despaired at the prevalence of Sabbatarianism. In turn were an object of fascination for the locals and the Scottish nobility were “astonished” by their “gastronomic powers“. City caricaturist John Kay captured Charles in 1796, walking hand in arm with Lord Adam Gordon, Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Scotland and Governor of Edinburgh Castle.
Charles as Comte d’Artois (right) and Lord Adam Gordon. Caricature by John Kay, 1796. © National Portrait Gallery, NPG D15136Charles and his family left Edinburgh for Austria on September 18th 1832, his departure being a public spectacle, as the young Henri in particular was a favourite in the city. The Scotsman reported that “white gloves, white ribbons and white favours of various kinds were worn by a large proportion of the people assembled.” Many white flags can be seen in the illustration below also, these were not a symbol of surrender, but the flag of the Bourbon restoration. The departure was from the Trinity Chain Pier on the 9AM steamer , the SS United Kingdom, from Newhaven to Hamburg, which is what can be seen in the background of the painting.
The departure of Charles X to Austria with his grandson Henri, 18 September 1832. It is probably the Duke and Duchess of Angoulême stepping out of the carriage. Painting by Charles Achille d’HardivillerCharles was now gone for good, but did leave one lasting mark upon the city from his residency. Disliking the attention he attracted from locals wherever we went, he had William Playfair include a convenient gated path through Regent Gardens to allow him to walk unmolested to hear Mass at St. Mary’s Chapel (now St. Mary’s Metropolitan Cathedral) at Picardy Place. Whether that story is apocryphal or not, there are indeed gates at both the north and south end of the western boundary of Regent Gardens and pleasant paths laid out between the two.
Regent Gardens and the western gates, marked on the 1849 OS Town Plan of Edinburgh. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
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Lady Dynamos: the thread about Edinburgh’s trailblazing women’s football team denied a sporting chance by the authorities
In April 1948, when the Edinburgh Lady Dynamos football team requested permission to play a charitable football match against an English select side at the New Meadowbank sports ground, they were denied permission by the City Corporation’s “General Purposes Committee”. When they had been allowed to play there in 1946, 17,000 spectators had turned out to watch a 2-2 draw.
Edinburgh Lady Dynamos football team, late 1940s. CC-by-SA-NC 0084-003, via Edinburgh Collected.
Back row L-R is ex-Councillor Esta Henry (Club President), Kitty Russell, Betty Rae, Agnes Whitelaw, Theresa Mulvie, goalkeeper Jessie Baillie, Nan Laurie, Babs McWhinney and Walter Caesar.
Front row L-R is Eleanor Wilson, Betty Davidson (?), Linda Clements, Mary Leslie, Bet Adamson.Councillor for Pilton, Magnus Williamson, gave a lukewarm approval “I am not an advocate of women’s football. I don’t like it, but women apparently want to play football and we have a responsibility to see women get a share of the available facilities“. He told the committee he had consulted a doctor on the matter to see “if football does women any harm.” He was “assured it does not, if indulged in moderately“. Councillor Bruce Turnbull, Morningside, simply dismissed the very idea of women playing football as “pure entertainment“; I mean imagine football being entertaining! In 1939, as chair of the Corporation’s Parks Sub-Committee, the same Councillor Turnbull moved approval of a motion to remove a subsidised rate for women to play tennis (a rate to encourage them into the game and that acknowledged their lesser financial position) saying they “required no encouragement at all” to play and were “rather proud of themselves” when they did. The only woman on the committee, Cllr. Mrs Ross, protested for the record that if “women have to pay the same as men, I would like to see them treated as equals” and excluded herself. The rest of the committee – the men – carried it 5-2, with only Labour Councillors Jack Kane and John Welch against.)
Back at the vote in 1948 Deputy Superintendent of Parks, Mr A. T. Harrison, explained that Mr George Graham, Scottish Football Association Secretary, had told them “all grounds that allowed women’s football would be banned” from hosting men’s football. The committee voted 8-4 against the Dynamos lest they lose the men’s game from Meadowbank – which Leith Athletic called home – and the income its lease brought in. Instead the women’s side were relegated to the decrepit Woods Park in Portobello, not a ground that could host the tends of thousands of fans they had proved capable of attracting. Esta Henry, the club president, addressed the crowd at Wood’s Park and alleged “there were no sportsmen in Edinburgh Town Council“, that “only three or four members of the Corporation knew anything about sport” and thought it was very unfair that women could not use a ground provided for by the ratepayers.
The Dynamos were formed in late 1945 by Mary Leslie and Lynda Clements of Leith, who decided to resuscitate a pre-war team, the Edinburgh City Girls, who had been runaway Scottish Champions (winning 19/21 games in 1937) and had toured England in the late 1930s. The City Girls had played to crowds of 30,000 and regularly thumped their opposition 7, 8 or 9 nil. Here they are, in hoops, mixed with their opposition Lothian Girls at Ettrick Park, Selkirk. Unfortunately the names are not recorded, but Leslie and Clements were in the squad.
Edinburgh City Girls, in the hooped kit, and Lothian Girls at Ettrick Park, Selkirk before a game. Perhaps there was some jersey swapping, as Mary Leslie appears to be in the middle row, 5th from the left, holding the ball in a dark top. Southern Reporter – Thursday 11 May 1939On June 17th 1939, at St. Bernard’s Park in Edinburgh, the City Girls won 5-2 infront of a crowd of 10,000 in an “International” charity match against Preston Ladies; Linda Clements scored 2 goals that day. They lost a follow-up return leg 3-0, to tie the account. The following month, the City Girls briefly became “international champions” after a mini-tournament of the 8 other womens League teams in Britain, thrashing Glasgow Ladies 7-0 at Carmuirs in Falkirk on July 6th – Linda Clements scoring a hat trick.
Mary Leslie, right, shaking hands with the Preston Ladies captain Margaret Thornborough before a friendly Scotland vs. England “international game” at Cleveland Park in Middlesborough in July 1939. This was held as a charitable game to raise funds for the North Riding Infirmary and the North Ormesby Hospital.
Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough – 12th July 1939Leslie and Clements had been inspired by the visit of Dynamo Moscow to the UK in late 1945, where the Russian team played Cardiff (thumping them 1-10), Chelsea (drew 3-3), Rangers (drew 2-2) and Arsenal (won 2-3) and took the name of the visiting side for their own. For their club president they attracted the formidable figure of Esta Henry, a well-known face in the Old Town, an eccentric and determined antiques dealer who had served as Parish and Town Councillor and had an insatiable appetite for getting involved in anything involving women, youth and organised events. Esta put her money where her mouth was too, she probably paid for the club kit and she provided the Esta Henry Trophy for the women’s competition. The Lady Dynamos had much success in the Scottish scene. When a national squad was put together for an international with England in 1948, they contributed 6 of the starting 11. That game, played at a rugby ground, was abandoned in a thunderstorm when Scotland were 5-0 down.
Edinburgh Lady Dynamos, 1946 at New Meadowbank for the first edition of the “Esta Henry Trophy” against Bolton before a 6-2 defeat. Thank you to Stuart Gibbs for assistance with this caption.
L-R, Betty Rae, N. Wilson, Eleanor Wilson, Kitty Russell, Jenny Nimmo, Babs McWhinney, Nan Nimmo, Agnes Whitelaw, Betty Davidson (Adamson), Mary Leslie, Linda Clements.
CC-by-SA-NC 0084-003, via Edinburgh Collected.In 1946, the Dynamos played Bolton Ladies at New Meadowbank for the Esta Henry Trophy, slumping to a 6-2 defeat at “home”, although they were able to hold the opposition to a 2-2 draw on the return leg in July 1947 at Bromwich. It was the 1948 return by Bolton to Edinburgh that caused controversy when they hoped to play it again at New Meadowbank. Dynamos manager Peter Farrell told the Dalkeith Advertiser he was determined they would be a match for Bolton Ladies – the best side in England – and if the latter were Arsenal then they would be Rangers. In a warm-up for the banned game with Bolton, the Dynamos played Newtongrange Bluebell – a men’s junior side – in front of a crowd of 1,500 at Victoria Park in Nitten. The rain-soaked match ended 3-3 after goals by Mary Leslie, Eleanor Wilson and a late equalising penalty by Linda Clements. When Wilson was in a position to score, her team mate yelled “Right, Eleanor! In wi’ it, hen!“, which she obligingly did.
The Dynamos in November 1946, photographed at Salford Rugby Club where they were to play Bolton Women in a charitable match to raise funds for the Salford floor relief.
Back Row L-R is Esta Henry (President), Betty Rae, Kitty Russell, Nan Nimmo, Babs McWhinney, N. Wilson, Peter Farrell (manager).
Front Row L-R is Jenny Nimmo, Agnes Whitelaw, Lynda Clements (captain), Betty Davidson, Mary Leslie, Eleanor Wilson.“Dynamo are hardy lasses and they love the game as much as most men” declared the Advertiser’s Albert McKay in a frequently patronising and sexist review of the match – which he opened with”for years I have waited to see a girl who could get her hair wet without complaint“. But McKay at least gives us some details of the squad. There was “no brighter star than centre forward Mary Leslie”. 13 year old schoolgirl Betty Davidson “a sturdy little girl with a shock of red hair” was compared with Scotland and Arsenal legend Alec James. Grace Livingston, 16, from Tranent was in goal for Dynamo. Other players included sheet metal workers Nan Wilson from Gorgie and Babs McWhinnie from Prestonpans; Kay Dunoon, a clerk from Granton; Typists Betty Rae and Effy Gray; Factory workers Linda Clements and Mary Leslie. The team was completed by schoolgirl Eleanor Wilson, 14, and Agnes Whitelaw from Dalkeith who worked for the Dobbies nursery. The side were coached by Etta Moffat and her brother Jock.
Dynamo in a kit which matches a photo taken of them in 1946.
Back row L-R, Mary Leslie, unknown, Nan Laurie, Kitty Russell, Betty Rae, unknown, unknown, Walter Caesar.
Front row L-R, Eleanor Wilson, unknown, Linda Clements, Bet Adamson, unknown
CC-by-SA-NC 0084-003, via Edinburgh Collected.The banned match was eventually played in the run-down Woods Park outside Portobello, a game which Bolton won 2-1. The Dynamos played on into the early 1950s but couldn’t persist against the official refusal to recognise them (an official “ban” which lasted in Scotland until 1974), the dwindling lack of interest shown to them and their game, and the ability to access proper facilities, match officials etc.
The driving force behind and within the Dynamos was the pair of Mary Leslie and Linda Clements. Clements has been described as one half of “two of the best Scottish players of the inter-war period” (Nancy Thomson was the other). Before the Dynamos and WW2, she played alongside Leslie for Edinburgh City Girls. Lydia, as she was Christened, was born in Rutherglen in 1918 to a coal mining family. By age 12 she was playing with a girl’s team in her native Rutherglen (often against men’s teams). Aged just 19, she left behind her family, her boyfriend and job as a curtainmaker to play professionally for the Darlington Quaker Girls, the team of Lillie Galloway. As such she is unique to be the only Scottish women’s player to transfer to England (and back again) pre-war. Clements was in a Quaker Girls team that thumped Edinburgh City Girls before Clements joined the latter.
Lydia – as she was then known – Clements, aged 19, on signing for Darlington Quaker Girls in 1937Her move was short-lived however as in April 1938 the Quaker Girls folded when too many of the team left to get married. Returning to Scotland and starting with the City Girls, Clements instantly improved that team’s fortunes. It was only after her spells with that team, the intervention of the War, and then the re-formed Lady Dynamos that Linda let marriage get in the way of football, marrying in 1968 aged 50. She passed away in Edinburgh in 1996, aged 78. Mary Leslie (neé Millan) was born in 1912 in North Leith, married in Leith in 1934 and passed away in Edinburgh in 1992 aged 80. If you know anything further about either woman, please do contact me.
The team name was revived in the late 1960s and they were a founder member of the Women’s SFA in 1970. They won the Scottish Women’s Cup in 1972 and again in ’74, ’75, ’78 and the League in ’77. In 1975 the Dynamos earned themselves a place in the Guinness Book of Records by notching up an incredible 42-0 victory of poor Lochend Thistle. This record has never been beaten in Scottish football (men’s or women’s) or in the non-junior English game. Dynamo‘s central defender, Sheila Begbie, would captain the Scottish Women’s national team in its first international against England. She earned 25 international caps, scored against Italy in the San Siro stadium and would spend 14 years with the SFA in management positions, becoming its head of women’s football, before making a switch to the oval ball and becoming head of SRU’s women’s rugby in 2014, later director of rugby development, before retiring in 2021.
Thank you to Stuart Gibbs for his assistance in correcting the caption on some of the photos and on identifying which game was played at which date, for which purposes!
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
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The Edinburgh Hostels for Women Students: the thread about their wartime role as Internment Camps for “Enemy Aliens”
This thread was originally written and published in January 2023.
An intriguing image was tweeted today, with the caption “WWII Prisoner of War Camp, Scotland, November 1939“:
Note, this tweet has been re-inserted as an image, as under current ownership, “Twitter” has completely and deliberately broken embedding and cooperation with other social media platforms such as WordPress.Where was this camp? The soldier is very obviously equipped by the British Army, but the building doesn’t look very Scottish, does it? In fact it looks more like a French chateau. Is it a school, a hospital wing or a sanatorium? I didn’t know, so I shared the picture and quickly the answer came back (thanks Sean McPartlin, Graeme Dickson and Ian “Silverback”). It is the Suffolk Road Halls of Residence or to give them their proper name, the Edinburgh Hostels for Women Students. These were used as an internment camp for “enemy aliens” at the start of the war.
Carlyle Hostel in 2001A 20 acre site in Newington, which had formed part of the the Craigmillar Golf Course, was purchased in 1913 for £10,000 by the Edinburgh Association for the Provision of Hostels for Women Students for a purpose-built accommodation hostel – or halls of residence. The Association was a joint venture between the Edinburgh Provincial Committee for the Training of Teachers, Edinburgh University, the Edinburgh College of Art, the Edinburgh Merchant Company and the Edinburgh Episcopal Training College. The hostels were “for the more satisfactory housing of women students” and were intended to eventually have a capacity for 350, with 250 reserved for teaching students at Moray House College. There already existed two small halls of residence for women medical students, converted from houses, on George Square.
Each hostel had a common room, library and dining room and 52 separate study bedrooms. They were grouped around a quadrangle which had a hockey field and tennis courts. The architect was Alan Keith Robinson. This was the first large commission for Robinson and his partner Thomas Aikman Swan, but would be his last. Both volunteered to fight in WW1 and Robinson refused a commission so that he could fight “in the line”. He was severely wounded and was invalided out of the army in 1917. He attempted to restart his practice and partnership but his wounds prevented him properly realising this and he died from them in May 1925.
Carlyle (l) and Darroch (r) HostelsThe first three hostels (Buchanan, Balfour and Playfair) were opened in June 1917 by Sir J. Alfred Ewing, Principal of the University at a cost of with £79,000; £44,000 from the Treasury and the bulk of the remainder from the Carnegie Trust. The running costs were to be met entirely by fees, in 1917 this was an annual £30 (about £2,600 in 2023).
The glory of the Scottish Universities is that they are open not simply to the rich but to those of very moderate means indeed. In Scotland we have always been proud of the fact that we have to cultivate the Muses on a little oatmeal, and even at the present price of oatmeal a Scottish University Education is cheap! There will, I feel sure, be a great satisfaction to all that a comparatively new side in university life will be developed in Scotland, namely the communal life; true education is not simply a matter of listening to lectures and studying books.
Opening speech by Sir Alfred EwingTwo further hostels – Carlyle and Darroch – were added in 1928 to Robinson’s original designs by Frank Wood, at a cost of £60,000, adding 120 additional bedrooms.
So how did the hostels end up in the photo at the top of this page, fenced off behind barbed wire and with armed guards in watch towers? A brief notice in the Edinburgh Evening News of 30th October 1939 states that the hostels had been “taken over for national purposes.” But the “prisoners of war” in the picture are not servicemen, they are interned civilians. Most were sailors who had been caught in – or en route to – British ports, or in service on ships of Allied-aligned nations at the outbreak of war. Others were simply people of German birth who had been resident in Scotland but now found themselves to be undesirables; “enemy aliens“.
One of the latter category was Adolf Theurer, an hotel chef at the North British Hotel in Edinburgh who “hated the war, and hated the Nazis, but was a German.” Theurer, 61, had lived in Scotland for 44 years and had been at the NB for 37, but had never become naturalised – with war approaching he felt his poor health and good record as a citizen would stand in his favour. He had been interned during WW1 for 4 and a half years and had declared to his family that we would “rather be put against a wall and shot than be interned again“.
Adolf Theurer, picture in the Sunday PostHowever, when he appeared at the “Aliens Tribunal” on October 12th 1939 they found against him and interned him at East Suffolk Road. Those subject to appearance at the tribunal were allowed no legal representation, but Theurer’s manager at the hotel had attended and spoke in his favour. He never saw his family again, and died 5 days later, “broken hearted”, from a heart attack. His family, at 16 Claremont Crescent, were only informed after his death and had not been allowed the opportunity to visit him during his final illness.
Theurer’s “Male Enemy Alien” index card, with the word “Dead” coldly printed in block capitals. © Crown Copyright Images reproduced by courtesy of The National ArchivesTheurer had been an active member of the German Congregation of Edinburgh, which had been forced to disband during WW1, and had assisted in the sale of its chapel to the Brethren after the war, an order in which he was also active. His wife – Johanna Becker – was also German (although her mother was Aberdonian and she was born in London) and they had three children in Edinburgh; George Adolf, Christina and William. His family were not allowed to take possession of his body, instead it was kept in the police mortuary. He was tragically unlucky; at this early stage of the war, relatively few Germans had been incarcerated. In May 1940 the Minister of Home Security, Sir John Anderson, informed the House of Commons that of 73,535 “aliens” in the country, only 569 – less than 1% – had been interned. There was an outcry of public sympathy for him and his funeral at Piershill Cemetery was well attended. John Mcgovern, the Independent Labour Party MP for Glasgow Shettleston raised a question in the House of Commons about the circumstances surrounding his death. Anderson replied that a “report would be prepared“.
This was not even the end of the Theurers’ travails however; on Friday 10th May 1940, two detectives knocked on the door of the Theurer house in Edinburgh while the family were eating a meal and requested that Johanna Theurer pack a case and follow them. Despite her protest, she was taken to Saughton Prison and sent into internment too. Her younger son, William, was a promising footballer who played with Blackpool and in Edinburgh, St. Bernards and later Hibs. He was a British citizen and was exempted from war service as a conscientious objector, telling his tribunal “I am not a member of any church, but my father was a member of the Plymouth Brethren. The horrors of war have been brought to my own door by his death“. He accompanied his mother to the prison gates.
William TheurerWilliam’s younger brother, George Adolf, went on to become a successful wigmaker in Edinburgh after the war. He was usually known as Adolf, one wonders if this was a direct tribute to his late father given the connotations such a name would have had at the time. He became a local politician, town councillor for Broughton Ward for the Progressives, 1959-74, senior Baillie and Deputy Lord Provost of the city and, after political reorganisation, Lothian Regional Councillor 1974-82.
An observation about the photo was made (by Adam Brown of the Scottish Military Research Group) that some of the men were dressed rather like sailors; zooming in we can definitely see men dressed in what look like peaked caps, sweaters and trousers tucked into sea boots! Contemporary newspaper reports confirm that all inmates were required to sew a circle of contrasting coloured cloth on to their outer garments and that most of the 100 kept at East Suffolk Road at this point were merchant seamen – unsurprising given the trade between the Port of Leith and the Baltic.
Prisoners at East Suffolk Road, November 1939On November 18th, three men escaped from the camp, described as “a bow-legged boy of 15 and two others aged 17” The 15-year old was Rudi Platta and the other two were Walther Bartels and Gunther Berger. They were merchant seaman and had managed to steal khaki uniforms – including caps and boots – from off-duty guards while they slept, climb through a window, climb the barbed wire fence and a 10 foot high wall to escape under cover of darkness. Without money, with no English spoken amongst the three and with no real idea where they were going, their chances were not high. They were found 10 hours later walking along the road to Peebles some 20 miles away after a motorist who had passed them heard of their escape on returning home.
Further embarrassment was caused to the authorities (and further sensation was reported in the papers) just 3 days later when two men escaped on the night of 21st November. The pair – George Sluzalek (24) and Franz Feltens (22) were in their civilian attire and again had no money or food, little English, and no plan of where they were going. They became lost, thinking they were heading for the sea but actually they were moving inland. They resorted to eating turnips from a field that had been left out for wintering sheep and were later found nearby, cold and wet, hiding in a yew tree near Dalkeith by an alert gamekeeper.
A detective returns Sluzalek and Feltens (one in his sailor’s pea coat) to Police Headquarters in Edinburgh. Photograph from the Courier and Advertiser, November 22nd 1939A second pair of men – Eber Hord Rolf Fischer, aged 23, and Max Waderphul, aged 38 – also escaped that night, parting company with Sluzalek and Feltens after their breakout. Again they had little idea where they were and had no resources with them, but managed to make an impressive distance on foot. Around 430PM the following day they knocked on a cottage door to the south of Edinburgh to beg for tea in broken English. Although they aroused the suspicion of the householder, she showed them kindness and welcomed them in to her house and made them a small meal of bread and butter, cheese and cold mutton, telling reporters “I never saw anyone so grateful in my life“. They left after 15 minutes and she phoned the police; the men had disappeared by the time they arrived. They were on the run for 36 hours and a man hunt of hundreds of police and soldiers combed the Lothians looking for them. They were recaptured cold, wet, hungry and exhausted by the search parties near Heriot, some 22 miles south of Edinburgh and seemed glad to have been found.
Remarkably, a further three men almost escaped on the 21st but were spotted by a sentry who fired his rifle in their direction, raising the alarm. They were quickly captured by the camp defence unit. Some of the escapees were allowed to answer questions by press. when asked if they “had anything to complain about of the treatment they were receiving at the camp, one of them said emphatically, ‘No‘”. All of the men were reluctant to be drawn into answering questions about the quality and availability of food in Germany vs. Britain.
The Corporation of Edinburgh was deeply unhappy about the location and security of the camp, and at a meeting on the 23rd November it was resolved to make a formal request to relocate it out of the city boundary; Lord Provost Steele was able to tell the assembled councillors that he had already been given notification of the intention to move it. On Monday 4th November, the Aberdeen Evening Express announced that a “motley company” of almost 200 German men had left Edinburgh at Waverley station from “an internment camp on the south of the city – the camp which has been so much in the news recently because of escape bids.” The prisoners were reported to be in good spirits and waved and smiled to morning commuters. Some conversation was made between men who could speak English and railway employees, and cigarettes were shared with the captives.On Tuesday 5th, the Daily Record reported that in total 300 German internment prisoners had left Scotland for England “for the duration of the war”.
On 28th December, the Edinburgh Evening News reported that the camp would now be formally closed, with transit accommodation for processing prisoners “for no more than 48 hours” having been arranged at an unspecified hospital. The East Suffolk Road Hostels were turned over to the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) officer cadets; the women’s branch of the British Army.
ATS Officer Cadets at East Suffolk Road Hostels, 1941. © IWM H 11075The requisition had caused something of a crisis for University Accommodation, which also saw 200 cadets billeted in its other accommodation. As a result most students who kept up their studies in wartime had to stay “in digs”, with the Scotsman reporting they were now sharing 3 and 4 to a single bedroom. The hostels were quickly returned to civilian use post-war, with adverts being taken out in the local newspapers for new wardens in August 1945. Later, they became the Newington Campus of Moray House Teacher Training College, closing in 1997 when this institution merged with the University of Edinburgh. They have since been converted into private housing.
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The thread about the Third Day of Christmas; an Edinburgh French Connection
This thread was originally written and published in December 2019.
This post in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas is preceded by a thread about The Lochend Dovecot.
On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; Three (Little) French Hens. This refers to Little France, a charmingly named area to the south of the city where one will now find the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. As a place name it is recorded from 1655 onwards and the popular convention is that its origin comes from the French retinue surrounding Mary Queen of Scots at nearby Craigmillar Castle. However, as early as 1786 we are cautioned about this tale, in “An Account of the Parish Of Liberton in Mid-Lothian”, by the parish minister, Rev. Thomas Whyte. Stuart Harris, author of The Place Names of Edinburgh, describes the evidence for it as “thin” and “circumstantial“. The Mary Queen of Scots myth here was popularised by an ancient tree, shown on Ordnance Survey maps as Queen Mary’s Tree, a sycamore said to have been planted by her here in 1561. Given she only returned to Scotland in August 1561, it is perhaps unlikely she found the time to plant a tree this soon.
A 1928 newspaper photograph of “Queen Mary’s Tree”In 1735, the Caledonian Mercury advertised the Lands of Little France as being for lease, paying a yearly rent of £432 12/- in old Scottish money and that there was a “good and sufficient” farmhouse and cottages here. In William Roy’s c. 1755 “Great Map” of Lowland Scotland, he records this place as the French Mills. This gives a hint at a more likely origin for the placename; it may be there was at some point a community of French cloth millers here working a mill powered by the Burdiehouse Burn. Indeed, the modern street name here is Little France Mills.
“Little France Mills with the ERI behind”. The bow in the wall behind the red sign is where Queen Mary’s Tree once stood.By 1795 the farm was again for let, and is described as extending to 27 acres and 12 falls. An 1825 sketch by Daniel Somerville entitled “Little France near Craigmillar” shows a row of cottages and a building that may be a drying house of some description. In the foreground we see the mill pond that is recorded on Ordnance Survey maps of this time. By the 1880s, maps show that the mill pond here had been drained and a more substantial farm occupies the spot.
Little France, by Daniel Somerville, 1825. © Edinburgh City LibrariesLittle France does have a real claim to fame beyond improbable associations with Mary Queen of Scots; it was the terminus of the first railway to serve the city; the Edmonstone Waggonway. It was not the first railway in the Lothians however by some stretch; as early as 1722 a waggonway had run between pits around Tranent to Cockenzie and Port Seton.
The Edmonstone Waggonway was built by Alexander Laing, tacksman* of the Newton estate and colliery to Lt. Col. John Wauchope, landowner of the Edmonstone and Niddrie Marischal estates. It was built across Wauchope’s land to move coal from the pit at Old Millerhill to a depot at Little France. While this railway did not enter the boundary of the city itself, it was built explicitly to serve the city; cutting the cartage distance to it in half, and therefore the overall price of coal. The consulting engineer was Robert Stevenson, who proposed both a completely level line to a terminus at The Wisp or a gentle 1/1000 incline to Little France. Laing chose the latter option, on a marginally different alignment. It likely used wrought iron “edge-rails” which were favoured by Stevenson at the time. The waggons were horse-drawn, and could carry between 8 and 11 tons of coal.
* a tacksman was a senior class of tenant, who leased a “tack” of land from the feudal superior (Wauchope in this case), and had rights of sub-leasing it, at the same time as acting as a form of agent for the superior.
A Waggonway – at Tanfield on Tyneside. The horse provided the means to move the waggon on the level or uphill. Going downhill it was tethered at the rear and the waggonman would control the speed of descent using the large wooden brake lever.The line was announced to be open for business in August 1818, not much is known about its operation however as it only placed this single advert in the newspapers. Alexander Laing of Newton died in his home on May 12th 1825, and the tack of Newton, its colliery and the Waggonway were taken up by Messrs. Alexander & Mowbary Stenhouse of Whitehill.
Caledonian Mercury, August 20th 1818The Waggonway was soon threatened by the coming of the Edinburgh & Dalkeith Railway, to bring Midlothian coal more directly into the city at St. Leonards. Its 1825 Parliamentary Bill failed, but it succeeded in 1826. Although Wauchope had been an objector to the 1825 bill and the Stenhouses initially acted likewise in 1826, they eventually came to an agreement with the railway whereby it would make use of some of the trackbed of the Edmonstone Waggonway and lay a connection to the Stenhouse’s pits.
Trace of the route of the Edmonstone Waggonway (pink) from Old Millerhill to Little France. The later alignment of the Edinburgh & Dalkeith Railway – some of which is still in use by the Borders Railway – is in yellow.In December 1833 the Edinburgh & Dalkeith advertised that Edmonstone Coal was now for sale at the St. Leonard’s depot, direct from the pit head. Some of the Edmonstone trackbed was later re-used in the 1890s by the Niddrie Coal Company, who laid a tramway to the old depot at Little France from their No. 14 and No. 15 pits sunk around The Wisp area. For most of the 20th Century, Little France was an entirely unremarkable place on the outskirts of the city, most notable for its quaint name. All that changed in 1998 when it was announced that the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh would relocated to a greenfield site here, away from Lauriston Place in the city centre. It opened in 2003.
The Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas continues with a thread about Burdiehouse.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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Those Magnificent Leith Men and their Steaming Machines: the thread about early steam-powered road transport
This thread was originally written and published in April 2019.
October 25th 1826. The North Leith steam coachWHAT?!
“On the 3d of February, 1824, a patent was granted to T. Burstall and John Hill, of Leith, for a locomotive steam carriage; an account of which was first given in the Edinburgh Journal of Science“. “We think we are warranted in saying, that there is considerable degree of ingenuity, as well as originality, in many of the details, and also in the general arrangement of the machinery.”
Burstall & Hill’s North Leith Steam CoachOh it gets better! “By the present improvements, the boiler is to be placed upon an additional pair of wheels, so that the whole machine may run upon six wheels instead of four.”
Patent steam carriage, by Mr. Burstall, Edinburgh, 1827Isn’t this just the best thing?
Burstall’s Edinburgh Steam Coach, © IMEWait! Haud the bus! (Well, the steam carriage anyway). There’s more! In an effort to drum up support for their contrivance, Burstall & Hill went on a sales tour with a working scale model. Here’s the handbill (from the University of Glasgow’s Special Collection)
BURSTALL & HILL’S
PATENT
Steam Carriage ModelMAY BE SEEN AT WORK IN
THE BLACK BULL HALL
ENTRANCE BY VIRGINIA STREETOn Monday, the 7th January 1828 , and Following Days,
From 11 to 4, Afternoon, and by Gas Light, from 7 to 9.
Admittance, One Shilling.From Grace’s Guide: “When the writer saw this interesting model at work, he was informed by the partner of Mr. Burstall, that it had, during the preceding 8 days, ran as many times round its circular course as amounted to 250 miles… and that during all that period it required no fresh packing or repair whatever. ” The best bit of the model of course is that the passengers were provided with complimentary yards of ale to chug”
Glug! Glug!Despite the sales effort, Burstall & Hill don’t appear to have had much success, it’s clear from just looking at the drawings that their design was impractical, and it was ahead of the limits of boiler, engine and wheel technology. In 1827, while exhibiting in London, the model overturned and injured Burstall’s younger brother. He submitted a design for the Rainhill Trials, “Perseverance” (a nod to his former Leith business partner?). It took 5 days to make it work and only made 6mph, but got a £25 prize.
PerseveranceBy 1841, Timothy Burstall is recorded as an “Engineer and Dealer in Patents” in Somerset, with his sons Timothy Burstall (11) and Timothy Burstall (3). It’s not recorded why his sons had the same name or how he differentiated them! He died aged 84 in Glasgow, 1860. Hill moved to England, but what became of him is not clear. But that’s not the end of the story for Scottish experimentation in steam transport. Enter stage left, John Scott Russell (better known for building steamships and describing the Soliton wave).
John Scott Russell, Esq. 1847Before he became better known, Scott Russell was a mathematics and engineering prodigy, teaching at the Leith Mechanics Institute at the age of 17. By 24 he was elected professor of Natural Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, although refused to stand for permanent employ. Concentrating on his engineering, Scott tinkered with boilers and steam engines, and came up with a method of constructing a flat-sided boiler (rather than a dome or cylinder) with internal stays. By 1834, success was sufficient that Scott Russell formed the Steam Carriage Company of Scotland to produce his perfected steam carriage. The square boiler can be seen slung under the wheels, with a 2 cylinder vertical engine on top.
A Scott Russell steam coach, rear sectionRussell’s company built 6 carriages “well-sprung and fitted out to high standard“. From March 1834 they offered an hourly service from George Square in Glasgow to the Tontine Hotel in Paisley. An unheard of speed of 15mph could be made (Burstall & Hill could make 6mph). The Mitchell Library describes the machine. “carried up to 40 passengers… a crew of 3 green-uniformed men. The engineer sat above the engine and boiler at the rear… The fireman stood on the step below him… A steersman sat on the front perch …The carriage pulled a trailer which carried coal, water, and more passengers. Mechanically it may have been successful, but the carriages apparently upset the trustees of the turnpike roads, who felt they caused damage in excess of the charges paid.”
Scott Russell Glasgow – Paisley Steam CoachWhat happened next is a matter of conjecture, either the trustees deliberately obstructed the road to impede the carriage, or it was purely accidental, but in the Glasgow trades fair, a carriage hit an obstruction and overturned. The boiler failed and the explosion of steam killed 2 passengers and injured several more (note, the BBC attributes the below device to Goldsworthy Gurney, but it was a Scott Russell contraption). This is sometime attributed to being the first fatal automobile accident.
The Paisley Steam Carriage explosionThe service was withdrawn and 2 of Scott Russell’s carriages found their way to London for service there. The man himself quickly moved on to greater things, first the description of the Soliton (standing wave) and later as I. K. Brunel’s shipbuilder on the Great Eastern.
John Scott Russell, on the left, with his assistant Henry Wakefield holding plans and between him and Brunel, at the launch of the Great Eastern.Scott Rusell’s time in Leith keeps up our connection between pioneering road steam carriages and the burgh, and there’s more to come! The next comes via the Kincardineshire town of Stonehaven in the form of Robert William Thomson, an engineer and inventor up there with Scott Russell and contemporaries in his imagination, inventiveness and skill. From a family of the new industrialist middle class, he was to be sent to the Kirk but being unable to master Latin he instead was sent to live with an Uncle in the United States where he apprenticed as a merchant.
Robert W. ThomsonReturning to Scotland in 1838, in between engineering apprenticeships, he taught himself chemistry, electrics, astronomy and mathematics and engineering with the help of an educated weaver. He settled in Edinburgh and his inventions and patents are a-plenty, including electrical detonators for blasting explosives, a self-filling fountain pen, a reversible washing mangle, a ribbon saw, an elliptical rotary steam engines and a hydraulic dry dock. Thomson also tinkered endlessly with improving steam engines and boilers to the point where they would (unlike the previous examples up this thread) actually be feasible for road transport.
Thomson patented the first pneumatic tyre in 1846. Not the vulcanised rubber tyre perfected by Charles Boyd Dunlop that we recognise now, but the first practical air-filled tyre. Thomson’s tyre was an inner tube of canvas rubberised with India Rubber which was encased in a stout leather outer tyre that was physically bolted to the rim of the wheel. It was ahead of the rubber technology of the time, but it worked in principal.
A Robert Thomson pneumatic tyreFrustrated by the shortcomings of his tyre, he turned instead to solid rubber tyres, and when he put these together with his advances in steam engines and boilers, he had a winning combination in the Thomson Road Steamer. The “tyres” were solid blocks of rubber attached all around the rim of the iron wheels. This allowed the heavy road steam engine to use the public road without damaging it and gave it the grip to get up inclines.
The Thomson Road Steamer and Train“But Thomson was a Stonehaven man living in the New Town of Edinburgh” you say. “What’s the Leith connection?” you ask. Well he had his road steamers built by T. W. Tennant at the Bowershall Iron Works in Leith, just off the Bonnington Road at (appropriately) Tennant Street.
Unlike those before him, Thomson’s Road Steamer actually really worked. To prove it, he had a rubber-wheeled Steamer called Enterprise hall a train of rubber-wheeled coal wagons of 40 tons from Dalkeith to Edinburgh. The contraption made about 8mph.
Coal from Dalkeith to EdinburghSo it could pull coal, so what? Next, Thomson demonstrated its abilities in passenger haulage by pairing it with a bizarre, single-axle, double-decker carriage (with patented rubber wheels) and ran it between Edinburgh and Leith, the “New Favourite”
The “New Favourite” Edinburgh and Leith Road SteamerWeighing about 5 tons and with about 8 horsepower at its disposable, the Thomson Road Steamer could pull about 40 tons up the 1 in 18 gradient of Granton Road, or about 100 tons on the flat. “One morning a road steamer was taken down on to the sea sands at Portobello, and ran up and down there at the rate of ten miles an hour, the rain pouring all the time in torrents.“
Thomson Road Steamer “Advance”Thomson’s machines, built by Tennant, were a global hit and were exported across the globe. He had worked for the Dutch improving their sugar refineries in the East Indies and they bought some for Java. The Indian government bought four of them too. Such was the success that Tennant’s couldn’t keep up with demand, and he also had them built by Robey & Co. in Lincoln, Ransomes, Sims & Head in Ipswich and Charles Burrell & Sons of Thetford. Ultimately, the solid India Rubber tyre although a success was an evolutionary dead end. It was extremely expensive and not particularly hard wearing. It was also useless when confronted with mud. But Thomson showed the way, and technology eventually caught up and allowed others to perfect a hard-wearing pneumatic tyre. Appropriately enough he’s commemorated in Stonehaven at a tyre-fitting garage.
The Robert Thomson memorial Kwik-Fit in StonehavenThomson died in 1873 and you’d think that would be the last of Leith’s connections with mad steampunk road machines. You’d think, but you’d be wrong! Enter “Mr Nairn, Engineer, Leith” and his patent 1871 steam omnibus!
Mr Nairn’s Patent Steam OmnibusNairn’s bus is recognisably to modern eyes as a double-decker. Sure it’s only got 3 wheels and it’s got a boiler and pistons instead of a diesel engine, and a chimney that runs along the top deck and hangs out the back, but it’s all there. Nairn stuck with solid wheels, but tackled the problem of ride quality by using a relatively advanced suspension of leaf springs mounted on stacks of rubber washers (ahoy Moulton fans!). His 3-cylinder machine, Pioneer could carry 50 passengers in (relative) comfort at up to 12 mph. Nairn ran it between Edinburgh and Portobello and it could make 11 or 12 trips per day. “It is doing exceedingly well. No horse-drawn ‘bus is more under control than this one; its safety and capabilities of doing excellent work are beyond cavil, and invite investigation. Its general construction is a great step in advance.”
So why did this modern-looking, high-capacity, relatively fast and apparently successful steam bus remain a one-off for a single season? There are two reasons. The first is probably pure economics. In 1871, horse-hauled trams came in to use in Edinburgh. A horse consumed less in feed than a steam bus did in coal, a tram car was much cheaper to produce and horses were more reliable than proprietary steam engines. The second was more fundamental; the tramway had no legal running powers for mechanical traction.
A Leith Horse Tram at the back of Shrubhill DepotYou’d think that would be the last of Leith’s connections with mad, steampunk road machines. You’d think, but you’d be wrong! Enter “Mr Leonard J. Todd, Engineer, of Leith.” and his patent steam omnibus of 1872. Not only does it have 4 (yes, 4, count them all!) wheels, it has 2 funnels (1 a false one). And check out the opulence of the lower saloon.
Leonard Todd’s Patent Steam OmnibusMr Todd insited that solid wheels were the way forward and could make a comfortable 20mph journey if they were appropriately sprung. He used a system of leaf springs, rubber washers and “volutes” (vertical spiral springs – not coils). I’m not convinced he was right to be honest. Todd also designed a “Silent Street Tramway Locomotive” which he said would be able to pull a train of two 40-passenger carriages up a 1 in 40 gradient at 10 miles an hour.
Todd’s Silent Street-Tramway LocomotiveAnd he also designed a 3-wheeled, steam-powered post van called “Centaur”. Again solid wooden wheels and iron tyres. It was designed to pull mail and passenger in a carriage at “high speed” wherever rails couldn’t go. The technology was mainly lifted from railway practice, including such features as the wheels built up from wooden blocks to reduce vibrations.
Leonard Todd’s Patent Mail SteamerThank you to Becky Taylor for pointing me in the direction of Leonard J. Todd and his marvellous machines.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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O Felicem Diem! the thread about the Leith Banking Company and its unusual banknotes
Today’s auction house artefact is this Leith Banking Company Twenty Pounds note from 1825, issued to the payee James Ker.
Leith Banking Company £20 note dated 1825James Ker of Blackshiels esq. was the general manager of the Leith Banking Co. and lived at a fine Georgian townhouse at no. 24 Royal Circus in Edinburgh. His father, also James Ker of Blackshiels esq., had been one of the founding partners of the bank in 1792. The Kers were Jacobites and kept in the family’s possession an ornamental and incriminating drinking glass engraved with the royal cypher of the claimant James VIII of Scotland. Their predecessor, once again James Ker of Blackshiels esq., had acted as a banker to Charles Edward Stuart, the Bonny Prince and had been financially ruined as a result. But clearly along the lines the family fortune and status had been somewhat restored by the late 18th century (unlike the Stuarts!).
24 Royal Circus in Edinburgh’s New TownSo it’s rather unusual that a note made out to Ker is also signed on behalf of the bank by… Ker! As a director of the bank with which he held an account, he was fundamentally issuing his own pocket money (and that’s what it literally was, paper money that a gentleman could carry on his person)
At this time, banks issued notes to clients of sufficient standing on an individual basis, and the bank would number, sign and date every note by hand. This note has also been embossed with a 2 Shillings stamp, I’m not clear if this added or deducted that value to/from it .
Two Shillings and crown embossed stampAnd the engraving is a typical Leith scene, with a sailing ship entering the harbour. The “windmill” signal tower can be seen.
The Port of LeithBottom left is the mark of the engraver, John Beugo. Beugo is best known as the engraver of the portrait of Robert Burns by Alexander Naysmith. While mainly an artistic printmaker and engraver, he did turn his hands to banknotes, also doing work for the Commercial Bank of Scotland and British Linen Banks.
John Beugo’s markThese notes were made on hard-wearing linen paper, which was produced in both Balerno and Penicuik (at mills both named Bank Mill for obvious reasons). Linen rags were a very important feedstock for the paper industry at this time (it’s where rag merchants made their money, see my thread about Asa Wass for more on the riches of this trade.) When you presented your note at the bank, it would be honoured. Deductions could be made from it, and interest or dividends paid on it, this was all noted down (by official stamp and by hand) on the back.
Various endorsements on the rear of an old banknoteThese rather plain notes were promissory notes issued to the gentlemen of means that were customers of the bank. General notes of a fancier design were also issued. In 1822 the Leith Bank issued the world’s first commemorative note to mark the arrival of King George IV. The main image was based on Alexander Carse’s painting, which hangs in the Trinity House in Leith.
Leith Banking Company commemorative George IV One Guinea noteExcerpt from Carse’s paintingTwo interesting features on this note. Firstly, at this time the Leith motto of “Persevere” was not in official use, instead the Latin “O Felicem Diem” just means “oh happy day!” in reference to George IV’s visit. And bottom left, “Fàilte don Rìgh“; “Welcome to the King!” I understand that this was the earliest use of Gaelic on a Scottish banknote; the Caledonian Banking Company did not open until 1836 and used “Tir Nam Beann, Nan Gleann, S’Nan Gaisgeach“, or “Land of Mountains, Glens and Heroes“. Walter Scott is known to have been a customer of the bank (from signed cheques that he drew on it), and one wonders if it was his influence on them that stimulated this romantic highland nostalgia in a lowland organisation.
£50 cheque signed by Walter Scott at Abbotsford in 1825 to pay his coachman and confidant, Peter Matheson, care of Scott’s agent, George Craig esq. of Galashiels.Anyhoo, the Leith Banking Company was established in 1792 by 18 merchants of Edinburgh and Leith, who were its partners. It was based in Quality Street . Here we see James Ker (senior) was the original manager. Pattison and Pillans were two of the more prominent merchants in Leith.
Leith Banking Company. Foot of Quality Street.In 1805 it moved from Quality Street to a purpose-built headquarters office in the style of the day, the architect was John Paterson (see also Seafield Baths).
Leith Banking Company HQ, Bernard Street. CC-by-SA 4.0 StephenCDicksonThe Leith Banking Company HQ, an engraving by H. S. Storer in 1820. © Edinburgh City LibrariesAt this time, this was one of only 3 banks in Leith; the other two being the British Linen Company and the Commercial Banking Company of Scotland. All were established very close to each other in the commercial centre of the town, set amongst its finest buildings. The Leith Bank as it was known, prospered for a while, and extended branches to the bright lights of Callander, Dalkeith, Galashiels, Langholm and Carlisle.
Leith Banking Company £5 George IV note. This lacks the crest of Leith, and has a caricature of a sailor welcoming the King on the right, surrounded by “Huzza! O Felicem Diem”. © Edinburgh City LibrariesIt had an agent in Glasgow and a travelling tent that visited provincial cattle and agricultural marts. The Lloyds Bank archives note that the Carlisle branch was registered as an English bank but was illegal according to an Act which forbade English provincial banks from having more than 6 partners! Trouble was brewing though, and the recession brought on by the “Panic of 1837” hit the bank’s business hard. The Glasgow Union Bank offered to buy it out but this was declined.
An American Whig cartoon showing the ill effects of the 1837 financial crisisThe bank soldiered on for a few more years until in 1842 it failed after a run caused debts of £123,582, including £10,000 of Leith notes in circulation. It was one of three Scottish provincial banks to fail that year, alongside the Renfrewshire and Shetland companies. According to newspaper reports of the time:
It was a very old established concern, but the business seems to have been dwindling away for some years, so that it has lately been considered of very little importance. The explanation which it is said has been given is, that one of the shareholders having retired from the concern, took the precaution of advertising his retirement in the newspapers, and that the depositors having taken alarm at this, a run on the bank commenced, and continued till it was deemed advisable to wind up its affairs
Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, April 28th 1842A further report stated that the partners possessed sufficient funds to pay all creditors and that “the public [were] not likely to lose any thing“. The dividends were 13s 4d per £1 on winding up, the partners were left “a reversion, a handsome one, we trust to themselves.” The Bank of Scotland took over the valuable agricultural and country clientèle at the Callendar branch and its remains were divided up by the Clydesdale Bank, its former headquarters on Bernard Street sold off to the National Bank of Scotland. The creditors of the the partners in the bank (JAmes Ker, Henry Johnston, George Craig and John Bisset) did not receive their dividend until 1848.
Footnote – in the archives of the Royal Bank of Scotland, there is something called the “spike file”. This is the sequential record (file) of the payment of promissory notes by the Drummonds Bank from 1781. When a client presented their bank note, the clerk would check their account balance, debit the relevant amount and cancel the bank note (the promissory notes were single use only) by defacing it, with a punch or cutting off a corner. It was then “filed” on a giant iron spike
The Spike File © Natwest Group ArchivesThe spike was retained as a record in case there was any quibble over payment, you could always go back to it and retrieve the note, on which the date and details of its payment would have been written by the clerk. The Drummonds’ spike got “filed” in a basement cupboard and forgotten about, which was then later walled up and forgotten about a bit more until recovered during renovations centuries later by which time the owner was the Royal Bank of Scotland.
And to bring us back round in a circle, Andrew Drummond of Drummond’s Bank was an Edinburgh goldsmith and financier who later established a bank under his name in London. Like the Kers, the Drummonds were Jacobites; his father was outlawed in 1690 for supporting James II, his brother died at Culloden.
Andrew Drummond, by Johan Zoffany, c. 1769The (Andrew) Drummonds were not the same as the (George) Drummonds who were – appropriately – Hanoverians, supporters of King George. It is George Drummond for whom Drummond Place and Drummond Street in Edinburgh are named. George Drummond was a government loyalist who helped negotiate the Act of Union, was a 6-term Lord Provost of Edinburgh, a driving force behind the New Town and other public works of the “Modern Athens” such as the North Bridge and Royal Exchange – and ironically one of the founders of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Lord Provost George DrummondNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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The Edinburgh & Leith Atmospheric War: the thread about the fight to build an improbable and impossible railway
An initial version of this thread was written in December 2020.
In 1844, Britain was in the grip of a stock market bubble called the “railway mania”. Rival companies vied to build lines here, there and everywhere, and attracted ever increasing financial speculation. In Edinburgh, three principal schemes were converging at a central locus that would later become known as Waverley Station; the Edinburgh & Glasgow – running between those two cities – the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton – running north to a ferry terminal at Granton through the Scotland Street tunnel, with a branch to Leith – and the North British Railway – entering the city from the east and Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Railway mania reaches Edinburgh; the E&G in green, the EL&G in Yellow and the NBR in brown. Overlaid on an OS 6-inch map of the period.These railways favoured orthodox steam locomotives to provide their motive power, with occasional assistance by rope haulage for steep gradients,e.g. the Scotland Street Tunnel. However there was an exciting new technology which promised cleaner, faster and more economical railways that would be cheaper to build; the “Atmospheric Railway”.
This name does not come from them having a particularly romantic ambience, it is because they are propelled – in theory – by atmospheric pressure. In principal the scheme was simple; a slotted tube was laid between the railway tracks and every few miles there was a pumping house which exhausted the air from the pipe, creating a vacuum. A piston in the pipe was pushed along by the atmospheric pressure behind it; if you attached a train to that then you could propel it too. The trick to get it working was how to connect the train and the piston without breaking the vacuum. This required a longitudinal valve (in practice, long leather flaps) to seal the tube; a trick that nobody ever managed to pull off reliably.
The atmospheric railway system was patented in 1839 by Samuel Clegg and the Samuda brothers. They set up a demonstration of the system at Wormwood Scrubs in West London. This impressed the directors of the Dublin & Kingstown Railway in Ireland who felt it would be suitable for an extension of their line from Kingstown to Dalkey. This was a 1 3/4 mile branch and began operation on 19th August 1843. It persisted for a full 9 years until a small locomotive was brought in to do the same work. The Dalkey scheme attracted the attention of the London & Croydon Railway, who in 1844 built a short 1 1/4 mile atmospheric expansion of their mainline from London Bridge station to Bricklayers Arms. This was to try and reduce congestion on a steep section of the line with a number of stops and starts. The whole thing though was a “sad fiasco” which consumed a huge amount of capital and was terminated in 1847.
Contemporary illustration of the Saint-Germain atmospheric railway in France. Note the vacuum tube between the rails and the slot in its top, sealed (in theory) by the leather flap valves“Croydon Atmospheric Road”, from the Illustrated London News, October 11th 1845These were small schemes and most sensible railway engineers steered well clear of the obvious complexities of the system for larger scale application, but the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel was an exception. He was captivated by the promise of this modern and unconventional technology and proposed it for the 51 mile South Devon Railway, to help overcome the steep curves and gradients. The father of modern British railways, George Stephenson, denounced the idea as “a great humbug” before it even got going. Brunel’s own locomotive engineer, the eminently sensible Daniel Gooch, said he “could not understand how Mr. Brunel could be so misled. He had so much faith in his being able to improve it that he shut his eyes to the consequences of failure.” Brunel however remained convinced and the force of his reputation carried the scheme through; the South Devon opened its first atmospheric section in September 1847, at least a year later than planned. By September 1848 it was abandoned, having “rapidly disintegrated throughout its entire length“.
A surviving section of track and 15 inch vacuum tube of the South Devon atmospheric railway. CC-BY-SA 2.5 ChowellsDespite these hiccups, for a brief period from 1845-1846, the “railway mania” investment bubble was briefly joined by “atmospheric fever.” And once again, Edinburgh and Leith were in on it, with not just one but two atmospheric schemes were proposed. And not just two schemes; two in direct competition, running from the same start and end points, less than 100m apart, each backed by a considerable array of the councillors, merchants and notable figures of both the City and its port. And so commenced the brief but petulant Edinburgh and Leith Atmospheric Railway War of 1845.
The rival Edinburgh & Leith atmospheric schemes were both formed at some point in June 1845; each claimed to be the original and genuine scheme and that the other was a pretender. In one corner was the Edinburgh & Leith Atmospheric Railway (which we shall call the Atmospheric Route) and in the other was the Edinburgh & Leith Atmospheric Direct Railway (which we shall call the Direct Route.) The engineer to the former was John Miller, who designed the Almond Valley Viaduct for the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway and also Granton Harbour. The latter had George Gunn, also a railway engineer, but one who had hitherto acted in support of another, including Miller himself.
The Atmospheric Route proposed to run a railway from a terminus in the Low Calton – with a connection to the “Waverley” stations – through the Greenside Valley, under London Road and then through the market gardens parallel to Leith Walk. It then continued around the west of Leith Links to a principal terminus near the Assembly Rooms at Constitution Street. From here, branches ran to the docks, with one possibly a small passenger terminus for the Forth ferries and the other going over (or under) the river to the wet docks. A service every ten minutes was promised.
The Direct Route originated at a station near West Register Street, with an onward connection to one or more of the “Waverley” stations. It ran underground down Leith Street, possibly with an intermediate station in the vicinity of York Place, and continued underground in a “cut and cover” tunnel a few feet below the surface to Elm Row. Here it re-surfaced to run in a semi-recessed trench down the entirety of Leith Walk, the proposal being to provide regular bridges across this road.
A drawing in the “Lighthouse” Stevenson collection showing the “Direct route” at Union Place. CC-BY NLSA drawing in the “Lighthouse” Stevenson collection showing the “Direct route” at Antigua Place. The tunnel roof was to be just 2.5 feet below the surface. CC-BY NLSWhile this proposal might seem absurd today – Leith Walk is almost end-to-end 4 storey tenements and is Scotland’s most densely populated neighbourhood by quite some margin – bear in mind that the street is all “made up ground”; it’s a former defensive feature, so easy to dig out, and that in the 1850s it was nothing like as built up as it is today. It was very lightly developed with few large or important buildings, and almost pastoral in character. It was intended to use an “inclined plane” (i.e. gravity) to provide downhill locomotion to Leith and the atmospheric principle to get back up the hill to Edinburgh. There would be two tracks but only the uphill would be powered, this would cut costs but greatly reduce operational flexibility; they did however hedge their bets and publicly did not preclude themselves from using normal steam locomotives “should they prove expedient.”
What the Leith Walk atmospheric railway of the “Direct route” might have looked like. London Illustrated News illustration of the Dalkey atmospheric railway in January 1844There two atmospheric schemes not only had each other to contend with, additional pressure placed on both by the conventional railway of the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton, – already building a line from Scotland Street to North Leith via Bonnington (yellow line on the route map below) – but were now also lodging a bill with Parliament to build an extension from Bonnington across the Water of Leith to South Leith (the pale yellow line). In November the North British Railway joined in and announced their intention to tunnel through the eastern end of the Calton Hill to get from their existing mainline at Croft-an-Righ to the top of Easter Road, down which they would run a horse-drawn tramway to a terminus in the vicinity of Queen Street (pale brown line).
Atmospheric Fever in Edinburgh; the “Atmospheric Route” in red and the “Direct Route” in cyan. The pale lines are the proposals to reach Leith by the EL&G and the NBR. Note the darker blue line of the Edinburgh & Dalkeith railway approaching Leith via Niddrie from the east. Overlaid on an OS 6-inch map of the period.The Atmospheric route got their preliminary announcement published first on October 7th 1845, a day before the Direct route. They were seeking a capitalisation of £100,000. The following day the Direct route announced they were seeking £200,000 and accused the Atmospheric route of financial impropriety by issuing considerably more shares to the public than they were actually available. The Direct route stated that they were proposing their scheme lest “the independence, usefulness and commerce of [Edinburgh & Leith] are gone forever”.
Initial invitations to purchase shares were made by both schemes in the Caledonian Mercury and Evening Courant in June 1845, but there was almost instantly a problem arose. One of the merchants listed as backing the Atmospheric Route denied any connection with it and that his name had been put against it without his knowledge. As did the stock exchange said to be dealing in the sale. As was the stock broker claimed to be acting for the railway! All three immediately took out their own personal adverts in the next days Scotsman to this effect. This pattern of disinformation and using the columns of the newspapers to fight a proxy war was one that was to continue.
Scotsman, 18th June 1845By October, both schemes were ready to issue their shares. Adverts to this effect were placed in the Edinburgh papers and also in Glasgow too (each city having its own stock exchange at this time). The Direct route was careful to point out in their advert that all other railway schemes proposed to Leith were “inutile and insufficient“. Despite the improbability of two such rival schemes, with the railway investment boom being what it was the shares of both concerns were oversubscribed. Adverts were placed in newspapers seeking to buy and surplus share and each company seemed to spread gossip that their opponent had not allocated their shares in an equitable manner. As a result, the companies had to place further adverts in the newspapers to reassure investors of the fair nature of their allocation.
A blank share certificate of the Edinburgh & Leith Atmospheric Direct RailwayAnd then the “phoney war”, hitherto conducted through the newspaper columns alone, suddenly got a lot more real. In the early hours of October 19th 1845, Sunday, a representative of the Atmospheric route pinned copies of its parliamentary notices in public on the church doors of Edinburgh & Leith (this was actually a legal requirement as a way to circulate official notices around the public – it was not until the 20th century that churches would have dedicated public notice boards for this purpose). However, when the faithful came to worship on the Sabbath later that morning, it was found that the Direct route had also been out and had replaced all the notices with their own.
Martin Luther also fixed his controversial notice to a church doorThe Atmospheric route was outraged, offering a reward of £50 if the perpetrator could be apprehended. The Direct route denied all complicity and reiterated that they were the original scheme and the opposition were “plagiarists”, out to serve not the public but only their own interests.
Reward notice offered by the Atmospheric routeThe next task for both schemes was to collect the deposit money for their shares, complete their surveys, plans and engineering proposals and prepare their bills to go before parliament for approval. While this took place, after the outrage on the Sabbath, the skirmishing returned to tit-for-tat adverts placed in the newspapers by the solicitors of each scheme. The details of this are tiresome and childish, each consistently blamed the other for forcing its hand and making it respond. On October 29th, both companies took out extensive, self-important adverts in the Scotsman in side-by-side columns in which they each reiterated the authenticity of their own schemes and attacked that of their opponent. Both besmirched each other as not acting in the interests of the travelling public and merely being moneymaking schemes for their backers. Each also claimed to be the original railway proposal and that the other was a mere copycat.
The Direct route consistently positioned itself as the “bona fide” and original scheme, thereby having the right of putting forward their bill to Parliament. It said that its rival “thereby created in the public mind a just and general dissatisfaction” and that that the criticism of their scheme had been “inveterate and persevering“. However, they were repeatedly vague about the specific details of their proposed route – beyond it just being more “direct” than the competition. The reality differed; their route was less than 50m to the west and the distance saving marginal. By choosing the route down the middle of Leith Walk – rather than the sensible parallel one of its rival through undeveloped ground – they gave themselves a far more expensive and complex construction proposition.
Neither company was prepared to back down, and both published notices proclaiming their intent to lodge a bill with Parliament. When the notices of intent were made to Parliament, the Treasurer’s Committee of the Edinburgh Town Council made it known that they would act in dissent, “inasmuch as it was proposed by these companies to take possession of the whole of the public markets beneath the North Bridge.” On November 20th, the Direct route “[had] the pleasure to inform the Shareholders” that their engineer had assured them their plans and surveys were nearing completion in order that they could be lodged with Parliament.
The sparring continued over the festive season as both companies tried to get the other to withdraw their bills. And then on January 29th 1846, in a surprise notice in the Caledonian Mercury, the Direct route threw in the towel and indicated that they agreed to give the Atmospheric route their “cordial cooperation and support”. After seven months, the war was over. Two days later it was announced that the Atmospheric route had lodged their bill with Parliament.
The surrender notice, in the Caledonian MercuryBut when the bill came to be read, the railway took the unusual action of immediately asking for more time. This was reluctantly given despite their opponents trying to use this as an excuse to have it thrown out; the Trustees of Heriot Hospital, who owned much of the land over which the railway was to run, and the competing Edinburgh, Leith & Granton having objected. The road ahead for the Atmospheric route was now clear, and with their focus back on the project and not fighting the competition, they evidently finessed their route, as the plans prepared for the bill are different from those described initially. A station has been inserted at Blenheim Place and at Duke Street, and the terminus is now at the harbour. The freight branches to the wet docks were still there, with an awkward approach over (or under) the lower drawbridge
The final route of the Edinburgh & leith Atmospheric, from Scotland’s Railway Atlas by David Spaven, from a map in the collection of the NLS.The company pressed on, but despite its triumph in the “Atmospheric war”, all was not well. Over Christmas, the Bank of England had increased interest rates. It was becoming obvious to many that the railway bubble was exeactly that, and that the investments might not be a sure fire winner, and began to get cold feet. Indeed this may have been what caused the Direct route to withdraw; was it a strategic withdrawal rather than a tactical surrender? The Atmospheric route‘s investors were evidently getting unsettled, and on April 6th, at a Meeting in the Waterloo Hotel in Edinburgh, a general meeting was called at the demand of key backers.
An 1845 newspaper cartoon warning over the dangers of “Railway Mania” financial speculationAsked to account for its progress, the committee stated that they had spent £670 in Edinburgh and £2,000 in Leith on ground for the termini, and a further £250 towards the Town Council for rights to run through the ground in their ownership. Construction costs were estimated at £160,000 and £1,000 had been set aside to cover the costs to date of the Direct route in a conciliatory gesture for their co-operation. It was noted that a deputation from the committee had been on a fact-finding visit to the Croydon Railway’s atmospheric operation and found its principal to be “most admirably adapted for the projected line.” This is interesting considering the persistent difficulties of that undertaking. The committee estimated that running costs would be 4d per mile, which was challenged by a key shareholder who countered that in Parliament the respected railway engineer Joseph Locke had stated that ordinary locomotives were costing 10d per mile and that the Croydon atmospheric was running up the incredible amount of 2/10d per mile.
The shareholders went on the record to say they were unhappy that the recent changes in the financial markets had made the scheme far less attractive and that huge additional costs (these were not specified, but one assumes they were for engineering) had made themselves known. The complainants made a motion to circulate the full details of the undertaking’s most recent reports amongst the shareholders and return at a further General Meeting on April 16th once there had been a chance to read these. The shareholders were clearly having second thoughts, time was pressing as they were due in Parliament to have their bill read as soon as May 4th, and one wonders if they were just looking for an excuse to call the whole thing off.
The General Meeting meeting was duly held, with the engineer Mr Miller and the patentee of the atmospheric principal, Mr Samuda, in attendance. on the 16th. By a majority of 462 votes to 309, it was decided to proceed with the bill – but to have one more vote to confirm this before going in front of Parliament. The naysayers, led by a Mr Berry – probably George Berry esq., chairman of the Leith Chamber of Commerce – retired to the Cafe Royal to plot their next move, and took out an advert in the Caledonian Mercury asking their sympathisers to join them. Two days later they published a letter in the Scotsman challenging the vote, on the grounds that shareholders accounting for 2/3 of the stock had not been present at the General Meeting and it was not therefore quorate. The solicitor acting for this group invited those seeking to wind the company up to sign a petition to parliament, copies of which were held in various locations around Edinburgh, Leith and Glasgow. Within 24 hours, the holders of 2,000 shares, or 40% of all the stock, had signed. The race was on to end the Atmospheric route.
A final General Meeting was due for the 18th May, just 2 weeks before they were due in Parliament, for the shareholders to finally decide the fate of the scheme.
By order of the Committee of Management. Edinburgh, April 27, 1846The meeting would never take place. On Saturday the 16th May, the “Committee of Management regre to announce to the Shareholders that the Select Committee of the House of Commons to whom the Bill for this Company referred, has found the preamble not proven“. Parliament would not read the bill. The Edinburgh & Leith Atmospheric Railway was dead. The shareholders now set about attempting to recover their investments, the management gave them 8 days to lodge their requests and set about winding up the company and liquidating their assets – the land at the Low Calton and behind the Leith Assembly Rooms that had been purchased for stations. The ground purchased for stations was quickly sold by public roup (the Scottish version of an auction).
On September 1st 1846, at a General Meeting held at the Waterloo Hotel, the company formally voted itself out of existence and agreed to return its remaining balances to the shareholders. Of the £20,000 raised by the Atmospheric route, £11,000 had been spent and little had been achieved apart from the acquisition of a few parcels of land and the creation of much bad blood amongst the merchant and political classes of Edinburgh and Leith. The subscribers at least got back 18s in the pound, or 90% of their investment. For all too many in the railway speculation boom, a failed scheme meant financial ruin. The engineer, John Miller, attempted to take legal action against the company in December 1846 for loss of dividends. I am unclear if he succeeded.
Although they promised so much, atmospheric railways were riddled with insurmountable technical and operational challenges. The problems included, but were not limited to:
- The leather flaps that were required to seal the vacuum wore out and froze as hard as wood in the winter
- The vacuum tube was constantly fouled by dirt and water, needing constant cleaning
- The pumping engines frequently failed; they were just not reliable enough to keep up the constant work required to provide the vacuum. If a steam locomotive failed, it could be uncoupled and replaced, if a large pumping engine suffered the same fate, every train on that section of line would fail
- Construction costs were far higher than promised
- Operating costs were far higher than promised, as a result of the fuel consumption of the stationary engines and the constant maintenance and replacement needs of the vacuum tube
Footnote. Little more was heard of either scheme ever again, although in 1868 when the engineer to the Atmospheric route – John Miller – was standing for parliament, he was charged in a letter to the Edinburgh Evening Courant by one James Aytoun of having acted with impropriety with regards the scheme and fundamentally having lined his own pockets at the expense of the investors. James Aytoun, esq. was an advocate who had at one time been a prominent supporter of the scheme, but who had become a dissenting voice within it and ended up losing money by his account. It was Aytoun who had seconded the formal motion winding up the company in September 1846.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
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White Friars and Lepers: the thread about Greenside’s chapel and hospital
Apropos recent world events (at the time of writing in December 2021) I thought it was worthwhile taking a few minutes to spare a thought for Lepers in 16th century Edinburgh, who lived life according to incredibly strict terms that we we might now call “lockdown“.
A 16th century leper. The clapper, broad hat, cowl and cloak are a recurrent image of leprosy sufferers of this period. CC-BY-SA 4.0 Wellcome CollectionThere had been a leper hospital in Edinburgh since medieval times, but there is no positive record as to where it may have been. There is a story you sometimes hear that the placename Liberton derives from “leper town“, but that is easily debunked by the fact the place name predates the arrival of the word leper into Scots language by centuries. By the 16th century, after the reformation, the leper hospital was located at Greenside, outside the city boundary at the time and actually in the neighbouring Barony of Restalrig. The approximate location was between the junction of London Road and Leith Walk and Greenside Church. We know this not only because it was helpfully marked up on those old Ordnance Survey maps but also there are surviving records, a contemporary illustration and archaeological evidence uncovered during the interminable tram works.
OS 1849 town Plan overlaid on modern aerial imagery showing the general location of the Leper hospital / Carmelite Friary of Greenside. Drag the slider to compare. Highlighted are the site of the “Rood Well of Greenside” and the “Monastery of Carmelite Friars (1536) subsequently Greenside Hospital for Lepers (1591)”. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe use of this site goes back centuries before the hospital however and its earliest recorded use was as the site of the Rude Chapel. The Rude refers either to a Rood Screen – a feature of medieval churches – to an existing cross (or Rude) near the site, or to the nearby Augustinian Abbey of Holyrood (which refers to the Holy Rood or cross upon which Jesus was crucified). This chapel may have been founded around 1456 when King James II gave the valley of Greenside to the town as a “sporting” field, one for the medieval sorts of sports like jousting and open air theatre. In 1554 the Queen Regent Mary of Guise attended an open air production of David Lindsay’s epic play “Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaits, in Commendation of Vertew and Vituperation of Vyce“; all 9 hours of it.
A 2013 production of “A Satire of the Three Estates” in renaissance costume at Linlithgow Palace, by Staging the Scottish CourtLittle is known of the Rude Chapel, not even which saint it was dedicated to, and it had fallen fell out of use by 1518 when James Hamilton – Earl of Arran and Lord Provost of the city at that time – conveyed it to the Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel: the Carmelite order, also known as the White Friars on account of the colour of their cloaks.
“Conferimento della Regola del Carmelo” – Confirmation of the Carmelite Rule – a 1430 Fresco in Florence by Filippo LippiThe other friars in Edinburgh at this time were the Dominicans or Black Friars in the Canongate (see also Blackfriars Street) and the Franciscans or Grey Friars where the Kirk of that name now is. In addition, in Leith there were the Augustians at St. Anthony’s Preceptory, near the Foot of the Walk whose chapel still exists as a ruin on the slopes of Arthur’s Seat. The Carmelites were well established in the Lothians with friaries at Linlithgow and South Queensferry, which Greenside fell under the patronage of. George Hutton’s sketches of the late 18th century give us an idea of what the Queensferry Friary looked like before later repairs.
Carmelite Church at South Queensferry, from Hutton Drawings. CC-BY-SA National Library of ScotlandIn 1557 the Prior of Greenside, David Balbirnie, is recorded as being in office at Queensferry. This was perhaps as a result of Greenside having being left in ruins by the English Army in 1544 during the Burning of Edinburgh.
“A Coloured Plan, or Bird’s Eye View, of the Town of Edinburgh“, the English Army marches from Leith towards Edinburgh via the Calton Hill. A 1544 watercolour, probably by the military engineer Richard Lee.The cluster of buildings shown on the above illustration on the right hand side of the image, below the castle and on the reverse slope of Calton Hill, are probably the Greenside priory and its doo’cot. The friars probably ran some sort of hospital here in the medieval meaning of the word – spiritual care on a Biblical basis, to prepare the soul for the next life – rather than the sort of medical institution that we would now think of.
This collection of buildings on the northwest slopes below Calton Hill, in a walled enclosure with a dovecot is probably the Greenside priory. Credit: With permission, from the British Library archive, Cotton Augustus I. ii. 56In 1534 two Protestant heretics, David Straiton and Norman Gourlay, were condemned to be burnt at the stake, a gruesome sentence that was carried out within the walls at Greenside. The priory was out of use by the time of the Reformation when the only other contemporary image shows it a roofless complex of buildings on the 1560 map of the Siege of Leith – probably also by the same Rirchard Lee – which records its name as the Roode Chappelle. There is also a partial wall shown, but no dovecot.
“Roode Chappell” from the 1560 “Petworth House Map” of the Siege of Leith. PHA 4640, Reproduced by the kind permission of Lord Egremont and with acknowledgements to the County Archivist, West Sussex Record OfficeBy the 1580s the friary and chapel were both long abandoned and when the city was casting around for a site to locate a leper hospital their ruins were a potential candidate. St. Paul’s Work, a charitable house in the Waverley Valley next to the Trinity College Kirk, was also mooted but was found to be unsuitable and so in 1589 the Magistrates of the city approved that a Leper House was to be provided at Greenside. This was financed by John Roberstson, a wealthy merchant of the city, in response to his prayers for an act of mercy being answered.
The hospital provided for seven inmates, and inmates was the right word. Although they were admitted to the “care” of the hospital voluntarily, this was a hard bargain and the price of admittance was forfeiting nearly all rights as an individual. These first seven patients were Robert Mardow, James Garvie, Johnn MacRere, James Wricht, and Johnn Wilderspune. Also incarcerated (voluntarily) with them were two of ht men’s wives; Isobel Barcar (Mrs Mardow) and Janet Galt (Mrs Garvie).
No manner of Lipper persone, man nor woman, fra this tyme forth, cum amangis uther cleine personis, nor be nocht fund in the kirk, nor fleshe merket, nor no other merket within this burghe, under the payne of burnyng of their cheik and bannasing off the toune
1530 Act of the Scottish Parliament against lepers.The inmates had to abide by the strict rules of the hospital on penalty of death. To underline the seriousness of this threat there was a gallows erected on the gable end of the hospital and the keeper had power of carrying out that sentence, on the spot, for any infraction. The local name for the confines of the hospital wall was reportedly The Hangman’s Acre. The inmates were forbidden to leave the confines of its walls, all except the two wives (who were not Lepers) and who could do so only on market days to shop for themselves and the patients. The wives were strictly forbidden to do anything else outside the walls of the hospital. The doors of the hospital were to be kept locked from sunset until sunrise. The patients had the privilege during the hours of daylight to sit at the door, one at a time in turns, and shake “ane clapper” to attract the attention of passers buy to donate alms.
Late 15th century image of a leper begging at the walls of a town. Again shown with long cloak and cowl, wide had and leather clapper. “Leper with a clapper”, from Bartholomeus AnglicusLepers didn’t ring bells (metal and casting was very expensive), instead they had wood and leather clappers that they shook to make a loud noise. Such devices are commonly seen in medieval illustrations. The inmates at Greenside were forbidden from begging under any other circumstances and in any other manner than that which was prescribed.
Leper clappers.There were no holidays for the hospital and no visitors were allowed within its walls, apart from those “placit with thame thairin at command of the said Councall and Session“. The alms collected from the door were to be shared equally and declared to the council on a weekly basis when the appointed keeper made his visit. In addition to this a pension of 4 shillings Scots (4 English pence) was provided. The only comfort afforded for them beyond this (and it would have been an important one at the time), was the appointment of “ane ordinair reider to reid the prayeris everie Sabboth to the said lepperis“; every Sunday somebody would come to read them prayers.
It should therefore be clear that the Lepers and their wives were fundamentally locked inside the hospital on their own, to care and provide for themselves as best as they could and saw only the weekly visit of their prayer reader and council clerk. There is also every chance that not all of the Lepers even had that disease, any severe illness of the skin may have been described as such at that time and gotten you sentenced to Greenside.
After its establishment the hospital seems to disappear from the record and it may have been that it only existed for what remained of the lives of its initial residents. The colony was likely abandoned by the early 17th century. Its last resident may have been Thomas Weir – the infamous Major Weir – in 1670, who was confined as a prisoner here untile his execution by garrotting and burning at the stake for witchcraft, bestiality, incest and adultery nearby at the Gallowlee (Shrubhill).
The Devil’s fiery coach, which apparently conveyed Weir to Dalkeith to hear of news of the defeat of the Scots Army at the battle of WorcesterThe 2013 excavations at what was the London Road roundabout in advance of the city’s notorious tram project uncovered remains of a graveyard in this area. The archaeological write up does not mention precise dating or any signs of leprosy on the skeletons, but pottery dated the interments to between the 15th and 17th century.
Report of the 2013 archaeological excavations at Greenside as part of the Trams projectThe Greenside Well is believed to date back to the time of the chapel / priory / hospital and may indeed have been the reason that these institutions had been established at this exact location. It existed as a public water source until the middle of the 19th century and is shown on maps of this time.
Ainslie’s 1804 Town Plan, showing the well and an adjacent washing house. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandIn a very odd hark back to the distant past of Scotland before the Reformation, until the 20th century the Catholic Church in Rome still had an official on its payroll who was “il Padre Priori di Greenside“; the Priory Father of Greenside.
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The thread about Edinburgh and Leith under occupation; when “Gardyloo”, Christmas and being rude to Frenchmen were banned
From 1548 to 1560, the Port of Leith was occupied by a French garrison in support of the Queen Regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise. During that time the French fortified the town and made themselves generally unpopular with the locals. Such was the mutual bad feeling that in 1555 Mary of Guise’s Parliament made it an offence to speak ill of Frenchmen. I am not sure if this act has been repealed yet…
The arms of Mary of Guise, Regent of Scotland (Maria de Loraine, Regina Scotie) in South Leith Kirk. CC-BY-SA 3.0 Kim TraynorOne of the reasons for the French being so unpopular was their constant requisitioning of ships – this was a town that relied on the sea for its prosperity and in doing so the occupiers were directly impoverishing its occupants. As a result of this, shipowners were in the habit of making their vessels be spontaneously elsewhere whenever they got wind that the French might need them, which created logistical problems for the garrison commander. In 1550, the French governor in Leith employed two pynours (porters) to remove and impound all the rudders of the ships of Leith to prevent them from slipping away without his say-so. Twelve days later, all Scottish vessels from Kinghorn to Crail were ordered to leave for Leith within three hours or face being forfeited with their masters put to death.
Opposing the French in Leith were Scottish Protestant lords – the grandiosely titled Lords of the Congregation, or The Faithful – backed by an English army. An English general, Randolph, noted in 1560 that “in no other country were ever seen so many particular quarrels, which daily cause many to keep off who mortally hate the French“: Randolph could not understand how the Scots resented the French occupiers so much but yet were so reluctant to fight with the English against them. He had money to finance 2-3,000 Scots troops to eject the French but could not get them “for love nor money“. The English ended up assaulting Leith under an incompetent commander, with untrained recruits and ladders that were too short to scale the walls. This amateurish attack was repulsed by the stretched, starving but competent and well entrenched French garrison. Further bloodshed was spared when Mary of Guise died shortly thereafter and a short peace was agreed, allowing the French to leave.
“Incident in the Siege of Leith”. It is not clear which party is which here and what they are fighting over. But nobody seemed to be getting along.Less than 100 years after the exit of the French, Leith would find itself once again under military occupation after the calamitous defeat in 1650 of the Scottish Covenanter forces at the hands of Oliver Cromwell in the Battle of Dunbar. Relations between occupier and occupied this time were less strained; although English rule was firm and uncompromising there appeared to be more mutual tolerance on both sides, probably both were just exhausted from nearly 12 years of bloody warfare. The population and economy of Leith had also been shattered by a plague in 1645 that killed nearly half its population.
Cromwell at the head of his Army at Dunbar, a 19th century painting by Andrew Carrick Gow. CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 Tate GalleryCromwell entered Edinburgh on Saturday 7th December, just days after victory at Dunbar. Although the remnants of the Scottish army fought on it had abandoned the city to wage a protracted war of retreat across the country. The occupation was initially marked by restraint on the part of the victors and under Cromwell’s direct orders on 27th December three of his men were publicly flogged through the town by the “Provest marschellis men” for the offence of plundering houses without orders. Another unfortunate Roundhead was strapped to a horse with a pint jug tied around his neck, his hands bound and muskets tied to his feet, and ridden around the town for 2 hours for the offence of drunkenness. In May 1652, an English officer had his ear nailed to the public gallows and thereafter cut off for toasting the King’s health.
Cromwell enters Edinburgh, from an 1886 souvenir of the Edinburgh International Exhibition telling the history of the cityCivilian administration in those days was relatively limited, but the English were sensible enough to allow that of Edinburgh to continue to function – under close observation. Leith however had no such local authority of its own beyond that of Edinburgh and so was ruled directly through military courts headed by English officers “without partiality or favour“. In November 1651 they hung one of their own troopers at the Market Cross “a gallant, stout fellow” for robbing a butcher. A soldier found drunk and swearing in Leith was bound, hit repeatedly in the mouth and tied to a pillar with “a paper bound to his breast” specifying his crimes. Relations in Leith with the English seemed to be downright cordial at times (perhaps because the locals were pleased to be relieved of the constant political and economic interference from Edinburgh) but things ended up becoming too cordial. In October 1651 English soldiers had to be forbidden from marrying Leith women without the written permission of their Major and in February 1652 this prohibition was extended to the keeping of female servants!
In Edinburgh, although the town itself had been easily taken, the Castle garrison had held out and was being besieged by Cromwell’s New Model Army. Anyone found treating with the garrison was dealt with severely. A gardener at the West Kirk (now St. Cuthbert’s Parish Church) was accused of giving intelligence to the Castle; he was taken to the city guardhouse and hung from his thumbs with burning slow matches (the sort used in matchlock firearms) between his fingers until they were “burnt to the bone“.
“Cromwell’s Bartizan, Edinburgh”, by James Drummond RSA, 1861. Oliver Cromwell surveys his newly conquered lands from a rooftop in the Old Town of Edinburgh after the Battle of Dunbar. A bartizan is an overhanging projection from a defensive wall. The solider in the background has a matchlock firearm over his shoulder, and the slow match is the fine cord that can be seen above his gloved hand. The auction listing suggests this is Cromwell at the Castle, but it was then under siege and he is lower than surrounding buildings. The original RSA listing confirms he is actually stood on a housetop.In March 1651 the English soldiers in Edinburgh mutinied due to the lack of provisions and pay; what had been sent to them by sea had been turned back by unfavourable weather. They put their own commanders in jail and “ran through the markets of Edinburgh, plundering and robbing the people of the town, so that few would go out on the streets“. General John Lambert arrived in Edinburgh at the end of November that year to restore order and to make arrangements for quartering of his army in the city over winter. He seems to have made a positive impression with the locals; on finding out that there was no local magistrate in place to dispense justice, he reinstated some of the old ones. He also ordered the Incorporated Trades to choose their own Deacons (the principal officers of the Trades, who formed a core of the Town Council). He did however maintain a right of veto over appointments and kept the appointment of the Castle’s governor to his personal choice.
Oliver Cromwell (left) and Lieutenant General John Lambert (right), 1745 mezzotint by Andrew Miller after Robert Walker, 1650. © National Portrait Gallery, London NPG D32974In December, Lambert ordered citizens in both Edinburgh and Leith to hang out lanterns and place candles in their windows or doors from 6PM to 9PM on account of the disorder being committed by the soldiers. This was observed but cost the inhabitants dearly as candles were an expensive commodity. Anybody found not complying was to be fined 4 shillings sterling, with the master or mistress of the house being thrown in the city guardhouse until it was paid. He also set about the perhaps impossible task of the cleaning up of Auld Reekie. Orders were given on the 24th December that the streets, closes and wynds in Edinburgh were be cleansed within 13 days and “no filth or water should be thrown forth from their windows upon pain of paying immediately 4 shillings sterling“. The proceeds of such fines were to be split equally between the informant and the poor of the town. Clearly it did not have a long lasting effect as just three years later the city was ordered to procure carts and horses for the carrying away of the filth.
“The Flowers of Edinburgh”, a satirical 18th century print on the traditional manner of “flushing the toilet” in Old Town Edinburgh. © The Trustees of the British MuseumOn December 25th 1651 the English authorities in Leith ordered that Christmas should be banned. The point being made here was probably moot however given it was not something that would have been openly observed or celebrated in Presbyterian Scotland. Indeed the Kirk, the usual incumbent authority on moral matters in Scottish towns and burghs, had banned its celebration back in 1640. However ten years later it had nothing like its former authority, especially in Leith where it had been evicted from its church buildings and relieved of its civic duties by the occupiers.
Entry for 2th December 1651 from the Diary of John NicollOn February 7th 1652, under orders of the Commissioners of the English Parliament who were at that time resident in Dalkeith, the symbols of the Stuart Kings’ arms, crowns and royal unicorns of the city were taken down wherever they were to be found. They were stripped from the King’s pew at St. Giles’ Kirk, from the Mercat cross, the Netherbow Port, Parliament House, Edinburgh Castle and the palace of Holyroodhouse. They were then taken to the gallows and publicly hung.
In May 1654 General Monck, who had been Cromwell’s military commander in Scotland until 1652, came once again to Edinburgh to proclaim the union of England and Scotland as the Commonwealth. He was received by the Lord Provost and Bailies of the Town Council (the most senior members of the civilian authority) in their finery. Perhaps they were mindful of the rape and pillage of Dundee committed by Monck’s men back in 1651 and set out to woo the General lest they incur his wrath. They conveyed him to a “sumptuous dinner and feast, prepared by the Town of Edinburgh for him and his special officers. This feast was six days in preparing, and the bailies of Edinburgh did stand and serve the whole time of that dinner“. They also laid on a “great preparation” of fireworks which were set off from the Mercat Cross between 9PM and midnight, “to the admiration of many people“.
George Monck by Peter Lely, c. 1665Cromwell also left it to Monck to resolve the interminable squabbles between the city of Edinburgh and Port of Leith. The latter wanted freedom to trade without interference from its neighbour, the former wanted to assert its historic legal rights to her port. An English merchant in Leith at the time said that the town had been “under the greatest slavery that I ever knew” and should subject to under Edinburgh no more than “Westminster to London.” As part of his overall strategy to pacify and control Scotland, Monck proposed enclosing Leith in fortifications as a garrison town – probably reconstructing the 1560 walls and bastions. The prospect of this terrified Edinburgh, as it would make it substantially easier for Leith to act independently. Edinburgh shrewdly counter-offered that it would pay £5,000 instead for a standalone Citadel outside of Leith – or it may be that the it was Monck being shrewd and he had played Edinburgh off against Leith to get them to finance his scheme. In the end the £5,000 citadel apparently cost many times that to build. The city would later buy it back for a further £5,000 from Charles II, so ended up paying for it twice. Although it was well engineered it was soon abandoned as a defensive fortification; the seaward walls and bastions had been impossible to protect from erosion by the sea and had collapsed within 30 years.
By May 1660, the Commonwealth was over (assisted in no small part by Monck) and the Houses of Parliament had proclaimed Charles II to be King. Orders were sent to the Governor of Edinburgh castle to fire 3 volleys from the guns, one for each of the Three Kingdoms. The chief gunner at the Castle gave the orders to his men but one refused saying that “The devil [would] blow him in the air that loosed a cannon for that purpose” and “if he loosed any cannon that day sum man should repent it“. The complainant was transferred to a gun overlooking the West Kirk. The first volley was duly fired and when this man went to reload his weapon, he recharged it with powder only for it to spontaneously discharge while he was doing so, there being a smouldering ember in the barrel. He was blown clean over the castle walls and off the Castle Rock itself, falling over 250 feet to his death. He was buried near where he landed in the West Kirk.
“The Prospect of the Castle and City of Edinburgh from the Nor’ Loch”, by John Slezer in 1693. The unfortunate gunner met his end by falling from the walls on this, the north side of the castle. © Edinburgh City LibrariesNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret