#auctionhouseartefact — Public Fediverse posts

“Indifference to Practically Everything But Rhyme”: the thread about William McGonagall’s elegy to Leith

“A classic example of his indifference to practically everything but rhyme“; the withering summary by an Edinburgh Evening News journalist in 2002 when recalling the work The Ancient Town of Leith by the poet and tragedian William McGonagall (or as he liked to style himself later in life; Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah). Sir William is a man most associated with the city of Dundee, but was born and would die in Edinburgh and is fondly remembered for his prolific output of universally awful poetry. In the words of Hugh McDiarmid:

McGonagall is in a very special category, and has it all to himself.

According to his biography by Norman Watson, McGonagall and his wife returned to Edinburgh via Leith in May 1895. Inspired by his new surroundings – and by his perpetual lack of money – he immediately got to work churning out locally-themed broadsides such as “Beautiful Edinburgh“, “New North Bridge Ceremonials” or “Lines In Praise of Professor Blackie“. These he attempted to hawk on the streets to make ends meet and to try and get himself invited into the parlours of polite (and hopefully, paying) society. By the time he penned The Ancient Town of Leith the McGonagalls were resident at 21 Lothian Street (demolished in 1912 to make way for an extension to the Royal Scottish Museum) and his health, finances and reputation were all in terminal decline.

Without further ado, let us take a few minutes to distract ourselves from modern life and enjoy this stellar example of “Sir” William’s absolute commitment to his craft:

THE ANCIENT TOWN OF LEITH
A New Poem
By Sir WILLIAM TOPAZ McGONAGALL
Knight of the White Elephant, Burmah

Ancient town of Leith, most wonderful to be seen,
With your many handsome buildings, and lovely links so
green,
And the first buildings I may mention are the Courthouse and
Town-Hall,
Also Trinity House, and the Sailors’ Home of Call.

Then as for Leith Fort, it was erected in 1779, which is really
grand,
And which is now the artillery headquarters in Bonnie Scot-
land;
And as for the Docks, they are magnificent to see,
They comprise five docks, two piers, 1,141 yards long
respectively.

And there’s steamboat communication with London and the
North of Scotland,
And the fares are really cheap and the accommodation most
grand;
Then there’s many public works in Leith, such as flour mills,
And chemical works, where medicines are made for curing
many ills.

Besides, there are sugar refineries and distilleries,
Also engineer works, saw-mills, rope-works, and breweries,
Where many of the inhabitants are daily employed,
And the wages they receive make their hearts feel overjoyed.

In past times Leith shared the fortunes of Edinboro’,
Because if withstood nine months’ siege, which caused them
great sorrow;
They fought against the Protestants in 1559 and in ’60,
But they beat them back manfully and made them flee.

Then there’s Bailie Gibson’s fish shop, most elegant to be seen,
And the fish he sells there are, beautiful and clean;
And for himself, he is a very good man,
And to deny it there’s few people can.

The suburban villas of Leith are elegant and grand,
With accommodation that might suit the greatest lady in the land;
And the air is pure and good for the people’s health,—
And health, I’m sure, is better by far than wealth.

The Links of Leith are beautiful for golfers to play,
After they have finished the toils of the day;
It is good for their health to play at golf there,
On that very beautiful green, and breathe the pure air.

The old town of Leith is situated at the junction of the River of
Leith,
Which springs from the land of heather and heath;
And no part in the Empire is growing so rapidly,
Which the inhabitants of Leith are right glad to see.

And Leith in every way is in itself independent,
And has been too busy to attend to its own adornment;
But I venture to say and also mention
That the authorities to the town will pay more attention.

Ancient town of Leith, I must now conclude my muse,
And to write in praise of thee my pen does not refuse,
Because the inhabitants to me have been very kind,
And I’m sure more generous people would be hard to find.

They are very affable in temper and void of pride,
And I hope God will always for them provide;
May He shower His blessings upon them by land and sea,
Because they have always been very kind to me.

William McGonagall, “The Poet Laureate of the Silvery Tay” died penniless and largely forgotten at 5 South College Street in Edinburgh in 1902 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Greyfriars’ Kirkyard. A plaque marks the approximate spot, but was not erected until 1999. If you’d like to own this original, signed copy of this magnificent work then it is currently up for auction next week by Lyon & Turnbull: bidding start at only two-hundred and twenty of your hard-earned pounds!

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.

“Of Very Doubtful Military Significance”: the thread about The Loyal Edinburgh Spearmen

Today’s Auction House Artefacts are a pair of silver Georgian merit medals awarded to Fletcher Yetts of the Loyal Edinburgh Spearmen. Mr Yetts (1759-1832) was the keeper of the City Water Works on the Castlehill. Britain was almost continuously at war with France for between 1793 and 1815 and the quaintly named Spearmen were one of the variety of amateur paramilitary formations raised in Edinburgh during this period in anticipation of a French invasion (or a popular revolution in the French style).

The Volunteer Corps Act of 1794 authorised the formation of volunteer paramilitary forces for home defence; the Volunteers. These were an infantry force that generally drew their officers from petty gentry and aspirational middle-class professionals. They were distinct from the volunteer cavalry of the Yeomanry whose members were the country landowners and required to have deep pockets and horses at their disposal – and be competent in their use.

In Scotland a third force was the Militia, established by the Militia Act of 1797 which empowered the Lords Lieutenant of the Counties to raise by ballot a conscript auxiliary force for service within Scotland. Its ranks were generally drawn from the lowest rungs of society and the Act was so thoroughly unpopular that it provoked widespread rioting across the country. This led to the Massacre at Tranent in August 1797 when eleven men, women and children were killed by Dragoons when protesting against it.

In contrast to the Militia, the ranks of the Volunteers were drawn largely from the lower middle and upper working classes; an attraction of joining being it could exempt one from being drafted into the Militia. Apart from a small number of drill sergeants and drummers, the Volunteers were unpaid but received their weapons and allowances for uniforms from the Government.

The Volunteers allowed patriotic and aspirational amateurs to play at being military officers without facing the dangers and hardships of actual military service. There was a steady supply of men keen to sport the over-embellished uniforms – and even finance the units at their own expense – to reap the benefit of the high public status that a uniform conferred in the ballrooms and drawing rooms of the city.

By late 1803, there were some 30,000 Volunteers in Scotland (and over 300,000 in the wider UK) but their efficiency varied widely; from semi-competent to completely hopeless. Georgian satirists mercilessly lampooned them, depicting them as physically unfit; poorly equipped, trained and led; over-enthusiastic and thoroughly incompetent.

In their distinctive blue coats the Royal Edinburgh Volunteers (REV) were one of the first established in the country and were an example of the semi-competent type of unit. A commissioned portrait of them certainly reflected this, Edinburgh caricaturist John Kay took a slightly more humours view of them.

The Spearmen – in contrast to the REV – showed “all the signs of being a force of very doubtful military significance” (W. A. Thorburn, curator of the Scottish United Services Museum, writing on the subject in the Book of the Old Edinburgh Club, vol. 32). They probably formed as a result of the officer corps of the city’s other Volunteer units being fully subscribed to and thus a further unit was required for those left out. Its stated purpose was to “defend the city, liberties and vicinity of Edinburgh, in case it be found necessary to march the other forces to a distance, and to protect the lives and property of the inhabitants from injury and depredation“. This was a coded recognition that the job of the Volunteers wasn’t really to fight the (real or imagined) threat posed by French invaders but to release regular forces to do so by securing the home front. A secondary and more realistic proposition was quelling popular revolt or opportunistic disorder in the absence of the regulars: to the local authorities and certain sections of society, the Mob invoked far more fear than the French did – as evidenced by their actions at Tranent – and the Toun Rats (the Town Guard of Edinburgh) had proved of dubious worth in the past.

The nascent Spearmen offered their services to the Crown, to make sure they were officially recognised and their officers Gazetted, and they were admitted as supernumeraries to the existing Volunteer establishment in the city in a letter dated 7th November 1803.

We are well persuaded that every man who can handle a pike and who is not engaged in any volunteer corps, will chearfully [sic] embrace this opportunity of coming forward for the defence of our families and firesides

Scots Magazine, December 1803

The initial plan was to raise two Battallions, each of six-hundred men in ten companies; in theory over 1,200 men. In practice however only one Battallion was ever constituted and its ranks fluctuated between four to five hundred men. They wore scarlet cutaway jackets, blue breeches and a tall beaver hat decorated with feathers (as per the medal at the top of the page and in contrast to the long blue coats and white breeches of the REV). Initially they were armed with nothing more than short pikes and swords for the officers. Their ranks were drawn largely from those exempt from balloting into the militia; the Incorporated Trades of the City and those too old, too young or with too many dependent children.

Mr John Bennet, surgeon to the garrison of Edinburgh Castle and President of the Royal College of Surgeons, was elected as the honourary Lieutenant Colonel Commandant. He had been the surgeon to the Sutherland Fencibles (an earlier, auxiliary military force in the Highlands) from 1779-83 so was an eminent choice. He was later replaced by William Inglis WS Esq. after being found dead in a field in Fife on October 10th 1805, his gun by his side, having suffered a fatal fall from his horse when hunting.

Other officers included Robert Dundas and John Peat, Writers to the Signet (solicitors); William Ranken, a Town Councillor from the Incorporation of Tailors; the lighthouse engineers Thomas Smith and his step-son Robert Stevenson; Francis Braidwood, an upholsterer and cabinet-maker (and allegedly the first man in Edinburgh to wear shoelaces); John Cameron, Deacon of the Tailors and James Newton, Deacon of the Incorporation of Bakers. Their chaplain was the Reverend Alexander Brunton of New Greyfriars Kirk, later the Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at the University of Edinburgh.

It was all very Dad’s Army, but at this time the fear of invasion was genuinely held as a result of intense newspaper speculation. Matters came to a head on January 31st 1804 when the Volunteers of Hawick and Teviotdale rose to repel an “invasion” after the lighting of the chain of hilltop warning beacons across the Borders counties. This proved to be a false alarm, the result of an inexperienced but enthusiastic watchman at Hume Castle near Kelso who saw a distant glow on the eastern horizon – actually charcoal burning at Shoreswood in Northumberland, 15 miles away – and thought it was the beacon at Dowlaw being lit.

It was not until the Scottish volunteer companies arrived at Berwick-upon-Tweed the following morning after marching excitedly through the night that the mistake was realised, but a celebration was held never-the-less to mark the efficacy of the warning system and the enthusiasm of the response. It was only a sceptical naval watchkeeper at the St. Abb’s Head signal station that prevented the warning being transmitted all the way to the end of the chain at Edinburgh.

Hey, Volunteers are ye wauking yet? Ho, jolly lads, are ye ready yet? Are ye up, are ye drest, will ye all do your best? To fight Bonaparte in the morning!
Now, brave Volunteers, be it day, be it night; When the signal is given that the French are in sight; Ye must haste with your brethren in arms to unite; To fight Bonaparte in the morning!

Marching song of the Dunfermline Volunteers, to the tune of the traditional “Hey, Johnnie Cope”

Despite the Government’s approval, as supernumaries the Spearmen had to finance themselves. In February 1804 a public subscription was raised to cover the expenses of fitting out the unit, the Caledonian Mercury reporting “there can be little doubt that it will soon exceed the sum required“. The Town Council voted fifty Guineas towards the cause as did the Association for the Defence of the Firth of Forth, the Incorporation of Goldsmiths and the United Incorporations of Mary’s Chapel (the Wrights and the Masons). The Incorporation of Tailors and the Bakers provided thirty each, those of The Hammermen twenty-five, The Fleshers twenty and The Hammermen of Canongate five. A number of town councillors and many of the founding officers also contributed, as did some notable local patrons. A Benevolent Society was set up by the officers to provide “mutual aid of each other in the event of sickness or death” in September of that year and which would later be extended to all the Volunteers of the city.

They used as their parade ground the Heriot’s Hospital green, that traditionally used by the other Volunteers in the city and seen in the background of the portrait at the top of the page of Sergeant Patrick Gould. In 1805 they were formally recognised by the Home Secretary, Lord Hawkesbury, as a full member of the Corps of Volunteers. This gave them equal status with the city’s other volunteer units and entitling them to receive Government funding, pay and arms. It is likely at this time they traded in their pikes for Government-issue muskets. To mark the occasion, “this band of citizen warriors had their stand of colours delivered to them on the 12th August 1805″ (the birthday of the Prince Regent, the Prince of Wales). These were provided and presented by the wife of the Lieutenant Colonel Bennet and her daughter Miss Scott of Logie. Chaplain Rev. Brunton consecrated them with “a most impressive prayer” after which the batallion marched out of the city to Duddingston House, the residence of the Earl of Moira, Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Scotland. The Earl inspected the formation after which they returned to the Bennet household on Nicolson Street where “they were regaled by him in a very liberal and handsome style of hospitality“.

In the event of the Spearmen being called out, they were to assemble upon the Mound as their chosen “alarm post in case of invasion or popular tumult“. In March 1804 a battery of artillery was added, armed with two experimental 6-pounder cannons designed and built by Mr Roebuck of the Shotts Iron Company. The guns were commanded by Captain William Braidwood jnr and were provided with two novel ammunition carts, designed to be pulled by domestic draught horses.

The artillery would get the Spearmen into trouble with the law. On Monday 25th September 1805, eager to demonstrate their efficiency and readiness to the city after formally receiving their colours, they marched and drilled through the streets before assembling on the Mound to firing off a number of volleys in salute from the Roebuck Guns. After the third and final blast, Lieutenant Colonel Bennet was apprehended with “violent passion” by John Tait, judge of the City Police Court and superintendent of the newly instituted Police Office. Tait threatened “at your peril remain on this ground a moment and if I ever see you and your Corps on the streets of Edinburgh again, it shall be at your peril“.

Bennet wrote to Sir William Fettes, the Lord Provost and Lord Lieutenant of the City, to complained that he and his men had been prevented by the civilian authorities from carrying out their duties and were treated with “gross and repeated insults from an immense mob“. He threatened that he would have to disband the unit if they could not go about their business unmolested. Tait had only been in his position of authority a few months and was likely trying to publicly demonstrate that it was he, and not any Volunteers, who was responsible for law and order. He wrote back to the Lord Provost standing his ground, but making the clarification that it was only firing off cannons in public that he wished to prevent, and not their marching and drilling. This seemed to placate both sides and thereafter Spearmen got on with tier duties of playing at soldiers.

On September 1807 they changed their name to the Loyal Edinburgh Volunteers to acknowledge their changed status (which causes confusion with the Royal Edinburgh Volunteers, who they remained distinct from) and also that thanks to Moira’s intervention they had retired their spears and were now properly armed with muskets. They marked their promotion by marching to Alloa for ten days on “active duty”. The Caledonian Mercury reported that “their conduct on the march to and from Alloa, and while in quarters, was orderly and regular in the highest degree, and their attendance at drill, for seven hours every day, was unremitting“.

The experience must have been enjoyable as they then applied to be transferred into the Militia, an offer which was rejected. Undeterred, in December that year it was announced that the Prince of Wales had “been graciously pleased to accept an offer… of an extension of their services to any part of Great Britain” and as such they would henceforth be known as the Prince of Wales’ Loyal Edinburgh Volunteers. This was far removed from their founding aim of serving only in the city; things may have gone to their heads as in 1809 the entire Volunteer forces of Edinburgh offered their services to go to Spain and fight alongside the regulars in the bloody Peninsular War. Again the offer which was politely declined.

Lieutenant Colonel Inglis remained in charge of the renamed Spearmen until the volunteer forces were officially disbanded on July 11th 1814. They have been largely forgotten about and even in their own time were in the shadow of the Royal Edinburgh Volunteers and the Yeomanry, but at least one unknown amateur poet penned a verse in their honour, although it is hardly complementary.

It is weel Kend these guy wheen years
I’ve praised our Royal Volunteers
The Spearmen has appeared at last
O’ them we should hope the best.
There’s numbers o’ them without doubt
They are baith souple louns and stout,
But other o’ they I do ken
Dude help them poor auld worn out men
An’ I wad scorn to tell a lee
They’re neither fit to fight nor flee
An’ other some raw mou’d callants
I’ve seen far better selling ballants.
What brings them out in name of wonder
Wer it no to make a gudly number.
O’ them the brethern may think shame
Far better they wad stay at hame.

Poem to the Loyal Edinburgh Spearmen, 1804

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.

Q-ship: The thread about Neil Shaw Mackinnon and the loss of the “Cullist”

Today’s auction house artefact is a set of medals awarded in World War One to Neil Shaw Mackinnon, a marine engineer officer from Leith. An experienced merchant mariner, Mackinnon’s wartime military service was brief but eventful and hallmarked by bravery and a run of luck that would end in tragedy; less than three weeks after he was presented with the Distinguished Service Cross by King George V (left hand medal, below) he would disappear with his ship into the cold, dark waters of the Irish Sea.

Neil Shaw Mackinnon was born on April 23rd 1877 at 64 Pitt Street in North Leith, the eldest son of Jessie Shaw and Donald Mackinnon, Gaelic-speaking natives of the Ross of Mull. The family raised their four children in the Gaelic language in Leith, but Neil did spend some of his childhood back on Mull at Bunessan before following his father’s footsteps and becoming a ship’s engineer. Tragedy struck the family in July 1903 when Donald was killed; he fell from an unsafe gang plank into the depths of a London dry dock one dark and wet night when returning to his ship and never recovered from his injuries. Neil now supported his mother and two younger sisters who, after the death of Donald, had moved nearby to 203 Ferry Road in North Leith before settling at 1 Royston Terrace in Goldenacre. Neil was the honorary secretary of the Clan Mackinnon Society in Edinburgh and like many merchant seamen he was a member of the Royal Naval Reserve. It was this latter commitment that saw him called up for active service during WW1, commissioning as a temporary Engineer Lieutenant on 13th May 1917. He would find himself on probably the most dangerous sort of ship that an RNR man could expect to be on at this time; the Q-ship.

HMS Cullist had started life as the merchant steamer SS Westphalia, launched at the Caledon Shipyard in Dundee on 24th December 1912 for the Leith, Hull & Hamburg Steam Packet Company. She was the sort of small steamer that was ten-a-penny on the North Sea at the time; a 1,030 ton, 230ft long ship plying back and forward between the Scottish east coast and the German ports on the Baltic coast. Her two boilers and 1,350 horsepower steam engine were sufficient to move her along at 10 knots, a slow but economic pace. A newspaper report in the Clyde Shipping Gazette from March 1913 describes the typical and varied cargo she could expect to carry being unloaded in Grangemouth; potash, machinery parts, earthenware, paper, glass, cement, firewood, flour, chemicals, metal ores, toys, pianos, electrical insulators, bread, scrap metal and more.

In March 1917, Westphalia was requisitioned by the Admiralty sent to Pembroke Naval Dockyard to be converted into a Q-ship. This was a naval code name for a merchant ship that was fitted with concealed weapons, with the intention of luring German U-boats into attacking it on the surface before suddenly revealing its true purpose by opening fire on the aggressor at short range and (hopefully) sinking it. Q-ships were named after the Irish port of Queenstown where they had first been converted in 1915.

The Q-ships had a brief period of success in 1915 before U-boat commanders became familiar with the ruse and switched their tactics. After this they became very risky propositions for their crews, far more likely to be sunk than to do the sinking. But such was the desperate situation at sea caused by the German U-boat campaign that the Navy still persevered with them and men still volunteered to sign up for them.

It was into this extremely risky service that Neil Mackinnon went, answering to the ship’s master Lieutenant Commander Salisbury Hamilton Simpson. Apart from the application of “Dazzle Ship” camouflage paint, HMS Cullist (as the Westphalia was now known) still looked just like any other tramp steamer. But she hid a number of secrets that only the very closest of inspections could have revealed; cleverly concealed on her decks was the armament of a 4-inch gun, two 12-pounder guns and two pairs of 14-inch torpedo tubes.

And so it was that Mackinnon, Simpson and the Cullist went to war. The ship was disguised under a number of fictitious merchant names – SS Hayling, SS Jurassic and SS Prim were all used – plying the merchant convoy routes and looking for trouble. She did not have long to wait; on July 13th she was steaming between Ireland and France when a German U-boat appeared on the horizon around 1PM. It was more economical for submarines to stay on the surface and to sink lone merchant ships using guns, but they were aware of the threat of Q-ships and so kept their distance. The U-boat opened fire at long range, but the shots were wildly short and so it began to press closer. Cullist spotted another merchant ship in the distance at 1:30PM and signalled her to keep away. Simpson was trying to draw the U-boat slowly into his trap. He kept himself between the aggressor and the sun, to dazzle the men trying to aim her guns, and regularly changed his course. This was a standard anti-submarine technique called Zig-Zagging that frustrated the use of torpedoes. By 1:45PM the enemy had closed to 5,000 yards and had begun to find the range, her shells were landing all around Cullist and showering her with spray and splinters. It would be very tempting for Simpson to have returned fire, but once he did so the game was given away and the submarine would be able to simply dive away and attack another ship another day. By 2:07PM the Cullist had counted sixty-eight shells land around her and finally Simpson gave the order to fire back; in an instant the screens were dropped and the guns were in action. It had paid off, the third round fired from the Q-ship was a direct hit and took out the U-boat’s deck gun. Further hits landed around the bow and conning tower and within a few minutes the submarine slipped below the water, on fire.

The Cullist closed in on where the U-boat had been seen to disappear below the waves and dropped a number of depth charges. Her lookouts spotted oil and debris on the surface and the grim sight of a corpse floating on the surface in the dungarees of a naval engineer. The destroyer HMS Christopher arrived in support at 3:30PM to keep up the hunt but the submarine was never seen again. The men of Cullist were credited with her sinking; it’s not actually clear whether they actually did or even what U-boat it might have been, but German naval records show U-69 was operating in this area at this time when she disappeared to unknown causes. Lieutenant Commander Simpson was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) medal for this, with two of his officers awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) and Engineer Mackinnon recognised by a Mention in Dispatches.

A little over a month later, the Cullist was back in action again. On August 20th, she was touting for business in the English Channel when a U-boat opened fire on her at long range. For two and a half hours this was kept up, but she could not be encouraged to move in any closer. After over eighty rounds had been fired to little effect, the submarine finally scored a hit. This pierced the boiler room below the waterline, started flooding and injured some of the men on duty. Engineer Mackinnon’s directed his men to plugged and shored up the hole with timbers to prevent any further intake of water and got her back up to speed again. It was by now 7:25pm, the light would soon fade and the danger was that the submarine would slip away under the water and come back at night with torpedoes. Simpson therefore reluctantly ordered his gunners to fire back at a disadvantageous range to drive her away. Once again their aim was true and the enemy departed the scene before she took any significant damage.

Trouble seemed to follow the Cullist around and it was only another month before she was in action again. On 28th September she surprised a U-boat on the surface at the relatively close range of 5,000 yards and took the initiative, opening fire immediately without trying any ruses. Her gunners’ aim was true once more and of the thirteen rounds she fired, eight were hits. The submarine slipped below the surface in an uncontrolled manner at 12:43PM and contact was lost. It was soon picked up again and for four and a half hours a surface chase took place, Mackinnon somehow coaxing a speed of 13 knots out of his 10 knot charge. A surface U-boat could make at least 16 knots however and once again their prey eluded them. Lieutenant Commander Simpson however would recommend in his report of the last two actions that Makinnon should be considered for a medal, for his damage control in August and the speeds maintained in September. The First Lord of the Admiralty approved the award of the Distinguished Service Cross on 15th November 1917, a medal “awarded in recognition of an act or acts of exemplary gallantry during active operations against the enemy at sea“. Mackinnon would receive this decoration from the King on January 23rd 1918.

The Cullist‘s career continued to be active. On 17th November 1917 she was fired upon by a U-boat from a distance of 8,000 yards. This time the enemy’s shooting was much better and the Q-ship was soon taking hits. Luckily the conditions were foggy and the Cullist was able to engage in a game of cat-and-mouse in the fog banks to hamper the submarine’s shooting and try and draw her in. At 4,500 yards distance, having been on the receiving end of ninety-two German rounds, she returned fire and of the fourteen shots she got off, six her hits. Once again the damaged submarine was able to dive and slip away to safety and once again the report of Mackinnon’s captain praised his engineer’s conduct during the action: ‘These officers [Mackinnon and his deputy] are stationed in the Engine Room and Boiler Room during action and have always kept their department in a high state of efficiency and ready for any emergency, stimulating all ratings under their orders with their good example.”

The ship had enjoyed a run of good luck in this time; it was rare for a Q-ship to have quite so many contacts with enemy submarines and come away from them with the upper hand. The run was soon to end however, on February 11th 1918 she was steaming 25 miles east of Drogheda in the when two torpedoes from the U-97 hit her without warning. The ship slipped below the cold, wintry surface of the Irish Sea less than two minutes later, taking forty three of the seventy on board down with her. Neil Shaw Mackinnon never made it out of his engine room. The survivors were left struggling in the water when the U-boat surfaced, asking for the captain. When we was told that the he had gone down, he kept two of the men as prisoners and abandoned the rest to their fates with parting “words and gestures of abuse“. As it transpired Simpson, although injured, was alive in the water and he and others in the water managed to survive by clambering aboard – or hanging onto – a life raft and singing songs together until a passing trawler picked them up; allegedly midway through the popular wartime ditty of A Long Way to Tipperary. The five officers, twenty seven ratings, two Royal Marines and nine Merchant Marine Reserve seamen who lost their lives that day were:

None of the bodies of those men were ever recovered and as such they are officially commemorated only in their medals and on the Royal Naval Memorial in Plymouth.

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.

Today's #AuctionHouseArtefact is the WW1 medals of Neil Shaw Mackinnon from Leith. His wartime career was brief but eventful, hallmarked by bravery and a run of luck ending in tragedy; less than 3 weeks after he received his DSC 🎖️ he would disappear with his ship into the Irish Sea. A thread 🧵▶️

Very loyal and very well-oiled: the thread about the Edinburgh Revolution Club

Today’s Auction House Artefact is a 1753 medal from the Edinburgh Revolution Club. This club was not the sticky-floored nightclub on Chambers Street, but a club for Loyalist, Unionist, Protestant and Whig gentlemen to indulge in drinking and singing in the 18th century city and following its thread gives us an insight into prevailing sentiment amongst the upper tier of society at that time. Apparently these medals were the last objects ever struck at the old Edinburgh Mint.

The Revolution the club refers to is of course the “Glorious” one of 1688. This is why the medal has on its reverse “In Commemoration of the Recovery of Their Religion and Liberty By King William & Queen Mary anno 1688“. In a particularly Scottish context, the events of 1688 precipitated a short-lived Jacobite uprising (the first of a number of these) and it displaced Episcopalianism and re-established Presbyterianism in the Kirk. The front of the medal shows an imperious looking King William III (of Orange), being adored by the seated ladies of Justice and Religion, having chased away the Medusa-headed tyranny and knocked the mitre off of Popery; i.e. he has deposed Catholicism, King James and the House of Stuart.

The club claimed to have been founded by “a number of Scots Gentlemen who attended [the Prince of Orange] from Holland” in 1688, but the first reporting of its activities is not until 1746 – apparently a revival by descendents of the founders. It is quite probable that this was a reaction amongst the powered class in the city after the final failure of the 1745 Jacobite uprising that had briefly held the city. The club’s first annual soiree was on 4th November 1747 when it met on the birthday of William. Proceedings started with a suitably Presbyterian sermon by the Rev. Alexander Webster at the New Kirk (the most senior of the kirks in the subdivided St. Giles) before adjourning to the Duke’s Head tavern to drink “many loyal and revolution toasts“. The Newcastle Courant reported the attendance was so high that not everyone could fit in the establishment. The fourth of November would become the annual climax of the club’s activities.

The corpus of the club selected itself from applicants who had written to its committee by “leaving a letter at the bar of the Royal Exchange Coffee House“. By 1748 it had 230 members who constituted a who’s who of power and class in the city (and indeed Scotland); “persons of the first distinction and some ministers” – nobility, gentlemen, senior military officers, judges in the court of Session and Exchequer, the Lord Provost and Magistrates. Club members were issued with a “diploma” which they were expected to carry “In their pockets” to all meetings. (Apparently they had trouble with unwelcome interlopers.)

In 1750 it is reported to have been holding its functions in the Assembly Rooms, which were at that time on the West Bow. As had been established, on the anniversary of King William’s birthday some 300 members met there for the usual array of toasts and patriotic songs.

If you didn’t know the words, the club published their own song book, “A Collection of Loyal Songs“, yours for 6 pence. This included such ditties as “Great William of Nassau, who sav’d us from Rome” (to the tune of “The Nun to the Abbess“); “Your glasses charge high, ’tis in brave William’s Praise” (music by Mr Handel); “Plaid-Hunting” (tune, “Packington Pounds“) and a variant of Rule Britannia.

1755’s meeting was advertised: “in commemoration of our happy deliverance from popery and slavery by King William of glorious and immortal memory, and of the further security of our religion and liberties by the settlement of the crown upon the illustrious house of Hanover.” All the newspaper reporting of the club’s activities went something like that…

In 1758, in addition to the Fourth of November function, they had a second bash – meeting on January 24th to celebrate the birthday of King Frederick II of Prussia (“The Great”) and to celebrate his recent victories in the Third Silesian War. And on 26th April they had another knees up, this time for the birthday of the Duke of Cumberland, at the house of John Clearihue, Vintner. Bearing in mind this club contained all the movers, shakers and powerful men of the city you can get an idea of some of the prevailing local attitudes to the events of the ’45 a decade before…

In the 1760s and 1770s, the committee of the club met annually in John’s Coffee House. This was one of the premier such establishments in the city, a place where much commercial and legal business was conducted and which had a prime spot in the northeast corner of Parliament Square.

At the 1773 November celebration, in the chair was Sir James Adolphus Oughton, Commander-in-Chief of the Army in “North Britain” and a big wheel in the masons (like many men in the Revolution Club and powerful positions in the city in general). Sir James proposed in future that “to retain and cherish in the minds of the people a just sense of the important advantages derived to them from the Glorious Revolution” that future meetings should once again begin with a sermon at the kirk before a ceremonial procession to the knees-up. While all were in favour of this idea and agreed to do it next year, it seems they forgot about the going to church bit as the Caledonian Mercury reported that they hadn’t bothered and instead had gone straight to the Assembly Hall for the drinking and singing.

Something revolutionary in 1776 clearly rattled the Club, it implored members “in and about town to take at this critical juncture this opportunity to testifying their well known attachment to his Majesty’s family and government“. I can’t think what that might have been but it might have had something to do with colonial matters… This year saw a swelling of the membership after dwindling attendances in previous years. A letter written to the Caledonian Mercury reported that on the “sound of a trumpet“, the club would now toast:

“Fame, let thy TRUMPET sound; Tell all the world around, GREAT GEORGE is KING.”

Events continued in the manner to which it was accustomed, and was at its peak in the year 1788 to celebrate the centenary of its namesake revolution. A great banquet was thrown in the Hall of Parliament House on the 22nd December (price 5/-), with 3-400 members in attendance. It was noted with some degree of irony that the last great banquet held in that hall was in 1680 for the then Duke of York, later King James VII – the very man the Revolution Club celebrate the deposing of! (that £1400 publicly-funded shindig left the city heavily in debt). The Club drank a huge array of toasts, from the King and all his relations all the way down to the Students of the University, the prosperity of the British Fisheries and finally to the “Land of Cakes“, that is, Scotland. House of Hanover? House of Hangover more like!

After that sesh to end all seshes, things went back to a more normal pace. In 1790 it was the Earl of Hopetoun in the chair and they were meeting in the newly completed Merchant Company Hall on Hunter’s Square. But while it seemed otherwise to be in good health, after 1793 it completely disappears from the newspapers. An interesting publication in 1792 might give us an insight into things. On the face of it it seems suitably sycophantically loyal;

Gibbie Burnet, or “Gossiping Gibbie“, was Gilbert Burnet, one of King William III’s closest Scottish advisers. The problem was he had been dead for almost 80 years… His name here was being used as a satirical nom de plume and the address was actually a very clever and excoriating attack on the Club, and Hanoverian and Orange loyalty in Scotland in general, stimulated by suggestions at this time of raising public monuments to King William III in the country. The attack took the form of an invitation to the Revolution Club, indeed a challenge, to put their money, where their mouths, their songs and their toasts were, and finance a monument to William – and to build it in the middle of Glencoe!

It rattled off a long list of government atrocities and failures in Scotland since 1688 (both Scottish and British; Orange and Hanoverian) and dared the club to put them on the public monument alongside the name of its hero William; the Darien Scheme; the ejection of Catholics (Mary and William may appear in the background enjoying the scene); the costly failures of the British Army in Flanders. You can read the full thing for yourself here . While this single publication may not have ended the Club, it’s a clear indication that the wind of public attitudes to the events of the preceding 100 years were somewhat changeable…

After that the club seems to disappear from the records. No more meetings advertised or reported… Which is slightly odd as before then it has left a not inconsiderable trove of medals and diplomas, e.g. the one below from 1775. Who knows why it folded; perhaps it was something to do with the flight to the New Town around this time by the great and the good of the city? Perhaps it was a case of an older social order dying out and a new one taking its place. Perhaps having a “Revolution Club” sounded like a bad idea in the context of what happened in America in 1776 and France in 1789… or perhaps they were just sick of all the drinking and singing…

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.

Finest yacht in the world: the thread about the Leith-built “Iolanda”

Today’s Auction House Artefact is a 1909 painting of the beautiful yacht Iolanda, cruising off Naples, by the artist Antonie de Simone. She was built in 1908 by Ramage & Ferguson in Leith for the wealthy American railroad and shipping financier (and yachting fanatic) Morton F. Plant, and had a long and interesting life

At this time if you wanted one of the biggest and best steam yachts in the world you went to Messrs Cox & King of Pall Mall in London to design it, specifically their naval architect Joseph E. Wilkins. And once you had your plans you likely went to Ramage & Ferguson in Leith to have them built. The Iolanda was the largest of the vessels that came out of the Cox & King-Ramage & Ferguson partnership, being 310 feet long (94.5m) and displacing 1,823 tons (1,654 tonnes). Described as “probably the finest yacht in the world“, she could make 19 knots on her 3,500hp steam engines and with her bunkers filled with 600 tons of coal she could cruise for 6,000 nautical miles. To lengthen her endurance, she was also rigged as a schooner and could proceed under sail power alone.

That’s a very big and very fast yacht by the standards of the day – as much as now – indeed she was the tenth largest yacht on Lloyd’s Register in 1913 and the third largest in private ownership (behind that of the Vanderbilts and of Gordon Bennett of the New York Times). This was the third in a series of such yachts that Plant had gotten from Cox & King – the others being the Venetia and the Vanadis. She was crewed by a compliment of 70 and had a capacity for 80 passengers. The interiors, as you might expect, were the finest that money could buy, a Queen Anne style. Her fittings included three electrical generation plants, a 3,000 feet long (914m) string consisting of 1,500 red, white and blue lamps that could be strung from the masts, a desalination system that could produce 15 tons of fresh water per day, a special system to chill the seawater in her plumbing for cold baths and an infirmary with its own X-ray machine.

Morton Plant, whose sailing schooner was named Elena after the Queen of Italy, named Iolanda after the Italian Princess Royal. He was particularly proud of how big his new steam yacht’s funnel was. To demonstrate its size and to mark the occasion of the launch of the hull in Leith in February 1908, he held a party luncheon inside it for 100 guests (the funnel at this times till being on its side on the quayside). Plant. On his arrival back in the US at New London on August 29th 1908, he flew a 220-foot long pennant from the masthead.

In 1909, Plant and his friends began a 33,000 mile cruise around the world that would take almost a year (including the visit to Naples as seen in the painting). He wrote and published an account of this voyage in 1911, sensibly titled The Cruise of the Iolanda. He returned from this global jolly on July 5th, 1910, but had already grown tired of his new toy and soon put it on the market. It was bought in 1911 by Mme. Elizabeth Tereshchenko, a friend of Plant and a wealthy member of the Ukrainian upper class, who spent most of her time in Cannes.

The Iolanda came complete with her Norwegian captain, Charles A.K. Bertun. On the outbreak of WW1, Bertrun and the yacht were stuck in Norway. As the property of an allied nation (the Russian Empire), she was secretly chartered to the British Admiralty and Bertun escaped with her to England on the pretext of going to Bergen for dry docking. The Royal Navy commissioned the yacht as a patrol vessel – work which her size and speed well suited her to. For this purpose she was given a couple of 3″ guns, and seems to have had an uneventful war.

Morton Plant died on 5th November 1918, just before the end of the war. His obituary noted his long list of yachts and membership of the New York, Atlantic, Corinthian (Philadelphia), Indian Harbour, Larchmont, Sea View, Royal Thames, Royal St. George and Royal Forth Yacht Clubs. When the war ended a few weeks later, Captain Bertun took possession of the Iolanda on behalf of the Tereschenko family and took her back to Leith to Ramage & Fergusons to be refitted and repaired after war service. On the death of her owner now exiled in Cannes and Monaco – she passed to Elizabeth’s son, Mykhailo Tereshchenko. Mykhailo was Russian Foreign Minister in November 1917 when he had been rounded up by the Provisional Government and locked in the St. Petersburg Citadel. He escaped from this imprisonment in 1918 and fled to Norway with the 42 carat Tereshchenko diamond, the largest blue diamond in the world. Legend says that this diamond is cursed, and this was responsible for the fall of Imperial Russia and the Tereschenko dynasty.

The family needed money to finance their life in exile on the French Riviera, so sold the Iolanda to the yacht brokers Camper & Nicholson in 1921 for use on the hire market. In 1927 she was purchased by Moses Taylor Pine Jr. of the National City Bank in New York. Like Morton Plant before them, the Moses Pines made an inaugural cruise and published an account of it (Diary of Happenings Aboard the Steam Yacht Iolanda, Being a More Or Less [principally Less] Veracious and Plain Account of the Adventurous Voyage Undertaken etc. etc.) Moses died, I believe, the following year, but his wife kept the yacht on for her own use. In 1939 the Admiralty once again came calling on the Iolanda, buying her off Mrs Moses through an intermediary, Mrs G. J. Guthrie Nicholson of Newport Rhode Island, reportedly for only $5. She was commissioned once again into the Royal Navy, this time as the submarine tender HMS White Bear. Her principal duties were to escort submarines heading out on, and returning from, patrols into their home bases.

On Nov. 30th 1942, White Bear left Holy Loch in company with the submarine HMS Tuna – which she escorted as far as Wolf Rock off Cornwall – before the latter set a course for the Gironde estuary to drop off 6 Royal Marine Commandos for Operation Frankton – the Cockleshell Hero raid.

White Bear was refitted as a survey vessel in 1944 and posted to the East Indies Fleet, stationed at Colombo. She was fitted with a large and modern printing plant so that the newly surveyed charts could be sent straight to the fleet.

She returned to the UK in 1947 and was sold, first to Burwood & Co. of London. She was scrapped in Holland in 1958 at the age of 50. A number of artefacts survived, including her clock, the ship’s bell (which sold in 2018 at auction for £1,116) and her figurehead.

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.

The thread about Leith shipping owners; industrial whaling, the penguins of Edinburgh Zoo and “Homes for Heroes”

Today’s auction house artefact is a painting of the handsome steam & sail ship SS Windsor of Leith off of Flushing in 1874 by Carl Ludovig Weyts (1828-1875), a Dutch artist. She carries the house flag of George Gibson & Co., a big name in Leith shipping that principally served the Low Countries trade. The Windsor was initially employed on the Leith to Antwerp run and was last noted in newspapers in 1899 when she landed the crew of a French hospital ship, St. Paul, who had been rescued off of Iceland after their ship ran aground and had worked their passage back to Leith.

George Gibson & Co. was set up by the man of that name in 1820, he had previously been the general manager of the Leith, Hamburg & Rotterdam Shipping Co. His company acquired its first steamer, the Balmoral, in 1850.

An 1886 advert for Gibsons lists nine steam ships in service. Alongside Windsor there was the Abbotsford, Amulet, Anglia, Kinghorn, Mascotte, Osborne, Talisman and Woodstock all serving Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Ghent and Dunkirk from Leith. The naming of their vessels borrowed from the lore of Sit Walter Scott (this was a common fad at the time in Scotland) and their advertising played heavily on links to their principal destinations in the Low Countries, the illustration below shoing the flags of Belgium and Holland and people in national costume. .As late as 1964 the company was still advertising weekly sailings to Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Antwerp and Dunkirk from Leith.

There is an example of the George Gibson house flag in the collection of the National Maritime Museum, the colours below have darkened and the lower bar of the flag was blue as it was based on the national flag of the Netherlands.

Gibsons were formed into a limited company in 1916 and on the death in 1920 of the last family owner of Gibsons, a joint parent company was formed, Gibson Rankine Line, with the interests of a number of other Scottish commercial shipping companies; J. T. Salvesen & Co. of Grangemouth, James Rankine & Sons of Glasgow and P. S. Nicoll of Dundee. This formalised a cooperation agreement for advertisement of services and sharing of traffic between these companies that had been in place since 1895. In turn, Gibson Rankine was acquired by the Anchor Line conglomerate in 1972 and had ceased to exist as a distinct subsidiary by 1976.

J. T. Salvesen of Grangemouth was founded in that port in 1843 by Johan Theodor Salvesen, the third son of the Norwegian shipmaster Thomas Salvesen (1787-1853) of Kristiansand. Johan Theodor first founded a business in Leith with a local partner, George Vair Turnbull, in 1846 as Salvesen & Turnbull. The business imported timber for pit props and railway sleepers and grain for distilling from Norway, sending coal and iron back from Scotland in return. They also dealt in Norwegian salted herring, a trade that returned healthy profits.

Johan Theodor’s younger brother, Salve Christian (known as Christian), was brought over from Norway to help in this business and would take over in Leith, his elder brother running the Grangemouth business. The house flag was a red field with a white-bordered blue diamond in its centre and a white “S” centred within that. Johan Theodore died in 1865, the Grangemoth company passing on to his sons. Christian left the partnership with Turnbull in 1872 and set up on his own in Leith as Christian Salvesen & Co., focussing on trade between mines he owned in Norway and Leith, via Stavanger. His house flag was a Norwegian cross set in a diamond in the middle of a white field.

In 1883, Christian delegated control of the company to his eldest sons Edward T. and Theodore. By the turn of the 20th century the company was sailing between Leith and many Baltic and Scandinavian ports, to as far east as Malta and Egypt. They had also become heavily involved in supplying the North Atlantic and Arctic whaling stations in Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes. In 1904 they moved directly into whaling, setting up a shore base at Olnafirth in the Shetland Islands. The company’s whalers would travel up to 200 miles into the Atlantic in the hunt for whales, which they continued to do until 1929.

A depression in the global shipping industry early in the 20th century saw whaling become an increasingly important part of the business, and its profits kept the company as a whole going. In 1907 they ventured into the South Atlantic whaling by setting up a station in the Falkland Islands, In 1909 a subsidiary of the company, the South Georgia Company, founded the port of Leith Harbour in South Georgia as a station closer to the whaling waters. It would become the largest of the seven such stations in South Georgia and Salvesens would eventually go on to become the single largest whaling company in the world.

Salve Christian Salvesen died in 1911. Up until 1914 the company’s funnels had been painted red, white and black stripes, but this proved to be too close to the colours of the Imperial German flag. When Salvesen’s steamer Glitra was sunk 14 miles off of Stavanger in October of that year by a U-boat they switched to the red, white and blue of the Norwegian flag. These new colours can be seen below on the preserved whale catcher Southern Actor, now a museum ship in Sandefjord, Norway.

After WW1, Salvesens purchased the former Royal Mail steamer Carmarthenshire and had her converted into a whaling factory ship – the Sourabaya – with a stern ramp up which carcasses could be hauled, to be disassembled and processed on board. The factory ships could accompany the whale catchers directly to the hunting grounds and made the whole process more efficient; the whalers had shorter journeys back and forth to the factory ship rather than always back to the shore base, and the partially processed whales could be transshipped to the shore base for final processing and packing. The Sourabaya was used as a cargo ship during WW2 and was sunk by a German U-boat in the middle of the Atlantic in 1942.

Salvesens shipping losses during WW2 were particularly heavy for the size of the company. Seven of their ten tramp steamers were sunk; they lost sixteen from their fleet in total, from the 876 ton Glenfarg up to the 12,000 ton factory ship Salvestria. The Salvestria was lost within sight of Leith, bringing a cargo of processed whale blubber all the way from the South Atlantic; she hit a German mine off of Inchkeith in July 1940 and went down with ten of her crew; 5 British and 5 Norwegian. Nine of the company’s whale catchers that had been requisitioned for naval service would also be sunk. After the war, Salvesens began to made good their war losses and return to the South Atlantic whaling. They started by buying up war surplus naval corvettes – a type of vessel built on the hull of a commercial whale catcher and which was easily converted into one.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/scottishmaritimemuseum/48126941931/

Whale catchers were small vessels and did exactly what it said on their tin; they caught up with the whales and caught them by harpoon. They had no facilities for processing the carcasses, which were towed to the factory ships or places onshore like Leith Harbour. The company’s post-war factory ships were enormous, the Southern Venturer was one of two 15,000-ton monsters complete with helicopter, landing pad and hangar. These were built in 1945. We can now look back on this industrial whaling with the horror it deserves, but this was a big and profitable business in depressed economics of post-war Britain.

But the company faced a problem of its own making; the extreme post-war modernisation of its whaling fleet was producing ever-diminishing returns; as they had become more efficient, the whale populations were ever more reduced. In turn, the whalers had to hunt further and further for longer and longer to try and find whales and it was ceasing to be a profitable venture. Salvesens now had an about turn in attitude and became a proponent of whale conservation; their whaling assets were sold in 1963 and the company’s “southern capital” at Leith Harbour was abandoned by 1965.

The company was not without a replacement income stream for whaling however, they had been hedging their bets and had also dipped their toes into the Atlantic whitefish business. Again they turned to industrialisation and would revolutionise the industry in the early 1950s when they developed the first stern trawler freezer factory ships. These both trawled for the fish and also processed and packaged it for sale and kept it frozen so that they could be at sea for much longer periods. The first of these vessels was Fairtry I of 1952 and was the brainchild of Sir Dennis Burney who had approached Salvesens in 1948 with the idea. He had been experimenting with the concept and Salvesens quickly saw the potential, buying both his prototype trawler Fairfree and his business. Their experience in factory whaling ships and knowledge of the Nordic demand for fresh white fish made this a common sense business decision.

But once again, the company’s heavy technological investment started to produce diminishing returns. As the whales had disappeared so too did the once seemingly infinite shoals of Atlantic cod and haddock. With trawling now waning too, the company survived once again through reinvention and diversification. They moved away from traditional coastal shipping and focussed themselves in specific sectors such as bulk carriers, managing colliers for the Central Electricity Generation Board and in the North Sea oil offshore service industry. On land they moved into containerised distribution, frozen food and storage – all head-quartered in Leith and Edinburgh. I can clearly recall their lorries around town when I was young, carrying the house flag once sported by the company’s ships.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/88738529@N02/16044987670/

In 1986 the company listed itself as Christian Salvesen PLC on the London Stock Exchange and by 1989 took the decision to exit the shipping business entirely to concentrate on logistics and distribution. In 1997 it left its spiritual home Bernard Street in Leith behind for the East Midlands and Northampton. They did at least leave their flagpoles behind! This building at one time also co-housed the Norwegian Consulate.

Salvesens are now long gone from Edinburgh and Leith but they have left us behind a few reminders of their presence. The famous penguins of Edinburgh Zoo for instance were first brought back from South Georgia by Salvesen’s ships alongside 4 seals. They were captured by the Coronda in 1913 and arrived in Edinburgh on Sunday 25th January 1914.

On the banks of the sterile river basin of the Water of Leith, now cut off from the sea and shipping, a Salvesen’s harpoon gun is a bit of a curiosity and a reminder of Leith’s dubious role at the forefront of the 20th century whaling industry.

The Salvesen family lost a number of sons and nephews in WW1 and after the war Edward T. Salvesen – by now Lord Salvesen – became involved in the Scottish Veterans Garden City movement; a scheme to build “Homes for Heroes“. In Trinity in Leith the SVGCA built a small housing scheme for injured ex-servicemen named Earl Haig Gardens (no comment on the appropriateness of that name.) on land that had been gifted by the Salvesen family, formerly part of the gardens of Salve Christian’s house of Mayfield . Plaques over the doors of some of the cottages commemorate the lost Salvesen men and relatives of some of the other benefactors.

At Kaimes Crossroads the Edinburgh Ladies Committee of the SVGCA, led by Lady Salvesen, built a row of neat modern cottage houses for disabled ex-servicemen, with ELC plaques on the pediments.

Lord Salvesen died in 1942 but his family remained involved in the SVGCA. After WW2 they again helped finance the construction of SVGCA ex-servicemen’s housing, this time in Muirhouse. Salvesen Gardens is a pleasant little cottage housing scheme again laid out along Garden City sorts of lines. If you stroll around you will find commemorative or benefactory plaques by most doors.

And next to Salvesen Crescent are the former Lighthouse keepers cottages for the Forth shore station, built in 1951 for the Northern Lighthouse Board. These housed the keepers and their families who served the lights of Bass Rock, Bell Rock, Inchkeith, Fidra and the Isle of May. As the lights became automated these were later used as retirement housing for ex-Lighthouse keepers before being gradually sold into private ownership. This is really one of the most charming little bits of social housing Edinburgh has to offer. Small but perfectly formed and with a style that evokes the NLB‘s lighthouse keepers cottage style.

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.

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.

James 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!).

So 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 .

And the engraving is a typical Leith scene, with a sailing ship entering the harbour. The “windmill” signal tower can be seen.

Bottom 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.

These 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.

These 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.

Two 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.

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.

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).

At 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.

It 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.

The 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 1842

A 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 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.

The (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.

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.

The Roperie: the thread about Leith’s manufacture of the finest ropes and sails for the world

This thread was originally written and published in September 2020.

Today’s auction house artefact is this measuring and conversion gauge for ropes and wires issued by the Edinburgh Roperie & Sailcloth Co., Leith.

Ropemaking was an established craft in North Leith and Newhaven, having been established in the latter village in the early 16th century in conjunction with King James IV’s naval expansion plans. Flodden may have killed the King and his nautical dreams in 1513 but ropemaking was a necessary and useful trade and persisted. Needing room to expand beyond the confines of those settlements, it had made the shift across the river to the Links of South Leith in 1710 when John Gilmour and Thomas Mayo took a site near the present day Salamander Street. This was the beginning of the industrial expansion of Leith beyond its medieval confines, with the glass works also expanding along the foreshore. Ropemaking in Leith and Newhaven was then consolidated under the ownership of a Captain David Deas or Daies before he and partners reconstituted the firm in 1742, changing its name to the Leith Roperie Company in 1750.

Within months, the adjoining plot to the south was occupied by a competitor, the Edinburgh New Roperie Company. At least three other rope makers joined them and rope-making became the principle industry of South Leith after seafaring in the middle of the 18th century. In 1793 the rope and sail products of Leith were described as “among the best produced in Britain” by George Robertson. The principal customer of these ropeworks was the Leith whaling fleet, and when the Greenland whaling was wound down and abandoned the businesses faltered. The Leith Roperie had borrowed heavily and was wound up due to a lack of capital in 1848 leaving what was by now the Edinburgh Roperie & Sailcloth Company as the principal rope and sail maker in Leith.

The site of the Leith Roperie would be swallowed up by the railway not long after it closed, and the Edinburgh Roperie came to acquire the sites of its adjacent neighbours in the 19th century.

Until the mid-Victorian period, Leith was always critically short of clean water (despite the river running through it), and its public water supply from Lochend was always insufficient. The company therefore established a mill at Malleny in 1805, south of Balerno on the upper reaches of the Water of Leith, where the water was clean and plentiful, to undertake the initial processing and bleaching of fibres. The coming of plentiful water from the Edinburgh & District Water Trust made the Malleny site surplus to requirements and it was disposed of in the latter part of the 19th century.

The advert on the left gives you an idea of the sort of things that the company were making in Leith.

The business survived into the age of steam on account of its reputation for quality products. Indeed such was the esteem with which Leith ropes and canvas were held that the company had to fight off the threat of poor quality imitations and take out newspaper adverts to this effect.

It was possibly for this reason that the Roperie adopted a distinctive trademark. The list of offices around Britain and beyond gives an indication of the company’s success and reach at this time.

At the time of this publication in 1906, the company advertised itself as having the “sixth longest rope walk in the world“, these rope walks were where the individual cords that made up the rope were gathered and twisted together in a technique that hadn’t evolved much over the centuries.

A 1958 advertisement used the words of the poet Henry Longfellow to convey “some of the atmosphere of our ancient craft, which has existed since the world was young“:

In that building, long and low,
With its windows all a-row,
Like the port-holes of a hulk,
Human spiders spin and spin,
Backward down their threads so thin
Dropping, each a hempen bulk.

The Ropewalk, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1858

The company carried out most of the stages of rope and cloth making for itself, from processing the raw ingredients through to spinning, weaving, binding and packaging of the end product. This included the bleaching, dying and waterproofing of fibres and it had an enormous drying green on the site. The fertiliser works on Salamander Street can be seen in the background.

It was not just maritime ropes and sails that were produced, general waterproofed natural fabrics known as “duck” were made for any sort of purpose;

And ropes for power transmission and winding;

Through to agricultural binder twine. Here the company’s steam lorry is seen heading out of the works with a full load of 5lb balls of twine.

At its peak it employed over 1,000 people in Leith, including a lot of women (as spinning and weaving mills often did). It was heavy and dangerous work, with unguarded, rapidly spinning, cable-powered machinery everywhere and the ever-present silent danger of a work atmosphere laden with fibres.

The Roperie became part of the British Ropes conglomerate in 1925, which was formed with the purpose of consolidating the British industry into a larger, more efficient concern following a huge loss of business during and after WW1. It continued to trade under its own name as part of this parent organisation.

On Saturday 25th April 1936, the Leith works suffered a disastrous fire which engulfed most of the site, the Dundee Courier reporting that there was a “quarter mile of flames” and that it was “one of the most disastrous which had occurred in that city for many years“. The fire broke out at the western end of the works and was fanned by the wind, quickly consuming the whole length within a period of just 20 minutes. Around £75,000 of damage (c. £6 million in 2022) was done to the works, but within days the company had 100 of its 500 strong workforce back on site. Its survival after this critical episode was attributed to it being part of the larger conglomerate. The management vowed to rebuild and the Minister of Labour opened the reconstructed works on November 16th 1937; this time the factory was entirely fireproof. It was now “the most up to date ropeworks in Scotland” and “one of the most important factories” in the British Ropes group.

The company moved into production of synthetic ropes and celebrated its bicentennial in Leith in 1950 with the opening of a plant for the production of nylon sailcloth. However, this was not enough to guarantee the long term survival of the works, which still depended on jute and soft fibre-based production for much of its business. On Friday November 18th 1960, British Ropes announced it was simultaneously closing its Leith works and exiting the soft fibre and jute business altogether. Synthetic rope and cloth production was transferred to company sites in Tyneside and South Wales. Of the 400 workers in Leith, 60% were women and there would be redundancy of between £17,000 and £20,000 paid out in total. The works finally closed 9 months later after a winding down process.

The site was then taken over by the company of Macdonald & Muir, whisky bottlers and blenders known for their Highland Queen bonded warehouse along Commercial Street, blends such as Baillie Nicol Jarvie and their ownership of John Crabbie & Co.’s green ginger wine business in Leith. They are probably best known as the parent company of the Glenmorangie Distillery, which they bought in 1918. Bath Road, by now known as Salamander Place, became the HQ, bottling and distribution plant for the company now known simply as Glenmorangie. They left in stages between 1993 and 1996, headed for Livingston where they are still going as part of the the Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton empire.

The site lay vacant before being snapped up by property speculators who demolished everything and then went bust in 2008 during the financial crisis. It then took the best part of another 10 years for things to get moving again and the final phase of redevelopment is imminently coming to a conclusion.

You will notice that one of the developers has branded its block The Ropeworks (a name under which it never traded) and the street names include the Ropemaker Street, Sailmaker Road and Chandler Crescent. Fans of the film Trainspotting T2 may recognise Sailmaker Road…

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.

The thread about Brydone’s Circular Delivery; trying and failing to break the Royal Mail’s monopoly

Today’s Auction House Artefacts are some intriguing postage stamps (stamps are big money on the auction scene, it seems) that unravels a really interesting local history story of their own. But these aren’t Royal Mail Stamps, they are Circular Delivery Company stamps. The Circular Delivery Companies where short lived attempts to flout the Royal Main’s postal monopoly, between 1865 and 1869. They were the brainchild of one Robert Brydone, a 33 year old Edinburgh printer and publisher. Robert was the son of James Brydone, an established printer and engraver with a good reputation around town. The family premises were on Elder Street, just off St. Andrew Square.

The Brydone family house was at the respectable address of 27 Dundas Street. Robert seems to have been on the move a bit as he goes from 5 Hope Park Terrace in Newington to 25 Gayfield Square between 1865-1866 and then is no longer in town by 1867 (more on that later).

The Brydones published railway timetables amongst other things;

1865 finds Robert Brydone as the manager of the Edinburgh & Leith Parcel Delivery Co., based at 4 North St. Andrew Street. Now the site of Edinburgh bus station and just around the corner from the family printing works on Elder Street. These parcel delivery companies were nothing new, they did exactly what the name suggested and moved priority parcels around town – and began charging by issuing stamps (which could be printed at the Brydone family works). The Edinburgh & Leith Parcel Delivery Co. had been founded in 1856 by Robert Ferguson, a merchant in the Kirkgate of Leith and ran “light parcel delivery vans” twice a day between the respective burghs to and from 9 different stops.

Robert’s brainwave was to exploit his delivery network to undercut the Royal Mail’s postage monopoly in the city. This was a curious 360° turn of events, as the very first postage network within the City had been set up by a private entrepreneur – “Indian Peter” Williamson – in the 1780s before being bought out by he Royal Mail. Brydone set up the Edinburgh & Leith Circular Delivery Co. to provide prepaid delivery for the booming market in “circulars”, magazines, newspapers etc. The Brydone presses already made the stamps for the parcel company so it was natural they should make the circular stamps too, from designs by George Oliver, engraver and die maker, of Edinburgh. None of these ideas were on their own novel, all Robert did was bring them together, and have the gumption to take on the might of the Royal Mail.

Brydone was directly targeting the legally protected revenue of the General Post Office here; they weren’t so interested in the parcels business. He also had his stamps perforated and gummed so they could be issued prepaid, a direct infringement of the GPO’s patents. But for whatever reason, the GPO decided to do nothing while the practice was restricted to just Edinburgh and Leith. Brydone issued stamps to the value of 1/4d (farthing), ha’penny, 3/4d and 1d., with the rates being 1/4d for circulars, 1/2d for newspapers and 3/4-1d for books.

The business seems to have boomed initially, with their stamps cancelled by an elegant R. B. & Co. monogram.

Had Brydone been content to leave it there he might have got away with it, indeed he had taken legal advice from the Lord Advocate who had shared this opinion with him, but he over-reached himself and decided to grow the concept by setting up similar Circular Delivery Companies across the whole country. Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow all got companies, as did Liverpool. Each got their own stamps, to a similar design inspired by the civic crest of each city.

Brydone also began to face competition himself – you can’t keep a good idea down and soon found himself up against his neighbour at Dundas Street, the stationer and printer Robert Clark, whose press was directly over the road from Byrdones’ at 15 Elder Street.

So now Brydone faced competition at home, form the lawyers of the Royal Mail who were not content at all for him to undercut their business across the country, and also from a third direction; Forgery. Philately was the new pass-time for the aspiring Victorian gentleman of leisure and the novel and relatively uncommon Circular stamps found themselves in huge demand (a similar thing happened with the short lived regional coinage of “Provincial Tokens”.)

Forgeries of Brydone’s stamps became common and before long Robert was declared bankrupt in 1866. His father James took on the business, moving it to the family’s Elder Street premises, and issuing new stamps to match; I assume that the removal of the price and perforations was to satisfy the Royal Mail’s lawyers.

The Philately website says it is “unlikely” that many (or any) of the offshoot stamps were ever used for delivery, instead they remained valuable collectables. Robert Brydone was not one to be kept down however, and moved to London in 1866. He founded the London Circular Delivery Company to carry on his ideas, merging with the Metropolitan Circular Delivery Company in 1867 to form the London & Metropolitan Circular Delivery Company.

Brydone’s next move was the National Circular Delivery Company, which would act to connect the provincial Companies and form the basis of a national delivery network to undercut the GPO. While they did not feature the monarch’s likeness, these stamps had a very thinly altered version of the Royal Coat of Arms and were a direct challenge and affront to the Royal Mail.

Enough was enough, and the GPO took the London & Metropolitan CDC to court in August 1867, a case which they quickly and comprehensively won. Within a month, all the other CDCs were closed down too, some having never got further than having their stamps printed.

The parcel delivery companies carried on, but the GPO got its monopoly on the prepaid collection and delivery of letters and printed materials back. But Brydone’s basic idea was sound and in demand, and in 1870 the Royal Mail bowed to demand and introduced the “red bantam” stamp, a reduced rate stamp for the delivery of circulars and papers.

Brydone still wouldn’t give up though, and his various companies were in court again in 1868 and again in 1869 for attempts to restart their practices by getting around the letter but not the spirit of the law (.e.g by not using prepaid stamps). Again they lost and again Brydone tried again. He registered the Circular Delivery Company Limited in 1869 and was taken to court yet again before they had even got off the ground. The GPO made it clear that they would not tolerate any form of competition, and this time it seemed to work. The railways, however saw their opportunity and very carefully got in on the act too. They restricted their practice to newspapers and parcel delivery and by not offering a door-to-door service; you picked up your items from the station. Thre’s a huge page of very beautiful railway delivery stamps on this website.

Perhaps it was the death of James Brydone in 1869 that dried up Robert’s sources of funding. Robert himself died a few years later back in Edinburgh, at 10 Comely Bank, aged only 41, from phthisis (TB of the lungs) with his brother by his side. Obviously not financially ruined, but a widower.

He may have died relatively quietly and in obscurity but for a short time, Brydone genuinely shook the establishment. The original local delivery disruptor! His main legacy is one of interesting and collectible stamps which seem to have been heavily forged in their time.

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.

The thread about the “Three As” of Scottish motor manufacturing and a pioneering woman who figured within

This thread was originally written and published in November 2021. It has been lightly edited and corrected as applicable for this post.

Today’s auction house artefact is this splendidly shiny McVitie & Price 1924 digestive biscuit delivery van, an Albion Type 24 built in Scotstoun in Glasgow. Estimated to sell for £24-28k. Albions were apparently the grocery delivery van of choice way back when this was built, being economical and reliable. Lyons, Nestles, Huntley & Palmer and of course Edinburgh biscuiteers McVitie & Price were big customers.

The Model 24 could also be built as a bus.

The radiator badge was originally a cast logotype stylised to look like a lion. To this a rising sun was later added in various guises. The product line names and badges later got a bit more patriotic.

Albion was one of the “Three As” of Scottish motor engineering, along with Argyll in Alexandria and Arrol-Johnston in Paisley.

Argyll expanded massively into the biggest car plant in Europe in 1906 and crippled themselves with the costs and inefficient production methods. They were bankrupt within a year. The factory limped a while until the costs of lawsuits finally closed the doors. The place later became a Royal torpedo factory and enjoyed a much longer life as such. It continued as such into the late 1960s, when it was bought by Plessey, promptly closed, lay vacant for 30 odd years and was then fortuitously saved as a shopping centre.

Arrol-Johnston (the Arrol from the famous Sir William Arrol who built a certain big red bridge over the Forth) prospered better, and in 1913 moved to a purpose built factory in Dumfries. They got the Americans to build it for mass production. The factory at Heathhall was built by the architect who built Henry Ford’s second factory for the Model T. A very sensible move. Looking futuristic for 1913, it was the first reinforced “Ferro-concrete” building in Britain apparently.

Although the company later failed, an interesting aside was the “Galloway” a car designed by a woman, built by Arrol-Johnston’s largely female workforce, for the woman motorist; Dorothée Pullinger was daughter of Arrol-Johnston’s managing director and chief designer, Thomas Pullinger.

She started work in the Arrol-Johnston drawing office at the age of 16, and when the First World War broke out, the 20 year old Dorothée was sent to the Vickers works in Barrow to be the “Lady Superintendent” of the 7,000 women workers producing munitions in the factory. Awarded an MBE for her service, she was nevertheless refused entrance into the Institute of Automobile Engineers until 1920, it’s first woman member. Back at Arrol-Johnston after the war, the Galloway was largely designed and built in a subsidiary called Galloway Motors, which largely employed the female expertise and labour that had been built up during WW1 on war work.

They were initially sold under a strapline of “a car made by ladies for others of their sex“. Galloway’s apprenticeships for engineers only last 3 instead of 5 years as it was felt that the women attended better and learned faster than men and so could get it all done sooner. Dorothée won the Scottish Six Day Trial in 1924 in a Galloway. She went on to have a long and successful career in running industrial steam laundry companies and was the only female industrial advisor to the Ministry of Production, advised the sprawling Nuffield group on the employment of women and helped to set up and run 13 war factories with them. Dorothée described her job as being “to see that the fullest use is made of woman-power throughout the Nuffield Organisation“.

Of the Three As, Albion fared the best and were bought by Leyland in 1951 therefore found their way into that particular stable and everything it entails. In the 1970s, British Leyland slowly rationalised the Albion product lines and production, with some moving to other BL plants. In 1972 they rebadged all Albions as Leylands. In 1980 all production in Glasgow moved to the Bathgate Truck & Tractor Plant.

In 1984, a collapse in BL’s fortunes saw the huge and modern plant in Bathgate shut down, with a crippling effect on a local economy also being hit with steelworks and colliery closures. In 1987 two young lads from Auchtermuchty wrote a song about it and other things.

That was not quite the end for Albion though, as truck components were still being made in the Scotstoun factory. When Leyland DAF collapsed in 1993, the business was bought out as Albion Automotive. In 1998, the new company was acquired by the American Axle & Manufacturing Inc. of Motown, Detroit, producing various transmission comonents and – I think – they are still hanging on in Scotstoun in a much reduced form.

And Digestive biscuits, that fine Edinburgh invention? Still being made, (although the McVities name is now mud in certain Scottish households thanks to recent industrial developments).

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.

The thread about a Leith communion token and how it can help us understand just why the Victorians built so many churches

This thread was originally written and published in October 2021.

Today’s Auction House Artefact is very topical given it’s the 31st October. No, it’s nothing to do with Halowe’en, sorry. It’s a Communion Token and of course today is also Reformation Day.

It’s just a small, roughly cast pewter token. But what is it, what do the abbreviations mean and what does it have to do with my usual subjects of interest? Well, obviously it’s marked LEITH, so that’s a start and the method by which it came to my attention. Beginning with what communion tokens are (and I’m no expert here, so do wade in if I’m wrong), they are peculiar to Reformed churches and the concept dates all the way back to John Calvin in the 16th Century. They were first issued in the Netherlands, but really became a thing of the Scottish reformed Kirk and all its various offshoots. There are at least 5,000 known different Communion tokens specific to Scottish churches alone. A communion token was a method to identify members of a congregation who practised “closed communion“; i.e. only known members of the congregation can participate. No token? No communion. Tokens were issued to those who had taken the necessary catechism (religious instruction).

Back to our token. What do the abbreviations mean? On the front it says, MR J. S. stands for “Minister, John Sharp”. The date of 1825 was not the date of issue of the token but most likely the date that the Rev. Sharp took over the congregation. On the rear, it stands for Associate Congregation, Leith, the name and denomination of the church. Below is an earlier issue, for Sharp’s predecessor, Robert Culbertson, who served from 1791 until his untimely death in 1823.

So what is an Associate Congregation and why is it interesting I hear you say? Well to answer that you heave to delve into the amusingly elaborate timeline of the various reformed churches in Scotland since the (Scottish) reformation .

If you go way back to 1733, some congregations began to secede from the established Church of Scotland (“the Kirk“). The Seceders left for various long-standing and unresolved reasons, particularly the threat of the patronage of Lairds in preventing a congregation choosing its own minister, which has been a key issue in Scottish Presbyterian churches since the Reformation. The Seceders were led by Ebenezer Erskine, minister in Stirling, formed their own church court, known as the Associate Presbytery.

They were summoned to answer by the Kirk in 1739 but refused as they did not recognise its authority over them, so were deposed. This had two effects. Firstly, the seceder congregations were ejected from their churches so had to find new homes. It also rallied parishioners to their cause and the new churches ranks were swelled. At this time I’m not sure what presence, if any, they had in Leith. This split was around a religious clause in the oath that burgesses had to take. The burgesses were the “freemen” of the burgh, an important position in Scottish society at the time. The “Burgher Oath” had to be taken in the royal burghs of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Perth. The hardliners refused to take the oath as they felt it would mean that they recognised the authority of The Kirk. The result was that the General Associate Synod split off of the Associate Synod, these two sects are better known as the Antiburghers and Burghers. So this is why you get those odd-sounding things on old maps of Edinburgh called Burger Meeting and Antiburger Meeting houses.

Maps of this time refer to “meeting houses” or “chapels”, likely they were not officially recognised by the mapmakers as churches in their own right, this title being reserved for the parish kirks alone. From the maps we can see a Seceders’ church on Bristo Street in 1765 and by 1784 it is the Burgher Meeting house and the Antiburghers have their own separate house.

If you’re still following, give yourself a pat on the back, because it’s about to get even more confusing…

But before then, let’s go back to Leith. The first Antiburgher Church was formed in the Kirkgate in Leith in 1766 following a stushie within the South Leith Kirk congregation over the appointment of the new minister William Aitken. They met in a meeting house on Cables Wynd, ordaining a minister John Proudfoot in 1772. Funds were raised to erect a purpose built church on the Kirkgate just over the wall from South Leith Kirk, which was completed in 1775.

In 1785, the Rev. Proudfoot was suspended by the Antiburgher synod and deposed. This caused a split within his congregation. Some members returned to South Leith Kirk, but most stayed with Proudfoot as a “free” Antiburgher church. Proudfoot died in 1787 and his Antiburgher congregation petitioned the Burghers to join. This was granted and so once again there was a split, and the Antiburghers left to do their own thing, leaving the Burghers in the Kirkgate. The Antiburghers who left the Kirkgate petitioned the Antiburgher church, were welcomed back in and a new congregation was established in the old Glasite Meeting House (let’s not go there!) off of St. Andrew’s Street, becoming the St. Andrew’s Street Antiburghers.

Anyway, in 1791, they appointed Robert Culbertson as their minister who was quite the scholar and patron of many things. He was notable enough to be subject to a caricature by John Kay. His church was an Associated Congregation, i.e. a member of the General Associated Synod, hence the stamp on the communion tokens. In 1798 however yet another split happened resulting in the Antiburghers splitting into Auld Lichts and the New Lichts (old and new lights). The same happened to the Burghers eight years later.

Culbertson was a New Licht Antiburgher, more theologically liberal than the Auld Lichts who held more strictly to Calvin and the Covenanting tradition. He was a popular and influential minister and donated heavily to the Edinburgh Bible Society and the Leith Public Library. Soon, the New Lichts of the Burgher and Antiburgher churches realised what united them was greater than what divided them, and a union took place. Culbertson was on the negotiation committee and “greatly rejoiced” on its success. The result was the United Secession Church of 1820 . Culbertson died an untimely death in 1823, falling ill during a meeting of the presbytery of the new church. He did not live to see his congregations grand new premises, which was not completed until 1826.

That church was built on land acquired from the city next to the High School of Leith, built by John and James Rutherford in the classical style. The St. Andrew’s Street congregation named the new street St. Andrew’s Place after their church. The building is now the B-listed Edinburgh Hindu Mandir & Cultural Centre.

In 1825, Culbertson’s vacant pulpit was filled by the Rev. John Smart (1801-1871), who initially lived opposite on Morton Street. Smart was minister until 1845. In 1847 the United Secession Church merged with another split off of the Kirk – the Relief Church*1 of 1761 – to form the United Presbyterian Church, which is what all those “U. P. Churches” are on Victorian maps of Scottish towns.

1. The Presbytery of Relief, to give it its formal name, was founded by Thomas Gillespie who had been deposed by the General Assembly of the Kirk for refusing to induct a parish minister against the wishes of the congregation (that old issue again!). In this case, “relief” meant relief from the patronage of Lairds to choose the parish minister. They were a liberal church, patronised by independents and Episcopalians. ↩︎

So in 1849, the Antiburgher church is now the St. Andrew’s United Presbyterian Church, (“seats for 1400” – the established South Leith Kirk only had 1200). The original hall was half that size and kept on as a meeting hall.

Remarkably, a photo exists of the original meeting house off St. Andrew’s Street. It was actually on Storrie’s Alley. It is seen here in the early 1960s when it was used by the YMCA, before being swept away. The French-style roofline of Yardheads School is the giveaway of the location, peeping out to the left of the church gable. The hall stood infront of the remaining old buildings, a former bonded warehouse..

In the late 1880s/early 1890s, the St. Andrew’s Place congregation opened a mission hall on Jane Street in Leith, a charming little building which is still there and is some sort of hotel/hostel thing.

Back to our diagram. In 1900, the U.P. Church joined with the Free Church (of the ominous sounding “Disruption of 1843“) to form the United Free Church (or U.F. Church on maps). By this time, the Kirkgate Congregation was also in this fold.

The Kirkgate congregation had by this time moved to a new and altogether grander premises on Henderson Street (see pictures below). While this fine and unusual looking church has unfortunately been demolished, that carving above the door and the cross survive as ornamentation on the otherwise modern and austere South Leith church halls.

In another picture from Edinburgh City Libraries, here we see the entrance to Storrie’s Alley off of St. Andrew’s Street. In amongst all the Victoriana we see a lantern pointing the way to the St. Andrew’s Hall.

The St. Andrews associate congregation completed its 360 degree journey in 1929 when it was one of the United Free Church congregations that merged back into The Kirk, becoming Leith St. Andrews. In 1973 it joined with the Claremont Church of Scotland at the foot of Easter/ Lochend Roads and relocated to the latter premises, which took up the name of St. Andrew. Around 2003, this combined congregation was joined by another from the district; that of Junction Road and St. Thomas’, as two more old churches in Leith became surplus to modern requirements.

When the Kirkgate Associate Congregation moved to its new home on Henderson Street in 1886, the old church became the Princess Theatre and music hall, which burned down 2 years later (as such places often did). The New Princess, later the Gaiety, rose from the ashes. The Kirkgate Congregation followed the route of St. Andrew’s Place, and returned to the Church of Scotland in 1929. It merged with the South Leith congregation in 1973 and vacated the Kirkgate Church, which was demolished and replaced by the South Leith Church Halls.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that even if you are not religiously inclined it pays to get your head around at least a bit of it as it really helps understand maps and buildings and local history. Especially the question “why did the Victorians build so many dang churches?”.

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.

RMS Forth: the thread about the unusual end of a Leith-built ship on a Mexican reef

Today’s auction house artefact is this print of the launch of the Royal Mail Steamship (RMS) Forth in Leith in 1841, by the shipbuilders Robert Menzies & Sons.

Forth was launched on May 22nd “in the presence of 60,000 Spectators”. The Scotsman newspaper reported it was “a glorious thing to see… streams of people gaily attired, moving towards one point, and animated by one feeling of joyous anticipation” and The Sun of London declared it to be the largest crowd assembled in the city since the visit of King George IV in 1822. At 1,940 tons burthen (that’s an estimate of her carrying capacity or “tonnage”), she was “without a doubt” and “incomparably” the largest ship ever built at Leith up to that time. Her overall length was 245 feet, her breadth was 60 feet across the paddle boxes and her draught was 30 feet. The engines, to be fitted by Mr Barry in Liverpool, would produce 225 horsepower each and she had cabins for 100 passengers.

The ceremony was officiated by Mr Menzies, the builder, and Miss Colville – daughter of the deputy chairman of the owners – performed the honours at 2PM by smashing a bottle of wine against the hull to bless and commence the launch. The builders had built a special gallery for which admission was charged to view the launch up close, the surplus from this being donated to the Leith Dispensary and the local Humane Society. Fourteen years earlier, Menzies had launched the little Sirius, of just 412 tons burthen, which in 1838 became the first steam ship to complete an east-to-west Transatlantic passage.

The newly established West India Royal Mail Steam Packet Co. was funded by a government subsidy and had a contract to provide a fleet of not fewer than 14 ships for carrying all Her Majesty’s mails to the West Indies; “to sail twice every month to Barbados in the West Indies from Southampton or Falmouth” . These new steamers were all named after British rivers, with Thames, Medway, Trent, and Isis (built at Northfleet); Severn and Avon (Bristol); Tweed, Clyde, Teviot, Dee, and Solway (Greenock); Tay (Dumbarton); Medina (Cowes) and finally Forth at Leith.

The Forth did not have a long life however and was wrecked in January 1849 on only her seventeenth mail run from Southampton to the West Indies. She departed the former port on September 2nd 1848 under the command of Captain Sturdee. In January she ran aground on Scorpion Reef off the north coast of Yucatán, Mexico. All her passengers and crew, 126 souls in total, were fortuitously landed on the reef and were saved. It took many months for news of her loss to be confirmed back in the UK, in early March the papers were still speculating on her fate.

When the account of her loss finally made it across the Atlantic, it was found that Forth had arrived in Havana from Jamaica on January 11th, from where she was to go to the following day to New Orleans and thence onwards to Vera Cruz. She left Havana on the Friday 12th as expected, and at daybreak on Sunday 14th she hit the Scorpion Reef. It was stressed at this point that:

“Captain Sturdee, the commander, was wholly free from blame, one of those inexplicable currents peculiar to the Gulf of Mexico, having negatived all his calculations, and that his subsequent conduct was in every way remarkable for firmness and self-devotion“.

Sturdee and his crew calmly embarked the passengers onto the lifeboats. While the best course of subsequent action was being decided, a sailing ship was spotted and some of the crew under the command of a Royal Navy officer who was on board as a passenger volunteered to row out of the reef and sail to their potential saviour. With the assistance of this ship, the passengers and crew were landed on the island of Perez. Captain Sturdee lead a salvage party back to the wreck to recover supplies and the passengers’ personal effects, and they were rescued from Perez by a passing Yucatan brigantine on Wednesday 17th January.

It was noted at the time that the Forth was the fifth large Royal Mail Steam Packet steamer lost since commencement of the steam mail ship service to the West Indies in 1841, the others being Medina, Isis and her sister ships Solway and Tweed. Tweed was lost on the Alacranes Rocks in the gulf of Mexico; which if you know your Spanish translates into English as the Scorpion Rocks; exactly the same that claimed the Forth two years later. Indeed one of Forth‘s passengers related to the newspaper men that he had read the account of the loss of the Tweed the night before the Forth was lost and on relaying his concerns to Captain Sturdee, was given an audience in the latter’s cabin to go over the charts and reassure him that they should not be within 18 miles of those rocks.

Captain Edwin Sturdee lived a long life, dying in 1897 at the age of 81. He was the uncle of Sir Frederick Charles Doveton Sturdee, the Admiral who avenged the Royal Navy’s loss at the Battle of Coronel in 1914 by winning the follow-up Battle of the Falkland Islands and sinking the German ships that had been victors of the former action.

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.

More than just dismissing us: the thread about the history of the Leith Police

Today’s auction house artefact is this Victorian Leith Burgh Police truncheon.

Policing in Leith goes back to the 17th century, when the first High Constables of the Port of Leith were established. They were appointed by the Magistrates of the Royal Burgh of Leith to uphold “cleanliness and orderliness, keeping the peace, law and order“. But at this point they acted as empowered individuals, rather than a force. Orders were given in 1725 stating that “they were responsible for the apprehension of beggars and vagabonds, persons guilty of a crime or disturbance, informing on houses of ill repute, bringing order to mobs and overseeing weights and measures.”

At this time, the principal civic building of Leith was the Tolbooth. It functioned as a seat of municipal government and administration, a customs house, a guardhouse, a jail and a meeting house and was one of the three essential public buildings of the Scottish Burgh; the others being the Mercat Cross and the Kirk.

In 1762, the seven constables held a meeting and elected a moderator, treasurer and clerk, and drew up regulations to form themselves into the Honourable Society of the High Constables of the Port of Leith. In 1771, Parliament passed the “Act for Cleansing and Lighting the Streets of the Town of South Leith, the Territory of St. Anthony’s and Yardheads thereunto adjoining, and for supplying the several parts thereof with fresh water“. The description of the act itself is a reminder that at this time, the municipal police were primarily concerned with lighting, cleansing and water supply; not watch keeping or law enforcement.

The act saw the election of 30 Police Commissioners to enact its provisions; the electors were the 2 magistrates of Leith (appointed by Edinburgh), the masters and 6 assistants of the 4 Leith trade incorporations (the Cordiners, Carters, Tailors and Weavers) and all heritors (the feudal landholders of a Scottish parish who were obligated to pay tax), liferenters (landholders for life) and proprietors of lands and tenement within the burgh. Basically, the people (men) with claim over land and/or property. Added to the Commissioners were the Lord Provost, Town Clerk of Leith, The Baillie (a civic officer) of St. Anthony’s Preceptory, and 2 others elected by the feudal heritors of Yardheads and St. Anthony’s.

So the Police Commissioners were basically a committee of the local worthies who were charged with keeping the streets clean and supplying water. At this time, Leith had no piped water, sewers, pavements or metalled roads (causeys) of any kind so they had their hands full. Such was the difficulty in resolving these issues in Leith, that for the next 20 years the Commissioners were fully occupied with water, cleansing and lighting. It was not until 1791 that attention turned to “watching and warding”, i.e. something more akin to modern policing.

The Commissioners had always employed a part time “Police Officer”, but his job was to keep order at the wells and to try and keep people to the schedule of the carters who carried away the filth of the town. Perhaps he is the officious looking man in Serres’ illustration conferring with the carter and the town drummer and poring over a schedule?

In 1791, this was made a full time position, and Leith’s first professional polisman was hired; at £25 a year. 10 years later, in 1801 the officer, one John Ross, was finally provided with a uniform. “A blue coat, red neck with buttons thereon and a red vest with a pair of boots“. In 1802, lawlessness in Leith was such that one of the Baillies proposed to the Police Commissioners that a part-time force of sixty men, in three watches, be hired for the purposes of law enforcement. At this point, Edinburgh stepped in and said “naw”, and that it would sort it. Edinburgh then did nothing for Leith, as was frequently the case; as James Scott Marshall puts it. “Edinburgh’s policy of masterly inactivity once more frustrated [Leith’s] desire for improvement.”

A new Leith Police Act, in 1806, made provision for the recruitment of watchmen for “Guarding, Patrolling and Watching the streets“. But again nothing was done, this time for want of money. Leith had 20,000 inhabitants, but Edinburgh absolutely and tightly controlled its purse strings. Finally in 1814, the size of the Leith Police force was tripled; to 3. Two watchmen were employed to assist the “intendant” (the man in the blue and red coat). The appointments were made by the Paving Committee as they had responsibility for safety on the streets.

In 1815, the force doubled in size, to 6, with 3 more watchmen being recruited. Finally in 1816, a special “Watching Committee” was formed, rather than leave the Police under the direction of the Paving Committee. But the new force was not well thought of and there were complaints asking for it to be better organised. The watchmen were also unhappy, as the day shift worked 6AM-9PM (!) and were unable to take on labouring work on the side as a result like the shorter nightshift could.

The force grew no further until the Municipal and Police Act of 1827, when the whole force of 6 was disbanded and then re-hired under a new system under a Superintendent; one James Stuart on £120 a year. The new force totalled 20, 1 Sergeant Major, 3 Sergeants, 3 “Daymen”, 3 “Night Patrol” and 10 Watchmen. Superintendent Stuart had the force raised to 27 with 1 more Dayman, 2 Night Patrol and 4 more Watchmen. The senior ranks were paid a guaranteed basic rate, which was supplemented by the court fees of each offender they brought in; half to the Sergeant Major, and the other half split between the Sergeants.

The 1827 act finally settled the boundary of the Leith Police, which had been rather vaguely defined up until this point due to the fragmentary municipal boundaries and land superiority of the separate parishes of North and South Leith. When the 1832 Great Reform Act extended the boundary of Leith to the red line on this map, the reach of the Leith Police extended too. A deal was also struck with the Edinburgh Sheriff to charge him for the lodging of prisoners sent from Edinburgh to languish in Leith.

The 1827 act also got round to the business of providing Leith with its first modern courthouse and police station, to replace the ancient Tolbooth. Some of the land of “Dr. Colquhoun’s Chapel” was acquired; a 99 year lease being taken on it. Dr Colquhoun was the minister of St. John’s Chapel of Ease on Constitution Street. This is how Leith’s first court house and police station came to be built on the corner of Constitution Street and [Queen] Charlotte Street, where they are to this day – although the courthouse is long unused.

The Leith Burgh Police were established in 1859 to cover the wider burgh of Leith defined in 1831 by the Great Reform Act. Policing of the port and docks was subsumed into the new force as a division, but the High Constables were maintained as an honourable society for ceremonial occasions. They still exist in this form, the uniform still being top hats and tails and the badge of office still being an ornamental baton. Until recently it was strictly a gentlemen’s club, although they have more recently elected a woman to their ranks.

They can be seen performing these same ceremonial duties for royalty here in Alexander Carse’s painting of the arrival of George IV in Leith back in 1822, backs to the artist with their top hats off. The fellows with the broad bonnets, white sashes and curving long sticks (bows) are the Company of Royal Archers .

At this point, the need for separate Commissioners of Police was redundant, as Leith was finally an independent burgh, The responsibility for oversight of the Police passed to the new Town Council, who made their home in the police station and court on Constitution Street. Below can be seen a picture of the Town Hall / court house / police station in 1870. It shows St. John’s, after the mock Tudor tower was built and parish school buildings were added to the front. Between the two is the small burgh fire station building .

The helmet badge adopted by the Burgh Police was from the traditional Leith coat of arms; the Virgin Mary and child on a galleon, underneath a canopy. The date of 1563 beneath refers to a letter signed by Mary Queen of Scots granting South Leith permission to erect its Tolbooth. Granting Leith this was a big step in its ancient struggle to exert independence from Edinburgh. The English had burned Restalrig Tolbooth in 1544 during the “Rough Wooing” (Restalrig at that time was the administrative centre of South Leith parish) and since then Edinburgh had been trying to prevent Leith from re-establishing its own local centre of law, order and taxation.

Anyway, Leith Burgh Police was a small force, but one well respected for keeping law and order in the potentially lawless port town. They were merged into the Edinburgh City Police as D Division in 1921.

Leith policemen were distinctive for wearing a “ball top” to their custodian helmet, Edinburgh had these only for upper ranks, the rank and file had a “button top”.

Leith’s greatest contribution to the world of policing is of course said to be the legendary tongue twister “The Leith Police Dismisseth Us” – which was apparently a test for drunkenness (but just try saying it sober!)

The Leith police dismisseth us, I’m sorry sir to say;
The Leith police dismisseth us, They thought we sought to stay;
The Leith police dismisseth us, They thought we’d stay all day;
The Leith police dismisseth us, Which caused us many sighs;
And the size of our sighs, when we said our goodbyes;
Were the size of the Leith police.

The Leith Police Dismisseth Us, a version from 1927

However the origin of The Leith Police Dismisseth Us is probably nothing to do with Leith. It actually first originates in print on the other side of the Atlantic; in the Boston Youth’s Companion, October 20th 1887, as a line in a list of “verbal snares” or tongue-twisters. It is quite similar to an earlier American tongue-twister; variously The Sea Ceaseth and Dismisseth Us With His Blessing or The Sea Ceaseth And that Sufficeth Us and it is likely these were created for elocution purposes and inspired by biblical verse.

It first appears in a British newspaper shortly afterwards, in December 1887 in the Irvine Times, before being reprinted widely across English papers the following year. These early examples are always in lists of tongue-twisters, many of which are still familiar such as Peter Piper and She Sells Sea Shells. A fuller version does not seem to appear in print until 1919 (in The Childrens Newspaper) but it had been widely popularised before this by the Mancunian musical hall comedian Wilkie Bard, one of the biggest acts of his day, whose stage gimmick was tongue twisters. Variety magazine announced in 1909 that he was appearing in London at the Tivoli, Oxford and Paragon with “a new tongue twister. It is called The Leith Police Dismisseth Us. Bard gets a whole lot out of this number with the aid of an assistant who does a lisping souse.“

The rhyme is still used for elocution, particularly in helping non-native English speakers master the “th” and -“s” sounds of the language.

Thank you to Chris Wright for his assistance and advice in researching the early details of “The Leith Police Dismisseth Us.”

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, 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.