#edinburghschoolboard — Public Fediverse posts

You Can’t Fight City Hall! The thread about Lothian Road Public School

Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (those built 1872-1918) hold a particular fascination for me, one most profound where they have been “deconsecrated” and are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but soon snowballed into an alphabetical deep-dive into each.

Before the Education (Scotland) Act 1872, which created the Edinburgh School Board and kick-started a building programme of new schools, the west end of the city was served by church-run schools on Cambridge Street by St John’s Episcopal Church and in halls behind the Lothian Road United Presbyterian Church (this latter building would much later become the Filmhouse cinema). They were joined in 1862 when the Free Church of Scotland established a school for 270 children on Riego Street as a mission of Free St Cuthbert’s and Free Greyfriars‘ churches.

The Riego Street School, a photograph taken in 1914 by J. R. Hamilton of the Edinburgh Photographic Society by which time it was in use as a mission hall. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.

After its initial flurry of construction to replace the worst of the schools it had inherited and fill gaps in provision, the School Board turned its attention to the Lothian Road area and acquired a tiny, undeveloped plot extending to only a quarter of an acre at the junction of Grindlay and Cambridge Streets. This land was feud from The Grindlay Trust for £2046 (for whom Grindlay Street is named) who maintained the rights to final approval of any designs. This new Lothian Road Public School was proposed in tandem with Canonmills Public School and at 800 pupils was of a capacity but with a density of 0.77 pupils per metre square it would be the most congested school that the Board would build.

Comparison of the 1849 and 1893 OS Town Plans of Edinburgh for Lothian Road, move the slider to compare. These show in 1849 two small church schools (an Episcopal School in the top right and a United Presbyterian School middle bottom) and in 1893 the Lothian Road Public School in the centre of the image, to the right of the open street square. On the right of the 1893 map are the School Board Offices on Castle Terrace. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Plans by the Board’s architect Robert Wilson were approved in March 1879 and generally followed the Collegiate Gothic styling then in favour, looking very much like a truncated version of its peer at Canonmills but raised to a height of three storeys to maximise the limited space available. An unusual deviation however was a French-style tower with louvred windows on the principal (western) façade adjoining the neighbouring tenement on Grindlay Street. The boys’ entrance was at its base, girls and infants having a separate entrance on Cambridge Street. The ground floor accommodated the infant department in a large central classroom (42 feet by 27 feet) with three smaller rooms leading off of it. The first and second floors were for the older pupils, again each following the same arrangement as the ground floor. To the rear of the school were two rather small playgrounds, one each for boys and girls.

Lothian Road Public School, looking towards the Castle. The striped globe-shaped objects in the middle distance below the Castle are on the roofline of the Synod Hall on Castle Terrace. City of Edinburgh Council Architectural Drawings and Photographs via Trove.Scot, DP 102382

Construction began in late June 1879, the accepted estimate for construction being £5,891 19s 6d (c. £640k in 2026). A site accident on 15th August 1879 injured joiner Alexander Glass when a crane failed and dropped an iron beam on his foot, part of which had to be amputated at the Royal Infirmary as a result. After this, work proceeded steadily and the new school school opened on 6th September 1880, the school on Victoria Terrace (an older building inherited from the Heriot Trust) closing as a consequence. The total cost including purchasing the site came out at £7,333 17s (c. £795k in 2026). As built the capacity was 825 pupils (280 infants and 545 juveniles) with a staff comprising the headmaster, infant mistress, a first assistant teacher and eight assistant teachers. They were supported by a sewing mistress, a singing master and twelve pupil teachers (older children who were remaining in education beyond the mandatory leaving age and who helped in monitoring and conveying the lessons to younger children). The school soon proved to be one of the top performers (helped in a large part because of the socio-economic circumstances of its neighbourhood) and in 1882 the staff were given a 15 percent salary increase on account of reaching the first class tier of the Board’s ranking system.

From the very beginning Continuation Classes (evening school for adults) were part of the school’s offering, with Advanced Classes “for young men” in Latin, grammar and English composition; basic elementary subjects and also more vocational ones such as bookkeeping, shorthand and commercial geography. Architectural and mechanical drawing joined the syllabus in 1885 and by 1889 advanced level mechanics and mathematics were also being taught. In 1898 there were 350 enrolled for continuation schooling with an average attendance of 302. Technical classes in confectionery were started by the Master Bakers of Edinburgh and Leith in 1903 “with a view to raising the standard of fancy baking in the district.”

A street artist at work on the pavement island outside Lothian Road Public School in 1903, while a crowd looks on. The sign on the lamp post reads “Cars Stop“, indicating that this was a passenger platform for the city’s cable tramway.

In 1887, 909 scholars from Lothian Road were presented for examination, suggesting the school was more than 10% over capacity, and before the Scotch Education Department reduced class sizes there were up to 1,000 learners crammed in. The school was a victim of its own success, having the highest attendance rate in the city meaning it was always full. A janitor’s house was added in 1889 at a cost of £223, an extra play shed for the boys in 1892 and new classrooms for drawing and cookery in 1893 at a cost of £1,000.

A fire in March 1891, the result of a fireplace in a classroom causing surrounding woodwork to overheat, proved to be “of a trifling nature” and was extinguished by the staff and janitor before the fire brigade could arrive. Headmaster George Robertson, who had been in charge since opening, died in March 1893. His newspaper obituary recalled him as “a man of a kindly and courteous disposition, which secured for him cordial relations with his staff” and one who had cut his educational teeth in some of the city’s poorest quarters. He had started his career in the school of the Chalmers Territorial Free Church in the West Port of which he was also in the congregation and a deacon (church civic officer). The teachers and a deputation of the schoolchildren attended his funeral at the Grange Cemetery.

Grave marker of George Robertson (1849-93), his infant son John (1875-76) and his wives Anne Mullay (1846-75) and Christina Barclay Robertson (1849-1918). Photo credit Charlie via Findagrave.com

The school was only sixteen years old when ominous clouds began to form on its horizon: in 1896 its site was mooted as one of a number of potential locations for a new civic music hall. The City Hall, as it was then known, was the result of a gift to the city by Andrew Usher (1826-98) who’s family had made a vast fortune in brewing that he had made even larger through perfecting the process of blending Scotch Whisky: revolutionising the product, the industry and a nation’s drinking habits. His endowment was worth £100,000 (about £12 million in 2026) and trustees invested it until an appropriate site could be found.

Barrels of Andrew Usher’s “OVG” (Old Vatted Glenlivet) blended whisky in one of his bonds at St Leonards. This was the first mass-market blended whisky.

A longlist of twelve sites was initially proposed including Princes Street Gardens, Melville Street, Atholl Crescent, opposite St Giles Cathedral on the High Street, Castle Terrace, Chambers Street, Port Hopetoun Basin, the junction of George and Castle Streets and – most controversially – the Meadows. London architect Alfred Waterhouse was engaged to survey each and draw up a shortlist of five, with Atholl Crescent being the favoured option.

Batholomew map, 1898, showing some of the proposed locations for the Usher Hall. A site on Atholl Crescent, to the west of these, was first favoured before attention moved to the area between Lothian Road and Castle Terrace (to the left of the middle of the three plots highlighted above.) Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.

Plans changed in 1900 however when the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland merged with the Free Church of Scotland and the former’s Synod Hall on Castle Terrace was now surplus to requirements. In an ironic twist, this large venue was actually first built as an entertainments hall but quickly failed as a commercial venture. The Town Council leapt at the chance to acquire it with a view that it might somehow be a good site for the hall, or might even be re-purposed as it.

The Synod Hall from West Princes Street Gardens. City of Edinburgh Council Architectural Drawings and Photographs via Trove.Scot SC2575722

Matters proceeded slowly for the next few years while the Town Council tried to acquire further adjacent land; it spent £15,000 buying plots totalling 2,719 square yards, on top of the 2,327 of the hall. In 1903 the Town Clerk, Thomas Hunter, was asked report “on the whole muddle” and set out options for the potential use of the Synod Hall site. Things were getting complicated by the fact the successor United Free Church were apparently attempting to buy the building back and had verbally offered the Corporation £40,000 for it ( the latter having paid just £25,000 a few years earlier). Proponents of the Synod Hall site argued it would be a less expensive proposition than the alternatives and sited facing the Castle it made for an appropriately grand backdrop. Detractors were quick to point out that the new hall proposed for that site would have 2,400 seats, just 300 more than the building it was proposed to demolish and replace!

While matters remained unresolved, the idea of siting what would become The Usher Hall in the vicinity of Castle Terrace had by now crystallised in the minds of the Town Council and their gaze soon shifted to the side of the block that faced on to Lothian Road. If the site of Lothian Road School was combined with the neighbouring tenements and added to the Council’s existing landholding, this gave a combined site of 4,221 square yards without demolishing the Synod hall and in 1904 firm plans were put in front of the Town Council recommending securing the school property.

A complication remained however in that the local authority did not possess the school – it remained the property of the School Board which was independent from the Town Council. An informal approach to the Board had been rebuffed and there was an unwillingness to resort to powers of compulsory purchase. Unfortunately Lord Provost Sir Robert Cranston then went and put his foot in it by letting it be known that the school buildings had been condemned by the Scotch Education Department: the implication being they would thus be easy to acquire, He was rebuked in a most public manner by the Board in a statement published by the Evening News. The Lord Provost wrote to the Board’s chair, the redoubtable Flora Stevenson, to set the matter straight.

Advert taken out by the School Board in response to the Lord Provost’s assertions that Lothian Road School had been condemned by the Scotch Education Department. Edinburgh Evening News, 13th February 1905.

A meeting was convened behind close doors between senior representatives from both sides and soon ironed things out. The Board let it be known they would give up the school for a “fair price” and sufficient land for a replacement school. They hoped to get ground at Lady Lawson Street, the site of the city’s cattle market which was to be relocated, however this was acquired instead by the Education Department for the College of Art.

Once again the scheme stalled, but for Lothian Road Public School it remained business as usual. On account of its central location it remained a favoured venue for a number of organisations. From 1906 to 1910 it was used by the Edinburgh Esperanto Society for meetings and lessons, the Board charging only a nominal rent so as to help encourage that language. A similar privilege was given to the Celtic Union who began Gaelic language evening classes, transferring them from the Outlook Tower on Castlehill whose facilities they had outgrown. It was the Union’s intention to prove there was a public appetite for the language in order that the Board might formally adopt them for its own programme. This plan quickly came to fruition and from 1908 these classes transferred to the School Board’s Continuation curriculum and were run from Gilmore Place Public School. (Coincidentally, this latter building remains in education use as an annexe of James Gillespie’s High School and has recently become a centre for its Gaelic Medium Education learning.)

On June 15th 1909 a meeting was held at the school by “a few far-sighted ladies and sympathetic mothers” which formed the committee to establish the Girl Guiding movement in the city. In July that year a concert was held by the senior pupils of the school to celebrate the attendance records of Janet Gray, Nettie Bee, Janet Taylor and Jane Bogue who all had achieved a perfect attendance record in their seven years at the school; a combined total of twenty-eight years without a day missed. The Board presented medals to the girls and commended the headmaster and his staff. The takings from the concert were to be “devoted to the purchase of pictures with which to adorn the walls” of the school.

An Edinburgh School Board perfect attendance medal first issued in 1908-09 to Robert McKinlay of London Street School. Picture via Lockdale’s Auctioneers and Valuers, sale lot from 2024.

Time was running short for the school however. It was now fourteen years after Usher’s gift to the city (and twelve after his death) and pressure was mounting to finally get his hall built. Finally on March 21st 1910 a report was submitted to the Lord Provost’s Committee of the Town Council recommending that it should be built on the Lothian Road site that included the footprint of the school. This was approved and at a closed meeting the following day the School Board agreed to its sale for £8,500 plus a new site at the City Slaughterhouse (the Killin’ Hoose) at Fountainbridge, which was about to be relocated to Slateford. The Board were initially offered one and a quarter acres but stuck to their guns that they would not settle for less than two – in the end they accepted one and three-quarters plus two buildings to convert into a janitor’s house. This still left the Board an estimated deficit of £17,000 (about £1.7 million in 2026) for the replacement, however they felt “willing to do all in their power to further the important scheme“.

Edinburgh Evening News, 7th January 1905 Shaded properties were those to be acquired for the final Usher Hall scheme. The area outlined by the dotted and thick solid line was already possessed by the Town Council.

Lothian Road Public School closed for the last time at the end of the summer term of 1910. Its brief thirty year life was the shortest of any of the Board’s schools and in that time it was estimated that 9,780 children had passed through its doors. Its Continuation Classes were removed to James Gillespie’s School when the new term started, the infant department to temporary huts at Ponton Street and the remaining 590 children were largely sent to the old West Fountainbridge School while their new home was completed. This building had been closed a few years previously (it had actually been condemned) and its lower floors had by then been converted into a central cooking centre for free and “penny dinners” for schools in the city centre. One can only imagine what the smells of boiling cabbage were like for children trying to learn about the kitchens’ coppers which had a capacity to cook 650 gallons in one go – 130 stones (or 826kg) of potatoes could be cooked per hour!

On Tuesday March 13th 1911, workmen of Messrs Neil Mcleod & Sons began working on building operations for the Usher Hall and that Friday the Edinburgh Evening News reported on “the passing of Lothian Road School“. Wooden hoardings been erected around the building and children were helping the teachers throughout the day to clear the school.

Although now the exigencies of modern educational equipment call for something more up to date [it] has never failed to satisfy the powers that be in the work of educating pupils and securing high attendance percentages.”

“The Passing of Lothian Road School”, Edinburgh Evening News, 17th March 1911

On the 22nd of the month, the demolition gangs moved in and it was reported less than a month later that a workman by the name of Alexander Young had been seriously injured at work on demolition, having been standing on a second floor staircase when it collapsed beneath him and he suffered a fall of thirty five feet as a result.

During and before images of the demolition of Lothian Road Public School, view looking towards Grindlay Street. Move the slider to compare. Photographs probably taken by Francis M. Chrystal of the Edinburgh Photographic Society. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries. During and before images of the demolition of Lothian Road Public School, view looking towards Cambridge Street. Move the slider to compare. Photographs probably taken by Francis M. Chrystal of the Edinburgh Photographic Society. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.

In December 1910 it had been decided that the replacement school should be called Tollcross Public School and that it should accommodate 800 children (300 infants and 500 juveniles). Tenders were advertised in May 1911 and it would open in September 1912.

Site of Tollcross School, before shown on 1906 Goad Fire Insurance map when it was the municipal slaughter houses and after shown on 1944 OS Town Plan. Move the slider to compare. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Demolition at Lothian Road proceeded swiftly and groundworks were advanced to allow the laying of the memorial foundation stones on July 19th 1911. King George V and Queen Mary performed the honours at a grand public ceremony, each dropping a stone into place by the turning of the handle of a crane and tapping it gently with a ceremonial mallet.

The stage is set, quite literally, for the laying of the Usher Hall’s foundation stones, July 19th 1911. These are on the site of the former Lothian Road School, the steepled building on the right of the photo being St. Columba’s Gaelic Free Church. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.

The Usher Hall finally opened on March 16th 1914, seventeen years and two hundred and eighty two days after the initial gift was made. By all accounts it has been a grand success, but its troubled gestation is just one of many examples of the city’s difficult (and ongoing) history of schemes to try and build public concert halls!

Bust of Andrew Usher, unveiled at the opening of the Usher Hall. Photograph by Francis Caird Inglis, 1914. Delays to the scheme meant that Usher was long dead by the time his gift was completed. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.

The previous chapter of this series looked at the James Clark School.

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Jimmy’s: the thread about the school on St Leonard’s Crag

Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (those built 1872-1918) hold a particular fascination for me, one most profound where they have been “deconsecrated” and are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but soon snowballed into an alphabetical deep-dive into each.

Part nine of the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” series takes us to St Leonard’s Crag, the rather romantic sounding name for a quarried-out promontory where the western boundary of Holyrood Park meets the old district of St Leonard’s (a name harking back to a so-named 12th century chapel and hospital). Perched atop it is these days is a handsome old building, now converted to flats, whose striking feature is a grand corner tower in the style of a French château. For those with a keen eye, the letters ESB carved on its façade give the game away that this was once a school, the last that would be designed and built by the Edinburgh School Board and one that was strikingly different from what had come before it. This is the former James Clark School– universally known locally as Jimmy’s – the feature of chapter nine of the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” series.

The former James Clark School, southern elevation.

The Edinburgh School Board was formed as a result of the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 which made education compulsory (but not then free) between the ages of five and thirteen. It was largely constituted from the various parish schools of the main Presbyterian churches; the Kirk and the Free Kirk between them educating around 40% of pupils in the city at this time. In the first three decades of its existence it embarked upon a mass-building programme to furnish the city with enough purpose-built new “public schools” to house and teach the children of its burgeoning population. In the Southside, no fewer than seven were opened; Bristo (1877); Causewayside (1877); St Leonard’s (1880); South Bridge (1886); Davie Street (1887); Sciennes (1892) and Preston Street (1897).

Former South Bridge Public School, a typical early “barracks block” product of the Edinburgh School Board in its favoured Collegiate Gothic style, by its house architect Robert Wilson

These had replaced the hodge-podge of inadequate and antiquated facilities that the Board had inherited but were only just able to meet the demand as the school-age population continued to rise. This was the result of a number of factors including the abolition of fees in 1890, more stringent efforts to ensure attendance, making it harder to employ school-age children in the daytime workplace and the raising of the minimum leaving age to fourteen by the Education (Scotland) Act 1901. By 1911 school capacity in the Southside had been well and truly exceeded; Sciennes had fifteen classes over-capacity, South Bridge eleven, St Leonard’s three and Bristo two. The Board thus felt it had no option but to built yet another new facility in the district, but the area was by now heavily developed and prospective sites were hard to come by. Eventually the relatively small and topographically complex one acre plot of the Gibraltar Villas at St. Leonard’s Bank was acquired, as well as an adjoining house to be converted for the school janitor.

Comparison of 1893 and 1944 OS Town Plans showing the St Leonard’s district. Gibraltar Villas are on the bottom right, where the James Clark School will later be built. St Leonard’s Public School is the cruciform building in the bottom middle, on Forbes Street, later an annexe to “Jimmy’s”. To its left is Free St Paul’s where the old district school was held in the Sabbath School Hall – later a temporary annexe – and at the top left is Davie Street School also later an annexe of technical workshops. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Plans were approved on March 25th 1913 to the designs of the Board’s long-serving architect, John Alexander Carfrae. But architectural thinking had moved on significantly with respect to school design since the looming “barracks” blocks of previous decades and Carfrae was rapidly adapting his style at this time in response. What he proposed was a two-storey, F-plan building with a capacity for 850 children in seventeen classrooms. It would be one which embodied the latest theories about maximising natural lighting and ventilation and an evolution of his preceding work at Tollcross School. Gone were the tall, mechanically-ventilated rooms lit by high-set windows on only one side in a sinister attempt to stamp out left-handedness. Instead, in came classrooms arranged “one deep” (i.e. with external walls on opposite sides of the room), naturally lit with as many windows as possible on both sides and naturally cross-ventilated by opening these windows. Gone too were the warren of internal corridors, rooms accessed off of rooms and monumental “parade” staircases and in came open verandahs, each classroom being directly accessed from its own door to the outside, protected from the worst of the elements by glazed canopies. The windows on the verandah side could be folded open so that classes could be “taught practically in the open air“.

Former James Clark School, from the upper playgrounds. Note there are windows on the rear (north) side of the closest classrooms, largely to provide natural cross-ventilation across from front to rear. The well considered arrangement of the buildings and use of topography means the two-storey range closest to the viewpoint casts relatively little shadow into the playground behind it. The squat, single-storey block contained toilets. The east range to the left of the photo has a first floor verandah giving access directly to each classroom from the open air. Picture via Ativa Property listing

Previous practice had been to simply plonk the school block directly alongside the street in a central and symmetrical manner that looked pleased on the drawings but which made for dark, oppressive and stale playgrounds and classrooms badly affected by road noise. Instead, the new school was pushed north by some seventy feet from the boundary to give an open, south-facing playground which maximised sunlight and circulation of air. A second, inner playground made use of the plot’s topography to also get the best of the daylight and drouth. Again following the lead of Tollcross, the styling was restrained; a mix of plain, rustic masonry and smooth ashlar at the ground floor giving way to glass and facing brick for the upper storey. One exception to this visual austerity was made though with advantage taken “of its commanding position to give it some bolder features rather than to employ elaborate architectural detail” – that enormous tower in the southeaster corner, which elegantly morphed from a square section to a conical spire and contained the headmaster’s office and a staffroom in its upper levels. The end product would be visually unique in the landscape of Edinburgh schools.

Former James Clark School, southern elevation showing the corner tower and Salisbury Crag’s beyond. Picture via Ativa Property listing

The new school was to be christened King’s Park School in acknowledgement of the formal name of Holyrood Park over which it had a commanding view and tenders were solicited in March 1913, with a total cost of £18,000 approved. However its shared boundary with that park caused “friction” in July that year when the Ministry of Works – the park’s custodians – demanded an annual 2 Guineas ground rent for a boundary wall which was be demolished and encroached upon by some eighteen inches.

The Scotsman, 15th March 1913

A tender for furniture was invited on 24th October 1914 but by this time World War Once had commenced and opening would never come. Instead the nearly completed but empty building (the north range of the F-plan was not yet built) was requisitioned by the War Office for the billeting of troops. Here stalled and ended the brief story of King’s Park School: but it was not the end, indeed it was really only the beginning.

A monogrammed desk from the James Clark School that formerly stood outside the headmaster’s office, now located in the Southside Heritage Association’s museum in the Nelson Halls.

When the school board took back possession of its building in 1918 it found itself now faced with a declining need for elementary-grade schools and an increasing need for supplementary grade capacity (i.e. for ages twelve to fourteen and potentially beyond). This was to provide the specialist training needed by the city’s industries for children destined to enter their workforces in a few years time. At this time these children were taught in their normal elementary schools in what were called the Supplementary Divisions; in 1905 the School Board had 3,494 such pupils on its books but by 1912 this had tripled to 10,391, but with an estimated deficit of 6,000 spaces. 1909 they had considered building three new Supplementary Schools to centralise this teaching in purpose-built facilities equipped with the necessary technical workshops and classrooms. Ground was aquired to the west at Tynecastle – where a Technical and Commercial School would be opened in 1911 – and at Bellevue to the north for this purpose. The third such school was to serve the Southside but had been delayed owing to the outbreak of the war. Finding a brand new, empty school in its hands and a declining elementary roll in the district, the solution presented itself.

It was decided to rename the new institution in honour of Lt. Col James Clark KC CB, late Chairman of the Edinburgh School Board and who had been killed in action at the Second Battle of Ypres. Fifty-six year old Clark – a long-serving Territorial Army officer – had volunteered to command the 9th (Dumbartonshire) Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders and was hit by a shell on the morning of May 1915 when leading his battalion forward near Zouave Wood to relieve the 2nd Cameron Highlanders. During this battle the unit was reduced in strength by three quarters, with just two officers and eighty five men surviving. Clark’s deputy, Major George J. Christie, would receive the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) medal for his part in the brutal fighting.

“A-Company of the 9th Argylls Advancing Under Heavy Fire to Reinforce the 2nd Camerons During the Second Battle of Ypres“, lithograph of a painting by Allan Stewart published in the picture book “Deeds that Thrill the Empire“. The officer leading the charge in this scene, Major George J. Christie, would receive the DSO for his part in this action which would claim the life of his superior, Lt. Col. James Clark

The James Clark Technical School accepted its first 730 pupils in September 1918 and was formally opened on 21st March 1919 by the Right Hon. Robert Munro, Secretary of State for Scotland. Norah Kathleen Clark, widow of the late Colonel, was present on the occasion. It was the second such school of this type in Edinburgh and was the last to be built and opened by the Edinburgh School Board. The Education (Scotland) Act 1918 which came into force a few months later replaced it with a new Edinburgh Education Authority. To align with the language used by this act, the school was re-designated James Clark Intermediate, although both names would be used interchangeably throughout 1920s.

Memorial to James Clark within the school. Detail of the inscription can be read in the Alt Text.

Clark was widely mourned and commemorated, leading memorials in the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh (of which he was a member); the Edinburgh Naval and Military Institute where he had been founding chairman (since removed to the Scottish Veterans Residences in the Canongate); on the battalion memorial at Dumbarton Castle and at his alma mater of Paisley Grammar School. His widow would later commission a vast, nine-light stained glass window in his memory from the artist Douglas Strachan for the eastern end for Paisley Abbey.

Part of the east window of Paisley Abbey dedicated to James Clark. Photo by Brian Madwsley, via IWM War Memorials Register

The press deemed the new school to be a “fitting memorial of Colonel Clark’s educational work“, but not everyone was happy. One local parent wrote to the Edinburgh Evening News to express their displeasure at it not being an elementary school:

It is not sufficient for Board members to sit in a board-room and come to decisions when the welfare of the children is at stake. Let them visit the district and get some practical experience of the conditions under which these children are suffering… Let the Board take up the question of technical education after they have dealt with the present conditions, and not start half way up the ladder.

Letter to the Editor of the Edinburgh Evening News from “A Parent in the District”, 16th May 1918

As an Intermediate School, Jimmy’s offered two-to-three year courses for children which were a combination of general education and either a Technical or Commercial stream aimed at preparing them for the workplace. But having been built as an elementary school it was lacking in certain facilities. In 1918 the nearby Davie Street Public School was closed to become an annexe for it, first providing additional teaching space while rooms for art, home economics and science were added to the main building in a new north wing. After this work was completed in 1924 it was converted into specialist workshops for teaching the trades of brassfinishing, tinsmithing, upholstery, plumbing, tailoring and printing (to boys only, of course!)

Davie Street School, built by the Heriot Trust in 1875 in their house style and later taken over and extended by the Edinburgh School Board as a public school

After 1927 depopulation in the Southside accelerated as a result of the city Corporation’s slum clearance schemes. This displaced much of the population to new housing estates to the south at Prestonfield and further east at Niddrie Mains. Families with children were relocated as a priority and so school rolls sharply declined, reaching a rate of 10% per annum at the dawn of the 1930s and resulting in some 1,200 vacant elementary school places in the district. When a brand new school at Prestonfield opened in 1931 to serve that estate the St Leonard’s Public School, just over the street from James Clark, was closed and the Education Committee approved its conversion into a second annexe for the latter.

James Clark School uniform in 1933, worn by Esther Reid of Parkside Street. Her hat sports a black and gold band – the school colours – and badge, and her gauntlet gloves have a golden band around the cuff. Copy of a photograph in the Southside Heritage Association’s museum in the Nelson Halls.

St Leonard’s already had workshops for supplementary classes in tinsmithing, metal working, tailoring, upholstery and masonry (for boys) and cookery, sewing and “cutting out” (for girls). Nine of its classrooms were refurbished and two new art rooms were added alongside new workshops for benchwork, a laundry, sewing and cookery rooms and a new gymnasium with changing rooms and showers. These changes allowed the conversion of such rooms in the main school into science laboratories. Work was completed for the start of the 1932-33 term after the summer holidays. An additional benefit for boys was that they could now undertake their physical education classes in the anew annexe; the smaller gymnasium in the main school had been hitherto reserved for girls and boys had instead been marched to and from a nearby drill hall for their “physical jerks“.

St Leonard’s Public School in 1959. Adam H. Malcolm photograph, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection of Edinburgh City Libraries.

The depopulation of the Southside didn’t have much immediate effect on the roll at Jimmy’s as it remained the only such school in the south and east of the city; all those children who had been displaced to the new housing areas had to come right back for their secondary education! Former pupil and Rangers footballing legend John Greig – a pupil in the mid-1950s – recalls in his autobiography “My Story”, how his footballing fitness was established by the daily two mile run from his home in the Prestonfield housing scheme to school, returning each way at lunch time and then the two miles home again at the end of the day. This situation would continue until 1938 when Niddrie Marischal Intermediate School opened to serve the Niddrie and Craigmillar housing areas. A third annexe was added to that year when workshops in the former Brown Square School, by then part of Heriot-Watt College, became available to train boys serving apprenticeships in the bookbinding trade on “day release” from the school. Use of this building had ceased by 1964 when it was converted into the students’ association for Heriot-Watt College.

Former Brown Square school in 1913. This was one of the Heriot Trust day schools that were merged into the School Board after 1872, immediately identifiable by all the Jacobean decorations modelled off of Heriot’s Hospital itself. Edinburgh Photographic Society collection, via National Galleries Scotland.

For the boys of James Clark, the facilities of its annexes meant the school developed particularly close links with the printing trade – an especially prestigious blue collar career in the city – and successful completion of the courses could lead to bursaries for the print qualifications at Heriot Watt College. These opportunities of course remained strictly off limits to girls, who were limited to clerical classes or for training in the domestic arts of cookery, dressmaking and laundrywork. A house at 17 St Leonard’s Bank had been purchased for the school and was used to teach “housewifery“, its upstairs flat accommodating one of the school’s janitors.

A girl’s class of ’34 infront of an entrance to James Clark School.

In 1940 the school was re-designated James Clark Junior Secondary, a Scotland-wide change to mark the shift to a broader curriculum at this level and in preparation for the school leaving age being raised to 15. At this time its roll was 861. Between 1942-48 and again between 1954-58, overspill accommodation was provided in the old Sunday School of the former St. Paul’s Free Church on St Leonards Street, where the first school in the district had been established way back in 1851. This was partly to provide a dining room, with many fathers absent and mothers out working during the day there was a huge wartime demand for school dinners. These were brought in from a central kitchen established nearby at the former Causewayside Public School and were of dubious quality. After the war the new National Health Service took responsibility for juvenile dental care off of the city and James Clark was one of a number of schools given a dental inspection and treatment room with a full-time staff.

On April 1st 1947, the minimum school leaving age in Scotland was raised from 14 to 15, significantly increasing the number of children in secondary education and helping keep the roll at Jimmy’s healthy. There was also a bump in the city’s urban population at this time due to an acute post-war housing crisis, again benefiting the school. On January 15th 1949 a memorial was dedicated in the school to the 121 former pupils and one member of staff (Sergeant Eric Webster RAFVR, who was killed on July 28th 1942 when his aircraft collided with another near Cambridge).

James Clark School WW2 memorial panel for former pupils who lost their lives in the conflict. Originally installed in the school, it was later relocated to the Southside Community Centre, although currently is not on display and awaiting restoration. Copy of a photograph in the Southside Heritage Association’s museum in the Nelson Halls.

A further memorial was unveiled at the nearby Deaconess Hospital in 1956. This was provided by the School’s memorial fund to mark the service that the hospital provided to the community and of the £750 that had been raised the substantial remainder paid for comforts for the patients such as TV and radio sets, which could not be met from its own budget.

Photograph of the plaque, now in the care of the Lothian Health Services Archive, a copy in the Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.

When the prevailing dire national economic conditions eased enough for new housing estates to start appearing in the south of the city in the early 1950s, again there was a lag in provision of secondary schooling to the benefit of the roll at James Clark; a temporary school was provided at The Inch in 1953 but permanent schools at Liberton and Gracemount had to wait until 1958. The Education Committee anticipated the roll increasing to over 1,000 by the end of the decade and so authorised a £36,000 extension in 1957 to provide four science classrooms, a new assembly hall, library as well as improvements to the existing facilities. This allowed the ancient overspill accommodation at the old St. Paul’s Free Kirk to be finally vacated. The new block conferred an additional benefit in that it bridged the height difference between the main school and the St Leonard’s annexe, significantly shortening the distance between the two.

The steel frame of the 1957 extension takes shape, seen between the annexe of the old St Leonard’s Public School on the left and the tenements of St Leonard’s Hill on the right. Photograph by Adam H. Malcolm c. 1957, G944A Edinburgh and Scottish Collection of Edinburgh City Libraries

Any optimism for the school’s future in the late 1950s had been severely misplaced however. Despite the forthcoming raising of the leaving age to sixteen (then planned for 1970), the scandalous condition of housing in much of the district – culminating in the infamous collapse of the “Penny Tenement” in 1959 – saw rapid and drastic action taken by the authorities. The Corporation designated whole swathes of the neighbourhood a Comprehensive Development Area, condemning the housing stock and acquiring it through compulsory purchase (CPO) before their wrecking ball moved in. Much of St Leonard’s and almost all of Dumbiedykes would be completely obliterated in short order and by 1964 some 1,500 houses had already been demolished in the area. The population inevitably collapsed, displaced to the outlying housing schemes and new tower blocks, and those left behind were generally the elderly or young people without children. School rolls thus fell disproportionately faster; by 1963 the roll at Jimmy’s was just 500 – half of what had been predicted – and by the end of the decade would be barely 300.

Evening News photo of the Carnegie Street CPO area, cleared after the collapse of the Penny Tenement, published 5th October 1961. The abandoned remains of Dalrymple Place can be seen on the left, running off towards the Deaconess Hospital.

It would have been hard enough for the school to survive this seismic demographic force in isolation, but it also faced three further existential threats. Firstly, after 1966 the specialist technical education for printing and allied trades was removed from the school’s curriculum and onto those of the new Telford and Napier further education colleges. The entire Davie Street building was transferred to those institutions and quickly run-down and relocated. Secondly, the raising of the leaving age to sixteen was delayed and coincided with a move from the two tier system of Junior Secondary and selective, fee-charging High Schools to a fully comprehensive and co-educational system. The Education Committee took this juncture as an opportunity to “rid” itself of as many of its old Junior Secondaries as possible; most of which were housed in converted old elementary schools with a variety of extensions and annexes tacked on over time. Jimmy’s generally positive reputation compared to some of its peers could not protect it from this desire.

James Clark School scarf, blazer badge and prefect’s pin. Objects in the Southside Heritage Association’s museum in the Nelson Halls.

Thirdly, the city had a long and deeply held aspiration to run an urban motorway – the Bridges Relief Road – directly through the neighbourhood and the school itself. As such it had been land-banking for this scheme in the district and was keen to clear any remaining occupied blocks as quickly as it could. James Clark Secondary School could not, and did not, survive these combined pressures and it closed at the end of the 1971-72 term, its remaining pupils relocated to a reconstituted James Gillespie’s High School.

Diagram of some of the central urban motorways recommended for Edinburgh in the “Buchanan Plan” in 1966 and further finessed in the 1970s. The Bridges Relief Road is marked in red on the right, running straight through the site of James Clark School.

Thus ended the fifty-five year history of Jimmy’s. The headmaster at opening was Robert Dickson. He was replaced in 1927 by James Flett, who died just 6 months later. In turn afterwards came Michael Oldham (1927-37), Thomas Scott (1938-53); James M. L. Drummond (1953-56); Ronald. S. Gray (1956-67) and Ronald Paul (1967-closure). The noted rubber stamp artist, calligrapher and instructional author George Lawrie Thomson (1916-2001), was a Jimmy’s pupil from 1929-32. In his 1988 autobiography My Life as a Scribe he recalled scoring 92% in the Qualifying Exam (“Qually“) at age 11 thus winning entry to Boroughmuir High School, but his class friend got 94% thus won the only scholarship on offer. Unable to afford the fees at Boroughmuir, he instead went to James Clark where like most of his peers he left after three years to join the prevailing mass unemployment of the time. By sheer talent (and motherly determination) he fortunately able to win a scholarship to Edinburgh College of Art.

Cover of The Art of Caligraphy bv George L. Thomson, one of many beautiful covers he produced for his own books.

Another notable former pupil was John Gollan (1911-72), general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, who was at the school until leaving in 1924 before his fourteenth birthday. In 1931 he made the local headlines when he received six months imprisonment for handing out socialist pamphlets (“The Soldier’s Voice” and “The Organ of Communist Soldiers“) outside Redford Barracks.

John Gollan addressing an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Trafalgar Square, London, July 1966.

Although there was the threat of the Bridges Relief Road hanging over it the unoccupied school was Category B listed in 1974, conferring some protection from immediate demolition. Thoughts given to relocating the Museum of Childhood to it, but instead it was brought back into educational use, briefly providing “decant” accommodation for pupils destined for the new comprehensive Castlebrae High School before becoming a junior annexe for St Thomas of Aquin’s R.C. High School. £100,000 was spent on refurbishments in 1977 but by 1983 the latter school was due to move out again at the end of the term. A potential lifeline came in the form of 1982 plans to close the remaining district primary schools at Milton House, Preston Street and South Bridge and to merge them into a new school in James Clark. These plans were vigorously resisted and instead Preston Street stayed as it was, with South Bridge closed in 1983 and merged into Milton House, which in turn was renamed Royal Mile Primary to mark the occasion. After this the sole remaining occupant was the South Side Youth Centre who used parts of the 1957 extension. The former St Leonard’s Public School annexe and (listed) St Paul’s Free Kirk were demolished the following year.

In 1985 Lothian Regional Council sold Jimmy’s to developer Jemscot Ltd for £270,000 (c. £847k in 2025) for conversion into flats. The transaction was anything but smooth however; £40,000 of the initial agreed deal of £310,000 had to be waived on account of the council allowing the building to be heavily vandalised, including all the lead stripped from the roof, while still under its control.

The abandoned James Clark School in 1986, still from a video image which showing the For Sale sign and internal vandalism. © South Side Youth Centre via Southside Heritage Group Youtube

To make matters worse, early in 1986 the Historic Buildings and Monuments Directorate of the Scottish Office stepped in with a demand for £19,995 from the Council, having discovered a clause in the Royal Warrant granted in 1913 that allowed the school to encroach on the Holyrood Park boundary which meant that should the building cease to be used for its educational purpose then the original boundary and wall was to be be reinstated. This would require the demolition of the entire eastern range and so the Directorate’s financial demand had been arrived at in lieu of this. The Council’s outraged Finance Chairman, Councillor James Gilchrist, made a counter-offer of £5 from his own wallet! A direct appeal was also made to the Secretary of State, Malcolm Rifkind MP, but went unanswered. The authority found it had no legal option other than to pay the money that had otherwise been earmarked for its education budget.

View of the entrance to some of the flats from the 1st-floor southern walkway which once gave “fresh air” access to classrooms. Estate Agents photo from Deans Properties

The development now went ahead and was designated as a new street called St Leonard’s Crag. An initial attempt to make the marketing name of Salisbury Court stick quickly fell by the wayside. In October 1986 the 1957 extension was vacated when the Southside Youth Centre left for the new Southside Community Centre in the former Nicolson Street Church. The developer then took the building in hand for conversion into flats, resulting in a curious-looking block with third and fourth-floor balconies which try hard to reference the arched window of the old school tower but largely fail to fit in with the older building in any way.

The 1957 extension as converted to flats, being entirely re-faced in blockwork and with a metal-clad upper storey and balconies added.

The first flats in the development were advertised for sale in late 1986 for between £23k and 55k (69k to £165k in January 2026 by straight consumer price inflation alone), but now selling for £200k, £300k or even more in the current Edinburgh property market. It is all a far cry from the smashed up, semi-ruinous state the building found itself in forty years ago.

You certainly get a lot of view for your money.

View from one of the flats in the former James Clark School, looking west towards the Salisbury Crags.

The previous chapter of this series looked at St Leonard’s Public School. The next chapter examines Lothian Road Public School.

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Remarkably Unremarkable: the thread about St Leonard’s Public School

Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (those built 1872-1918) hold a particular fascination for me, one most profound where they have been “deconsecrated” and are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but soon snowballed into an alphabetical deep-dive into each.

It’s been a few months now since we last looked at one of the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh”. Chapter eight of this series takes us to St Leonard’s Public School, of which you can now find no trace where it once stood, and precious little in books or online resources either. Even Forbes Street, where it once stood, is unrecognisably different these days and similar in name only.

Parish schooling in the St Leonard’s district began in 1851 in the Sabbath School behind Free St. Paul’s Church on St. Leonard’s Street. This small building – confusingly referred to locally as St Leonard’s School – served the neighbourhood under control of the Free Kirk for twenty or so years until the passage of the Education Act (Scotland) 1872. This made education between the ages of five and thirteen compulsory in Scotland and formed new area School Boards to take over the existing provision of the various Presbyterian churches, which in Edinburgh accounted for over 40% of public schooling.

Free St. Paul’s in 1959, seventeen years after deconsecration and a year after it was sold by the Corporation out of use by James Clark Secondary. The date stone, 1836, pre-dates The Disruption which formed the Free Church. Adam H. Malcolm photograph, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection of Edinburgh City Libraries.

The new Edinburgh School Board thus inherited this (and many other) small, ex-church school. But with bigger priorities in other parts of the city at first it was content to just let things run as they had before. The principal change a was the introduction by the Board of “evening classes for workmen, apprentices and others“, where Mr George Robertson taught reading, dictation, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography and history from 8PM to 10PM, four nights a week at a rate of four Shillings a term. Matters changed after 1878 when the Scotch Education Department withdrew its £500-a-year grant on account of its lack of proper facilities, “awkward rooms and indifferent light” and poor ventilation (the Department was obsessed about ventilation in those days).

The Board had already resolved to build a purpose-built school for the district and now progressed this as a matter of urgency; as an interim measure new double desks were ordered to cram in additional bums-on-seats in the old building. A small, narrow site – barely over half an acre – and just to the east of the existing building was acquired between Forbes Street and St Leonard’s Lane. The Board’s house architect, Robert Wilson, prepared plans for an elongated, three-storey building with a projecting central gable block. Like other contemporary large, tall schools in the city that were squeezed into awkward blocks surrounded by tall tenements, it suffered by design from poor natural lighting and ventilation, dark and dingy playgrounds and obtrusive noise from the parallel roads. But the Board’s number one priority was building school capacity and these such considerations were further down on their list of requirements.

Comparison of the 1849 and 1893 OS Town Plans of Edinburgh, showing before and after Forbes Street was laid out and St Leonard’s Public School built on it. St Paul’s Free Kirk and the school behind it, which served as the parish school, are on St Leonard’s Street. James Clark School would later be built on the site occupied by Gibraltar Villas. Move the slider to compare. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The formal opening ceremony of the new St Leonard’s Public School took place on Friday 16th January 1880, presided over by the Rev. Dr Adamson and members of the School Board. It was the tenth new school to be completed by the board since its formation in 1873 and was “the largest, cheapest and in every sense, the most commodious“. It had cost £10,000 (including the janitor’s house and boundary walls) and could hold 1,100 pupils at the regulation 8 square feet per child. The roll at the time of opening was 956 of whom 820 attended on average on any given day. At this time it was now felt that together with Bristo and Causewayside Public Schools – both opened three years prior – that “the educational requirements on the south-east part of the city had been fully met”.

Former St. Paul’s Free Church in 1983, prior to demolition, and St. Leonard’s Public School on the right. Via Trove.Scot SC 1508948

Not everyone was happy with the Board’s newest creation. In 1889, when it was considering plans for the new Sciennes Public School, the Dean of Guild Court – the equivalent then of a municipal planning approval committee – retrospectively criticised the architectural appearance of St. Leonard’s. It further implied that the School Board “were not considering the health of the children“. In 1927 Robert Sterling Craig SSC, an outspoken independent member of the Edinburgh Education Authority (successor to the School Board) derided the school, its lower floors were “practically cellars, as the sun never enters them from one year’s end to another“.

Aerial photo of the St. Leonard’s district, early 1970s, showing St Leonard’s Public School towards the middle left, below the James Clark School which is the prominent building with the tower in the upper middle of the picture. This shows to good effect just how penned in the building was, orientated in the wrong direction to get the best of the natural daylight. Via Trove.Scot DP 622460

In 1889 an extension was approved to add six further classrooms, to meet demand until Sciennes could be built. In 1901 estimates were sought for the addition of a cookery room, workshop and gymnasium for the school. Headmaster George Yule, of Blacket Avenue, died in January 1906 after a period of illness. Described as a man of “a genial and kindly disposition, highly esteemed and respected by his colleagues, and as a teacher had an excellent record” he had been in charge of the school since 1888. He was replaced by a former assistant, James Clark, who was then head at Causewayside Public School. Clark retired in 1921 having spent 39 of his 41 years in teaching at the school.

St. Leonard’s Public School, a class in 1921. The boy on the extreme left in the front row, with the striped tie, is Andrew Archibald, who wrote memories of the area for the Edinburgh Evening News.

In 1913 workshops were added for “instruction of tinsmiths, metal workers, tailors, upholsterers and masons“. These were “Supplementary” courses (i.e. specialist trades education beyond the age of 11) only open to boys; Girls could go to Causewayside Public School but were restricted to taking domestic courses. In 1924, newspaper adverts record that St Leonard’s was offering evening “cutting-out classes for women”, i.e. translating patterns for clothing onto fabric for sewing into garments. The school otherwise seems to have led a life most remarkable for how unremarkable it was.

St Leonard’s Public School in 1959, by which time it was the annexe for James Clark School. Photo taken from the south end of Forbes Street where it meets St Leonard’s Lane, showing just how penned in the building was on all sides by tenements. Adam H. Malcolm photograph, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection of Edinburgh City Libraries.

Things continued in this fashion until 1927 when the Corporation began clearing the worst of the old and overcrowded slums in the district in earnest. There was some rebuilding in the area with new council house tenements at Richmond Place, the Pleasance, East Crosscauseway, Gifford Park and St. Leonards Street, but this was at a much lower density than what it replaced and thus much of the displaced population were rehoused a mile south in the Prestonfield Housing Scheme or much further east to Niddrie Mains. Families with children were moved out as a priority and as a result school rolls in the area began to decline sharply; it was reported to be at a rate of 10% annual decline.

Photograph taken in advance of the St Leonard’s Improvement Scheme in 1927 by A. H. Rushbrook. It shows the rear of 33 East Crosscauseway which was condemned for demolition. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.

Davie Street School had already closed in 1918 to become an annexe of the James Clark School and the half-empty Causewayside Public School followed in 1924 to relocate St. Columba’s Roman Catholic School there. This reduction in capacity could not keep up with the falling demand and so St Leonard’s shut for the last time at the end of the summer term in 1931, its fiftieth year. With a brand new “Sunshine School” at Prestonfield opening after the holidays, the vast majority of its remaining pupils were set to dissapear. Those children who did not relocate were transferred to Preston Street. Bristo Public School, described by Corporation as “one of the worst” of its schools, was not far behind and shut in 1934.

The inner courtyard of the new Prestonfield School in 1932, a “Sunshine School” that prioritised maximum amounts of natural daylight and ventilation. Note the all-round verandah and the folding glass doors to allow light and fresh air into every classroom. The dormer windows provided additional natural lighting into the classrooms from above. Its low-slung design on a large plot, arranged around a pleasant central courtyard, was the antithesis of the St Leonard’s Public School that it replaced.

With a large, empty building on its hands, in November 1931 the Education Committee approved a recommendation to convert the it into an annexe for the neighbouring James Clark Intermediate School (no relation to headmaster James Clark of St Leonard’s). This involved refurbishing nine classrooms, providing two new art rooms, teaching spaces for benchwork, sewing, laundry and cookery, adding a new gymnasium with changing rooms and showers and a medical room. A completely new heating system and boiler house was added and new electric lighting installed throughout. These changes allowed the benchwork and art classrooms in the main “Jimmy’s” building to be converted into science laboratories. Tenders were sought for this work in April 1932 and the building was ready for the next stage of its life and the start of the 1932-33 term.

Scotsman, 23rd November 1931

With a new function, once again the building on Forbes Street settled down to a remarkably unremarkable life, quietly getting on with things and following the waxing and waning fortunes of its parent school. In something of a coincidence, Free St. Paul’s would return to educational use when it was temporarily used by James Clark as a further annexe and dining hall between 1942-48 and again between 1954-58. After exactly fifty years as an Elementary school, it would serve exactly forty years in Intermediate (later rebranded Junior Secondary) service. It closed along with Jimmy’s in 1972 due to the forces of a hugely declining school roll and the move from two-tier to comprehensive schooling that saw the Corporation rid itself of most of its non-purpose built old Junior Secondaries.

Drainage plan for St Leonards School in 1932 when it was converted to an annexe for the James Clark School. Notice that the toilet block is in the playground, top left, the workshop block on the left and the new boiler block below the word “School” of “St Leonard’s School”. City of Edinburgh Council DG46-171

Around the time of the closure of the James Clark School, six separate compulsory purchase orders issued in 1969 and 1971 would clear most of the rest of the old housing and industries in the Forbes Street, St Leonard’s Street and St Leonard’s Hill area for redevelopment. This left the former school isolated in a block of wasteground, even though it and Jimmy’s would continue to be used as a school until 1983, serving as a junior annexe to St Thomas of Aquin’s (Tam’s) R.C. High School.

Looking towards the boarded-up school and Forbes Street from Bowmont Place, mid-1980s. Photo © Colin Inverarity, used with permission

In 1984 Lothian Regional Council demolished the former school but whole plot remained vacant until 1986 when the remaining surrounding wasteland was purchased by Edinburgh District Council through compulsory purchase. The long-promised new housing was finally built along with a new St Leonard’s Police Station.

Looking towards the partially demolished school on Forbes Street past the sad sight of the old Free St Paul’s church from St Leonard’s Street, mid-1980s. Photo © Colin Inverarity, used with permission

In the process of this redevelopment of the neighbourhood, Forbes Street was truncated from a through road to a cul-de-sac accessed off of St Leonard’s Lane. This scheme controversially also demolished the listed, 150-year old St. Paul’s, which it had been intended to protect. Thus at a stroke, two generations of local educational establishments were removed permanently from the map.

Forbes Street, 2022, now a cul-de-sac on a different alignment and home to a modern, mixed-density housing development. View from St Leonard’s Hill looking northwest across what would have been the old School.

The previous chapter of this series looked at Gilmore Place Public School. The next chapter examines the James Clark School.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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Gilmore Place Public School: the thread about the Rise, Fall and Renaissance of Darroch

Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (those built 1872-1918) hold a particular fascination for me, one most profound where they have been “deconsecrated” and are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but soon snowballed into an alphabetical deep-dive into each.

Instalment seven of the series looking at “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” takes us to Gilmore Place Public School; a name likely to draw blank looks from most. That’s not unsurprising as it’s a building well hidden from passing view and a moniker that lasted but twenty years. But mention Darroch School and – despite the passage of over half a century since it last closed its doors as a standalone educational institution – you will get a flicker of recognition from a certain generation of Edinburgher. Darroch’s story is not a simple one, indeed it was never just a single school and in its time has housed more than ten different schools and any number of other council functions. But if we take the time to understand its travails it offers us a neatly encapsulated case study of the ebb and flow of secondary education in the city. It is also a happy story as it has bucked the trend of “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” and despite repeatedly being deemed surplus to requirements it has avoided the fate of many of its contemporaries – conversion into private flats – and is now enjoying an educational and cultural renaissance.

The former Gilmore Place Public School in its new guise as Ath-Thaigh Darroch – Darroch Annexe – after a refurbishment completed in 2022 to become the GME annexe of James Gillespie’s High School. Photo via Prime Joinery Solutions.

Our subject came to be as the solution to two urgent problems facing the Edinburgh School Board at the dawn of the 20th century. Firstly in 1903 West Fountainbridge Public School had been condemned as unfit by the Scotch Education Department for the third year running and it had been found impossible to bring it up to standard. Secondly all other schools in the locality, especially Bruntsfield, were over their capacities and there were 246 children in the district on a waiting list for places. The Board decided they could kill these two birds with a single stone and set upon building a large new school for the area.

Bruntsfield Public School in 1895, the year of its opening. Note that the styling is slightly less restrained than Gilmore Place, with more use of mouldings and carved details. Photograph by Bedford Lemere. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.

It was settled on to purchase a one acre site at the end of Gillespie Street off Gilmore Place then occupied by an engineering works whose lease was approaching expiry. The owners however demanded “an extravagant price” due to complex servitudes1 upon the land. Undeterred, the Board petitioned for a compulsory purchase order in November 1903. This was the first occasion they had taken this drastic step to acquire a site but it would take over two years of legal wrangling and two rulings at the Court of Session to conclude it. The plot ended up costing £9,000, the majority of which was compensation and legal fees for neighbours, with a further £20,000 spent on the building, fittings and furnishings.

1. In Scots property law, a Servitude is a right befitting adjacent properties over their neighbour, e.g. a use of a path, a prohibition on building a certain distance from a boundary etc. ↩︎

Ordnance Survey town plans, 1893 compared to 1944, showing the location of Gilmore Place School. Note the school is pushed well back from the street after which it was named, making it easy to miss if you are passing. In the 1944 map it can be seen that there are four large “temporary” huts claiming most of the playground space. Move the slider to compare. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The plans for a large, three-storey, T-plan building in a “simple adaptation of the English Renaissance style” were completed by the the Board’s architect, John A. Carfrae. The designed capacity was 1,500 pupils but it was planned that the two-storey side wings could easily be raised to three if an increase was required. There were twenty-six classrooms with an average capacity of 56 pupils. The infant department occupied the ground floor with juveniles on the first, each being arranged around a large central hall of 49 by 40 feet in size. There were mezzanine-level galleries around the halls so that children moving between classrooms did not disturb those in the hall (a common problem in earlier schools). The second floor contained practical teaching spaces for cookery and laundry and a workshop for manual crafts.

Artists impression of the “New Edinburgh Board School in Gillespie Street”. The ventilation cupola in the centre of the roof was lost at some point after the 1970s. Evening News, 22nd March 1905

The school opened for business on Tuesday 3rd September 1907 with the staff and roll of the closed West Fountainbridge transferring here. The formal ceremony did not take place until Saturday 30th November with the Chairman of the School Board, W. H. Mill, presiding and the Secretary of State for Scotland, the Right Hon. John Sinclair MP, as guest of honour. After various self-congratulatory speeches the assembled dignitaries retreated to the Caledonian Hotel for a celebratory and well-oiled luncheon with numerous toasts.

The roundel of the Edinburgh School Board on the facade of Gilmore Place Public School. “The female figure of education” dispensing knowledge to the young, surrounded by books and a globe. © Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, via Trove.Scot SC 1229693

From the very beginning, Gilmore Place was not one but actually two different schools. During the day the Public School provided elementary education for children up to the leaving age of fourteen. But the Board was keen to maximise the return on the “large amount of educational plant” that they had built at great expense and thought it wasteful to have buildings sitting idle after pupils emptied out their gates at three o’clock. Therefore by night it became Gilmore Place Continuation School, providing evening classes for adults. Evening classes were not new, but this was the first time the Board had opted to run a large, centralised school offering a full curriculum. For the first session, 1907-08, expectations were greatly surpassed with 750 students enrolling. Such was the demand – “so great as almost to be embarrassing” in the words of the Chairman of the Board – that additional courses had to be put on over the summer. Two of the courses, millinery and cookery, were reserved for those already working in those trades and accounted for almost half the intake. These were the first explicitly vocational further education courses run by the Board in Edinburgh and the Evening News reported the confectionery course “will be of an advanced nature, and it is expected that in a year or two it will be possible for Scotsmen to do high-class work now almost exclusively done by Frenchmen“.

An additional roundel on the façade of Gilmore Place Public School, representing Industry. A bearded master teaches his young apprentice, surrounded by symbols of industry; an anvil, workbench, tools and gear wheel. © Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, via Trove.Scot SC 1229692

Life as an elementary school was short and just two decades after opening it closed in 1928 in preparation for a metamorphosis into the city’s fourth Intermediate School. Such institutions were defined by the Scotch Education Department as providing “at least a three years’ course of instruction in languages, mathematics, science and such other subjects as may from time to time be deemed suitable for pupils who, on entering, have reached the stage of attainment in elementary subjects.” The purpose of this new class of school was to centralise teaching of post-elementary age pupils (from twelve to fifteen) in dedicated schools with a higher quality of staff and teaching. These were the children who had not passed the Qually – the qualification exam sat at the age of eleven which streamed their educational future – and would otherwise have remained in elementary schools in the Advanced Divisions, working towards a fairly generic leaving certificate. As well as the general curriculum the Intermediate schools would also offer dedicated Commercial or Technical courses aimed at improving the vocational skills of children fully expected to enter the blue-collar workforce as soon as they hit leaving age.

Class photo of the short-lived Gilmore Place Public School, 1919-20 session. Picture via Darroch FPA

Edinburgh opened the first of this new class of school in 1912 at Tynecastle Technical School. The First World War delayed proceedings and so the next – the James Clark School – did not follow until 1918 at which juncture the School Board was merged with that of Leith and other surrounding parishes to create the Edinburgh Education Authority. Bellevue Intermediate (now Drummond Community High School) followed in 1926 but demand far outstripped supply and another was soon needed. The school at Gilmore Place was a perfect candidate; it was large, fairly central, relatively new and at that time relatively under-subscribed. It was altered at a cost of £6,000 with the number of classrooms reduced to eighteen and the capacity reduced to 720 children. A range of new facilities were provided, including dedicated classrooms for the specialist teaching of cookery, laundry, dressmaking, science, art and manual crafts. The nucleus of the new school was made by transferring the entire Advanced Division of Bruntsfield School as well as sending children coming of age from South Morningside, Tollcross, North Merchiston and Torphicen Street schools.

Boys at work in the machine shop, 1952. Picture via Darroch FPA

While the Evening News wanted the new school to be called Merchiston Intermediate the Authority instead renamed it the Darroch Intermediate and Technical School in honour of their late chair Professor Alexander Darroch (1862-1924). Darroch had held the Bell Chair of Education at the University for over twenty years and as chair of the Edinburgh Provincial Committee for the Training of Teachers he reorganised and modernised the training of educators. He believed his contemporaries “placed too much stress in examinations and on the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake” and was a champion of offering children instead the sort of practical skills that would prepare them for their working lives and taking their place in society.

Professor Alexander Darroch (1862-1924), 1908 by Robert Helnry Alison Ross. University of Edinburgh EU0318 via ArtUK

In 1939 under a further reorganisation of education in Scotland a new name was given; Darroch Junior Secondary. This was in preparation for the leaving age being raised to fifteen and the “sentence” of students being extended as a result from three to four years. At this time a flat at 5 Leamington Terrace was purchased by the Education Committee for practical use of the girls taking the Domestic Studies courses which became known as the School Flat. This remained the exclusive domain of the girls until 1969 when – in a bold experiment which was a sign of changing times – groups of six boys at a time were sent for a fortnight course in bed-making, housekeeping, shopping, cooking and sewing.

The “School Flat”, where girls were taught housewifery. Picture via Darroch FPA

Back in 1928 when the Intermediate School was formed, the Continuation School was reconstituted into the Darroch Institute for Adults to benefit from the new facilities on offer. This had 1,300 students aged from twenty to eighty-two on its roll and as well as a full curriculum of courses offered novel subjects such as lip reading for the deaf, speech therapy for stammerers and “Everyday Law and the Home” which taught the students the legal basics of topics such as marriage, parenting, pet-owning, pensions and renting. The Evening News praised the Institute as ranking “second to none among the modern schools devoted to adult education.” In 1967 there was a major reorganisation in further education in the city in preparation for the new colleges of Napier, Stevenson and Telford opening and it was rebranded as the Darroch Adult Education Centre with its courses pivoted to being largely recreational.

One course offered by the Institute was unique in the city; the Gaelic language. It was a subject that had been taught at the Supplementary School since way back in 1908 with Gilmore Place being home to the first public tuition in the language in the city. This class had its roots in 1901 when the Celtic Union had begun offering tuition on a private basis. In 1906 they had gotten permission from the Board to use a classroom at Lothian Road Public School with a tacit agreement that should they prove successful they would become part of the Evening School offering in the city.

Lothian Road Public School in 1910, immediately prior to demolition to make way for the Usher Hall. Picture by the Edinburgh Photographic Society, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.

The tutors were the Rev. G. R. Maclennan of St Oran’s Gaelic Church, Peter Thomson and J. White Maclean, secretary of the Gaelic Union in Edinburgh. In addition, specific classes in Gaelic singing and the theory of Gaelic music were given by Neil Orr, conductor of the Edinburgh Gaelic Choir. The Oban Times would write:

“It is to be hoped… that as many pupils will enrol as possible to ensure a continuation of Gaelic being recognised as worthy of a place in the curriculum of the Edinburgh evenings schools.”

Oban Times and Argyllshire Advertiser, 2nd October 1909

These classes were intended for the “interest of the Lowland Gaels in their mother tongue” and would later come under the tutilage of Calum Johnston. Johnston had come to Edinburgh aged 16 to train as a draughtsman with the firm of Bruce Peebles & Co. and for twenty-seven years would also teach his native language to the city. A lauded singer and piper he retired to his native Barra in 1956, the Stornoway Gazette writing that they were “sure that if any mortal is privileged in this Atomic Age to see the fabled isle of Roca Barraidh towards the setting sun, then Calum will be that one.” (In Gaelic mythology, Roca Barraidh is an island that will be visible to the west of the Hebrides only three times, the third and final heralding the end of the world.) In 1972, then aged eighty-two, Calum stood on the beach in his kilt in the December wind and rain to pipe ashore the body of Compton Mackenzie, author of Whisky Galore, which was being brought to the island where he lived for a decade for burial. He piped the procession up the 200 yard hill to the burial ground, stood to attention during the short ceremony before collapsing at the graveside and dying minutes afterwards.

Calum Johnston piping on the beach on Barra in 1967. Photo via Calum Maclean Project, University of Edinburgh

On leaving Edinburgh, Johnston was replaced by Bh-uas Murdag Nic Choinnich (Miss Murdina Mackenzie) who became the only Gaelic teacher on the payroll of the city. The classes were in peril however and were withdrawn in 1958 following dwindling attendance; indeed they were suspended each session after Johnston retired due to a lack of students, thus ending a half-century association between the school at Gillespie Street and the Gaelic Language. (For now…)

Darroch remained open throughout World War two and a noted pupil at this time was one Thomas (Sean) Connery, who completed his time in education there between 1942-44. A reluctant pupil, his teachers branded him “very average – not at all brilliant” and he was apparently voted by his classmates as the boy “most unlikely to succeed“. Post-war it continued as a Junior Secondary with an average roll in 1945 of 550. Despite a long-term decline in Edinburgh’s urban population at this time its roll actually climbed beyond 600 due to the leaving age being raised to fifteen in 1947.

The School Captains are cheered on by their fellow pupils after their election. Edinburgh Evening News, October 3rd 1947

In 1960 it became one of the pilot schools ahead of the introduction of the new Modern Studies subject to Scottish secondary education in 1962. This gave pupils the opportunity to learn about TV, advertising, the press, citizenship and politics to equip them with “some knowledge of the complexities of the ever-changing contemporary world“. On Monday 22nd June 1970, the boys of Darroch set a world record for non-stop five-a-side football at the ground of North Merchiston Boy’s Club: they had passed the previous record of 13 hours and 7 minutes and at the time the story went to print were still playing.

But, new courses and football achievements aside, all was not well at Darroch. A letter to the Evening News in 1968 outlined the situation:

This conglomeration of old buildings is a disgrace to the town; and, to all appearance, a death-trap should an outbreak of fire take place on the ground floor.

The teachers are to be admired for their tolerance and consideration in taking a post in such a place because the pupils are not and cannot be expected to be proud of such a school

J.M. Morningside. A letter to the Evening News, 4th July 1968

In 1969 the school was publicly criticised by Councillor Robert Knox, chairman of the Education Committee, who acknowledged that its facilities were outdated and inadequate and that it required replacement. Knox, a Progressive, was criticised by his Labour Party opposite number for having presided over new schools for the fee paying all-boys Royal High School and James Gillespie’s School for Girls despite “in neither case was the need as great as Darroch“. The Scotsman printed a large investigative spread on the subject under the banner headline “The trouble with Darroch“.

The Trouble with Darroch, Scotsman, 8th March 1969

Adjectives spring to mind – all derogatory. Bleak, barrack-like, looming. Inside, the school is no better: the corridors are furnished like a public lavatory, all white tiles and nasty green paint; the classrooms are unappealing, dingy and dark, with windows placed high up on the walls so that no pupil can be distracted by what is going on outside… Darroch Secondary School was built in the early 19000s and still has to suffer the educational norms of that time.

“The Trouble with Darroch”. Lindsay Mackie, investigation for the Scotsman, 8th march 1969

A teacher at this time at the school was the former Green MSP Robin Harper, who recalls his spell there from 1970 to 1972 in his autobiography “Dear Mr Harper: Britain’s First Green Parliamentarian.”

On my first day at Darroch a spokesman for a group of young teachers warned me: ‘Robin, this place is sheer hell. The kids never stop fighting. Any of them who show any academic ability are creamed off to Boroughmuir. Those who remain are an aggressive mix of children rejected by the system.

One school parent was the lawyer and author of contemporary history John G. Gray (seen alongside the headline of the Scotsman article). On learning his daughter was to be sent to Darroch due to a lack of capacity at nearby Boroughmuir, he was so taken aback by the state of the place that he wrote a pamphlet denouncing the condition of the place and the socially segregated state of secondary education in the capital in general.

As Edinburgh Citizens, we have allowed ourselves to become subject to a particularly vicious type of blackmail. Either our children secure a place at a top state school like Boroughmuir or we are offered a secondary course in such appalling conditions that sensitive parents prefer to educate their children privately at fees which many of them can ill afford.

John G. Gray, Focus on Darroch

Rather than simply pull his child out of the school and join his social peers in privately educating her, Gray instead took the Corporation to task; they did not care or “to put it vulgarly but accurately, give a damn“. He contended that they were happy with this state of affairs in the city whereby 45 percent of children went to a fee-paying secondary school. He noted that the conditions at school’s like Darroch were largely ignored by the authorities and the press until middle-class parents like himself began to complain. He publicly challenged the city’s Director of Education to produce a signed statement that the facilities at such Junior Secondaries were adequate: a call that did not elicit a response.

“Focus on Darroch”, the pamphlet issued by John G. Gray outlining the problems facing the school, and secondary education in the city in general

The list of charges against the school went on. Despite being built for 1,500 and having a declining roll of only around a third of that, it was cramped by modern standards, with numerous “temporary” wooden huts in the playground to provide additional teaching spaces. Its toilets were outside and “so revolting that children refuse to use them“, the gymnasium was tiny and had no changing or showering facilities, the playground was “minute” and it had no playing fields; children had to travel half an hour to Meggetland for games and sports. Its students tolerate a lot, but for them the straw that broke the camel’s back was the state of their school dinners. Matters came to a head in 1971 when the Head Boy, Andrew Ewing, wrote an angry letter to the editor of the Scotsman complaining about the state of affairs. As the school had no cooking facilities of its own, its meals had to be brought in by a lorry and were cold by the time they were served. It also had no dining facilities, instead students had to collect their lunch trays from a corridor floor and eat the unpalatable, cabbagey contents in classrooms. One such space was a science laboratory where the would pushed around escaped droplets of liquid mercury on the worktops with their cutlery in-between mouthfuls of cold custard.

With the increase in dining charges I hoped that the standard of dinners would improve. But the custard is cold. It is also watery, lumpy, lukewarm or inedible

Andrew Ewing, Letter to the Scotsman, May 1971

But rather than reprimand him for stepping out of line, Darroch’s headmaster – Dr William Gray – praised his student for putting into practice what he had learned in the new subject of Modern Studies. He confirmed to the Scotsman that the school had been serving dinner in this manner since 1946 but that a temporary dining hall would finally be opened later in the year to put an end to the practice. As John G. Gray put it, Darroch had “an excellent headmaster” in William Gray (no relation), one that did not believe that it was just the buildings that made a school “good” or “bad”. Writing in defence of his students, he cited a first year boy who when asked to write an essay on what he thought of his school wrote: “Darroch may be a slum, but when you are inside it is not half bad; I admit it is not fur-lined, but it is the teachers that count… Maybe it is a bit ragged, but it is the best school in Scotland“.

Headmaster Gray knew that the facilities at his school were badly lacking and that the authorities imagined his job was largely one of babysitting reluctant teenagers before they could enter “humdrum jobs” in the workforce as soon as they hit aged fifteen. But he was not content to accept this and made strenuous and praiseworthy efforts to provide better outcomes for his students. After taking up his position in 1964 he pushed for an early introduction of the new Ordinary Grade qualification into Darroch – something not all Junior Secondaries were afforded. He made sure the most successful students were allowed to stay on for a fifth year beyond the leaving age to sit the Higher Certificate – a privilege usually reserved for those streamed into the High Schools, which in Edinburgh charged fees. This gave students the chance to escape their planned futures in the rapidly disappearing “humdrum jobs” by opening up a wide range of employment and educational opportunities to them and also meant that students showing academic potential were not simply “creamed off” to other schools. His faith in his charges was well placed and by 1971 three-quarters of students of the age wanted to sit the O-Grade and there were 101 staying on beyond the age of fourteen, up 246% since Gray took charge.

Given the height of the building and its restricted site down a narrow street, it can be hard to fit Darroch into a single picture frame and not make it look oppressive! Photo by Kim Traynor via BritishListedBuildings.co.uk

Despite all these efforts, after 1970 the school’s roll began to sharply decline; dropping by almost 100 in a year. The Corporation saw an opportunity to dispose of the troublesome school on the cheap and made a proposal to merge Darroch with the James Clark School in St Leonard’s, which faced a similar issue of demographic pressures, a poor reputation and ageing facilities. But rather than spend any money on new facilities, they intended to simply move the combined school into an even older building, that of “Old” James Gillespie’s School, which had first been built in 1904. This rightly provoked anger amongst parents; if old Gillespie’s had superior facilities to Darroch then why had they prioritised a new building for the fee-paying, selective Gillespie’s High School for Girls to allow them to leave it. They knew their question was rhetorical.

“Old James Gillespie’s”, was built in 1904 as Boroughmuir Higher Grade School, which left after just six years on account of the building being inadequate to secondary teaching needs.

These merger plans were put on hold until the outcome of the General Election that year was known and instead on December 14th 1970, the Education Committee voted to re-organise secondary education in Edinburgh to a fully comprehensive system “to end the unhappy segregation of children at the age of 12 into two distinct ability classes” and in preparation for the school leaving age being raised to sixteen in 1972. The end came swiftly for most of the old Junior Secondaries, dubbed as “dull, dingy, semi-slum schools” by the editor of the Scotsman, and in 1972 it was not just Darroch and James Clark but also Norton Park and David Kilpatrick in Leith that were unceremoniously closed. Darroch’s pupils merged into the newly co-educational, comprehensive James Gillespie’s High School at Marchmont in its brand new campus. Both the newly vacant Darroch building and – ironically Old Gillespie’s – became overspill annexes for Boroughmuir High which had rapidly expanded beyond the capacity of its building with the comprehensive move.

“New” James Gillespie’s in 1974, which incorporates the 17th century Bruntsfield House (left of image) within its campus. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.

Concurrent with this the school’s adult education role was rapidly run down and by 1973 it was offering only ballroom dancing, dressmaking, embroidery and flower arranging. The deckchairs of secondary schooling in central Edinburgh continued to be shuffled around over the next few years as the comprehensive schools established themselves and the population continued to decline. By 1976 things had changed again and Darroch now become an annexe for James Gillespie’s, the school to which its former pupils had been moved to just 4 years previously!

Aerial photo showing three of the schools frequently referred to in this post. Darroch is in the middle left, with the gleaming roof. Boroughmuir is the large building middle right with a tower at each end. “Old” James Gillespie’s is middle top, again its roof shining brightly, the building which was built as the original Boroughmuir Higher School. “New Gillespies” was built in the top right of the image, where the old building of Bruntsfield House can be seen.

Darroch remained occupied by Gillespie’s until 1989 after which a building programme at the main campus allowed it to be consolidated there and close its annexes. Once again it became a school without a purpose but this situation did not last long. In 1990 Lothain Regional Council sold the Dean Education Centre (previously the Dean Orphanage and later Dean College) and former St Bernard’s School in Stockbridge which made their Advisory Service – training for in-service teachers – homeless. They were therefore transferred to Darroch but couldn’t hope to fill such a large building and so it would become something of a dumping ground for various council departments including a base for teaching English as a second language, administrative offices for the city’s adult and vocational education programmes, storing excess classroom furniture and serving as a mail-order warehouse for souvenir merchandise for the centennial celebrations of the Forth Bridge!

Darroch School in Lothian Regional Council days when it served any number of educational functions beyond being a school. Note how the tall central block dominates the narrow approach street and the inadequate pavements and entranceway. One of the multitude of “temporary” hut units can be seen jammed hard up against the gate on the left. Photo via Darroch Secondary School Pupils Group on Facebook.

The Local Government etc (Scotland) Act 1994 saw Lothian Region replaced by a new unitary authority – the City of Edinburgh Council – in 1996 and with the transfer of education functions from the old authority to its new successors, once again a big question mark was placed over Darroch’s purpose and future. Perhaps it too may have ended up being converted to expensive flats had a pressing need for its services not arisen just a few years later. In 1998 the collapse of a staircase at nearby St Thomas of Aquin’s R. C. High School at Lauriston highlighted the perilous state of repair of that school. It was quickly condemned and hurriedly decanted to Darroch until 2002 while it was demolished and completely rebuilt. Once again Darroch was the right building in the right place at the right time and once again its corridors resounded to the sound of children’s feet and its classrooms to the refrains of teaching. After another spell of vacancy, between 2013 and 2016 it was James Gillespie’s turn to decant back to Darroch while the “New Gillespie’s” school on Lauderdale Street in Marchmont was itself demolished and rebuilt.

Once again quiet and vacant, in an effort to save money the council then turned the heating off, leading to a rapid decline in the fabric of the building but typical of the short-sighted, disjointed thinking of local authorities they had also left the place partially furnished and so were paying over £40,000 per annum in Non-Domestic Rates! Fortunately positive plans were afoot for Darroch’s future as a second dedicated Gaelic Medium Education (GME) school for the city. This would follow on from the success of Bun-sgoil Taobh na Pàirce which had opened at the former Bonnington Road Public School in Leith in 2013 and which had quickly grown to capacity. Fittingly, in the early 1990s the office of the small team who brought the city’s first GME unit at Tollcross Primary to fruition had been based in Darroch. These plans would both return primary education to the school after a break of almost a century and also the teaching of the Gaelic language after a break of sixty years.

Bun-sgoil Taobh na Pàirce, Edinburgh and Leith’s first (and so far, only) dedicated GME school, housed in the former Bonnington Road Public School. Photo via Edinburgh Reporter

These plans fell through due to a combination of factors including the difficulty in recruiting and retaining sufficient Gaelic-fluent teachers to meet demand and the complete inability of the council to provide a satisfactory solution for GME secondary education – which was being delivered from Àrd-sgoil Sheumais Ghilleasbuig; James Gillespie’s. This setback however was perhaps a blessing in disguise as it allowed a quiet reset of the council’s GME secondary plans which were at the time being driven by a lack of capacity at Gillespie’s, the new showpiece school that completed in 2016 having been built too small. A ten million pound investment brought the schools facilities and accessibility into the 21st century – many of these changes directly addressed the shortcoming first highlighted back in the late 1960s, such as an accessible new entrance, bright and modern interiors and a dedicated dining hall.

Ath-Thaigh Darroch. 21st century facilities in what is fundamentally a 19th century school. This shows one of the two “central halls” of the original design and the mezzanine-level corridors that provided access through it without disturbing those learning in it. Photo via Future Schools Edinburgh

The school re-opened in 2022 as Ath-Thaigh Darroch – Darroch Annexe – housing much of Gillespie’s GME teaching as well as providing dedicated study spaces for older students preparing for exams. The building also houses a number of Gaelic language cultural institutions in the city and has “has quickly become the heart of the Gaelic-speaking community in the city.”

TimeOccupant1908-1928Gilmore Place Public School / Continuation School1928-1939Darroch Intermediate School1928-1967Darroch Institute for Adults1939-1972Darroch Junior Secondary School1967-1998Darroch Education Centre1973-1976Darroch Annexe, Boroughmuir High School1976-1989Darroch Annexe, James Gillespie’s High School1998-2002St Thomas of Aquin’s R.C. High School (decant)2013-2016James Gillespie’s High School (decant)2022-presentAth-Thaigh Darroch, James Gillespie’s High SchoolTimeline of educational occupants of Gilmore Place / Darroch School

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“From the Three R’s to Transistors”: the thread about Dean Public School

Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (1872-1918) hold a particular fascination for me, one most profound where they have been “deconsecrated” and are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but soon snowballed into an alphabetical deep-dive into each.

Part six of the series of posts looking at “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” pays a visit to the former Dean Public School. Judging by the crowds of tourists on phones who gather daily in crowds outside, this must be one of the most Instagrammed of schools. I wonder how many stop for a moment to consider its history and its claim to a unique first in the story of education in the city. So let us take a moment for ourselves to do just that.

Following the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 (which made schooling compulsory in Scotland between the ages of 5 and 13) the newly elected School Boards undertook a flurry of construction to rationalise, modernise and expand the existing provision. At its formation in 1873 the Edinburgh School Board (ESB) took stock of the situation it had inherited in the city and found there were almost twenty-two thousand pupils being taught in one hundred schools, with the majority run by the various churches. Unsurprisingly the Presbyterians dominated, educating forty-three percent of scholars.

ProviderSchoolsPupilsShareFree Church174,28219.7%Church of Scotland164,22219.4%Heriot’s Hospital163,74217.2%Non-denominational & private203,65416.8%R. C. Church82,0149.3%Episcopal Church91,5187.0%Industrial & free schools, etc.81,4266.6%U. P. Church68573.9%Total10021,715Elementary Edinburgh Schooling in 1873, census by Edinburgh School Board

In 1873 the Board held a survey of teachers in the city to help prioritise where new schools should be built and the following year held a competition to find architects for its first batch of seven purpose-built schools; Bristo, Causewayside, Leith Walk, North Canongate, Stockbridge, West Fountainbridge and the Water of Leith Village*. The work was divided between the successful applicants, that for the Water of Leith was awarded to Robert Wilson, who would later become the Board’s house architect.

* = The naming and jurisdiction of this school is somewhat confusing. While the area today is widely known as the Dean Village, well into the 20th century it was always known as Water of Leith village. “Dean” referred instead to the old Village of Dean slightly to the north. Both Water of Leith and Dean villages were in the Edinburgh School Board catchment and while the new school was in the former village it was christened Dean Public School at opening. This was most probably in recognition that it served the Dean quoad sacra Parish (an ecclesiastical division, but not a municipal one). To add further confusion, until 1895 there was also a separate St Cuthbert’s and Dean School Board. This covered the western hinterland outwith the city’s municipal boundaries as they then stood and was responsible for schools such as Gorgie, Roseburn, and South Morningside (extension of the city boundary in 1882 meant that the former two schools were actually now in Edinburgh but served by the St Cuthbert’s and Dean Board!)

Water of Leith village, looking northeast past the Bell’s Brae Bridge to Holy Trinity Episcopal Church pre-1875. The school would be built in front of the tall mill building with the circular windows on the left, where the low range sits in this picture. Thomas Vernon Begbie glass negative dated 1887 (incorrect). The Cavaye Collection of Thomas Begbie Prints; City of Edinburgh Council Museums & Galleries

Perhaps because it was the smallest, the Dean Public School was the first of the batch to complete. The opening took place on Wednesday December 8th 1875 making it the first purpose-built school by the Board in the city. The Scotsman reported that at two o’clock, the 150 children of the older division were assembled in the upper classroom in front of the Board and “a large number of gentlemen interested in the work“, including Lord Provost James Falshaw, James Cowan the MP for Edinburgh and numerous town councillors. Following the singing of a psalm and a prayer led by the Rev. Whyte of Free St George’s Church, the Lord Provost gave an opening address and observed that “it was to him a most gratifying circumstance that an auspicious event like the present had occurred during his term of office.”

The roundel of the Edinburgh School Board, “the female figure of education” dispensing knowledge to the young at Dean Public School. © Self

The Chairman of the Board, Professor Henry Calderwood, mentioned that at this time they had 7,386 children in public education at the nineteen schools under their charge but that most of these were small and overcrowded and there was much work ahead to provide purpose-built accommodation for them. Thanks were given to the kirk session of Dean Free Church for allowing the continued use of their schoolhouse since the 1872 act before the new school was ready.

OS Town Surveys of Edinburgh in 1849 and 1876, before and after the Dean Public School was built. Note that at this time the village itself was referred to as “Water of Leith”, as it always had been. Note the Dean Free Church on the old Queensferry Road where schooling took place before 1875. Move the slider to compare. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The new school was arranged over two storeys with accommodation for 400 children (using a formula of 10 square feet of space per child). The infants were accommodated on the ground floor and the older children upstairs, each level having a principal large school room (57ft by 23ft, or 17m by 7m) which could be divided by movable glass partitions, as well as smaller classrooms. There were separate entrances for boys on one side and girls and infants on the other, with the playgrounds being similarly segregated. The total cost was £5,740 5s 2d; £1,030 9s 9d for the site and £4,709 15s 5d for the construction work.

Dean Public School in 1950, looking south. The squat gable of Drumsheugh Baths can be seen in the middle distance. Picture CC-by-NC-SA Dean Village Memories, via Edinburgh Collected

As early as 1878, in a report to the School Board the Inspector complained of overcrowding and a lack of writing desks in the school (those available were sufficient for only 1/3 of the children). This had “spoiled the writing, wasted time in the classes and has prevented the highest discipline grant through the copying traceable to over-crowding“. Failure to remedy these defects would result in the school’s government grant being cut. The school roll at this time was 311, with 200 children qualifying for the Examination in Standard – but the pass rates in these qualifications of 82% for Reading, 84% for Writing and 71% for Arithmetic were the lowest in the School Board. Headmaster Waddell was however praised for his organisation and discipline and the infant department was “in many respects a model one“.

Class portrait of older girls at Dean Public School, with the headmistress Miss Mary Mackenzie (labelled as Hunter). 1883 photograph by J. & S. Sternstein of Glasgow. Note that at least one girl has very short hair, likely the result of it being shaved to combat headlice. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection of Edinburgh City Libraries.Class portrait of boys at Dean Public School, with the headmistress Miss Mary Mackenzie (labelled as Hunter). 1883 photograph by J. & S. Sternstein of Glasgow. Note the boy on the left of Mary seems notably older, taller and better dressed than his peers and may be one of the pupil teachers. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection of Edinburgh City Libraries.Class portrait of boys at Dean Public School with (probably) their headmaster, Esdaile Duncan. 1883 photograph by J. & S. Sternstein of Glasgow. The boy to the left of her is notably taller, older and better dressed than the others and may be one of the pupil teachers,1883 class photos from Dean Public School

The lack of accommodation was remedied in 1888 with a 3-storey extension for 132 additional children added to the rear, comprising a play-room, a sewing room and an infant classroom. The space beneath was left open and served as a covered part of the playground.

1907 photograph showing the extension added at the rear of the school on the right, adjacent to the bridge. The apparently 17th century structure on the left is Well Court, in fact a late 1880s model workers housing complex in a Scottish Vernacular Revival style by architect Sydney Mitchell. 1907 photograph, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.

When education was made free of charge in 1889 (the 1872 act had introduced fees, although assistance could be provided by the Parish Poor Boards for those who could not afford them), the headmaster at Dean wrote to the School Board to say that the hoped for improvement in attendance rates had not materialised within his district and that “the parents who before were indifferent, are now equally or more so“. In 1894, 120 children were sent to the school from the nearby Dean Orphanage, being reported as “perfect models of cleanliness and order” by the Scotsman and commended in the Evening News for making the school football eleven “a combination to be feared and respected“. They were moved to the new Flora Stevenson School in Comely Bank when it opened in 1901, before being moved back to Dean in 1913 when the new Parish Children’s Home on Crewe Road opened, putting pressure on capacity at Flora’s when there were 115 vacant places at Dean School.

The Dean Orphanage in 1850, recently relocated from its old location beneath the North Bridge where it been in the way of the North British Railway. The community of Bells’s Mill lies beneath and children from both of these locations would attend the Dean Public School. Salt paper print, unknown photographer. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection of Edinburgh City Libraries.

With no playing fields or local park to call its own, the school sports days were held at Warriston Playing Fields. In June 1912 the Edinburgh Evening News reported that the pupils from Dean – for the first time in the history of the ESB – had performed mass dancing as part of the day. One hundred and sixty pupils danced “with great zest… danc[ed] a reel to the music of the pipes.”

Pupils of the Dean Public School perform a maypole dance at Warriston Playing Fields as part of their annual sports day, June 28th 1913, Edinburgh Evening News.

In December 1914, the staff of the school contributed £1 4s 6t to the Edinburgh Belgian Relief Fund. The following year Robert Peter Smith, assistant teacher, was wounded during at the Dardanelles when serving as a lieutenant with the 1/4th King’s Own Scottish Borderers.

Officers of the 1/4th KOSB in 1915. Robert P. Smith is in the 3rd row, third from the left, the shorter man sporting a moustache. Photo via UK Photo and Film Archive.

In 1939 the school was requisition by the War Office and temporarily relocated “for the duration” to the St Mary’s Cathedral Mission Hall on Bell’s Brae, the ancient convening house of the Incorporation of Baxters (bakers) of Edinburgh. It was returned to educational use and in 1953 was placed under the charge of Dorothy Edmond. The new headmistress was determined to raise the school’s profile and instituted a uniform, having a school badge specially commissioned for the blazers.

She rallied parents together and asked for support financially. Although it would not be a lot, it was a lot to some folks and it caused some controversy… Miss Edmund was strict and eventually was held in high regard by both parents and children.

Recollection by pupil Kathleen Glancy of Dorothy Edmond. Via Edinburgh Collected.

Dean School badge, showing the castle of the arms of Edinburgh, open books symbolising learning, the blue of the Water of Leith running through the centre. The Boar’s Head is from the arms of the Nisbet of Dean family, The Cock’s Head may refer to the Poultry Lands of Dean, which in the 17th century conferred the holder the hereditary title of Poulterer to the King. From Kathleen Glancy by Dean Village Memories, CC-by-NC-SA via Edinburgh Collected.

But not even the determination of Miss Edmond could counter the significant long term depopulation in the neighbourhood, the result of much of the housing stock being decrepit and condemned combined with the decline of the remaining traditional industries of milling and tanning. In January 1961 the school closed, its roll having reduced to just 37 pupils, less than 10% of capacity. Those remaining were transferred to Flora Stevenson’s and the empty building was leased to the defence electronics company Ferranti Ltd. of Crewe Toll for a period of seven years as a training centre for apprentices and assembly line staff. The Evening News felt it an appropriate symbol of the city’s growing demand for specialist technical education that its oldest public school should have made the transition “from the Three R’s to transistors“.

Christine Robertson, age 10, photographed alone in the school on its last day, 20th January 1961,

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Ferranti did not require the two basement rooms and these were given over to the use of the Edinburgh Union of Boys Clubs as a base for an outdoor education scheme, the Adventure Centre for Use. A number of Ferranti staff were involved in this, including the works’ own Mountain Climbing Adventure Group for its younger employees. This provided equipment and specialist training to established clubs in activities such as climbing, mountaineering, canoeing and dingy sailing. After Ferranti’s lease was up, in 1969 the school became an annexe to Telford College, whose domestic courses were based nearby at the Dean Education Centre, the former Dean Orphanage.

Dean School in the 1960s. Picture from Dean Village Memories, CC-by-NC-SA via Edinburgh Collected

In May 1984 the school was disposed of on the open market (offers over £100,000) by Lothian Regional Council and was converted into flats in 1986 by James Potter Developments. Eighteen two, three and four-bedroom properties were created which would have cost between £39,000 and £55,000 when completed.

Former Dean Public School in 2025. Comparison of the photo with that further up the page shows how extra floors were cleverly inserted by reducing the window heights significantly from those of the Victorian schoolrooms. Photo by Fiona Coutts, via Britishlistedbuildings.

The previous instalment in this series looked at the Davie Street School(s) in the Southside. The next looks at Gilmore Place Public School.

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From “Rewards For Good Boys” to “Britain’s most unusual school”: the thread about the Davie Street School(s)

Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (1872-1918) hold a particular fascination for me, one most profound where they have been “deconsecrated” and are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but soon snowballed into an alphabetical deep-dive into each.

The fifth chapter of our series looking at the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” looks at Davie Street School; with which I made the mistake of proclaiming “there doesn’t seem to be anything interesting about this one” before I had taken a proper look see. Naturally I proved myself completely wrong! And so actually what follows is the quite interesting story of the various schools that have called Davie Street home.

The first school at Davie Street was the Lancasterian School whose foundation stone was laid by the Lord Provost and Magistrates on Monday 12th October 1812. It replaced a temporary home which had been built on the Calton Hill, a “long, low, wood and brick erection“. The school was the work of the Edinburgh Education (Lancasterian School) Society, a charitable institution founded in 1810 by “several respectable Gentlemen…” to address the lack of education for the lower classes of the city by providing it at the “least possible expense of time and money“. It had been determined to use the educational system of Joseph Lancaster, thought it to be both the most economical and the most extensively tested system in practice.

Joseph Lancaster, portrait by John Hazlitt c. 1818 in the National Portrait Gallery, NPG99.

Lancaster’s was a Quaker and early pioneer of education for the masses, his schools being highly unusual at the time in being reward-based and almost entirely lacking in punishments. Like the contemporary Madras System of Dr Andrew Bell (familiar to generations of Leithers as the Dr Bell), the Lancasterian System taught large classes in a single “school room” with one teacher supported by multiple pupil monitors. These were older children who relayed the instructions to the younger and kept an eye on their work. The contemporary engraving below shows the pupil monitors walking amongst the rows of younger children, helping them with their work, with the teacher seated on a podium at the front. On the wall a sign reads “REWARDS FOR GOOD BOYS” and the walls and ceiling are hung with toys such as kites, hoops, racket and shuttlecocks, balls and bats which the children could win.

Contemporary engraving of a Lancasterian School – the Royal Free School on Borough Road. The teacher sits on a podium at the front, the children are arrayed in ranks by age (and ability) and the older Pupil Monitors move amongst the rows, relaying the lesson and checking the work.

Davie Street had two school rooms, boys and girls being taught separately, sufficient to hold 1,000 scholars and was one of the first steps on the route to a free, mass education in the city. For a subsidised fee of just 2s 6d per quarter, children over 6 years old were taught their Reading, Writing and Arithmetic with the only book in use for teaching being the Bible. However with its Quaker roots, the school was non-sectarian and counted amongst its founding directors in Edinburgh both Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Children were taught the Church of Scotland’s approved Catechism by rote but “the Directors, from respect to the rights of private judgement, do not impose it on children whose parents have conscientious objections to it“.

Davie Street showing the Lancasterian School, 1849 OS Town Survey of Edinburgh. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The school was “the achievement of the Whigs and of the pious” and was well supported at the highest levels of Edinburgh and Scottish society, as evidenced by the titles of its presidents and directors in the below newspaper advert. It was not universally popular however and according to “Memorials of His Own Time” by Lord Henry Cockburn it was “cordially hated by all true Tories, who for many years never ceased to sneer at and obstruct it.”

Principal office bearers of the Edinburgh Education (Lancastrian Schools) Society in 1812 as published in the Caledonian Mercury.

A report of the Committee of Council on Education of 1844 noted that the headteacher, Mr Robert Dun, had supplied “at his own expense, a considerable assortment of philosophical apparatus, with which he performs, before his pupils, the more useful and interesting experiments in Chemistry and Natural Philosophy“. Dun was praised as running an institution being representative “of a well conducted monitorial school“.

There is no educational institution in Edinburgh which does a more extended share of substantial good than the Davie Street Lancasterian School, now 25 years established, and none upon which the public spirited and philanthropic can, to better account, bestow their money.

The school at this time was very much a family affair; it had 200 older boys taught by Robert and an assistant plus 100 infant boys by his father, Robert Senior. 250 girls were taught by John and Miss M. Dun – Robert’s siblings. Including evening classes, the total roll was 622 but it was noted that absence could run high, between 10 to 20 percent. The Duns had joined the school in 1826 and remained there for 35 years until Robert resigned in 1861 and received wide praise for their long-term efforts to educate and better the lot of the poorer children of the city.

Mr Dun, of the Edinburgh Davie Street School, decidedly the best Lancasterian teacher I have yet met, has introduced much useful knowledge into his plan; and, if the means were afforded him, would yet do much more.

James Simpson, “Necessity of Popular Education as a National Object”, 1834

A notable alumnus of the Lancasterian School was George McCrae (1860-1928), later Colonel Sir George McCrae DSO DL VD. A self-made man in the textile and drapery trade, McCrae was knighted in 1908 for his services as MP for Edinburgh East. He is best remembered in Scotland for raising and commanding the 16th Battalion, The Royal Scots during World War 1. This unit, better known as McCrae’s Own, was composed of Edinburgh men and its ranks included 16 members of Heart of Midlothian Football Club as well as players from Hibernian, Raith Rovers, East Fife, St. Bernard’s, Falkirk and Dunfermline football clubs. Much of the rest were drawn from the supporters of these clubs.

George McCrae during his time as an MP, by Sir John Benjamin Stone, 1901

At the time of the Duns’ departure the school was proving to be a financial liability for its directors. In that year its expenses were £147 14s 5d but they had raised only £98 9s 7d in subscriptions and fees; outgoings exceeded income by 50%. The Lancasterian School was being kept solvent only by the £900 proceeds of the sale of a bequeathed house. The trustees had therefore been looking to put the institution on a sounder financial footing and in 1857 had proposed to the Governors of the Heriot’s Hospital Trust that it be transferred to their care.

George Heriot’s Hospital (School) in 1966, looking towards the Castle. Edinburgh City Libraries, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection.

The Governors in turn remitted the request to a sub-committee who reported favourably on the idea “when the state of funds admitted to an increase“. In the event it was not until 1874 – with the State’s financial support as a result of the Education (Scotland) Act 1872) – that Heriot’s were able to complete the takeover of Davie Street which was to be converted to one of its Outdoor Schools. These schools, instituted in 1838, were outdoor in the sense that they provided education outwith the walls of Heriot’s Hospital itself. They were run on the Madras System and financed by the surplus of the Heriot Trust to provided a free education for the “children of burgesses and others“: in practice this meant the poor.

In October 1874, temporary accommodation was arranged for the non-paying pupils of Davie Street while their school was to be demolished and replaced with a larger and more modern building for 650 children. The architect of the Heriot Trust, John Chesser, drew up plans for a two storey school in a Jacobean style, richly ornamented with the roses and stars from the coat of arms of George Heriot and mouldings and corner towers directly inspired by the mother Hospital School.

Davie Street school as rebuilt by Heriot’s in 1875

The school reopened on Whitsunday 1875, the tablet on its principal gable now reading George Heriot’s Hospital School. Its first – and only – headmaster was to be Mr John McCrindle who held this position until his retirement in 1905. The infant headmistress was Miss Jane Johnston from 1877 to 1908, she herself having been educated at one of the Trust’s the Outdoor Schools at Heriot Bridge.

An engraved portrait of John McCrindle by the Edinburgh Evenening News upon his retirement, July 18th 1905

In 1879 a tragedy occurred when a pupil, Ellen Bennet, died from burns she had received at the school; on a cold November day she sneaked unsupervised back into her classroom at lunchtime and climbed over the guard of the fire that heated the room to warm herself causing her clothing to catch fire. The following year there were 180 infants and 320 older children on the school roll and “almost all the children… are the boys and girls of parents of the strictly working and artisan classes. They all appeared scrupulously clean and very tidy at the examination“.

Davie Street showing the Heriot’s School, 1876 OS Town Survey of Edinburgh. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The school’s life with the Heriot Trust was to prove short lived. In 1886 the Edinburgh School Board agreed to purchase it for £2,368 16s 8d. The Heriot’s schools at Stockbridge (later St. Bernard’s) and Abbeyhill (later Regent Road) were also acquired at this time, the Trust having decided to dispose of all of its Outdoor Schools and move its remaining day scholars to the Hospital itself. The Trust approved the sale and transfer in January 1887, part of the transfer arrangement being that they would continued to fund the free education of its existing scholars – the School Board charged fees, unlike the Outdoor Schools – any pre-existing arrangements for free education, so long as the beneficiary continued to pass the relevant exam standards.

The Board “were not at all satisfied with the internal arrangement” of Davie Street and so spent a further £2,379 2s 9d on expansion and alterations. Their architect, Robert Wilson, added an additional wing to the south with accommodation an additional 130 pupils, increasing its capacity to 690. By re-using the additional ornamental stonework this addition appears almost seamless, beyond the plainer style of the roof line. Despite the change of administration, the “Heriot’s Hospital” tablet remained on its façade, never being replaced by the School Board’s roundel.

Davie Street showing the School Board’s public school, note the large projection of the new wing to the south. 1893 OS Town Survey of Edinburgh. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The peace of Davie Street Public School – as it was now known – was breached in October 1889 when a wave of excitement spread throughout British schools via newspaper reports of an attempt by schoolboys in Cardiff to institute a general strike. Their demands were a half-day Wednesday, no homework, shorter hours and no corporal punishment. The action spread contagiously and by the following afternoon the boys of Davie Street had organised themselves, marching behind a banner (reported to be “a handkerchief nailed to a stick“) to Castlehill and Dalry schools in an effort to instigate risings there too. Their demands – reasonable to modern eyes – were conveyed on a scrap of paper; “strike for short hours and no home lessons and free education for the whole school“. The action rumbled on for a few days more with “strikebreaking” pupils at some schools reporting being hissed at the gates by the holdouts before it petered out. Those who were judged to have been ringleaders found themselves punished for their efforts with the tawse – a short, sharp reminder of how things had changed since the days of the reward-based Lancasterian School.

Headline, Evening Mail, 9th October 1889

Perhaps memories of the brief uprising of 1889 died hard as in October 1913, once again boys from Davie Street marched out of their school in spontaneous protest in an effort to get their compatriots in the district – at Causewayside, South Bridge and St Leonard’s Public Schools – to join them in resisting rumoured (and entirely spurious) plans to force them to attend school on Saturday mornings.

Life was harsh for many of the children in the Old Town and Southside and a particularly extreme case was reported in the Evening News in November 1908 involving children from Davie Street. Philip Lavin of 150 Dumbiedykes Road was sentenced to three months imprisonment at the Sheriff Court for ill-treatment and neglect of his five children, aged six months to 13 years. He had been repeatedly visited and warned of his conduct by the Scottish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SSPCC) over the course of five years. Finally, Headmaster R. James Reith wrote to the SSPCC to inform them of bruising on the face of one of Lavin’s daughters which he suspected was the result of assault. Visiting the house again, they found the childrens’ “clothing was scanty and on [their] bed the only covering was an old quilt.” The hungry children had sometimes shared just two rolls between four for their breakfast or five potatoes for their dinner. Lavin earned good money as a painter, 30s a week, but spent it on drink and gave none to his wife, Marion Hewit. She instead had to go out to work for the upkeep of herself and the children and continued to do so when she became ill until collapsing and being sent to the City Fever Hospital suffering from acute consumption (TB). She died less than a year later, on 20th October 1909; her husband however lived until the age of 76.

Boys of Davie Street School in 1910, many barefoot, waiting for tickets for a day trip to Ratho organised by the charitable Courant Fund.

In 1917 the School Board undertook an extensive reorganisation of education in the city to provide additional “supplementary education” – that for children over the age of 12 but who had failed to pass the qualification exams for Higher Grade schools. They recognised there was a demand for specialist commercial and technical education at this stage for children who soon be entering the workplace when they finished their compulsory schooling at the age of 14. It was therefore agreed to establish specialist institutes in the city and Davie Street was selected to become part of one of the city’s first specialised supplementary Technical Schools. In 1918, Davie Street closed without ceremony as a primary school and became an annexe for the nearby James Clark Technical School.

Former James Clark School with its remarkable corner tower.

Initially Davie Street provided rooms for practical subjects such as art, home economics and science while these facilities were constructed at James Clark (which had been planned for elementary education and therefore was not originally built with them). In 1924 it was then taken in hand to be properly modernised (including being converted from gas to electric lighting) and converted into specialist technical workshops for teaching the trades of brassfinishing, tinsmithing, upholstery, plumbing, tailoring and printing. In this guise it provided centralised training in these crafts for the Southside, successful completion of its printing courses could lead to bursaries for a print qualifications at Heriot Watt College and entry into one of the city’s most prized blue collar careers.

An exhibition of work in the printing and allied trades by students of Davie Street in 1957 – a bookbinding for HMS Caledonia is admired.

The specialist technical education at Davie Street was moved from the curriculum of James Clark School to those of Telford and Napier Colleges after 1966, its workshops being run-down and moved to those institutions shortly thereafter. James Clark school itself closed in 1972 as part of the citywide secondary education shake-up required to move to a fully comprehensive system; by this time its roll had declined steeply from an inter-war high of over 1,000 to just 300.

Davie Street School in 1959 from the Dumbiedykes Survey by Adam H. Malcolm © Edinburgh City Libraries L973B

Davie Street sat vacant for a number of years until it started what was to be an altogether very different chapter in its life story. In 1969 it was turned into the Theatre Arts Centre, the brainchild of Edinburgh Corporation’s drama advisor Gerard Slevin. Slevin approached English teacher Leslie Hills, a self-described “newly minted teacher“, to run this project on the basis that she had upset her school establishment by abandoning the old “chalk and talk” methods and using instead the medium of drama to engage and teach her students. On her first visit to Davie Street she found:

The paintwork was ancient; the boiler was coal-fired and the toilets indescribable. I said yes. I was 23.

Leslie Hills, describing her first visit to Davie Street School

On a shoestring budget, the school was converted to its new purpose which involved removal of a large quantity of old printing machinery, outfitting the hall as a drama studio and cleaning the toilets as best as could be done. With a drama teacher, art teacher and music teacher under Leslie, by the autumn of that year the centre was open for business: “It was an extraordinary position to be in. No-one knew what we should be doing, so we made it all up.”

Edinburgh Corporation’s Theatre Arts Centre sign (Art was a spelling mistake), rescued from Davie Street when it was replaced by a sign for Lothian Regional Council in 1975. Picture kindly provided by Leslie Hills.

The first pupils to attend came from the city’s Junior Secondary schools, those destined to be replaced by Comprehensives in the coming years. “Many came from difficult backgrounds, some from the surrounding housing soon to be flattened, where water was obtained from a tap in the yard. Many were underfed, ill-clothed for Edinburgh’s winters and, leaving school at 15, just too wee to be sent, bewildered, out to scrapyards and tyre depots with a bit of paper on which was written an address in a part of town of which they had no knowledge.“

Slum housing in Edinburgh, 1969. Marshall’s Court, Greenside, . S. G. Jackman photo, Edinburgh City Libraries, Edinburgh and Scottish Collection.

Up to 500 secondary-age children a week came through the doors of the Theatre Arts Centre from across the city, including from “List D” reformatory schools, those pushed to the very extremes of the education system. Leslie Hills takes up the story:

I talked to every class on their first day, explaining that we did not use the belt – still in use in schools – and that the rules were behave yourself and no graffiti – except in the toilets into which they were allowed to take felt-tipped pens which were in plentiful supply. The boys’ toilet became a wonder to behold – absolutely covered in intricate designs. I never worked out how they did the ceilings. The rest of the building remained pristine.

With its radical approach to learning through the mediums of drama, art and music, the laid back approach to uniform, lesson structure and timetabling and the lack of corporal punishment, the “school-in-a-theatre” was dubbed “Britain’s most unusual school” by the Daily Record. It was a fitting coincidence that Davie Street School had unwittingly been returned to its roots of education without punishment.

Drama teacher David Prince is “attacked” by his pupils at the Theatre Arts Centre in an exercise learning about the value of movement in drama. Daily Record, 2nd December 1970

The initial success of the Theatre Arts Centre gamble allowed the facilities and services on offer to be improved. Finding out from the Corporation’s painters that they didn’t need to follow the official schools’ colour palette of mushroom and cream, re-painting made use of colour. One room was colour drenched in pale green and fitted with an epidiascope and light box for projecting and copying designs for poster; An in-house theatre company – Theatre in Education – was set up who undertook outreach visits to city schools; A technician and a van was acquired to run a stage equipment lending library; The curriculum was widened to include photography, printing and film; Evening drama clubs for teenagers were run and later, Edinburgh Youth Theatre found a home here and it was a regular performance venue during the annual Festival Fringe.

The reorganisation of local authorities in 1975, the Centre became part of Lothian Regional Council and the geographical remit expanded accordingly. Leslie Hills departed in 1980. Ten years later it survived a threat to its continued existence at Davie Street when the site was short-listed as a potential location for a new medical centre for the district. It was announced in 1993 that a central arts school for Lothian Region would be created in the former Leith Academy building on Duke Street, which would have seen Davie Street closed and relocated there. This plan never came to fruition, likely as the result of Lothian Region losing control of its further education colleges later that year. Having survived these threats, it was the Local Government etc (Scotland) Act 1994 – which abolished Lothian Regional Council in 1996 – that did for the Centre. It was closed by the new, unitary City of Edinburgh Council in 1997 when the Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Forsyth, refused to provide sufficient funding to the newly established councils. Dr Bell’s Drama Centre, the primary-age equivalent of the Theatre Arts Centre was closed at the same time. A “cheery wake in the rather battered studio” was held by staff past and present to celebrate its 28 year life, which also marked the end of 185 years of continuous educational use of the site.

Over the next three years the Council sought to dispose of the old school and it saw only intermittent use as a Fringe location. It was finally sold for redevelopment in 2000 and was converted into flats, a change which at the very least preserved its fine Jacobean-style masonry for the future.

Davie Street School in 2021, estate agent’s photo from the sale of one of its flats

The previous chapter in this series looked at Causewayside School. The following chapter covers Dean Public School.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

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Causewayside Public School: the thread about the epicentre of a very sectarian Southside scandal

Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (1872-1918) have for some reason a particular fascination for me, one which is more profound where they are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about each of the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but rapidly snowballed into an intention to cover each, in alphabetical order, on its own and in rather more detail, but not so much that they can’t be posted quite frequently.

The fourth chapter of our series looking at the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” investigates Causewayside School. In 1875 Edinburgh School Board purchased the house of Grange Villa at 140 Causewayside for £3,218 13s 11d with the intention of erecting a new school. This half acre plot was a parallelogram in shape on account of its northern boundary being defined by an old drainage ditch that cut diagonally relative to the main road. Prior to this, schooling in the district was conducted at a school run by the United Presbyterian Church on Duncan Street, which moved with that church to the corner of Salisbury Place in 1864.

An overlay of the 1876 Ordnance Survey town plan of Edinburgh (Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland) and modern Google Earth aerial imagery showing the location of Causewayside School. Note the parallelogram shape of the building plot. The UP Church can be seen to the top of the map, its school building to the rear being marked as a Sunday School. Move the slider to compare

The Board had already held a competition in 1874 to find architects for its first batch of new schools and divided the work between the most successful applicants. Causewayside was awarded to Robert Rowand Anderson, who would rise to become one of Victorian Scotland’s most notable architects. He was also awarded the work for schools at West Fountainbridge and Stockbridge and the three shared a number of design and style features (“the dimensions of the various rooms repeat to within a few inches… and the ventilating and playground arrangements are also precisely similar“) but with significant variation in the layouts to make use of three very different sites, all of which had significant constraints.

Front elevation by Robert Rowand Anderson of the Causewayside School, dated 1875. University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections, Coll-31/2/EC.74

Anderson set Causewayside back from the main road and spread it across two storeys, each with a large central school room with two smaller classrooms on either side at the rear, giving a roughly cruciform footprint. There was a single large gable projecting forwards whereas at Stockbridge (below) there was one on each flank. His early work designing churches translated easily to the Collegiate Gothic style much in favour at the time for schools except now the “steeples” did not contain bells, but hid an Archimedes screw ventilator to promote good air circulation through the buildings.

Stockbridge Primary School by Robert Rowand Anderson, sharing many design features with Causewayside. CC-by-SA 4.0, Drnoble via Wikimedia

The construction contract was worth £7,974 11s 0d and work commenced in late June 1875. Progress by January 1876 was reported as “slow” but by June was “well advanced“. Although it was to be completed for 1st December that year opening did not happen until 9th January 1877. The chairman of the School Board, Professor Calderwood, performed the honours and at this time already 500 of its 600 spaces had been subscribed to.

Rear (left) and north side (right) elevations of Causewayside School, dated 1875. The pair of blocks to the back housed stairs, toilets and offices on intermediate floors, hence the extra sets of windows. University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections, Coll-31/2/EC.74

An inspection in its second year of operation reported favourably on the quality of teaching at the school:

Report of HM Inspectors on the Edinburgh Board Schools for Session 1878-79.

Causewayside School.

Mixed School. — An extremely good tone pervaded this School, and the class movements were very orderly. As regards the work of the three lower Standards, some weakness appeared in the spelling and intelligence of the third Standard, but everything else was most satisfactory. Of the upper Standards, the fourth might have done rather better in arithmetic, and the fifth in composition, while both the fifth and sixth Standards answered unequally in history and geography. On the other hand, for grammar, general intelligence, and acquaintance with their specific subjects, all three Standards deserve praise. In judging of the School, it must, of course, be remembered that the staff is strong. Needlework and music are both carefully taught.

Infants’ School. — Discipline and instruction in this Department both deserve the highest praise. It is evident that the Mistress and her Staff exercise a most beneficial influence alike in quickening the intelligence and in regulating the behaviour of their young pupils.

A subsequent inspection in February 1885 by the local Superintendent, Colonel Campbell, “complained strongly” about the drawing examination at the school; the children were using their pencils as a measuring gauge when doing freehand work and that they were placing lined pages beneath their drawing paper as a further guide. The teacher protested that this was how she had been taught to draw but the Colonel demanded that the exam be cancelled: the matter was not dropped until representations in defence from both the Headmaster and Flora Stevenson of the School Board.

Flora Stevenson, a redoubtable figure on the Edinburgh School Board and in the Suffrage movement. 1895 photograph by G. Watson, from the Edinburgh & Scottish Collection of Edinburgh City Libraries.

In common with the first wave of schools that the Board built, Causewayside was really too small to cope with demand and already by October 1878 it was over capacity, with 638 pupils. By 1883 it was so oversubscribed that an extension for 200 further children was authorised, widening the front of the building to the same width as the rear to add additional classrooms. In 1894 a further extension was approved but by the following year there were 250 vacant spaces on account of the recent opening in the district of Sciennes School. By 1901 the school was once again reported to be suffering form overcrowding – this was still a time of urban population growth.

1893 Ordnance Survey town plan centred on Causewayside School, with the original footprint (orange) drawn over the extended footprint which added additional classrooms either side at the front. The wall across the playground was to separate girls from boys, the structures with dotted outlines on the left (west) side being open play sheds. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Located as it was between the Grange and Newington, you could be forgiven for thinking this school as being in a middle-class catchment. However, like most Board schools at this time, it drew its intake largely from the working classes and its pupils were subject to a life in the harsh social environment of Edinburgh at this time. In a court case in February 1884 Helen Dick, or Taylor, was brought before Sheriff Rutherfurd and charged with “failing to provide elementary education for her children and also with failing to secure their regular attendance at school“. She told the court that “she could not do more than she had done” for her two children – Jessie (10) and George (8) – her husband had abandoned the family 6 years prior and to support them she worked anti-social hours at a laundry. She had to leave early in the morning and was not allowed to return home to wake her children and get them ready for school, so they inevitably did not go. The Sheriff ordered that they be made to go to school at Causewayside. Another example comes from an 1896 meeting of the School Board which heard that of the 722 children at the school only 21 had baths in their homes. 71 boys and six girls reported that they went – occasionally – to the Corporation baths to wash. In 1901, it was estimated in 1901 that 15 percent of the juvenile department of the school were working after their school day to help support their families.

Causewayside children, 1927, at Grange Court. The tall building with the Gothic window in the background is the UP Church where the Causewayside School was located prior to the opening of the Board school. Photograph by John Smith, via Edinburgh City Libraries.

In 1905 the headmaster, Robert Mathewson, retired owing to ill health after 20 years in service. He was briefly replaced by James Clark, promoted from St Leonard’s Public School, who soon returned to the latter institution as its head to be replaced in turn by Thomas W. Paterson of North Canongate. Paterson had begun his career in 1879 at Causewayside and remained there until retiring in 1922 after 51 years in the profession, the pupils and parents presenting him with the gift of a typewriter for the occasion.

On October 1st 1913, pupils from Causewayside joined their compatriots from Davie Street, St Leonard’s and South Bridge in a spontaneous protest march through the district, a rumour having spread through the streets that they were to begin attending school on Saturday Mornings.

Evening schooling began at Causewayside only a month after it opened, when the Edinburgh School of Cookery was allowed by the School Board to run courses here which were open to the general public. This became known as Continuation Schooling; continuation of education for those who had left school (at 14) but had not qualified for a Higher Grade school (or could not afford to go to one). Causewayside became the principal such school for young women and girls in the city, offering both basic academic subjects and practical classes focussing on employable skills – cookery, millinery, laundrywork, dressmaking and needlework. While these classes were not free, in 1915 a term cost 5 shillings, an excellent attendance record could result in the fees being reimbursed. Completion of these classes could qualify women for the Edinburgh School of Cookery and Domestic Economy, where employers provided bursaries. In 1915, 177 pupils earned the return of their fees and forty qualified for the School of Cookery. Headmaster Paterson of Causewayside wrote to the editor of the Scotsman in 1917 that continuation classes were “to the better equipment for life’s battle for those children who leave school at 14 years of age without passing the qualifying examination.”

Advert for Edinburgh School Board’s Continuation Classes, including Causewayside, Musselburgh News, 21st September 1906

An almighty brouhaha erupted at Causewayside in 1925 when the Education Authority announced plans to close the school, transfer its pupils to other nearby schools, and re-open it as a Roman Catholic school. The background is complex but stemmed from the fact that R. C. schooling in Scotland was not transferred from that church to the state until 1918 at which point the newly formed Education Authorities inherited a rather poor portfolio of school premises. Few, if any, of these had been purpose-built and almost none were really fit for purpose; St. Columba’s R. C. School, which served the Southside, was teaching 291 children (with a waiting list of 27) in a totally inadequate converted town house at 81 Newington Road. Causewayside’s school roll had slumped after WW1 due to urban depopulation and with only 321 children at less than half its capacity. The authority’s bean-counters were convinced that Sciennes, Preston Street and Bristo schools could comfortably accommodate Causewayside as they too had falling rolls and that nobody would have a problem with making the most economical use of their buildings.

81 Newington Road, former St Columba’s R. C. School.

How wrong they were! Edinburgh, in case you didn’t know, was a hot-bed of radical, anti-Catholic political Protestantism in the first half of the 20th century and the nascent Scottish Protestant League, led by the rabble-rouser Alexander Ratcliffe, went all in on trying to use the school proposal as a wedge issue in their efforts to repeal the provisions of the Education (Scotland) Act 1918 that saw the state obliged to provide non-secular R. C. schooling. You can read the full details of the vitriolic campaign that they orchestrated to oppose this change in the thread about the Sciennes School Strike of 1925. Suffice to say, the Education Authority was unmoved by the accusations it was handing over a “Protestant school to the Roman Catholics” and “putting Rome on the Rates” in “the city of Knox“. It maintained its position that it had a legal obligation to meet and that its only other option was to build a new school in its entirety – which would add even further to the tax burden of the local rates! And so it was that Causewayside School closed at the end of the 1923-24 term and re-opened after the summer holidays as St Columba’s R. C. School.

Pupils and teacher nun of St. Columba’s R. C. School in 1925, the year after they moved – controversially – to Causewayside. Copy of photograph in “St Columba’s Edinburgh, Centenary Year” by Mark Dilworth OSB for St Columba’s Centenary Committee, 1989

The Continuation School was unaffected by all this, a matter quietly and conveniently overlooked by those claiming the school was being “given” to the Catholic Church! The Scottish Protestant League were still publicly and vocally agitating against St Columba’s, well into 1925 – until the focus of their ire was drawn to the opening of a Carmelite Convent in Merchiston in September.

As St. Columba’s the school also became a Supplementary School, i.e. for children over the elementary age of 11 and below the leave age of 14 and who were not in High School education; what we might now call a Secondary School. It took children from other R. C. primaries in the city; St Mary’s on York Lane, St Patrick’s on St John’s Hill, St Ann’s in the Cowgate, St Peter’s in Morningside and St Ignatius’ at Tollcross, adding 300 students and 9 teachers to the school. This brought the school to over 600 pupils, but the effects of depopulation soon began to take their toll and by 1938 it had dropped to 409. There were only 190 children in the elementary department and so the following year it was closed, the pupils displaced to those other R. C. schools, and the girls’ supplementary department transferred to St Thomas of Aquin’s at Lauriston. St Columba’s was to be converted and expanded into a dedicated junior secondary school for boys aged 12 to 14 and the Education Committee authorised expenditure for this scheme. This coincided with the outbreak of WW2 and so no work ever took place. Evacuation caused a further drop in the remaining school roll, part of the school was requisitioned by the Auxiliary Fire Service and the remainder suffered from a lack of coal which caused the heating to stop working, pipes and toilets to freeze and then flooding when they thawed. In February 1940 the authorities called it quits and the remaining 150 boys were sent to other schools and it was closed permanently.

This was not the end for the building though and it was given a new lease of life by converting it into an emergency cooking centre, the work undertaken by John Kelly & Son (Kitchen Engineers) Ltd of Rose Street. What became “the largest kitchen in Edinburgh“, capable of cooking 10,000 meals at a time, was intended to help feed the populace in the event of a catastrophic air raid. Fortunately it was never required for this purpose and so was transferred to the Education Committee in 1942 as a central kitchen for producing school meals. Together with the existing centre at the former West Fountainbridge School, together they could produce 9,000 two course lunches daily, sufficient for every child in the city who wanted one. Its official opening took place on Friday 11th September, when Thomas Johnston MP, Secretary of State for Scotland, made a speech imploring the nation to double its consumption of home-grown oatmeal and potatoes. He also announced that school cookery classes would now focus on these ingredients and local and national schools competitions for their use.

Thomas Johnston in 1955 when chairman of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, by Sir Herbert James Gunn. © artist’s estate, via National Galleries Scotland.

Closure of the Causewayside centre was proposed in 1952, both as an economy measure and also reflecting the fact that most schools now had their own kitchen facilities. Newspaper adverts from 1955 record the disposal of its cooking equipment to the highest bidders.

Adverts for staff at the Causewayside Cooking Centre. Edinburgh Evening News, 25th May 1943

After this it lay vacant for a decade until in 1965 the newly formed Scottish Certificate of Education Examination Board (SCEEB) acquired and demolished it as a location for its new headquarters. A modern, three storey, brutalist office block by Alan Reiach & Eric Hall was built in its place, the only notable feature of an otherwise unremarkable building being an abstract concrete panel over the entrance by Charles Anderson. This includes the crest of the Board and their motto In Trutina Ponentur Eadem which, according to the Dictionary of Foreign Quotations, translates from Latin as “These Matters are to be Weighed in the Balance“. The SCEEB moved in during 1967 but lasted less than a decade, moving in 1975 to Dalkeith on account of needing more space. They were replaced in turn by the Scottish Law Commission but their coat of arms remained, the motto perhaps equally appropriate for both institutions.

Anderson’s relief above the entrance to the SCEEB building

No trace of the old school now remains and as of the time of writing (February 2026) the redevelopment in turn has been empty for a number of years and a full planning application for its demolition and replacement has been submitted to the Council. A previous plan for the site in 2023 was asked to consider the re-use of the sculptured panel but I the current developer has offered it as a gift to the Scottish Qualifications Authority – SQA, the spiritual successor of the SCEEB at Dalkeith. Thank you to Peter Gillett for this update on their future. The SQA of course now needs to follow through in accepting the gift and having it removed and appropriately relocated…

The previous chapter of this series looked at Castlehill School. The next chapter examines the Davie Street Schools.

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Educating Children, Bakers and Tourists: the thread about Castlehill Public School

Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (1872-1918) have for some reason a particular fascination for me, one which is more profound where they are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about each of the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but rapidly snowballed into an intention to cover each, in alphabetical order, on its own and in rather more detail, but not so much that they can’t be posted quite frequently.

The third chapter of our series looking at the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” investigates the life and times of Castlehill School. This occupied the site of the Gordon House, the 17th century residence of George Gordon, 1st Duke of Gordon who was Captain and Constable of Edinburgh Castle and is remembered for surrendering that fortification all too readily to the Protestant Lords during the Glorious Revolution of 1689. His property came later into the possession of the Bairds of Saughtonhall who gave their name to Blair’s Close that forms the western boundary of the school plot.

Gordon House in 1887, immediately before demolition to make way for Castlehill School. Photo by Alexander Adam Inglis, Edinburgh & Scottish Collection of Edinburgh City Libraries

The school was designed by Robert Wilson, architect to the Edinburgh School Board, and was a radical departure in style from its rather austere Collegiate Gothic contemporaries by the adoption of Scots Baronial Revival; complete with turrets, crowstepped gables and mock battlements. This was seen as more befitting of its prominent location at the head of the Old Town. Another change was the use of red Cornockle sandstone from Lochmaben in Dumfriesshire to add a visual contrast with the more usual yellowy-grey from the local Hailes Quarry.

Castlehill School, north elevation on the Castlehill itself. CC-by-SA 2.0 Neil T, via Flickr

A third change from its predecessors was the extension from two to three storeys; an attic level, lit by rooflights, providing rooms for teaching specialist subjects such as needlework and drawing. This was done to make the best use of a cramped site which amounted to just quarter of an acre; half that of the contemporary Milton House School in the Canongate and even less than the notoriously cramped Bristo Public School. (The only other three storey board school before this was West Fountainbridge, which had a similarly small plot)

Ordnance Survey Town Plans of Edinburgh, 1876 (right) and 1893 (left), before and after Castlehill School opened. Move the slider to compare. Note in the 1876 map that the Church of Scotland and Free Church both have schools in the district; St. Columba’s and St. John’s respectively. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Internally, three original mantlepieces from the Gordon mansion were incorporated into staff rooms as was an old entrance door. To the rear (south), the site dropped steeply away down the slope of the Old Town’s Crag and Tail topography. An additional level was therefore required, originally this was an open colonnade, providing a covered extension to the playgrounds, but later it was enclosed to provide additional teaching areas. A tall retaining wall faced onto Johnston Terrace at the rear, with entrance staircases (separate for boys and girls) up to the playgrounds and a three storey Janitor’s house bridged the two levels.

South (rear) elevation of Castlehill School, showing the plot sloped steeply in two directions; down from the Castlehill and down Johnston Terrace. The additional lower storey to the rear with the arched windows, the retaining wall with entrance stairways and the three-level janitor’s house can be seen. The spire of the Highland Tolbooth St John’s church towers over an already tall school. CC-by-SA 4.0 Stephencdickson via Flickr

The school opened on Monday December 3rd 1888. Although there was no formal ceremony to mark the occasion, over 800 pupils were marched out of their old schools (those inherited by the School Board at Brown Square, Borthwick and Old Assembly Close and Victoria Terrace) up the hill to their new home. A formal opening would take place exactly 5 months later on May 3rd 1889.

Former Brown Square school in 1913. This was one of the Heriot Trust day schools that were merged into the School Board after 1872, immediately identifiable by all the Jacobean decorations modelled off of Heriot’s Hospital itself. Edinburgh Photographic Society collection, via National Galleries Scotland.

Interestingly, the legend carved prominently into both the front and read façades reads “CASTLE HILL SCHOOL”, even though it was nearly always officially referred to as one word, just Castlehill, a change that was also reflected in the Ordnance Survey maps around the time.

“CASTLE HILL SCHOOL” on the north façade from the Flickr of Bob White, CC-by-NC-ND 2.0

From the beginning the school was also used for evening education. But – maintaining the theme of being different – at Castlehill this was not for adults. Instead it catered only for children under 14, pupils given special dispensation by the School Board to attend evening school on account of them needing to work during the school day to help support their families. In 1898 there were 212 boys and girls so registered. In 1890, the school’s first headmaster, John Davidson, resigned on account of poor health. In May 1898 headmaster William C. S. Hunter died and was replaced by James C. Anderson of Leith Walk School. His salary of £340 being equivalent to around £38,400 in 2025 and his “reign” was formally inaugurated with a presentation by Colin G. Macrae, chairman of the School Board, and concert at the school on Wednesday 1st June that year.

The school and its pupils suffered as a result of the harsh social conditions in Edinburgh’s Old Town in the late 19th and early 20th century. Headmaster Anderson was one of a number of his peers in the district who in spoke publicly in 1904 on “how drunkenness [of parents] affects the children“. 150 of his pupils were on the “food roll” due to the inability of their parents to feed then, with a further 30 receiving relief from the district fund. This was almost a quarter of the school and other children of leaving age (14) were being taught with 7 year-olds on account of how much schooling they had missed. Anderson put this down to drunkenness which he said was getting worse, as was thriftlessness. In 1908, under the terms of the Education (Scotland) Act of that year, the School Board instituted a meal scheme for necessitous children, each receiving a bowl of soup and bread during their school day. This was a great success and was expanded in 1911 by converting West Fountainbridge School into a dedicated central cooking centre. One hundred children from Castlehill were among the first recipients to benefit, but as their school lacked a dining hall they went to the Independent Labour Party Hall on Melbourne Place to eat. The tickets for these dinners issued daily at school to encourage children deserving of the meals to actually attend their lessons. They could also be purchased for 6d a week; with a little bit of liberal rounding they became known as “penny dinners“.

Soup and bread is served for lunch at North Canongate School, c. 1914. The man with the moustache and white apron is the headmaster. Note the lack of shoes on a number of the boys’ feet.

Feeding was not the only effort made to improve the lot of the children of Castlehill. In 1908 permission was gained by the School Board to adopt a piece of ground on Johnston Terrace next to the Church of Scotland Normal School (a teacher training college) for use as a playground, that at the school being completely insufficient in size and aspect. In 1909, under the auspices of Patrick Geddes’ Edinburgh Social Union, a patch of wasteland on Johnston Terrace was converted by pupils at the school into a model demonstration garden of their very own. Geddes established numerous such gardens, believing them as living classrooms for teaching both biology and self-improvement. Vegetable plots 150 feet long and 7 feet wide grew potatoes, peas, beans, cauliflowers, cabbages, turnips, leeks, onions, carrots, lettuces and other salad vegetables which were used in cookery classes in the school. This space was used for teaching natural history lessons and the principles of crop rotation. It also allowed the school to apply for a valuable additional grant for teaching gardening from the Education Department.

The Castlehill School garden off Johnston Terrace, c. 1914

The next year, 1910, headmaster H. F. Sim brought the first case of its kind in Edinburgh to the City Police Court under the Children Act 1908, when two shopkeepers were charged with and pleaded guilty to selling “smoking mixture” to to children under the age of 16. Sim had caught boys in the school trying to smoke a pipe filled with the ersatz tobacco and confiscated from them their paper bag marked “The Boys’ Smoking Mixture and Pipe: price One Halfpenny“. On questioning, he had found from them where they had acquired it and reported the matter to the city’s Medical Officer of Health. The magistrate admonished the defendants and said “a warning should be given to tobacconists that the sale of such a mixture was an illegal practice, and that in other cases of the kind the offenders would certainly be punished.“

A production of scenes from Julius Caesar for the benefit of the School Board by the boys of Castlehill School, March 1912. The Evening News recorded that Mark Anthony was played by William Caldwell and that he “made a very excellent attempt at the speech at Caesar’s funeral”.

In October 1912, to remedy a lack of accommodation in the school, the adjacent ancient tenement known as Cannonball House – the last block of old Castlehill – being acquired by the Board for £1,925. It had recently been bought by the Cockburn Association with a view to preservation and the Board spent £3,500 thoroughly renovating and converting into additional teaching spaces. Its four principal classrooms could accommodate 180 children and there were special rooms for practical subjects such as cookery. In the basement were “spray baths“; showers for the children, most of whom lacked even basic domestic sanitation in their homes. The building was substantially altered, with one wing and the old Blair’s Close removed to improve ventilation and daylight. A number of original 17th century features were uncovered during restoration and were retained and installed in the fabric in new locations, making the end result something of a chimaera. The east gable is the biggest give-away way that not all is what it seems with this apparently old tenement; look for the tall classroom windows and the Edinburgh School Board emblem high up on the pediment.

Cannonball House, before and after. In 1900, an image by James C. H. Balmain (left) and in 1957 by H. D. Wyllie. Photos in the Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries. Move the slider to compare.

In WW1 the school was requisitioned by to act as a depot and billeting for soldiers of the 5th Royal Scots based out of Edinburgh Castle. The Church of Scotland Young Men’s Guild was given the use of a room the following year to run a canteen and recreation room for them, with a gramophone, games, books, newspapers and writing materials. A teacher at the school, James Bathgate, was injured on war service in July 1915 when serving as a private with the College Company, 4th Royal Scots, in France. In April 1917, Headmaster Sim lost his son, Charles Henry Stuart, who died in hospital having been fatally injured serving with the Royal Field Artillery.

After the war, in April 1922, Headmistress Miss C. E. Anderson retired and was presented with a gold wristlet watch from the parents and her colleagues and a diamond brooch from the pupils. She had been teaching the children of the area since the school opened – a record period of 41 years!

In 1936 a new technological front in teaching was opened up at Castlehill when a room was specifically converted for the use of the Edinburgh branch of the newly instituted Scottish Educational Film Association for the production of educational films. It had been recognised that technology had a part to play in education – in 1931 a group from Canonmills School had been given a trial lesson on the theme of sound recording and reproduction at their local cinema – but further progress was wanting on account of a lack of suitable films for the classroom. The Education Committee thus resolved to make them for themselves: as well as providing the studio for the Association, they also covered the (then) substantial overhead of film costs and in return had a controlling say in the content of films. The first production was a four-part geography film entitled “The Port of London“. The Association would remain at Castlehill until 1957, when they moved to Boswell’s Court.

Members of the Scottish Educational Film Association and school teachers working on a production in the new studio at Castlehill. Edinburgh Evening News, December 19th 1936

On the morning of September 1st 1939, children showed to schools all over the city with their coat, a bag or case and a cardboard label – they were being evacuated. Some 200 gathered at Castlehill before heading to Waverley station and destinations unknown. The school remained open for those children that stayed behind and there were still 273 on the roll in September 1940. The logbook records the peculiarities of an education during wartime; there were separate air raid shelters for infants, girls and boys; all children had to carry their gas masks with them; there were weekly gas mask drills and weekly marching drills to and from the shelters.

Excerpt from the logbook at Castlehill School for February 1940 with notes on the gas mask and air raid shelter drills.

Additional wartime uses were found for the partially vacant school. A central depot for clothing for evacuees was established in October 1939; donations were received and sorted before being distributed to those in need who had been evacuated and found themselves wanting during their “enforced holiday to the country“. This was organised by Miss Cairns, Superintendent of Domestic Subjects for the Corporation, and she had 50 sewing mistresses from across the city under her direction. The supply of children’s coats proved insufficient and so these “clever-fingered” women picked apart the excess of larger items, cut them down to the required sizes and put them back together again. They were joined by women of the Edinburgh Personal Service League who performed a similar operation for men’s clothing, to be sent via the Red Cross to injured servicemen and prisoners of war. Wartime cookery classes were run in the school by the Corporation’s night school teachers. These were aimed at women to try and instruct them in how to eke out their rations, substitute various items that were off ration to recreate old favourites and how to do so more healthily and with less waste of fuel. Mrs Gray of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) established a group of like-minded women to make soft toys and dolls and clothing for babies and toddlers who were being cared for in public nurseries, their mothers being on war work. Most of these things were no longer being manufactured during wartime. Such was the success of this endeavour that it later relocated to a dedicated workshop at Bristo School as the Nursery Equipment Centre.

A wartime cookery lesson at Castlehill. Edinburgh Evening News, May 14th 1940

Postwar, a shock announcement in May 1951 broke news that the school was to be closed at the end of that term. It had been built for 800 but as a result of the long term urban depopulation of the city it was down to 293 by this point; there was plenty excess capacity to rehouse them at Milton House, Tollcross and South Bridge schools for the same reason.

A Castlehill class, 1947

A secondary reason behind the closure was that the authorities wanted to establish a Central School Of Bakery and Catering where apprentice workers from the city’s important baking industry (as well as more general cookery and catering) could undertake industry-specific further education. Parents protested the decision but the Corporation was unmoved and voted by 14 to 5 for closure. Its only concession was to promise crossing guards to help children navigate the busy roads that they now needed to transit on their way to their new schools.

One mother vents her frustration towards Councillors Thomson and Hedderwick of the Education Committee at a meeting to oppose the closure of Castlehill School, May 25th 1951.

The bakery school opened on Monday 19th January 1954, Councillor H. A. Brechin performed the honours and stated “these new premises, together with the modern equipment, give Edinburgh one of the most up-to-date baking and catering schools in the United Kingdom“.

Mr John Russell shows apprentices a loaf fresh from the oven (left) and John Notman (right) is supervised in the correct way to serve diners at Castlehill School in these photos from the Evening News, October 2rd 1957

It did not last long however and as a result of changes to further education and the city’s industries, it was closed by 1970. While it once again sought a purpose, during the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh that year it served as a temporary museum of regimental history at Edinburgh Castle. In 1971 the main building was converted to offices for the City Engineer’s department and would later be occupied by the Drainage Department of Lothian Regional Council. Between 1972 and 1974 it was also the home for the Theatre Workshop, an arts and drama centre for children, while it was found permanent premises.

1965, the sad sight of the abandoned School Garden. Photo by Ronald Alexander © Edinburgh City Libraries

In August 1986, Lothian Region accepted an offer for £250,000 from William Muir distillers who proposed to convert the former school it into a whisky museum and heritage centre. £2 million was spent on this project which opened its doors on 3rd May 1988, the building’s centennial year. It was an instant success and is now into its 5th decade of offering a very different sort of education than that the building’s planners had in mind.

Cannonball House was retained by the Education Department when the main building became the bakery school and was used for community education, passing to Lothian Regional Council on the formation of that organisation. In 1984 a Children’s History Centre was opened and the building was later properly converted by the Region for £200,000 for use as a schools education centre modelled on Patrick Grddes’ ideas; the Castehill Urban Studies Centre. It was the first such centre in Britain and I recall school trips there in the early 1990s, the name of the guide was Mrs Quick – I’m not sure why that name stuck with me, but it did!. Between 1999 until the opening of the new Scottish Parliament at Holyrood in 2004, Cannonball House was used as a schools education centre for the temporary parliament housed in the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland on the Lawnmarket. In 2013, 100 years after it opened as part of the school, it found a new life as a high-end restaurant by the Scottish-Italian Contini family, who themselves had started out in Scotland a century before.

Contini Cannonball Restaurant and Bar, via Contini.com

Want to read more about Edinburgh’s Lost Board Schools? The previous chapter was about Canonmills School.

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Bristo Public School: the thread about “one of the worst” schools in and its journey to further and higher education (by way of a car park)

Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (1872-1918) have for some reason a particular fascination for me, one which is more profound where they are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about each of the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but rapidly snowballed into an intention to cover each, in alphabetical order, on its own and in rather more detail, but not so much that they can’t be posted quite frequently.

Bristo Public School was located on Marshall Street in that old district of the city known as Easter Portsburgh. It opened in 1877 with a capacity for 600 children at a time when the Edinburgh School Board was rapidly trying to expand education provision in the city at the same time as dealing with a legacy of inherited and substandard properties. The School Board was formed as a result of the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 which made education compulsory for children aged between 5 and 13 in Scotland (but not free). The school occupied a site where once had stood the General’s Entry lodgings of Robert Burns’ paramour Clarinda – Agnes Maclehose – and took its name from the adjacent Bristo Street, itself an old Edinburgh place name dating back to the early 16th century.

1893 Ordnance Survey town plan overlaid on a modern Google Earth satellite image, centered on the location of Bristo School. General’s Entry is the small lane to the south of the school. Move the slider to compare.

The land was acquired from the Edinburgh Improvement Trust as part of an early civic improvement and slum clearance scheme that swept away some older closes and built a westward extension of of Marshall Street between the Potterrow and Bristo Street. Construction was intended to begin in 1875 but was delayed on account of the original cost estimate of £8,760 being far in excess of what the Board had budgeted per capita. The final cost, including purchasing the land, ended up at £26 10s per head, a huge sum for the time compared to other new schools. In the meantime, the School Board leased premises at 4 Nicolson Square to open a temporary school. The purpose-built Bristo School was designed by the architect to the Board, William Lambie Moffat, in the Collegiate Gothic style that was then in favour for schools and was extremely similar to his Leith Walk School.

Leith Walk Public School, 1887 engraving. Note the similarity in the design of the tower, the primary gable end and the ornamental buttresses with the photo below of Bristo School.

Serving a densely populated neighbourhood, in its early days Bristo School was frequently overcrowded. Just three years after opening it had 840 pupils, some 40% more than it was designed to take, and the adjacent Marshall Street Halls had to be taken over in 1885 as an annexe and a new school was begun at South Bridge to provide additional capacity. Matters came to a head in 1896 when the school suffered a negative inspection on the grounds of the overcrowding and the substandard nature of the annexe and the Scotch Education Department cut its grant. On investigation the School Board found that almost half of the pupils actually lived closer to another of their schools than Bristo and so by redistributing them closer to home it was possible to both deal with the overcrowding and close the annexe.

Bristo School, looking wesr down Marshall Street west towards Edinburgh University’s “New Buildings” off Teviot Place. © Edinburgh City Libraries

The capacity crisis may have been solved but the school continued to cause the Board problems. On account of its north facing position, cramped plot and being surrounded all around by tall tenements, it was particularly dark inside and had a very small playground which was also very dark. The lack of natural light and ventilation – very important to Edinburgh’s Victorian school designers – soon saw it labelled as “insanitary“. Furthermore it lacked any hall and the arrangements of its classrooms were unsuitable to cope with class sizes; there were too many small spaces. As early as 1900 the School Board were exploring options to replace it and an extension was added to the rear as an interim solution at a cost of £4,350, further decreasing the playground space. In 1909 it was reported that as a result of the poor lighting within the building that it had the highest proportion of children with “defective eyesight” in the city. A special experiment was carried out from 1930 onwards whereby entire year groups were transported to Liberton Playing Fields by tramcar, one day per week in the spring and summer, to have their education outside, far removed from their usual oppressive and dark surroundings.

Five-year-old children of the infant department of Bristo School, dressed for a mock coronation portrait photo in June 1911 to mark the occasion of King George V’s coronation.

In 1925 the school found itself caught up in the Sciennes School Strike saga and it was observed at this time that it was under capacity. By 1927 its roll was in steady decline on account of slum clearance in the district which transferred much of the populace to new housing schemes in the southeast of the city. By 1933 the population of school age children in the Southside was declining at 10% per annum and there were 1,228 vacant places in its schools. As a result Bristo, described by Edinburgh Corporation’s Education Committee as “one of the worst” of its schools, was closed in 1934. The remaining scholars were transferred to Sciennes and South Bridge. In 1935 it was proposed to re-open the school by transferring pupils from the condemned St Ignatius’s Roman Catholic (RC) school in Glen Street and St Columba’s RC – the former Causewayside School – into a new Intermediate RC school for the district. Nothing came of these plans except sectarian controversy until final approval in 1939 but war quickly intervened and put them on hiatus again, this time permanently. Instead, after closure it was used for a variety of purposes including evening classes, a day centre for the long-term unemployed and hosting community groups such as the Boys’ Brigade.

1951 aerial photo showing Bristo School on Marshall Street, running from bottom right to middle of shot. In the top left corner is the Teviot Union of the Edinburgh University. Note the 1900 extension at the rear of the school which served to make its already small playground even smaller and darker. Photo SAW039077 via Britain from Above.

In 1938 the Clarinda Club – a local appreciation society of the poet Robert Burns – marked the school being built upon the site of her lodgings by unveiling a commemorative bronze plaque on its walls. During WW2 it served as training centre and headquarters for First Aid and Air Raid Precautions. Another more unusual purpose was established which was the Nursery Equipment Centre. This had first been established by the WVS (Women’s Voluntary Service) at Castlehill School and was set up to produce soft and wooden toys, clothing and playthings for young children at the public nurseries that had been set up to allow their mothers to undertake war work. These items were largely no longer being produced by industry during wartime. In 1941 part of the school also became a British Restaurant – a municipal wartime canteen – operating under the name Clarinda’s.

Unveiling the Clarinda plaque at Bristo School. Speaking is Councillor Wilson Mclaren and to his left is George Mathers MP. Inset is Dr John Trotter of the Clarinda Club. The plaque read “Near this spot resided ‘CLARINDA’. Friend of Robert Burns 1787-1791”.

The Nursery Equipment Centre attracted a significant number of volunteers with disabilities which prevented them from undertaking war work and became something of a specialist centre in helping people adapt their lives to work. Such was the success of the scheme that it – and the school – was taken over by the government’s new Disabled Persons Employment Corporation as a work training centre for the disabled – a Remploy Factory – until purpose-built premises were completed at Sighthill.

Men at work at the Bristo Remploy centre. The man on the left is John Collister, in the centre is the instructor Thomas Williams (holding the hammer) and to the right his pupil, Robert Lennie.

When Remploy vacated the school in 1949 it was taken back by the Education Department and repurposed as the Bristo Technical Institute. This was a training centre for apprentices in engineering trades, either on day release from their workplaces or taken as evening classes. It taught specialist skills that could not gained on the job such as technical drawing, physics and chemistry and also basic certificates in maths and English to bring candidates up to standard. After 1959, much of this part of the city was threatened by the comprehensive redevelopment plans of Edinburgh University, which wanted wholesale demolition of the area but the old school survived where much did not. The institute closed in 1966 after the opening of the new Napier Technical College at a purpose-built campus in Merchiston, with most of the city’s pre-existing hodgepodge of technical further education being transferred to it. The building was then leased by Heriot-Watt College, which was at this time on nearby Chambers Street and about to gain university status, as its Department of Industrial Administration. Heriot-Watt University began its move to its new Riccarton campus in 1969 and left its Bristo Building around 1974. By this time the old school was the last remaining building on the western portion of Marshall Street and it was quickly and one old educational institution was unceremoniously demolished by another just shy of its centenary; Edinburgh University replaced it with a windswept car park that was perennially covered in puddles.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/georgeupstairs/6004096117/in/photolist-2kv1F4n-QgTH16-2jVXWem-a9yyAz-ai75jg-ai9SE1-25VNJbP-ai75ac-44cRz1-6aZhqo-4aECh1-2jvFhCR

The car park was meant to be a temporary measure, but I clearly remember parking there in the 1990s when my Dad would take me to the Museum on Chambers Street; the University scheme for which it had been cleared never came to fruition. This most wantonly destructive of Edinburgh institutions would not finally build upon the gap site until the 21st century. The final part of the development – the School of Informatics’ Bayes Centre – was opened on the site of Bristo School as recently as 2019. It was perhaps some small consolation that the site was at last returned to educational use again.

Want to read more about Edinburgh’s Lost Board Schools? The next instalment covers Canonmills Public School; where thrift and self-denial were taught

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret

South Bridge Public School; the thread about the ups, downs and uncertain future of an inner-city educational establishment

It was in the news this weekend that there is the potential forced loss of accommodation for long-sitting community groups and public services from Edinburgh’s South Bridge Resource Centre to make way for a new multi-million pound home for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society means that it’s a good time for a thread on the history of what is the former South Bridge Public School itself. This gives us a useful case study of 150 years of inner city social and economic change in the city’s Old Town.

Scotsman, 9th December 2023.

South Bridge Public School was opened by Edinburgh School Board on 2nd November 1886, with the Right Hon. Arthur J. Balfour, then the Secretary of State for Scotland, formally cutting the ribbon. It was designed by the Board’s architect, Robert Wilson, in the Collegiate Gothic style then favoured and cost £7,942 to build, with the total cost of the project including land purchase, staffing etc. being £14,500, which was borrowed from the Scotch Education Department. It had an opening roll of 1,170 children (although not all attended at once); at this time the ESB was falling over itself at this time to build schools to meet the demands of the 1872 act which made Education in Scotland compulsory (but not free!) and a booming inner-city population. It was the first Board school to consist solely of classrooms; prior to this a mixture of school rooms and class rooms had been employed, with various innovative systems of partitions to subdivide spaces as required into smaller teaching spaces. Three infant rooms on the ground floor which could be opened together with partitions, with older children on the first floor.

South Bridge Public School, very much in the collegiate gothic style of the 1870s, but with a modern arrangement of rooms (for 1885) inside

The Head master was Mr Paterson, who transferred from North Canongate School, the head mistress being Miss Brander (also of that establishment), the first assistant Mr Johnston (Canongate too) and the singing-master, Mr Sneddon. The Board also provided evening classes here under Mr Robert Williamson MA, for those seeking personal advancement but also children who could not attend during the day as they were working. As well as a core curriculum, subjects such as shorthand, drawing, bookkeeping etc. were offered to “young men and lads“. Education at this time was segregated (with separate boys and girls classes, playgrounds and school entrances. If you’ve ever been in one of these old Board schools, you’ll know that there’s a curious double arrangement of internal stairs – this was to keep boys and girls separated when moving around the school). Women and girls were offered similar evening classes at this time at Bruntsfield and Torphicen Street schools, and could also take dressmaking, fancy and plain needlework and cookery.

As well as keeping boys and girls apart, the architect struggled to accommodate such a large school on a confined site. This had been bought by the ESB off of the Town Council from the site of the town’s Fever Hospital, which was the original Royal Infirmary building and as well as being constrained by space it was north facing (poor for natural lighting) and hemmed in on all sides which was poor for ventilation.

Comparison (drag the slider) of the 1876 and 1893 OS Town Plans of Edinburgh showing the location of South Bridge School and Infirmaty Street Baths.Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The school was co-located with the Infirmary Street Public Baths, built at the same time, which were the first such public facility in the city (and the only Victorian public bath in Edinburgh not to survive – its empty shell was later re-purposed as the Dovecot Studios). When the school opened, it was ESB‘s first organised purely on the classroom basis. Prior to this, they had used the schoolroom layout, with a small number of large teaching rooms and classes (more like lecture theatres) overseen by a single teacher with help from assistant teachers and “pupil assistants” drawn from the most able of the older students, with smaller rooms off this large space for separated tuition. But just to be sure, the partitions between the classrooms at South Bridge were sliding to allow the spaces to be combined together for this more traditional style of education.

The school was built to relieve overcrowding at the new Bristo (Marshall Street), St. Leonards (Forbes Street) and Causewayside public schools. Milton House and Castlehill schools would also be built in the Old Town in the next decade, allowing most of the older, smaller Heriot Trust schools that the Board had inherited to be closed and sold off. An exception was Davie Street which served the Pleasance district that was retained and expanded as a Board school.

Former Davie Street School, in the distinctive Jacobean style favoured by the Heriot Trust.

The first Headmaster at South Bridge was Mr Paterson, who transferred from North Canongate school, the headmistress Miss Brander (also of that establishment), the first assistant Mr Johnston (Canongate too) and the singing-master, Mr Sneddon (not from Canongate). The school could not keep up with demand and was enlarged in 1892. In 1905-6 an entirely new school was built next door on Drummond Street. for the infant department, with junior schooling staying at South Bridge. The Board’s architect, John Carfrae, used a Renaissance style as favoured in London and exploited the difference in height between Drummond Street and Infirmary Street to make ita full 3 storeys, for reasons of economy.

The close proximity of South Bridge (left) and Drummond Street (right) schools and Infirmary Street Baths between them (now the Dovecot Studios).

In 1907, James Buchanan Tait – aged 13 – received a medal and award for 8 years of perfect attendance at the shool. His older brother William had made it to 9½ years previously and had also received a medal. His sister Marion (11), Robert (9), Christian (7) and Sophia (6) also had perfect attendance at this time. In 1913, his mother recoeved a gold brooch from Dr Shoolbread of the School Board in honour of her eight children’s 60 years total perfect attendance (regarded by the Edinburgh Evening News as a world record). They had also set perfect attendance record at Sunday School and the Good Templar Juvenile lodge. For this, educational publisher George Newnes & Sons of London had presented the family with a crystal clock.

James Buchanan Tait.

The need for education continued to grow in the Old Town and Southside, peaking around 1911 when there were 13 primary schools in the district with a total roll of around 10,000 children (for context, now there are 2 – Royal Mile and Preston Street with a combined roll of 430).

The children of South Bridge came from poor households but were generous. In 1915, they gave concerts raising £27 to sponsor 2 hospital beds in Rouen in France. In 1930 they contributed £20 to the construction of the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion at the Royal Infirmary. In 1943 they contributed £410 for a Wings for Victory wartime savings drive (for reference, a production Spitfire aircraft cost between £9-9,500 at this time). When headmaster Robert H. Tait (no relation to the children with perfect attendance) retired in 1932 after 10 years in charge (and 43 in total teaching), his pupils bought him a walnut writing bureau!. (The teachers presented him with an armchair and the cleaners a smoker’s cabinet).

The retiral of Robert H. Tait in the school playground, 1932

At this time, the combined South Bridge / Drummond Street school was the largest primary school in the city, with 1,271 children on the roll and an annual budget of £12,850. The infant head mistress Catherine M. Watson retired in 1936 after 40 years service, 35 at South Bridge / Drummond Street; Miss Margaret Bliss from Leith Links school replaced her. Tait was replaced by William J. S. Little, vice president of the EIS education union in Scotland. He oversaw the institution of a “Continuation School” at South Bridge, where children leaving Primary education but not destined for Secondary or Higher education could take up classes to prepare them for whatever their futures held.

School leavers at South Bridge School, 1933.

The school celebrated its 50 year jubilee in 1938, the school installed a wireless set to mark the occasion and collected £20 towards the cost of buying a cinema projector. Headmaster Little was very aware of the socio-economic circumstances faced by the pupils at his school and how they impacted their education and life outcomes. He raised this the Justice of the Peace Court in 1938 when it was discussing the approaches to dealing with delinquency. During WW2, the socio-economic conditions faced by pupils became very apparent. In response a welfare committee – the South Bridge School Care Committee – was established in 1941 by Miss Handasyde of the Edinburgh University Settlement. This was modeled on successful schemes in London to look after problems faced by children in the district such as absenteeism, delinquency and nutrition. It is what we might now call a multi-agency partnership, with education, medical and public health professionals working together in an attempt to take the place of the dreaded Attendance Officers.

August 1939, issuing and fitting gas masks to children at South Bridge Primary School.

After the war, despite not having a pitch (or any grass at all!) of their own, the South Bridge School team won the 1949-50 School Board Trophy. Tommy Millar, front right, would go on to played 209 caps at fullback for Dundee United. His brother Jimmy (not shown) scored 91 goals in 197 games for Rangers. Another famous former pupil is the ballet dancer Roddie Patrizio (b. 1969).

1949-50 South Bridge School football team. Back row L-R, Ian Irvine, Davie Williamson, Jimmy Higgins, Alan Mcleod, Bill Robertson, Billy Budge, Ian Christie. Middle row L-R Franny Ferguson, George Brett, Alan Gay, Ernie Lee, Billy Thomson. Front Row L-R Willie Gleming, Tommy Millar (later Dundee United fullback). Teachers L-R are Mr Alexander, Mr Munro, Mr Ross, Mr Stewart.

But the world was changing fast in the Old Town at this time (indeed, it had been since the first big wave of 1920s slum clearances, which had seen five Board primary schools close as they were no longer neccessary, see the table at the bottom of the page for details). In 1951 it was the turn of Castle Hill Primary School to close, becoming a central school of catering and bakery. Most of its pupils displaced to South Bridge, where depopulation already meant that there was surplus capacity there to completely accommodate the roll of the closing school.

Castle Hill Public School, also by Robert Wilson.

In 1952, South Bridge school took part in the first ever Fulbright Scholarship teacher exchange. Elementary school teacher Retta W. Dillon from Noyes, Washington DC, swapped places with Miss Margaret Brownlee from South Bridge. An unusual evening class began to be offered in 1954, when the Edinburgh and District Referees Association opened a school of refereeing!

The school was modernised in 1959 to keep it open – new regulations about toilets meant they now could no longer be outside and all had to be flushing and have hot water for hand washing. This saw some other city schools closed or rebuilt at the time, e.g. Fort Street in Leith. But not even new toilets could stop the forces of urban demographic change. as the inner city continued to be forcably cleared. When South Bridge’s headmaster retired in 1961 he lamented the loss of the “personal touch” of such schools, as communities were dispersed out to the new housing schemes at The Inch and Gracemount. South Bridge, he said, had a reputation as “the Friendly School“.

Clearance at Dumbiedykes in 1959. Within a few years, everything in this photo would be gone. Photo by Adam H. Malcolm, © Edinburgh City Libraries

By 1970 the Drummond Street building was surplus to requirements, so St. Patricks RC school was moved there from St. John’s Hill to allow that district to be cleared. It would close itself just 11 years later (see table at bottom of the page for details).

Drummond Street Infant School, heavily London-influenced inside and out. Even the crowsteps on the gables don’t look Scottish.

During the 1970s, South Bridge School found a new lease of life in the summers when it began to increasingly be used for staging productions at the Festival Fringe – pertinent to the current discussion around its future. When Head Teacher May Beattie left what was now called South Bridge Primary to move to Stockbridge Primary in December 1982, the writing was already on the wall. Not just for her former school, but all of the city’s three remaining Old Town and Southside schools – Lothian Regional Council wanted to shut the lot. Inner city depopulation had proceeded faster than council projections and each school by this point was down to just three composite classes, with fewer than 500 children in schools built with a capacity of over 3,000.

The council’s favoured plan was to shut South Bridge, Milton House and Preston Street and open a “new” school in the old James Clark Technical School (“Jimmy’s“) at St. Leonard’s Hill, saving £80,000 a year. An alternatice scheme offering a lesser reduction of £64,000 could be achieved by merging South Bridge and Milton House and disposing of the James Clark building. This was favoured by the Council’s Labour group and a particularly vociferous campaign against the closure of Preston Street from the parents at that school. It had been intended to close Milton House and move pupils there to South Bridge, but it was recognised that the former school was better located to serve the main centre of population at Dumbiedykes and had a more favourable site in general, so the opposite happened. Statutory notices to this effect were published in November 1982.

November 1982, Statutory Notice announcing Lothian Regional Council’s intent to merge South Bridge and Milton House Schools

And so it was that South Bridge Primary School closed in 1983 and its pupils moved to Milton House on the Canongate. Also a school by Wilson, it was in a red sandstone Scottish Baronial Revival style. The combined new school was renamed to Royal Mile Primary School.

Milton House Public School, now Royal Mile Primary, by Robert Wilson

The last day at Infirmary Street came in May 1983. Pupil Murray Ramsay ceremonially rang the school’s hand bell for the last time. Six year old Sally Atta was overcome at the occasion and had to be comforted by Headteacher Mrs Sturgeon.

Last day at South Bridge Primary School, resale samples from National World

But while it closed as a school, that was not the end of education at South Bridge – Lothian Regional Council reopened it as the South Bridge Resource Centre to serve various outreach services, adult education, youth groups and more. The Old Town Oral History and Old Town Community Development projects moved in, as did the Canongate Youth Project, which has been there since 1984 and is the primary occupant of the building. Various other community and educational projects have come and gone, but the City of Edinburgh Council’s Adult education service are still run from here.

Amendments were put forward by the council’s Green group (and I believe, approved) to make any such changes contingent on first securing the position of the sitting organisations, but news this last week suggests this has not happened (see first paragraph!) But one thing certainly has a precedent – once such buildings are lost from community and education use, they don’t go back to it. The table below shows the fate of all the Old Town and South Side schools since 1911. You can make up your own mind whether or not you think agreeing to such handovers behind closed doors before publicly consulting on the future of resident organisations and coming up with a plan or any money to facilitate that is the right way to do things.

SchoolRoll (1911)Closure as Primary SchoolFate of building after closurePreston Street863––St Leonard’s (Forbes Street)10421932Became James Clark School annexe. Demolished after 1972 closure of latterDavie Street6451918Became James Clark School annexe then Theatre Arts Centre, then converted to flatsBristo (Marshall Street)7921934Became Technical School, then part of Heriot Watt College. Later demolishedCausewaysidec. 7201940Became St. Columba’s R.C. 1925, later School Meals Centre, demolished 1965Drummond Street7001981Became St. Patrick’s R.C. 1970. Converted to flats after 1981South Bridge9491983Education / community useSt. Patrick’s R.C. for boys² (St. John’s Hill)4551970DemolishedSt. Ann’s R.C. for girls² (Cowgate)9091956Education / community useCastlehill700*1951Became Central School Of Bakery and Catering, closed 1970. Later Scotch Whisky CentreMilton House (renamed Royal Mile, 1983)1100*––North Canongate (Infants, Cranston Street)700*1938DemolishedNew Street (Juniors, New Street)730*1938“Venchy” community use, now Brewdog HotelMoray House Demonstration School4791968Thomson’s Land, Part of Moray House School of Education* = these are capacities, rather than actual rolls.
² = note that at this time, Roman Catholic schools were not part of the School Board system

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret

Two different visions of secondary education: the thread about the origins of Tynecastle and Boroughmuir Schools

This thread starts with a picture taken of the former Tynecastle School on McLeod Street – it was moved to new buildings further down the same street in 2010. It was built by the Edinburgh School Board from 1910-12 to the designs of their architect John A. Carfrae. This was what was known as a Continuation or Supplementary School i.e. continuing education beyond the statutory limit, or gaining supplementary education in specialist subjects. Such schools were later known as Junior Secondaries. It was to provide a “technical and clerical” education for 1,200 children in the Gorgie and Dalry area. This was meant those who didn’t pass their qualification (Quali) exams at the age of 11 for Higher Grade school, which at this time were schools offering the “Intermediate Certificate” to prepare students for going on to professional vocations and for a few perhaps, University.

Former Tynecastle School © Self

Such schools were the beginning of a specialisation in secondary education for many children into more technical, career-focussed education. Previously most would had stayed on until the age of 14 (13 until 1901) and been taught a largely academic curriculum in a non-specialist school; the brighter or better off being able to attend the Royal High School or one of the endowed schools such as James Gillespie’s, George Heriot’s or those of the Merchant Company for a “proper” secondary education. Tynecastle was one of three schools planned at the same time and was the first built. The two others would follow later as the James Clark School at St. Leonard’s and Bellevue School (at Bellevue, now called Drummond High School), as the School Board sought to greatly increase this sort of provision.

These schools were aimed at working class children who aspired to pick up particular specialist trades or to enter a clerical rather than a strictly manual occupation. Tynecastle was built to a fairly strict budget and instead of the traditional stonework, it was built almost entirely of brick, most of which was hidden behind harling to greatly reduce the cost; facing brick, which was more expensive to produce and for which Scotland did not have a large supply of skilled bricklayers, was saved only for detailing. The use of external landings to give access to classrooms was very of its time; there was a real concern about the spread of infectious diseases, particularly tuberculosis, and huge efforts were being made in school design to try and deal with it. It also reduced costs as internal corridors were not required.

Children from 11-14 were taught at Tynecastle when it opened, with evening and weekend classes for older children or adults. There was a strict separation of the sexes, with academic lessons taught in the main building and the practical skills being taught in workshops to the rear of the quadrangle. As such they could not be seen from the road so were “given Spartan treatment” architecturally.

Former workshop block at Tynecastle

The school opened with only 12 classes, for 500 boys, in the spring of 1912, fully opening on November 12th 1912, the ceremony being performed by the Rt. Hon. Alexander Ure, Lord Advocate. Within a few years, 25 classes were occupied and there was a roll of 790 boys and girls. Subjects on offer included woodworking, plumbing, cobbling, hairdressing, engineering, plastering, laundry, sewing, cooking, trade blouse-making, millinery, dressmaking and housewifery. A speciality of Tynecastle was motor body building.

Woodworking, for boysLaundry, for girlsMetal casting, for boysCookery, for girlsPictures of children at Tynecastle School, c. 1912, from Edinburgh at Work by Malcolm Cant

Schools like Tynecastle can directly be compared and contrasted to their far more lavishly finished and appointed Higher Grade contemporaries; where you went if you passed your Quali. For this district of Edinburgh this meant Boroughmuir (the only other School Board Higher Grade schools at this time being Broughton and Portobello). Coincidentally, at the same time that Tynecastle was being built, Boroughmuir was being rebuilt, also to the designs of Carfrae.

Former Boroughmuir School, CC-by-SA 4.0 StephenCDickson

Although it still made use of some harling and brick on the façade to lower costs, the lower floors were in traditional stone and it was heavily ornamented with pilasters, finials and even a corner tower. Where Tynecastle had a single 3,200 square foot hall that doubled as as gymnasium, Boroughmuir was built with *two* dedicated gymnasia, each of that size. Tynecastle was built with “spray baths for the benefit of dirty children” – Boroughmuir most definitely was not. With regards Tynecastle, never before had the Board “been so economical over school buildings“. Boroughmuir in contrast was slated as “the last word in public school building“.

This was not the first grand Boroughmuir School however; the now venerable institution had a faltering start to life. It was built as a brand new school in the Free Renaissance style reminiscent of London board schools (again to Carfrae’s plans) . It was opened with much civic pride in 1904 on Bruntsfield Links, this is the building referred to by Muriel Spark as “the school on the Links.“

The original Boroughmuir School building

Just 6 years later however, the same changes to the structure of Higher Education that resulted in the School Board building Tynecastle caused a significant reduction in class sizes at the Higher Schools and removal of many of the “supplementary” subjects from their curriculum meant that the classrooms of the new Boroughmuir were far too big, its facilities for specialised teaching (art, music, etc.) were sorely lacking and it had other facilities and workshops that were not required. To right those wrongs, a whole new school was built! The same Evening News article reporting on the business of the Edinburgh School Board on April 15th 1910 announced both the new Boroughmuir school and the school that would become Tynecastle.

“Proposed New Higher Grade School”. Edinburgh Evening News, April 15th 1910

In a curious twist of fate, the newest Boroughmuir High School, completed in 2018, was built too small and was in need of extending before it was even opened.

“New Boroughmuir School is already too small.” BBC News website, July 18th 2018

The original school did not lie vacant, it was occupied by the James Gillespie’s School (which at this time was a selective, endowed school, and not a Board school, but confusingly was administered by the School Board). Here it stayed until the 1960s when a reorganisation of education saw Gillespie’s formally join the state comprehensive system and move to a purpose built new school nearby in the grounds of Bruntsfield House. Boroughmuir reoccupied their old building as a junior annexe. More recently it was sold to the University of Edinburgh who converted it into student halls of residence.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

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Political sectarianism and redoubtable mothers: the thread about the Sciennes School Strike of 1925

As often seems to happen, I start off reading a little bit about one thing and then fall unwittingly yet compliantly down a deep rabbit hole with all kinds of unexpected tangents. So let’s unravel a bit of the Sciennes School Strike of 1925.

Sciennes, if you don’t know, is a neighbourhood in Edinburgh. You pronounce it to rhyme with machines (it’s a Scottish corruption of Sienna, after a convent that long ago stood here) and it is home to a school of the same name. To get to the root of our story we go back to 1872, when the Education (Scotland) Act of that year brought responsibility for mandatory schooling in Scotland under the control of local School Boards. For the Burgh of the City of Edinburgh (the formal name of the city) this was the Edinburgh School Board.

The roundel of the Edinburgh School Board, “the female figure of education” dispensing knowledge to the young. Dean Public School, one of the ESB’s first new schools after the 1872 act. © Self

Most of the existing schools at that time were either church, parish or charitably provided and those of the Presbyterian churches (that is the majority of all churches in Scotland at that time) and parishes were transferred directly to the School Boards. Most of these facilities were too small and found to be inadequate as teaching spaces for modern methods, so a crash building programme was initiated. Sciennes School was a product of this program, completed in 1892. Other public schools in the Southside of Edinburgh at the time included the 1877 Bristo School on the long demolished part of Marshall Street, Causewayside School on that street and later Preston Street school of 1896 on the east part of that street.

Sciennes Primary School, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Stephencdickson

Board schools, while largely Protestant in outlook, were strictly speaking non-denominational and there was no direct church control (although the churches had a reserved seat in the board’s membership). Crucially to what would happen in the future though, Catholic schools were not covered by the 1872 act and remained in control of that church, with the Scottish Episcopal Church also choosing to remain independent at this time, fearing the erosion of their denominational, religious education. To provide for a Catholic education in central Edinburgh therefore that Church set up a school, St. Columba’s. It moved around a bit, repeatedly outgrowing a series of unsuitable premises, before settling in a converted townhouse at 81 Newington Road. You can still see where the sign once was.

81 Newington Road, you can see where the sign would have been above the central window.

Edinburgh’s Catholic population was growing quite rapidly at the time with immigration into the city centre from both Ireland and Italy. And then came the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act, which brought the Catholic schools into control of the state sector, with the School Boards rationalised into larger local Education Authorities, with wider responsibilities. Like the old School Board, the Edinburgh Education Authority (EEA) was directly elected by popular ballot and was outwith direct control of the City Corporation or any church; although a system of proportional representation meant a balance of Presbyterian, Episcopal and Catholic members had reserved places on its board. The new authority was unimpressed by the size and quality of the facilities it had inherited off the R. C. Church (actually, it bought them off them under the provisions of the 1918 act) so set about trying to find a better home for St. Columba’s.

The post-WW1 economic slump meant there wasn’t the money to go around to build a new school – particularly a minority school – so the EEA looked to rationalise its public schools in the Southside, which it found had an excess of capacity, and make one of them into a new Catholic school. The plan seemed simple enough; move St. Columba’s to the half-empty Causewayside School and transfer that school’s roll to Sciennes, Bristo or Preston Street schools, whichever alternative was closest to children’s homes.

Causewayside School, architectural elevation by Robert Rowand Anderson, which would later become St. Columba’s

After the numbers were crunched, 154 children were to be relocated from Causewayside to Sciennes, 101 to Preston Street and 66 to Bristo. 291 children were to transfer in turn from St. Columba’s into its new home and 81 Newington Road would be disposed of. All simple enough and making better use of the Authority’s resources, so it should be relatively uncontroversial administrative change, yes?

No. What happened next was the emergent Scottish Protestant League decided to wade into things and try and make it a wedge issue – stirred up in part by local lawyer, political dabbler and green inker, Robert Sterling Craig Esq SSC, known as Sterling Craig. Sterling Craig was nominally a Liberal and therefore opposed to any place for religious education in schools, but it seems clear from his writing and speaking on the subject that he also had a clear anti-Catholic bent. When the Authority announced its decision towards the end of the school term in June 1924 he and a local parish councillor, Mrs Inglis Clark, organised a public meeting in protest “in the strongest way“.

What followed next was a rather predictable series of conflicting arguments by Sterling Craig and Clark, which began to descend into the disingenuous, e.g. the alternatives would be too far, causing 2 or 3 mile walks to school (Sciennes and Preston Street were less than 500m away). The EEA was accused of inflating the roll of St. Columba’s by “stuffing” it with children from the Catholic Home (an orphanage), a claim the Authority flat out denied: they claimed 477 children were being displaced – the Authority said it was 321. Sterling Craig simultaneously claimed that Causewayside was a non-denominational school (it was) but also “Protestant” (it wasn’t, although likely much of the school roll was). His loud and authoritative voice drowned out the views and representations of the parents and children impacted by this. He had previously sat on the Edinburgh School Board and was standing for the upcoming Edinburgh Education Authority election and decided to make this issue a key plank of his campaign. His letters to the Scotsman refer to “the Roman Catholics” and “the Roman Catholic Children” in a very othering tone – they are quite unpleasant to read in places with retrospect.

Sterling Craig was upset that a “central” school (i.e. one serving a wide rather than strictly local catchment) was being located in the Southside of the city; that children would be bused-in (actually, trammed) at the Authority’s expense and that they would be given school meals at the EEA‘s expense (at this time most school children went home for their lunch time) – despite these all being provisions in line with the 1918 act and therefore a legal obligation for the authority. To boil his arguments down to a single sentence, they would be: I’m not anti-Catholic, but can’t they just go some place else? To this extent he suggested wholly inadequate facilities at Old St. Patrick’s in the Canongate (the Authority pointed out that they didn’t own these and so would have to buy and renovate them at its own expense). It was all very not from round here and he and his allies in Mrs Inglis Clark and others began to go rather seriously down the route of sectarian scaremongering. However the EEA, to its credit, stuck to its plans and even managed to get most of the parents would would be impacted by the changes on side. The nay-sayers were not placated however and together with the nascent Scottish Protestant League (SPL) under Alexander Ratcliffe and a number of local Presbyterian churchmen, they organised a “Great Protestant Rally” at the Livingstone Hall on South Clerk Street in January 1925, which was attended by around 500.

Advert for the Great Protestant Rally, Edinburgh Evening News, 3rd January 1925

The meeting denounced the Education Authority as “traitors” and as a result the SPL – which claimed itself apolitical – and Sterling Craig agreed on a platform of trying to take over the Education Authority at the upcoming elections and campaign for repeal those provisions of the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act that they disliked; namely the state provision of R. C. education. Sterling Craig’s words were reported as “the only thing that prevented ‘the Catholics’ walking back to St. Columba’s and the old school going back to Causewayside was the laziness of the ratepayers” (if only people would turn out and vote for him, he would sort it out).

1935 reprint of The Protestant Advocate in Ratcliffe’s own newspaper, the Protestant Vanguard

In case you didn’t realise it by the way – 1920s and 30s Edinburgh local politics was quite a hotbed of anti-Catholicism. The Protestant League stood seven candidates in the 1925 Authority election, Sterling Craig stood himself as an independent. Just one of the those candidates – Alexander Ratcliffe (who styled himself “Scotland’s Modern John Knox” and went as far as to refer in public to St. Columba’s as “the now misnamed St. Columba’s“) – was elected, as was Sterling Craig. Ratcliffe soon turned his ire to the opening of a Carmelite Convent in the city before getting altogether a bit bored of Edinburgh local politics. He would move to Glasgow where he made some inroads with the SPL in that Corporation’s elections of 1931, exploiting and stoking that city’s long-standing sectarian tensions. In Edinburgh it was to be the Protestant Action Society under John Cormack that would later take up the anti-Catholic political mantle. As a party held together purely by a common hatred, it was inevitable that the SPL would eventually become unstable. It split with the Ulster Protestant League in 1933 when Ratcliffe’s wife Mary and another SPL member attacked and defaced a (factually correct) painting in the Northern Irish parliament that showed the Pope celebrating William of Orange’s victory at the Boyne

William III, the Duke of Schomberg, and the Pope (top left, blessing the Protestant monarch from a cloud), by Pieter van der Meulen, c. 1690

After falling out with the UPL, the SPL itself fell apart due to irreconcilable internal divisions. The Scottish protestant mainstream distanced itself from the increasingly extremist and unpredictable Alexander Ratcliffe. The man who had started his political life at the Edinburgh Education Authority moved on to dabbling with the Scottish fascists, who in turn kicked him out as being too extreme for even them. He has been described as “one of the very first Holocaust deniers in the country and perhaps even the world“. He was an extreme anti-Catholic and anti-Semite to his core who thought that Hitler and Mussolini were in league with the Pope to smash Protestantism… This conflicting and thoroughly distasteful man died at his home in Glasgow in 1947.

A wartime anti-Semitic pamphlet issued by Alexander Ratcliffe

But back to Edinburgh and back to 1925, when St Columba’s opened its doors after the summer holidays, the former pupils of Causewayside School instead made their way to Sciennes, Preston Street and Bristo schools. How did this end up in a strike? Well what happened was that – in true local authority style – after winning parents over to its controversial plans the Education Authority went back on its assurances and rightly aggrieved a lot of parents. Sciennes, it said, was actually too full and so 150 or so children who had just recently been settled in at Sciennes would instead need to go to Bristo School.

Bristo Public School on Marshall Street. © Edinburgh City Libraries

This poured salt on a wound that had not yet had any chance to heal and the mothers of the Southside were having none of it. Official phraseology such as “arriving at a more equitable distribution of scholars” just made things even worse. The problem was not just the repeated relocation of children, it was where they were to be moved to. Bristo was notoriously small and dark and dingy on the inside and as you can see from the aerial photo below it had a tiny playground that was penned in on all sides by tall tenements. Furthermore, it was fundamentally on the wrong side of the (tram) tracks for many parents.

Bristo Public School from the air – it is the building in the centre with the flat roof to the rear and the corner tower. You can see how penned in the playground at the back was, and how many of the school windows were in the shadow of neighbouring tenements. From Britain From Above

Without the distraction of Sterling Craig or Mrs Inglis Clark and their anti-Catholic agenda, the mothers of the affected children quickly formed themselves into an effective deputation to the Education Authority. They literally marched strait there and beat on the door – turning up at its offices on Castle Terrace on September 2nd 1925 to demand an audience. For good measure, a flying squad was also send to the home of the Authority’s chairman – Councillor P. H. Allan – to wait for him in case he was there. When it became clear that the Authority was not for budging the mothers organised a public meeting on September 4th, packing out the Nicolson Square public hall. Councillor Mrs Adam Millar tried to cool things down but only inflamed the situation by saying it was not the Authority’s fault but the fault of parents as they had voted for the same EEA (or hadn’t bothered; turnout for the previous election was only around 20%). At the meeting the mothers of around 110 of the affected children agreed to stop sending them to school entirely if they could not send them to Sciennes. The Sciennes School Strike had begun.

Councillor P. H. Allan, Chairman of the Education Authority

On September 8th it was reported there were rumours that the strike would spread as a result of some children from Craiglockhart, Roseburn and Gorgie schools being dispersed to Dalry in the name of a “more equitable distribution of scholars“. The strike did not end up spreading but neither did it go away. The Authority tried to offer an olive branch and say children from the Buccleuch Street area could stay at Sciennes, however those from George Square would still have to go to Bristo. Whether this attempt at strikebreaking was a deliberate ploy to divide and conquer their opposition is unclear, but it failed. By September 15th, the 3rd week of the strike, it was still ongoing with 55 children remaining out of school. The mothers caused uproar in the Authority board room by turning up en masse with their children in tow and “infants in their arms“. But they did have sympathisers on the Authority and Mrs Swan Brunton* spoke out in their favour. At a deadlock, the Authority did what Authorities do best when they don’t know what to do and conceded to set up a Special Sub-Committee on School Congestion to look into the matter further.

Janet Swan Brunton 1882 – 1932. * = The redoubtable Mrs Swan Brunton JP, a suffragette of the Scottish Cooperative Women’s Guild. In 1928 she became only the 5th woman elected to the Corporation of Edinburgh, as a Labour member. She died suddenly in 1932 aged 50, in Glasgow at a meeting of the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society, and was buried in North Merchiston Cemetery

September 21st. No resolution was in sight, 58 children were on strike from Sciennes and in total 86 across the city were. On September 24th the Scotsman reported that the Education Authority declared the strike had been broken and most of the children had returned to the schools it had allocated them to. The next day, September 25th, they had to print something of a retraction; the children had not in fact gone back to school and were still on strike. At a public meeting of ratepayers it had been agreed that a general strike of children should be called for in the Central District. Come September 26th the Authority remained unmoved, issuing a statement that it had acted in accordance with its statutory obligations and that if the 42 children on strike were not sent to school then they would start taking legal action to enforce it. But still the strike was not broken and so one month into the walkout, on October 6th, the Authority held an exceptional meeting. Mrs Swan Brunton implored her colleagues to use their common sense and allow the 40 children to go back to Sciennes as they had been promised, with Mrs Mclaren speaking in support. Unfortunately, Mrs Swan Brunton’s motion, seconded by Mrs Mclaren, was voted down. Alexander Ratcliffe blamed the Catholics as usual.

October 14th, five weeks in and the strike dragged on. It was suggested at an Authority meeting that if only the Corporation would repave the street outside Bristo School with wooden setts that the noise of traffic that affected it would be reduced sufficiently to entice the strikers to attend. Chairman Allan tried to force through a resolution to this effect but Mrs Swan Brunton challenged the count on the grounds that it had not reached a quorum of three quarters of members. She prevailed this time and the meeting then collapsed into farce and had to be adjourned. The Authority tried again the next week. One typically bureaucratic proposal that came out of this was to set up yet another sub-committee – the Special Committee on School Areas. Alexander Ratcliffe yet again agitated against “the Catholics” and also this time the Episcopalians, supported by Sterling Craig as seconder. It was agreed to set up the sub-committee and spent the rest of the meeting was spent listening to the extremist ramblings of Ratcliffe .

Eight weeks in on October 26th another meeting was held by the Education Authority. It lasted precisely two minutes before again collapsing into chaos when the chairman over-rode Mrs Swan Brunton’s motion for resolution. He left to the mothers in the gallery crying “Shame!” November 2nd. Week 9. The Chairman called a private meeting restricted to a sub-set of members of the Authority, with the mothers forced to wait outside the offices. The Authority could not bring itself to publicly concede but fundamentally capitulated when it agreed that the 46 children who had been moved from Sciennes to Bristo could instead have their pick of Castlehill, Preston Street, Tollcross or St. Leonard’s schools.

Castlehill School, now offering a very different sort of education as the Scotch Whisky Experience

The mothers decided as one that they would send their children to Preston Street. They were true to their word, and 37 mothers and 46 children arrived at the school door the very next day, November 3rd, exactly 2 months from the start of the strike. The strike was over. Almost: the Authority meeting had ended so late in the day that nobody had bothered to write to the Headteacher at Preston Street to inform them of the decision! The school refused to admit the children and sent them away. It was not until November 4th that the Head was satisfied with the paperwork and the children were admitted to Preston Street School. The Great Sciennes School Strike of 1925 was finally over.

Preston Street School, CC-BY-SA Kim Traynor

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.

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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret