#corstorphine — Public Fediverse posts

The Edinburgh Radium Bomb: the thread about the Beechmount Institute

A couple of things happened recently. A fire at the former Corstorphine Hospital prompted me to read up and write about the history of that establishment and it was also the annual Christian Aid bumper booksale in Edinburgh, at which I picked up an excellent history of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh1 (amongst many other things.) These circumstances converged to pique my interest in Beechmount, a grand mansion house which was, for a short time at least, the exotic and atomic sounding National Radium Centre and a pioneer in the field of radiotherapy.

Beechmount, set amongst 8 acres of woodland, was built in 1900 in an Italianate style to designs by Messrs McArthy & Watson as the private residence of Sir George and Lady Mary Anne Anderson. The land was feud from the Beechwood Mains estate at Murrayfield and its name was a simple amalgam of the neighbouring properties of Beechwood and Belmont.

Sir George was treasurer of the Bank of Scotland from 1898 to 1917, which explains how the coat of arms of that institution came to be found above the house’s main door and grand fireplace. He was the first Scottish “banker knight“, his title conferred for services to his industry. After his retirement in 1917, the Andersons spent their retirement at Beechmount as respected members of Edinburgh society. Sir George died there on December 1st 1923, aged 78. Lady Anne survived him before she too passed away in the house on 26th May 1926, aged 80. Her husband had intended that the house be left to his bank as an official residence for its treasurer but Lady Anne instead bequeathed it to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. She recommended it be used as a convalescent home for servicemen injured during World War I but gave the hospital managers final discretion as to its use. In addition, £5,000 was left to them to help adapt the property to its new purpose.

And that may have been that for the Beechmount story had it not been for the rapid development of a new field of medicine. In 1926, the Infirmary had been able to purchase 500mg of the radioactive element Radium – a substantial proportion of the entire global supply of it at that time – as the result of a donation of £5,000. It began to experiment in its use for the treatment of “malignant disease“; cancer. Prior to this, the only known treatment was surgical removal of tumours and the new branch is what we now call Radiotherapy. To begin with, Radium treatments were undertaken in the main buildings of the Infirmary at Lauriston Place by introducing tiny amounts of the element directly into tumours using needles, different coloured threads attached to them indicating the radioactive strength. However it soon became clear that a specialised unit dedicated to the therapy would be desirable and in 1928 it was decided that Lady Anderson’s bequest should be fitted out as such; the Beechmount Radium Institute.

The medical promise of Radium was great but so too were the costs, dangers and difficulties associated with its use. As a result, in 1929 the government established the Radium Trust to source and hold supplies of the wonder material for the nation and the National Radium Commission to oversee its regulation and distribution. The Commission did not want to deal purely with hospitals and so in 1930 a joint partnership between the Royal Infirmary and the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Edinburgh was set up to combine their teaching and research in the field in order that they could mutually benefit from the national supply. In the meantime £11,000 was spent on the Beechmount project and the new facility, with 36 in-patient beds, was opened in October 1932. To begin with patients continued to be treated at the Infirmary and were sent to the new annexe for their pre- and post-treatment convalescent care, however the entire process was soon centralised at the Institute.

The facility was overseen by the respected surgeon John James McIntosh (J.J.M.) Shaw, a military doctor, pioneer in re-constructive plastic surgery and member of both the Radium Trust and Commission. Its first matron was Margaret Colville Marshall, later “Lady Superintendent” of the Infirmary and awarded the OBE for this service. From his base at Beechmount, J.J.M. oversaw the establishment of the Cancer Control Organisation for Edinburgh and Southeast Scotland in 1934, a group of influential (and wealthy) members of society to help organising towards the running costs of the Institute. That same year the Radium Commission approved the Infirmary’s proposal that Beechmount become the National Radium Centre for southeast Scotland, the first of five such centres proposed for the country.

With the support of the Commission an additional 80omg of Radium was acquired and combined with the existing supply to form a mass unit of the material that was called a “Radium Bomb“. This made history as the first such Bomb outside of London and meant that treatments could be made indirectly, focussing the emitted radiation towards the tumour from a few inches away, rather than introducing it directly on needles. This new method was far more efficient and effective and was far safer for both the patient and the medical staff. The Commission also provided funding to pay for the running costs of the Bomb and to safely maintain and house it.

In 1936, J.J.M. reported that “treatment of malignant disease in certain situations such as the throat by means of the radium mass unit or ‘bomb’ has surpassed anything previously known“. He was joined at this time by Dr Margaret (Peggy) Tod as Honorary Associate Assistant Surgeon. Tod stayed for only a year before moving on to become the Deputy Director of the Holt Radium Institute in Manchester, but made “an outstanding contribution to the pioneering work at Beechmount“. The Infirmary’s capacity to administer radiotherapy increased exponentially as a result of dedicating Beechmount to it; in 1939 it reported over 15,000 treatments had been administered, up from only 907 just five years previously.

From 1937, the matron was Jean Ritchie and she served in this post until 1939 when the Institute was closed “for the duration” and re-purposed as a convalescent Auxiliary Hospital; this scheme was directly funded by central government and allowed patients to be removed from the main Infirmary thus freeing up capacity there for dedicated military use or for civilians injured as a result of air raids. The Radium Bomb was removed to the Infirmary and buried at the bottom of a 40 foot deep well shaft to avoid it resulting in a “dirty bomb” in the event it was hit by an air raid. Sadly, Dr Shaw died on wartime active service with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Cairo in September 1940, aged 54, having contracted dysentery while serving as the Consultant Surgeon to the Army GHQ.

After the war, Radiotherapy in Edinburgh was concentrated at the Western General Hospital and Beechmount was not returned to that use. Instead it remained as a 46 bed convalescent home, operated in tandem with the Corstorphine Home and attached to the Royal Infirmary. In 1974, reorganisation of the medical bureaucracy saw Beechmount detached from the Infirmary and grouped in with other small district hospitals in the Lothians to provide specialist geriatric convalescent care.

One long-standing problem of Beechmount was that the building was accessible from the main road only by a very steep set of stairs or a driveway with multiple hairpin bends. In 1969 an ambulance driver did not correctly apply the brakes of his vehicle resulting in it careering 50 yards down the embankment before progress was arrested by a mature tree. Fortunately the occupants, Mrs Ella Hamersley and Mr Charles Baker, suffered only minor injuries. For the benefit of less mobile visitors to the hospital, members of the Corstorphine Rotary Club used their own cars to provide a shuttle service of rides up and down the gradient during visiting hours.

In 1987 the Lothian Health Board denied that it had plans to either close Beechmount Hospital or convert it into a unit for the specialised treatment of patients with HIV/AIDS. However the following year it proposed the closure and sale of the hospital amid a widespread rationalisation and cost cutting plan. The Board cited the fact that the facility was costing £360,000 a year to run, its opponents countered that the running costs of convalescent hospital beds was only a third of that at major hospitals like the Royal Infirmary or the Western General. But the site was potentially very valuable to developers and with the support of the Secretary of State for Scotland, in what the Daily Record dubbed the “Sick Sale of the Century“, Scotland’s health boards were backed from the top to dispose of a swathe of surplus property on the open market to raise money for their capital budgets. Beechmount was closed in 1989 and the house and grounds were to be sold the following year for £1.8 million. The sale fell through however, as did a scheme to convert it into a Hotel. In 1993 the Health Board intended to build a new dental hospital at Beechmount but found it could not afford the renovation costs of £6 million. The premises were in the interim leased to the Scottish Wildlife Trust who used it for offices and returned to the market and finally sold by the Health Board in 1996, the former staff accommodation being converted into apartments and returned to residential use. It was on the market again in 2018 for offers over £4.5 million and eventually sold. It is currently (2025) being used as emergency accommodation for those experiencing homelessness.

1. Story of a Great Hospital. The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh 1729-1929, by A. Logan Turner. ↩︎

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“To the Glory of God, for the Welfare of the Poor”: the thread about the Corstorphine Convalescent Home

Corstorphine Hospital may have been shut for over a decade, but it (briefly) made the news earlier this week as a result of a fire in the abandoned building. I had a front-row seat as I happened to cycle past on my way to work; by which time it was fortunately under the control of the Fire Brigade before it had a chance to have properly taken hold.

The building was first opened on 2nd August 1867 as the Convalescent Home for the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. Five acres of the Meadowhouse Farm had been feud from landowner Sir William Hanmer Dick-Cunyngham bt. the previous year, allowing the institution to be set back from the road on a gentle, south-facing slope for the best sunlight and vistas across to the Pentland Hills.

It was a fairly plain building to designs by Messrs Peddie & Kinnear. It originally had 44 beds in two wings, 26 for men and 18 for women, with a service block in the centre that extended to the rear. It was intended to accommodate patients from the Infirmary who were recovering after operations and treatment, for periods of around 3 weeks. It did not however deal with infectious diseases cases, as these were dealt with by separate hospitals. The extended natures of most stays, along with the fact that patients may be paying for the privilege, meant that the standard of accommodation was good; a mix of private rooms and small wards with two or three beds. Space per “inmate” (as the patients were termed) was also very generous in the name of airborne disease control. The decorative stone was brought from Dunsmore Quarry near Stirling with the infill from nearby Hailes Quarry. Heating was by open fires and there was as yet no piped water supply in the district of Corstorphine and so a well was sunk in the grounds.

The new Home allowed the variety of makeshift – and often inappropriate – convalescent houses in the city to be closed and all work centred on a modern building; well staffed by medical professionals, in a pleasant setting on the outskirts of the noise, smells and diseases of the city. It was funded to the tune of £12,000 by an anonymous philanthropic gentleman who did not want his name attached to it. It later transpired that this was William Seton Brown of Prestonpans, a wealthy London-based merchant who had made his money in Bombay and Shanghai. He came from a missionary family in East Lothian and his younger brothers, Alexander and Robert Ebenezer, were doctors who had died early in life in their 20s and 30s.

The inscription above the doorway of the Home read, in Latin, “To the glory of God, for the welfare of the poor, and in memory of most affectionate brothers, the surviving brother caused this house of healing to be built“. This overlooked somewhat that the fourth and oldest brother and also a medical doctor – John Taylor Brown – outlived them all! In its early years the supply of fresh water was an obvious problem as the Home required 4,000 gallons a day, which clearly was a rather ridiculous proposition to try and source from a well. It took until 1878 for the Edinburgh & District Water Trust to pipe a supply in, which Corstorphine village also benefited from. By 1881 the Home had 50 beds, with an average occupancy of 37. 660 patients were being treated per year, with an average stay of 20 days at a cost of 13s 11d per head, per week. The institution was very efficiently run with only a 1.3% management overhead and it’s annual income of £4,491 exceeded expenditure.

In 1892 the Home was closed for a year and a half to extend it to a capacity of 100 beds and provide general improvements. This was made possible by a bequest from local engineer James “Steam Hammer” Nasmyth and saw the corner towers heightened and extension blocks added to each wing and the addition of south-facing balconies at 1st floor level. The original architects were employed, by now known as Kinnear & Peddie.

For some, the quiet and regimented life of the Convalescent Home proved relaxing and recuperative. But it wasn’t to everyone’s taste: many found it an overbearing straitjacket and discharged themselves against doctors orders just to escape. Yet others were told firmly to leave on account of their lasciviousness and drunkenness; while it catered for both men and women, the sexes were kept strictly apart.

In the year 1912, 1,323 patients had stayed at the Home with 925 of those staying for more than 3 weeks. It was found that very few had to return to the Infirmary after their time in Corstorphine, proving the utility of such institutions in freeing up primary hospital beds and aiding in recovery. From 1923 onwards, Corstorphine was joined by the Astley Ainslie Institution in providing convalescent care for the Infirmary. This modern facility was to pioneer long term care, medical supervision and rehabilitation. Little changed at the Corstorphine Home, which remained focussed on the traditional shorter stay recuperation for patients before they returned to their lives. A nod to modernisation came in 1927 when wireless receivers were installed and £80 was raised to provide headphones for patients to listen to the programming. The following year – 1928 – 1,612 patients were treated and the Astley Ainslie fully opened.

Little else changed at the Corstorphine Home in the interwar period, but as the Infirmary found itself treating increasing numbers of older children, small numbers found their way to the Convalescent Home which opened a children’s ward. Those treated by the Royal Hospital For Sick Children were lucky to be sent to its seaside Home in Gullane.

During WW2, like many such institutions it became an Auxiliary Hospital for service personnel. Initially the City was told by the Government that 300 of its 1,000 hospital beds were to be reserved for the military, reduced to 200 later that year. As a public, but charitable, institution, the Home was brought into the fold of the new National Health Service in 1947, remaining attached to the Infirmary. By the 1950s however it was recognised as being hopelessly out of date, described as “resembling a poor law institution of the earlier part of the century“. In addition, its wooden floors were found to be suffering from rot: something had to be done.

Various options were considered and eventually the institution was closed, had its floors reconstructed in reinforced concrete and was thoroughly modernised and refitted by the Regional Health Board into a General Hospital. Corstorphine Hospital, as it would now be know, had 112 beds in large, open wards and its balconies were now enclosed by glass curtain walls. A new nurses’ house was built in the grounds, freeing up internal space, and when it reopened in 1962 it was now certified to provide nursing training. A big change was a move to pre-ordered catering, with patients selecting their food in advance from a menu, rather than the old “take it or leave it” system which often saw it left, to the detriment of patients health. By 1974 changing practices saw it detached from the Infirmary and grouped in with other small district hospitals in the Lothians to provide specialist geriatric convalescent and rehabilitation care.

A threat to the Hospital came in 1990 when it was proposed to close the hospital and potentially use the site for a new Sick Children’s Hospital. It weathered this storm but changing patterns for the elderly in the following decades, which was increasingly provided in patients homes or pushed into the private sector, saw it slowly run down. In 1999 a modern nursing home, Murraypark, was built in the grounds and in 200 the old nurses’ home was demolished and replaced with 30 residential care flats by a housing association. Closure for the hospital finally came in 2014, its founder’s message of “To the Glory of God, for the Welfare of the Poor” long forgotten, with Murraypark following in 2016. Plans to demolish the site and replace it with a “care village” came to nothing and in 2019 a plan by Michael Laird Architects was approved to renovate it into 32 flats, with extensions and additions in the grounds for 44 more flats.

Neighbouring Edinburgh Zoo objected to this on the grounds of it being adjacent to the enclosures of their prized pandas (which would later be moved, and later yet moved all the way back to China).
The added complexities of Covid and the economics of the construction industry has meant that nothing has yet come of the housing plans and the building has now lain abandoned for over a decade. That hasn’t stopped the Urbexers getting in though, and their videos show the interior has been thoroughly vandalised.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9W2JjCMJeE

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.

Edinburgh survey on Police Leadership (Please complete and boost).

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MSc Criminology student Grace Bell is looking for Edinburgh residents to complete a 15 minute survey on police leadership for a degree project.

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#Edinburgh #Leith #Granton #Gorgie #Dalry #Sighthill #Corstorphine #Liberton #Craigmillar #Muirhouse #Silverknowes #Cramond #Sighthill #Colinton #Slateford #Oxgangs #Marchmont #Blackford #Morningside

Edinburgh survey on Police Leadership (Please complete and boost).

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MSc Criminology student Grace Bell is looking for Edinburgh residents to complete a 15 minute survey on police leadership for a degree project.

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#Edinburgh #Leith #Granton #Gorgie #Dalry #Sighthill #Corstorphine #Liberton #Craigmillar #Muirhouse #Silverknowes #Cramond #Sighthill #Colinton #Slateford #Oxgangs #Marchmont #Blackford #Morningside

Edinburgh survey on Police Leadership (Please complete and boost).

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MSc Criminology student Grace Bell is looking for Edinburgh residents to complete a 15 minute survey on police leadership for a degree project.

Please help by completing at the link above!

#Edinburgh #Leith #Granton #Gorgie #Dalry #Sighthill #Corstorphine #Liberton #Craigmillar #Muirhouse #Silverknowes #Cramond #Sighthill #Colinton #Slateford #Oxgangs #Marchmont #Blackford #Morningside

Edinburgh survey on Police Leadership (Please complete and boost).

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MSc Criminology student Grace Bell is looking for Edinburgh residents to complete a 15 minute survey on police leadership for a degree project.

Please help by completing at the link above!

#Edinburgh #Leith #Granton #Gorgie #Dalry #Sighthill #Corstorphine #Liberton #Craigmillar #Muirhouse #Silverknowes #Cramond #Sighthill #Colinton #Slateford #Oxgangs #Marchmont #Blackford #Morningside

Edinburgh survey on Police Leadership (Please complete and boost).

https://edinburghinformatics.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9LhzQI2slXFtYEK

MSc Criminology student Grace Bell is looking for Edinburgh residents to complete a 15 minute survey on police leadership for a degree project.

Please help by completing at the link above!

#Edinburgh #Leith #Granton #Gorgie #Dalry #Sighthill #Corstorphine #Liberton #Craigmillar #Muirhouse #Silverknowes #Cramond #Sighthill #Colinton #Slateford #Oxgangs #Marchmont #Blackford #Morningside

Lovely article about my friend and ever enthusiastic running companion who is taking a big role in our Edinburgh-based athletics club this year. https://www.caac.org.uk/2023/08/29/meet-the-new-co-captains-janet-grigor/

#running #athletics #Edinburgh #Corstorphine #CAAC #scottishathletics