#leith — Public Fediverse posts

And here's a closer zoom - you can see these enormous wind farm structures sitting on a huge ship, ready to be taken offshore
https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/55259592330/in/photostream/lightbox/

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #GreenEnergy #WindFarm #Leith #LeithDocks #Ship #Beateau #Engineering

Looking towards Leith and the Forth, from Calton Hill
https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/55259331743/in/photostream/lightbox/

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #architecture #Leith #CItyscape #CaltonHill #BlackAndWhitePhotography

🌤️  Good morning Edinburgh. Wednesday’s headlines: £15.5m to tackle homelessness, victory for campaign against Shore holiday flats, Tollcross clock to return, Water of Leith camera warning + local mum wins lunch with George Clooney

⏰ Read today’s newsletter: https://www.edinburghminute.com/the-edinburgh-minute-wednesday-29-april-2026/

Photo by: @TomDuffinPhotos

#edinburgh #leith #scotland

Brown’s of Leith / Timber Bush.

#leith #edinburgh #scotland #photography #FensterFreitag

Review: Ernest & Bob, a hamburger restaurant on Leith Walk

Ernest & Bob has become a cornerstone of the Leith Walk food scene and one of those locations…
#Edinburgh #UnitedKingdom #UK #GB #Scotland #Headlines #News #Europe #EU #Britain #Burgers #ernest&bob #GreatBritain #Leith #LeithWalk
https://www.europesays.com/uk/905538/

https://www.europesays.com/uk/905538/ Review: Ernest & Bob, a hamburger restaurant on Leith Walk #Britain #Burgers #Edinburgh #Ernest&Bob #GreatBritain #Leith #LeithWalk #Scotland #UK #UnitedKingdom

Towering
https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/55130898449/in/photostream/lightbox/

Huge, bright yellow engineering structures in Leith Docks, so tall they're clearly visible from #Portobello Beach. I've seen others posting recent pics of huge structures there that are part of an offshore wind farm, wonder if these are related?

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #Portobello #PortobelloBeach #Engineering #Leith #LeithDocks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Review: Ella – Taste of Greece on Leith Walk

My first visit to Ella – Taste of Greece coincided with a trip to the nearby Leith Arches market. Situated conveniently on Leith Walk, this Greek bistro immediately catches the eye. It presents a facade of artistic dilapidation …
#dining #cooking #diet #food #mediterranean #MediterraneanDiet #MediterraneanFood #Greek #leith #leithwalk #Mediterranean #mediterraneanfood
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2420439/review-ella-taste-of-greece-on-leith-walk/

Review: Ella – Taste of Greece on Leith Walk https://www.diningandcooking.com/2420439/review-ella-taste-of-greece-on-leith-walk/ #Greek #leith #LeithWalk #Mediterranean #MediterraneanFood

Review: La Casa, Leith Walk

La Casa is a well-established Mediterranean restaurant on the bustling stretch of Leith Walk. With a sister restaurant in Dalry, this Leith location has become a reliable fixture for those seeking a casual, lively tapas meal. It’s a spot I was fir…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #mediterranean #MediterraneanDiet #MediterraneanFood #lacasa #leith #leithwalk #Mediterranean #mediterraneanfood #solo #tapas
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2363340/review-la-casa-leith-walk/

Review: La Casa, Leith Walk

La Casa is a well-established Mediterranean restaurant on the bustling stretch of Leith Walk. With a sister restaurant in Dalry, this Leith location has become a reliable fixture for those seeking a casual, lively tapas meal. It’s a spot I was first introduced to via an Itison vou…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #MediterraneanFood #lacasa #leith #leithwalk #Mediterranean #mediterraneanfood #solo #tapas
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2363340/review-la-casa-leith-walk/

Review: La Casa, Leith Walk https://www.diningandcooking.com/2363340/review-la-casa-leith-walk/ #LaCasa #leith #LeithWalk #Mediterranean #MediterraneanFood #solo #tapas

Waiting for Dixy https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/54680610946/in/dateposted/

Dixy takeaway at night, Leith Walk

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #EdinburghByNight #NightPhotography #photography #photographie #Leith #LeithWalk #takeaway

Leith Walk after dark

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #EdinburghByNight #NightPhotography #Photographie #photography #LeithWalk #Leith #UrbanNight

Down by the docks https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/54383107959/in/dateposted/

Vessels moored in Leith Docks, with the vertical distillery building in the background

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #boat #ship #bateau #Leith #PortOfLeith #LeithDocks

Ship loading at #Leith Docks https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/54353125703/in/photostream/

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #LeithDocks #Docks #PortOfLeith #Industrial #Ship #Boat #Bateau

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Just noticed today that the Boundary Bar has returned ☺️
#leithwalk
#edinburgh
#leith

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

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

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

Please help by completing at the link above!

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

The Palace at the Foot of the Walk: the thread about the many lives of an early cinema

The Foot of the Walk pub in Leith has been in the news recently as its owner has put it on the market for sale, to much local indignation. These premises first opened on 1st January 1913 as The Palace cinema (in reference to the term “Picture Palace“, which was in use at the time to differentiate the upper end of the cinema market from the lower), showing a programme of illustrated nursery rhymes, a film about a gang of horse thieves and other “pictures of a humorous kind, which were greatly appreciated“. The cinema, as built, had a proscenium 32 feet wide by 22 feet high which gave it the largest screen in all of Edinburgh or Leith. It had a capacity for 2,000; 900 in the pit, 650 in the pit stalls and 450 in the upper gallery and a feature was that both the roof and balcony were cantilevered, with no supporting pillars to get in the way of the view of the screen. Great attention was paid to fire safety; the Brackliss Motiograph projector was installed behind the auditorium, within fireproof walls, there were 8 emergency exits from the auditorium and lighting was electric, rather than gas.

It cost the Leith Public Hall & Property Co. around £20,000 to build (around £1.8 million in 2023) and was part of a syndicate of cinemas controlled by theatre impresario Robert Colburn (“RC”) Buchanan; a man described by Scottish Cinema journal at that time as being gifted to the trade “by the gods“. Buchanan was for a time the managing director of the Gaiety theatre in Leith, which stood on th opposite side of Constitution Street from The Palace. The latter site had long been the premises of Bell, Rannie & Co., one of Leith’s longest established wine merchants, where brothers Robert and John Cockburn served their apprenticeships.

A fire at Bell, Rannie & Co.’s George Street shop in 1910 led to the sale of their Constitution Street warehouse and offices. It was briefly thereafter occupied by the Rev. John Findlater and the Leith Methodist Church, which had recently become homeless after its church across the road was demolished to allow the construction of Leith Central Station. Shortly after this, it too was cleared, to make way for the cinema which was built on top of Bell & Rannie’s old vaults.

The cinema was surrounded at ground floor level with shop units on both Constitution and Duke Streets and at this time the opportunity was taken for the former street to be widened and a corresponding portion of the latter narrowed, to improve the road layout at the Foot of the Walk. Upstairs, on the Duke Street side, there was a hall that was long occupied by the Leith Central Snooker Club.

One thing that wasn’t included in the demolition and rebuilding was an adjoining bonded warehouse, the property of Cockburn & Campbell, wine merchants at 15 Duke Street. This sad looking, long-abandoned old building is actually one of the oldest in this part of Leith – dating from at least 1804!

The Palace was designed around showing two programmes every night, at 7PM and 9PM, and so was laid out internally such that one audience could enter through the foyer while previous one exited through separate doors onto Duke and Constitution street, without any mutual disruption. The advert below shows the opening week’s programme, which described the venue as “a Lordly Picture House. The Largest. The Latest. The Best.“

The opening feature – “A Race For An Inheritance” (A Drama rushing from sensation to sensation) – was a Gaumont film that had only recently been released.

This wasn’t the only “Palace” cinema in the neighbourhood, there was Pringle’s Picture Palace at the other end of The Walk on Elm Row and they were joined by the Empire Picture Palace on Henderson Street in 1917. Further afield there was the St. Bernard’s Picture Palace in Stockbridge, which opened in 1911, The Palace on Princes Street, which opened on Christmas Eve 1913 and the New Palace on the High Street that opened for talkies in 1929. The Leith Palace was wired for sound in September 1930 to allow it to join that latest cinema craze. In 1931 the Cimarron with Richard Dix and Irene Dunne was one of the first such pictures being shown. Alterations were made at this time by renowned cinema (and roadhouse!) architect Thomas Bowhill Gibson, whose work includes the Dominion in Morningside and former George / County in Portobello. These may have included removal of the tower over the entrance that is seen in the first picture on this page.

The Palace quietly prospered in the 1930s and 1940s, although eclipsed by newer and larger and more modern houses (such as The Capitol on Manderston Street and The State on Great Junction Street, it remained popular. However by the 1960s, like many smaller houses it was beginning to struggle to compete with television and closed without ceremony on December 31st 1966, 53 years to the day since it opened, showing The Trouble With Angels starring Rosalind Russell and Hayley Mills.

The cinema went on the market and was purchased by new owners, Norwich Enterprises Ltd, trading as Palace Promotions. It was shortly thereafter converted to serve the new craze of bingo, still under the Palace name. A fire in 1968 destroyed most of the auditorium roof of the building on March 24th 1968, fortunately some hours after the 1,000 patrons who had been playing had gone home. It was repaired thereafter and soon back in business.

In 1978 the Bingo hall closed and was replaced by Cuemasters Snooker and Social Club and in turn the long established Leith Central Snooker Club upstairs closed in 1983. In 1992 a small church called “The Potters House” moved in to the latter space.

The old cinema was refurbished and reopened as the Wetherspoon pub The Foot of the Walk on 27th June 2001. Few of the original features are visible inside, but if you use your imagination you can get a rough idea of the original layout. The upper balcony still exists, hidden away, with its seats, carpets and wall coverings as they were when the last film was shown in 1966. You can view pictures of it here on the excellent Scottish Cinemas website. After over 20 years of security in the guise of a cheap, cheerful and popular watering hole, its future is once again uncertain. In its life it has spent 53 years as a cinema, 12 years as a bingo hall, 23 years as a snooker hall and a further 23 as a public house; like many former cinemas it has now spent longer not being a cinema than the time it spent serving its intended purpose.

As for the name “Foot of the Walk“? It’s a name for this locality that’s as old as postal directories are in Edinburgh and Leith, appearing in Peter Williamson’s first directories in the 1770s. And we can push it back 40 years more in the newspapers, an advert for one of the first houses built here appearing in the Caledonian Mercury on January 4th 1737.

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Redemption in Leith: the thread about HMS Cossack

The neat, well kept war graves at Seafield Cemetery include 5 men from the destroyer HMS Cossack, who lost their lives in an accident at sea on November 7th 1939, when their ship collided with the Leith steamer Borthwick off the Isle of May.

The protagonists in this accident were the Cossack, one of the Navy’s big, new “Tribal class” destroyers: two and a half thousand tons of guns and torpedoes which could cut through the sea at 36 knots (over 40mph).

The other was the George Gibson & Co. steamer Borthwick, a ship built and owned in Leith which plied the North Sea on the Antwerp and Rotterdam route. She was much smaller than the big warship’,; over 100 feet shorter, about 1/4 her displacement and barely capable of double digit speeds on her single steam engine which had an output 1/300th of that of Cossack.

It was a dark winter night on the Firth of Forth and ships were showing only the bare minimum of navigation lights. The Borthwick and Cossack were on a parallel course, heading east off the Isle of May, with the destroyer overtaking the little steamer when, for reasons of his own, Captain Daniel De Pass of the Cossack turned across the path of Borthwick. De Pass had a bit of a reputation for poor seamanship, having done something like this before on pre-war exercises. The outcome was inevitable, the bows of the Borthwick cutting into the side of Cossack, right into the seamen’s mess where the men were just sitting down to dinner. Three men died where they sat. Able Seaman Heatherley and Ordinary Seaman Clarke were pulled into the cold, dark North Sea as the water rushed in to their compartment, never to be seen again. Three more men were seriously injured (Ordinary Seaman Clifford Harmer would be invalided out of the Navy with a hand injury) and those in the mess below were trapped for an hour, up to their necks in water. Their ship limped back to Leith for extensive repairs, the men boarded in the Seamen’s Mission. In an interview in 2005, a survivor – Trevor Tipping – pointed out the steel plate of the ship was only 3/8 inch thick and “folded back, like a sardine tin” when the collision happened.

The repairs – by Leith shipyard Henry Robb – took almost 2 months and cost £11,250 (£504k in 2023). Captain De Pass faced a Board of Inquiry, which put him 75% at fault. He was court martialled, relieved of his command and posted away elsewhere before taking retirement. His replacement was the dashing yet thoroughly competent Captain Philip Vian.

The men of Cossack, cooling their heels in Leith while their ship was repaired, raised a subscription to fund a memorial stoner to their lost shipmates out of their own pockets. It was erected in Seafield cemetery, and is situated by the Cossack war graves.

The Borthwick was patched up and soon back on the dangerous Leith to Holland route. She was sunk 4 months later – on March 9th 1940 – by the German submarine U-14 off the River Scheldt, on her way home from Rotterdam to Leith. All 21 on board survived and were picked up. The newspapers celebrated on 11th March when news reached home that the men of the Borthwick had all been landed safely in Flushing.

Cossack did not leave Leith until 10th January, but was back 3 days later for more repairs after an embarrassing – but fortunately minor – collision with the cable laying ship Royal Scot in Leith Roads. She left again, returning to the 4th Destroyer Flotilla with Captain Vian now installed in command. But she wouldn’t be gone long and would return with the month. This time should would be an international hero, the victor of the daring “Altmark Incident“, a swashbuckling tale that can always do with retelling.

On the face of it, Altmark was a humble German merchant ship. In reality, she was a supply tanker for the Kriegsmarine – the German Navy – and had on board almost 300 British and Allied prisoners, merchant seamen whose ships had been sunk by the “pocket battleship” commerce raider Admiral Graf Spee in the South Atlantic.

The Graf Spee had been scuttled just off Montevideo after the Royal Navy had cornered her into a fight in the Battle of the River Plate on December 17th – while Cossack was laid up in a Leith drydock undergoing repairs. Before the battle she had transferred most of her prisoners to her supply ship, which was heading back to Germany. Conditions on board caused the British press to call her a “hell ship” and a “floating concentration camp“.

Captain Dau of the Altmark intended to sneak back home by hugging the coasts of the (then) neutral Greenland, Iceland and Norway. He had almost made it when, on Feb. 15th, reconnaissance aircraft out of RAF Leuchars spotted her in Norwegian waters off Bergen. The British destroyers HMS Ivanhoe and Intrepid from Vian’s squadron made to board her but the Altmark sought refuge in the safety of Jøssingfjord. The Royal Navy could only look on as the German ship was escorted into the fjord by the Norwegian Navy, who politely but firmly affirmed their neutrality and turned the British ships around.

Captain Vian, as commander of the squadron, made contact with the ancient Norwegian gunboat Kjell but was asshured that the Norwegian had searched the Altmark, that all was in order and it was a simple German merchant ship and not an armed, Kriegsmarine prison ship. Vian knew this was rubbish, but had no option but to retreat a respectful distance and to signal the Admiralty for orders.

Further reconnaissance flights by the Royal Air Force confirmed that the Altmark was safely holed up right at the end of Jøssingfjord. Meanwhile, Vian’s signal found its way to the desk of the First Lord of the Admiralty, a man who had a reputation for sticking his oar in to operational matters and trying to direct operations from Whitehall. You might be familiar with his name, it was Winston Churchill.

Churchill sent Vian a signal telling him that if the Altmark wasn’t escorted to Bergen for inspection under a joint Anglo-Norwegian guard, he was to board her and free the prisoners, that he had permission to use lethal force in order to do so and that he was to politely but firmly make sure the Royal Norwegian Navy butted out of matters. This was a blatant violation of Norwegian neutrality of course, but there was not a lot the little old gunboat Kjell could do to stop the Cossack beyond yell at her – Vian had permission to fire on her if they fired first, but to stop when they stopped.

And so Vian was set on a course of action and turned his ship around, entering the mouth of Jøssingfjord at 2200 hours on February 16th 1940. He once more went on board the Kjell, this time to give her Captain the ultimatum to either escort the Altmark to Bergen with him, or step aside. When he declined, Vian invited him aboard the Cossack for a grandstand view of what was about to follow, but again he declined. On board the Altmark, Captain Dau saw the threatening shape of the destroyer looming down the Fjord towards him. At first he made to ram her, but instead ended up running his ship aground instead. He next tried to dazzle the Cossack with his searchlight, but the British ship was brought skillfully alongside and in true Nelsonian fashion, a party of 2 officers and 30 men leapt across the gap and boarded the German ship. Legend has it that 4 cutlasses, kept on board for ceremonial purposes, were carried by the boarding party. If true, it would be the last boarding action in which such a weapon was known to be used in anger.

There was a brief skirmish on board but the German crew were soon overpowered. Just as things were almost over however, a German sailor fired at and injured a British sailor, and for his trouble 9 of his shipmates were shot and wounded in the return fire; 4 died and a further 4 were fatally wounded. Having taken the Altmark, the boarders now combed the ship looking for the captives they knew were held somewhere within. One sailor called “Any Englishmen in there?” into a dark hold and on hearing a cheer replied the immortal words “The Navy’s here! Come up out of it!“

Less than two hours after she first entered the fjord, Vian’s ship was on her way out again with 299 freed prisoners on board (including one, an Indian seaman, suffering from Leprosy). She plotted a course for Leith and set off for home at top speed. The Cossack had last entered Leith with a cloud hanging over her reputation, but on her return on February 17th she did so triumphantly. The press cameras were assembled and waiting to welcome her back and to make the most out of this propaganda opportunity.

Ambulances were ready and waiting to take the injured away to hospital while the newsreel cameras rolled.

It was a rare bit of good news so early in the war, so reporting restrictions were not observed. The Scotsman carried a full page spread of photos. Many of those pictured coming ashore had lost all their possessions, some had been prisoners for almost 6 months and their families had no word of what had become of them. For weeks the papers were full of stories of reunions and heroes welcomes.

The Dundee Courier and Advertiser printed a picture of some 1940s medical care, with a nurse at Leith Hospital lighting a recuperative cigarette for Third Officer Leslie Ross of the ship Huntsman. 250 of the his companions were sent to the Eastern General Hospital in Leith for attention, with officials from the City and the Shipwrecked Mariner’s Society on hand to sort out replacement clothing, papers, money, cigarettes etc. and arrange lodging and travel. The sailor who had been suffering from Leprosy was taken to the Infectious Diseases Hospital (the “City Hospital”).

In Stornoway, the Daily Record interviewed the 75 year old Elizabeth Mackenzie of Newton Street, who had not heard from her merchant seaman son – Donald Morrison – for over a year. She was making a public appeal for his whereabouts, he had last written to her over a year ago and was last known to be on the SS Newton Beech: that ship had been sunk by the Graf Spee on 5th October 1939. “I have been very worried because I am going blind, and I am living here with a brother who is over 80” she told the reporter. “I haven’t many friends, but the Lord is my friend, and that is enough.” The happy news about the safety of her son was soon brought to her by Donald Macleod, another Leodsach sailor who had been with him on the Altmark. “It is good news my boy is safe” she told the Record. Donald Murdo Macleod of Tolsta Chaolais had been on the SS Tairoa which had been intercepted by the Graf Spee in the middle of the South Atlantic on December 2nd 1939. Tairoa had been the penultimate victim of the German raider, and had managed to transmit a distress signal that eventually allowed the the Royal Navy to catch up with her assailant.

Donald Morrison however seemed reluctant to return home and instead went to Hull, telling Macleod to let his mother know he “might go home later“. Instead he went back to sea. It seems the whole experience may have left an indelible mark on him and changed his character. He forfeited bail of £1 in Buckhaven on a charge of drunkeness in February 1941. He was soon in trouble again for going absent from his ship. In May 1941 he was hauled before the Lord Mayor of Portsmouth at the Police Court there, again for deserting a ship. Morrison could offer no explanation for being 31 hours overdue and potentially making his ship miss its convoy, beyond “I just had a good time, that is all“. The Master had dismissed him but told the court he was of good character and had been through “unpleasant experiences” and would gladly take him back again. It turned out Morrison had another ship sunk from underneath him recently and had once again lost all his papers and possessions. The Lord Mayor fined him £5 (half a month’s wages) and allowed him to return to his ship on account of his value to the war effort. He won’t have been the only merchant sailor in the War in the Atlantic to have an experience such as this, and in retrospect we can understand his reluctance to return to his ship and potential death and to want to have one more night of fun on earth…

Back in Leith, the Fife Free Press reported that the Altmark Incident was commemorated with the gift of £500 to the Leith Hospital by an anonymous benefactor on the condition that a bed be dedicated to HMS Cossack for rescuing the prisoners. For his “outstanding ability, determination and resource” and “for daring, leadership and masterly handling of his ship“, Captain Vian received the Distinguished Service Order medal and was promoted off of Cossack in July 1941. He would go on to have a glittering wartime career, and would retire in 1952 as Admiral of the Fleet. Cossack had an eventful 18 months after the Altmark, taking part in the 2nd Battle of Narvik and the hunt for the German Battleship Bismarck

The ship’s luck would soon run out however and she was torpedoed and sunk in October 1941 by the German submarine U-563, west of Gibraltar. In November 1941, the Edinburgh Evening News reported that three local men were missing, presumed killed, from her:

• Petty Officer Alexander Burton Colthart, 22, 20 India Place
• Petty Officer Douglas Maurice Gammack, 32 Parsons Green Terrace
• Assistant Cook Robert “Sonny” O’Hara, 23, 205 Crewe Road North

Her cat, Oskar, survived this sinking: legend has it that he had been the ship’s cat on the Bismarck and was plucked from the Atlantic by Cossack after her sinking. His name was said to have been derived from the code letter for “O” (with a German spelling) which was used to mean “man overboard“. Further legend has it that after surviving the loss of his second home he went on to serve on HMS Ark Royal and survived her sinking also. The whole thing was probably just a sailor’s yarn but Unsinkable Sam has garnered a cult following on the internet: you will find Facebook pages, pop history articles, Youtube videos and even computer game cameos in his memory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The mining of the “Saucy” and the “Firefly”: the thread about the WW2 loss of forty-two lives in the Forth

I was looking for something in Seafield Cemetery last week and couldn’t help but stop by the war graves. Some are for merchant seamen and many of them were from HMS Saucy, lost with all hands on this day (September 4th) in 1940. As yesterday was Merchant Navy Day, this is a doubly appropriate time to relate their story.

The Saucy was built for the Royal Navy in Hull in 1918 as a 600-ton, 155ft-long Frisky-class rescue tug. She was sold out of service in 1924 but kept her name and was requisitioned in 1939, returning to the UK from Shanghai. She was crewed by merchant seamen, serving under officers of the Royal Navy Reserve (RNR men were professional merchant naval officers who had joined the reserves to be called up in times of war).

Saucy was based on the Forth at Rosyth, her duties to assist in any damaged vessels entering the estuary and was at sea on September 3rd (Merchant Navy Day and exactly 1 year into the war) when she brought in a damaged Dutch merchant ship that had been bombed by German aircraft. With this charge safely brought in, she headed back out on patrol in the early morning of the 4th. Contact was soon lost with her when she was in a position about 1.5 miles west of the island of Inchkeith; the unfortunate tug had hit a mine and gone down almost instantly, taking all 281 on board with her. It is not clear whose mine she had struck, it may have been dropped by a German aircraft, but just as likely it may have been a “friendly” mine that had broken free from its moorings and had floated further into the Firth.

Of the crew the 3 officers were all RNR men and the 25 ratings were all merchant seamen. Eighteen came from the Devonshire fishing town of Brixham, 7 from the same extended family. Eight bodies were recovered, 5 of them of Brixham men and all were buried at Seafield – although one was never formally identified.

On this day in 2004, a memorial plaque was dedicated in Brixham Harbour to the men who were lost – it has 26 individual names, however different sources list 27 names and some say there were 28 on the ship’s roll. See footnote.

A new HMS Saucy was named in her honour in 1942, an Assurance-class rescue tug. The wreck of her predecessor was marked with a buoy in 1940, but it was largely lost by 1945. Sonar surveys by the Navy in 1967 and 1871 failed to locate it, but it was found again by the minehunter HMS Sandown in 1992, and her divers explored the wreck in 1993 and found it to be remarkably intact in 15m of water, position 56° 2′ 10″N, 3° 10′ 33″W.

The men whose bodies were never found are further commemorated on the Liverpool Naval Memorial, which commemorates almost 1,400 merchant sailors who died serving with the Royal Navy during WW2 and have no known resting place.

1. Some sources say 26 or 27 were on the ship’s roll. Most also 7 seven men were buried at Seafield, however there is the grave of an 8th and unidentified victim also alongside. ↩︎

Alongside the men from the Saucy at Seafield lie three others who lost their lives to sea mines that year; Lt. D. B. Johnstone RNVR, Chief Petty Officer C. E. Baldwin RN D.S.M. and Sub Lt. C. Dobson RNVR. All three died on HMS Firefly in February 1940. Baldwin had earned the Distinguished Service Medal early in the war for being the first to defuse a German magnetic mine, allowing it to be captured, inspected and countermeasures devised.

Firefly was a requisitioned civilian trawler, hired from her owners as a minesweeper. Trawlers were perfect for this sort of work, which required a seaworthy vessel that could handle the towing of “sweeps” that cut mines free from their moorings before the crew destroyed them (usually by shooting it with a rifle until it exploded).

On February 3rd 1940, Firefly was in the Forth, her crew attempting to defuse a British mine that had gotten loose and was posing a hazard to shipping. These sort of mines look exactly like they do in cartoons; a buoyant, black sphere with spiky “horns” in which the detonators are mounted.

Firefly was stopped in the water, her crew watching from the railings while a detachment in the row boat carefully manoeuvred alongside the mine to defuse it; dangerous but routine work. Without warning they were hit by the wake of a passing destroyer, which pushed the mine onto the boat. The horn contacted one of the boat’s oars, and 200-250lb of explosives was detonated. Everyone on the boat was killed instantly, as were all except one watching on deck (who would die the next day from his wounds). Only the 3 men in the wheelhouse and 1 in the galley survived from a crew of 18. Sadly one of the four survivors, Lt. Andrew Macgavin Maclean RNVR, would die in the Royal Infirmary two weeks later as a result of infection, he was laid to rest in Strathblane Parish Churchyard (I am indebted to Pat Davy of Strathblane Heritage Society for this information).

Remarkably, the vessel herself was largely intact – apart from damage to her superstructure – and she was towed into Leith by the minesweeping trawler HMS Wardour and repaired. She returned to service, recommissioning in June 1940, and serving out the rest of the war. Returned to her owners and renamed St. Just, she fished out of Harwich until 1961. Wardour herself was sunk by a mine she was clearing in October 1940 but her crew survived. In a curious coincidence, a previous HMS Firefly was one of the first ships to strike a naval mine (which at the time were referred to as “Infernal Machines”) when she and HMS Merlin ran into a Russian minefield off Sveaborg in the Baltic Campaign of 1855, although both survived. In another odd twist of fate, the Firth of Forth was the location of both the first loss of a ship to a torpedo in WW1 (the cruiser HMS Pathfinder), and the last such in WW2 (the Canadian steamer Avondale Park and the Norwegian collier “Sneland I).

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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“As unthinkable as to bulldoze Arthur’s Seat”: the thread about the 1980s scheme to infill Wardie Bay

I like to be asked questions about some matter of local history or knowledge, because they usually create a “happy accident” whereby I go down a particular rabbit hole and end up finding a tangent to follow about something I never knew about. Today was one such case, I found something I could hardly believe: a 1987 scheme by Forth Ports to fill in Wardie Bay! In case you didn’t know, Wardie Bay is that pleasant little haven of sand, sea, seals and (sometimes) sun, which has become increasingly popular in the last few years as a sport for swimming and other water sports. I wrote about the origins of the bay and its name on this thread.

Forth Ports, the harbour authority for Leith and Granton, created a subsidiary company – Edinburgh Maritime Ltd. – with Glasgow developers GA Group, to front this outrageous, £400m scheme. The overall architects were Hind Woodhouse, with individual large buildings by RMJM and Cochrane McGregor. It was all backed by the Scottish Development Agency.

Their plan would include the infill of most of Granton Harbour, the Victoria Dock and much of Western Harbour at Leith, and everything inbetween – i.e. Wardie Bay. This was to “reclaim” 500 acres of land from the Firth of Forth, and would have obliterated the coastline from Seafield to Granton. 8,000 jobs were promised (from where, it was not said), with 1,895 houses, offices, a cinema, an industrial zone, new supermarkets and cultural attractions such as a Granton marina village planned. It was said without a certain amount of chutzpah that the site would rival San Francisco’s or Sydney’s waterfront and be 5x the size of the Glasgow Garden Festival.

The scheme was met with much scepticism, and local outrage. The Wardie Bay Action Group, chaired by John Horsburgh QC, was set up to resist the scheme.

Wardie Bay is a recreational asset equivalent in value to Holyrood Park. In both cases their accessibility is th emajor factor in their value to the citizens. To infill Wardie Bay is as unthinkable as to bulldoze Arthur’s Seat.

The above quotation comes from a £3,000 counter-report they produced in 1988, for which the below artists impression was also commissioned. This shows an 80 acre “loch” between the sea wall and the new development, and which would have retained the harbour of Newhaven, accessible to the loch. It is not clear if the loch was connected to the sea or not.

In August 1988, Edinburgh Maritime tried to sweeten the deal with plans for an Opera House, but it farcically collapsed when the Trust for an International Opera Theatre for Scotland made their public announcement too early, resulting in back-pedalling counterstatements being issued by Edinburgh Maritime Ltd.

By 1989 however, Lothian Regional Council had made it be known that they would refuse the plans on the basis of the strong local opposition, so they were hastily redrawn to exclude Wardie Bay. But they still included Granton Harbour and parts of Western Harbour. It was this scheme that was approved in May 1990 and that led to the Ocean Terminal development (which for years has sat half empty, and is about to be partially demolished), to the Scottish Office at Victoria Quay and to the infilling of the western portion of Granton Harbour, of Leith’s Western Harbour. The planned boom in housing on these latter two sites has only materialised in fits and starts, and their painfully slow housing projects are still incomplete 30 years later. Multiple “marina village” ideas have come and gone for Granton, and there has never been a flourishing of industry on the western side.

We have a lot to thank the Wardie Bay Action Group for in their successful counter-campaign. Planned in a fit of late-1980s capitalist optimism, multiple economic downturns since the 1990s would probably have created nothing more than a vast foreshore wasteland had it gone ahead, with none of the projected “benefits” being realised.

It was, however, never quite clear just where the money was going to come from to develop the scheme as originally planned. Environmental destruction aside, it was a project for which there was no real need. There were vast swathes of brownfield land around Granton and Leith that wouldn’t require expensive reclamation, and more pressing investment needed in the existing housing schemes in this area. The privatisation of Forth Ports in 1992 saw the authority turn its attention to instead acquiring the competition and focussing on land-banking its existing reclamation.

This was not the first such proposed act of mass environmental vandalism proposed for the Forth. Some 60 years previously, a scheme was put forward to construct a vast tidal barrier across the estuary just upstream of North and South Queensferry. Fortunately this came to nothing, but you can read about it over on its own thread.

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

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An Awful Endurance: the thread about the seizure of “SS Alster” and the sinking of “Empire Endurance”

Sometimes I go looking for interesting rabbit holes to go down in the hopes of finding a story. Sometimes people send me the strand that will lead me to a thread of the story. And sometimes unique and unusual inspiration just drops itself straight into my inbox, begging to be looked into.

You see way back whenever, I set up email alerts for online auction houses with the words “Edinburgh” or “Leith“, to keep a watchful eye on whatever interesting objets may be coming up for sale with those words in the listing. Mainly it’s sets of Edinburgh Crystal, kitsch Duke of Edinburgh memorabilia or job lots of Prue Leith cookbooks: but sometimes it will be something unusual. Very occasionally it’s something very unusual indeed, something you never knew you were looking for until it arrived in your email at 3:30AM one morning. And today’s Auction House Artefact is one such, because it is the original “Writ of Summons” from the WW2 seizure of the German merchant ship SS Alster in Leith in June 1940: the prize rules dictating that the officer who served this writ had to board the vessel and nail this very paper to its mast!

The Alster was a 12,000 deadweight tonnage cargo ship of the German Norddeutscher Lloyd line (NDL). Built in Hamburg in 1927, she was intended to sail the routes between Bremen, Australia and the far east. Her name is taken from a tributary river of the Elbe which flows through the city and port of Hamburg.

The ship was requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) in 1940 in advance of the German invasion of Norway. She surreptitiously departed for that country on April 3rd, destination Narvik, loaded up with military supplies. On board were guns, ammunition, 80 lorries, thousands of tons of coke fuel, food, hundreds of tons of hay for horses and even toys to distribute to children in a hearts and minds effort. She arrived in Norwegian waters under cover of being a regular merchant ship four days before the invasion proper began in order that she would be in position and ready to supply the landing. The old Norwegian torpedo boat Trygg was deceived and cleared her to pass and escorted her towards land.

On the 8th April Alster reached Vestfjorden and was warned off of a British minefield by a Norwegian patrol boat Syrian. This latter vessel, a converted trawler inspected the Alster and– deciding there was nothing odd about this heavily laden German merchant ship – let her pass on her way to Bodø. When war officially broke out two days later the Syrian caught up with Alster once again but, worried that the much larger ship was probably armed and carrying German troops, decided that discretion was the better part of valour and stood off. Instead, as the Alster plodded off at her leisurely top speed of 14 knots, Syrian passed the details to the Royal Navy instead. Realising the value of the thousands of tons of supplies in the merchantman, a force was quickly dispatched to capture her, consisting of the cruiser HMS Penelope and four destroyers led by HMS Icarus.

On paper it was a hugely one-sided fight stacked in the favour of the Royal Navy, but things very quickly started to go wrong. The Penelope ran into a few navigational difficulties which caused her to run into the island of Fleinvær on April 11th. The big destroyer HMS Eskimo managed to pull the damaged ship free and, with the assistance of Norwegian tugs, on to Skjelfjorden where temporary repairs could be made. She would limp back to the UK and be out of the war for 14 months, requiring an extensive rebuild below the water line.

The next day it was Eskimo, erstwhile saviour of Penelope, that needed help when the German destroyer Georg Thiele hit her with a torpedo in the Second Battle of Narvik, causing a significant rearrangement and truncation of her bows. Amazingly, despite the damage, Eskimo survived, was patched up at Skjelfjorden and sent back to the Tyne to get a new front end. She was back in action within 5 months, going on to survive the war.

It was thus left to HMS Icarus to round up the Alster The crew of the German ship tried and failed to set of a scuttling charge and quickly found themselves British captives. The Royal Navy was surprised to find that the German captain was none other than Oskar Scharf, the Norddeutscher Lloyd line’s most senior officer and something of a celebrity in maritime circles.

Scharf was – or had been – the captain of the NDL transatlantic liner Europa, the pride of the fleet. He found himself on the Alster as a demotion after it proved impossible for him to work under the political supervision of the Nazi party and Robert Ley. Ley was a fanatic, close to Hitler and in charge of the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF).

Scharf was adamant to the end of his days that he was no Nazi . Although he admitted he had joined the party for a year from 1934-35, this he said was purely in order to keep his job. His later actions would lend some credence to that position and as an old fashioned captain, he was not used to taking orders on his own ship, particularly political orders, and he was not about to change. But Scharf was also a German officer and therefore wasn’t about to hand over his ship to the Royal Navy without a struggle: six of his men would die resisting the boarding parties.

The captive Alster and her crew were moved to the British advanced naval base at Skjelfjord and all the supplies and materiel aboard were turned over to the Norwegians who were more than happy to turn them against their former owners. The Royal Navy used the ship as a temporary base for repairing ships; ironically one of the first ships she would assist would be the truncated Eskimo. Scharf and his crew, still aboard, managed to make one more attempt to scuttle their ship by opening seawater valves to try and flood the ship. They failed again and the officers found themselves taken off for their trouble and locked up on other Royal Navy ships for onward transport to Scotland.

The Navy now needed a prize crew to man the Alster and as many of the men of the cruiser Penelope now found themselves without a ship to sail they were put on-board and given the task. The Germans now made multiple attempts to sink her by aerial bombing, but somehow she survived them all.

On April 27th, Alster arrived in Tromsø to unload the last of her supplies for the Norwegian forces defending that port. To satisfy Navy regulations the British consul observed the unloading and gave the Norwegians an official receipt. After almost a month, she was then sent on to the port of Kirkenes in the far north of the country to load 10,000 tons of iron ore to be taken to the UK. On her way south again catastrophe was narrowly averted after she was sighted and attacked by the British submarine HMS Truant. This was despite her having been made aware of the submarine’s patrol area and being given orders to avoid it, and despite messages being sent to Truant to make her aware the vessel was friendly. Fortuitously the two torpedoes fired at Alster missed and exploded harmlessly on the shore.

Four days after this narrow escape, she finally departed Norwegian waters for the last time and sailed across the North Sea. As well as her cargo she evacuated 209 British and 46 Norwegian military personnel, 72 German prisoners of war (her crew, minus the officers who made their way separately) and the surviving forward gun turret from HMS Eskimo, which currently had little use for it in her new configuration. British newspapers reported the capture of the Alster with great enthusiasm as there wasn’t much other good news to tell at the time, plus Captain Scharf was a high-status prisoner of war and his old ship the Europa was a household name.

Alster unloaded her passengers at Scapa Flow on 31st May and arrived at the naval base of Rosyth on the Firth of Forth on June 4th. Shortly thereafter, she was sent across the Firth to Leith to unload and conclude the legal formalities of making her a prize. And so it was that Robert Robertson, a man from Morningside and a Customs & Excise Officer at the Leith Custom House, went aboard the ship on the 13th of the month and nailed the official writ to the mast. At a stroke, she officially became the property of the British Admiralty.

The ship was now passed to the Ministry of War Transport who made her an Empire Ship, a ship owned by the Government and allocated to a British merchant shipping company to make good wartime losses. Her new managers were Alfred Booth & Co. of Liverpool. After being refitted to bring her to a British standard and being renamed SS Empire Endurance she left Southend in Convoy FN255 and started her new career in the middle of the Battle of the Atlantic, plying the dangerous waters between British ports and Canada. This she did for six months after which she was ordered to Egypt via Cape Town with a mixed load of cargo and passengers. She departed on this new journey from the Welsh port of Milford Haven on the 19th April 1941.

Early the next morning, at 3:32AM German time she was hit by a torpedo from the German submarine U73. She was far out into the Atlantic, some 425 miles southwest of Rockall, and 460 miles west of the nearest dry land on the west coast of Ireland. A second torpedo 25 minutes later broke her in two and sent her to the bottom, with the ultimate loss of 66 souls from the 95 passengers and crew on board. The Canadian warship HMCS Trillium found and picked up twenty-four survivors (sixteen merchant seamen and eight servicemen who were on board to man the guns) the next day, landing them at Greenock four days later.

Another lifeboat had been filled with survivors but was destroyed when the second torpedo hit the ship and only one of the occupants survived. He was blown overboard but made it into a further lifeboat. Also sent into the water at this time was the Captain, William Willis R. D. Torkington, who was was also picked up. David Selwyn Davies, the Chief Officer, took charge of the survivors in this boat and was credited with pulling his injured captain aboard. For these few survivors, the name Endurance would be cruelly ironic, as they would spend the next nineteen days adrift in an open lifeboat in the North Atlantic Ocean.

As the senior ranking man in the boat, Davies took charge as best as he could. His board was not found – by the Royal Mail Line liner Highland Brigade – until the 9th of May. During this time twenty of those onboard had died and only eight remained alive, the last two on the day of rescue. Of the slim remainder who made it aboard the Highland Brigade, three more died aboard her including the Captain and Second Engineer. A fourth would die in hospital in Liverpool, leaving only four survivors from the boat. Including the first boat, only twenty souls survived from the eighty-five who had been onboard Empire Endurance. (Thank you to Kirby Grant for providing me with additional details and corrected numbers for the losses and survivors from the ship.)

For these efforts he would receive the MBE and the Lloyd’s Medal. “No one would have lived to be rescued but for the skill, seamanship and courage of the chief officer” reported the London Gazette.

Oskar Scharf found himself sent to Canada for internment. Because of his seniority and because he was neither a military or political man, he was put in charge of the internees in Camp R in the pleasant lakeside township of Red Rock, Ontario. This institution had around 1,100 inmates, mainly merchant and naval seamen. Some were ardent Nazis, others were Communists, many were politically apathetic and amongst their number there were 78 Jews, interned in Britain as “enemy aliens“, including 11 of school age. Scharf is credited in a number of sources as going out of his way to protect the Jews in his charge from the Nazis within his ranks. This he did for about 6 months before the authorities came to their senses and released the Jewish inmates back to Britain in January 1941.

Scharf had an awkward balancing act to maintain between those he was in charge of and his Canadian captors – with whom he was no collaborator. He found that the Nazis in the camp went out of their way to make life difficult for him, they heckled and humiliated him for refusing to give a “Sieg Heil” after official announcements. The Canadian authorities eventually decided that Scharf posed no threat and somewhat surprisingly released him in April 1944, allowing him the option to return to Germany as a civilian. This he did, departing for home on a Swedish ship in New York and taking a dangerous and convoluted journey via Algiers, Barcelona and Marseilles. He was reunited with his family after a 4 year absence but would be interrogated by the Gestapo on-and-off until the end of the war. Nevertheless, he was given back his job and rank with NDL and put back in charge of the liner Europa which was laid up in Bremerhaven as a barracks ship.

He was still in charge of her in May 1945 when first the British and then the Americans entered Bremerhaven, capturing the port and the ship. The Americans claimed her as a war prize, Scharf symbolically handing over his pistol to an American sailor. He thus found himself in the unusual position of having not one but two of his ships boarded and taken off his hands by the Allies in the war. However the Americans had need of the Europa, commissioning her into their navy as USS Europa, for use as a transport ship repatriating servicemen from Europe back home across the Atlantic. As they didn’t know how to operate her Scharf and some of his officers were allowed to remain on board to ensure the operation of the ship. They departed for Southampton, picked up the first 4,500 men for repatriation, arriving in New York on September 24th 1945 under Scharf’s command.

Europa made 3 further transatlantic repatriation trips, before being laid up in her home port of Bremerhaven in May 1946 and decommissioned by the US Navy. Later that year she was allocated to France as a war reparation, and given to the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT) line, who renamed her Liberté and refitted her for post-war service as their flagship, to replace the SS Normandie which had been lost in a wartime accident.

Scharf resigned from the NDL after the war and took up the job of port captain of Bremerhaven, helping oversee the restoration of the docks. The post-war de-Nazification process classified him as Level II (Follower), which was the 2nd lowest level and which incurred a fine – nearly worthless as it was denominated in Reichsmarks – of 18,000 Marks. He died in 1953, aged 67.

Chief Officer Selwyn Davies MBE returned home to Moreton in Cheshire, to his neat suburban house, his wife Helen and his daughter Sadie. He died at home in 1952, aged 64.

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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The First Inuit in Scotland: the thread about John Sakeouse; Hunter, Explorer, Artist, Interpreter, Kayaker, Friend of Leith and

The registers of the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh record that on 17th Feb 1819 a man was interred there, having died 3 days previously from fever. They say he was 22 years old, although nobody was exactly sure. What they do not say is that he was far from the land of his birth and that he was a truly remarkable man. He was John Sakeouse and this is his story.

John was well known in Edinburgh and Leith, infact it was fair to say he was something of a celebrity, for he was a unique character in the city; he was a Kalaaleq , an Inuk from West Greenland, and was the first of his people to travel to Scotland. He was born around 1797 in Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland at a latitude of 69° North. We do not know his name in his native language, but he grew up in an area where Danish missionaries were active and from them he took the biblical names Johannes Zakaeus; John Zacchaeus (also Anglicised to Sackhouse, Saccheuse, but he signed himself Sakeouse so we shall go with that.) From the missionaries he learned about the bible and had a knowledge of and interest in Christianity. He also learned of the world beyond his horizon and picked up a little English.

John had wanted to satisfy a curiosity as to what was over the horizon and beyond the land of his birth, and he wanted to learn about art. He may have been further motivated by being unlucky in love and rejected by the mother of a potential bride. But his reasons were his own and using his own initiative and ingenuity in May or June of 1816 he took to his kayak and paddled out to a whaling ship that was getting ready to depart the Davis Strait. Using his basic English, he managed to convince the crew to help him stow away and the seamen took pity and smuggled not just John but also his kayak aboard. Once he was safely over the horizon he announced his presence to the master of the ship; who either offered or threatened to turn around and put him ashore, but John was obviously a persuasive communicator and the master, John Newton, was convinced to take him home with him. That ship was the Thomas and Ann, it was owned by Peter Wood and Company of Leith, and that port was its destination. That is how on the 15th August 1816, John Sakeouse came to Scotland “with 11 fish“, as a very special passenger.

On the long journey back to Leith, he earned his passage by assisting the seamen in their duties and occupied himself in improving his English.Standing between 5 foot 6 and 8 inches tall, with a head of thick black hair, he was of stocky build and impressed his hosts with his great physical strength, his dexterity and also his gentle nature and eagerness to learn. When the Thomas and Ann finally arrived back in Leith, news of his presence seemed to spread like wildfire and large crowds assembled wanting to catch a glimpse of this unusual visitor. The crowds prevented Master Newton from unloading his precious cargo of whale, so he had Sakeouse taken ashore and lodged in his house in the Timber Bush area. The crowds simply followed and gathered outside Newton’s house instead.

But although John had never seen this many people in his life, he hadn’t come to Scotland to hide himself away. So he took himself and his kayak down to the new Wet Docks, lowered himself into them and with great showmanship put on an hour long display of his proficiency and dexterity in it. He thrilled the crowds by being able to roll his boat over at will, paddle it while inverted and roll it back upright again “in the twinkling of an eye… and scuds off as if nothing had happened“. A ship’s biscuit was floated on the water and from 30 yards he would hit it – and split it – with his harpoon.

His show was an instant hit, and it was put on each day for the crowds. Handbills were printed and money was collected. On Thursday 5th September, a grand race was organised; John against the best whaling boat and six of the best crew that Leith had to offer. “A vast assemblage of persons of all ranks were collected at Leith. The piers, windows and roofs of houses and the decks and rigging of the vessels, were crowded with spectators; and the water from the harbour to near the Martello Tower was covered with boats, filled with Ladies and Gentlemen.” They set off from the end of the pier, the course being around the Martello Tower and back again; John was the clear winner, taking just 16 minutes.

An exhibition of some of his artefacts was put on in a dockside warehouse, described as “two sea unicorn’s horns, the skulls of a sea horse and bear, the ear of a whale and the preserved skin of a black eagle“. The money these ventures raised helped support him financially; to provide him with the food and clothes that he needed to get through the winter in Scotland until he could return home the following season when the whalers went north again. By the end of August news of him had spread the length of the country; with newspapers not just in Scotland and London, but all across England, in Belfast and in Dublin relating the story of “the Esquimaux* now at Leith“.

* = the French term which was in written use at the time in the press for Inuit. The Scottish whalers used the term “Yackie”, in some contemporary accounts he refers to himself as “Yakee”, a term he undoubtedly picked up from the whalers.

Lodging with Newton and his family, when John was not putting on his displays he attended to studying English in “which he made considerable progress“; he learned to play the flute a little and to dance. He told his hosts that he had received some schooling in his childhood, had some basic knowledge of the wider world and historical facts and had heard of an elephant – but never having seen one was “much delighted” when shown a picture. He had not, however, seen or heard of a cow and on first encountering one fetched his harpoon with which to defend himself from this strange beast. He sat for portraits, was taken to the theatre, and was the toast of the evening soirées of Leith and Edinburgh, comfortably ingratiating himself with all who met him.

In the spring of 1817, the Leith whalers set out again for the Davis Straits and John was with them, once more on board the Thomas and Ann. Newton was under strict orders from his employer, Peter Wood, that John was to be “treated with the greatest kindness” and returned to where he had been picked up, and not to return with him unless John explicitly desired to. On reaching his home however, John was distressed to find that his only living relative, his sister, had died over the winter. On learning that she had believed him dead and had died of a broken heart, he returned to Newton and made it known that he wished to stay with them and “revisit his country no more.” And so it was in September 1817 once again the newspapers in Edinburgh reported that the Thomas and Ann had returned to Leith and once more it had a special passenger aboard. And once again, this exciting news was reprinted from Inverness to London and from Cambridge to Belfast.

That winter, John exhibited the selfless kindness to others for which he was knows. Enjoying he snows that had fallen, and walking far beyond Leith, he came across two young children whom he observed “to be suffering from the cold“. He took off his sealskin jacket, wrapped the pair of them in in it and carried them safely home to Leith. He refused all attempts at a reward, not thinking himself having done anything remarkable. It was on another winter walk that John’s adventures took an interesting new direction, for who should he by chance bump in to but one Alexander Nasmyth; pupil of Alan Ramsay and one of Scotland’s foremost landscape and portrait painters at that time. Nasmyth recognised John by his dress, and having once drawn a set of native clothing that had been brought to Scotland he was keen to ingratiate himself. He invited John up to Edinburgh and had him sit for a portrait in return for providing him with drawing lessons. Nasmyth got his painting, now part of the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland, and John got his lessons, proving to have a natural talent and be a quick learner. He was the first Inuit to recieve formal art training, although he came from a rich artistic culture.

It was through the well connected Nasmyth that John’s life took its next turn; he was introduced to the naval explorer Captain Basil Hall and his father, Sir James, the President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The Halls were aware that the Admiralty was preparing an expedition to search for a Northwestern Passage, under fellow Scot Capain John Ross (later Sir John), and were quick to realise that having a native guide who could also act as a translator could prove invaluable to the mission. The Halls wrote to Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, who agreed with them and asked for John to be sent to London if he was willing. John seems to have turned down offers of payment for his services, and was keen to join the expedition so long as it was not a ruse to send him back to the land of his birth.

In London, John ingratiated himself with his usual ease, and – having taken it with him – as usual thrilled the crowds with kayaking and harpooning displays in Deptford Docks. A trick that went down very well was to throw his harpoon, which he could do with great accuracy over 50 yards, and then follow it up with smaller “darts” with which he could hit the handle of the floating harpoon, time after time. Captain Ross and the Admiralty wasted no time in engaging John’s services, however it nearly wasn’t to be; in late March a stranger, who may have been an agent for the Aquatic Theatre, attempted to lure him away from the expedition and onto the stage, with offers of money and a considerable quantity of alcohol. The usually sober John almost succumbed to temptation, but on recovering his faculties and suffering his hangover thought better of it, apologised to Ross for his change of heart and stayed firmly on board and away from the dockside taverns thereafter. The Admiralty quietly ordered that he was to be kept on board and away from strangers thereafter.

Ross’s expedition departed London on board a small fleet of hired Hull whaling ships on 18th April 1818. Ross led on his flagship Isabella, with Captain Buchan on the Dortothea, Lieutenant Parry on the Alexander and the ill-fated Lieutenant Franklin on the Trent. Their search was for the Northwest Passage and the Bering Strait beyond, and part of the expedition intended to strike out for the North Pole. Their journey would find none of those destinations, but would take them further north than any British navigator had yet been.

The convoy arrived off Greenland in mid-June. By the end of the month, they reached 70° North. This was Disko Bay, the land where John – or Jack as the sailors had taken to calling him – had been born 19 or 20 years before. John took take to his kayak, returning with specimens of birds for the expedition’s scientists, and also with a party of local Inuit he had contacted. Acting as a translator, he negotiated for a larger party of them to return with the gift of a dog sled for Ross. They were invited aboard for coffee and biscuits and shown around, had their portraits taken and further gifts were exchanged. An impromptu cèilidh was then held on the deck, with the Inuit dancing Scottish Reels with the seamen to the music of their fiddler. Ross describes John as acting as the “master of ceremonies”, calling out the dances. Catching the attention of a young woman in the Inuit party, “by far the best looking of the group“, John was given a lady’s shawl by one of the officers to present to her. She returned his affections with the gift of a ring, and Ross was in “no possible doubt [he] had made an impression on her heart“.

After the ball concluded with more coffee, the guests departed and John was permitted to escort them home and perhaps return with more specimens for the expedition. It was at this point however that he suffered an unfortunate accident; demonstrating a gun to some of the Inuit, he over-filled it with gunpowder under a mistaken assumption that he described himself as “plenty powder, plenty kill. Letting the weapon off, he could not handle the recoil and broke his collar bone. A search party had to be sent out to retrieve him when he did not return to the ship.

They did not linger here and continued north into Baffin Bay, intending on making an anti-clockwise navigation in search of the North West Passage. Ross made an illustration of his little flotilla as it moved carefully through the ice at 70°44′ North. They pressed on and at 75°25′ North they reached a bay that the Greenlanders call Qimusseriarsuaq. Although whalers had been here before, they hadn’t troubled to give it an English name, so Ross Christened it Melville Bay, after Robert Dundas, 2nd Viscount Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the man who had given Ross his first commission and a son of Edinburgh (for whom Melville Street is named).

The were able to sail as far north as 75°55′, before becoming trapped in the ice at the start of August and could go no further. It was with a great deal of skill, hard work and luck that they were able to extricate the Isabella and the Alexander, and now headed west around the top of Baffin Bay. An illustration made by Captain Ross shows this desperate scene.

Soon they were heading south again and on August 9th 1818, the Isabella and the Alexander came to what Ross called Prince Regent Inlet. Here, at 75°55′ North, 65°32′ West, and with the unique help of John Sakeouse, they made first contact with what Ross called the Arctic Highlanders: the native Inughuit.

It was the Inughuit who spotted them first. By the time Ross’s lookouts spotted them in return, they took these men far out on the ice to be stranded whalers, and made for them. As they approached, they realised that they were natives travelling on dog sledges. When they came within shouting distance, John attempted to call to them in his language, but the men took to their sleds and fled. Boats were sent out and some gifts left on the ice for them. Ross also had the men make up a large flag showing the image of the sun and the moon, with an outstretched hand holding a spring of a native shrub in the manner of an olive branch (this western metaphor would of course have been completely lost on them.) This was run up a pole in a prominent position on the ice, to which was also affixed a bag of gifts and a large outline of a hand pointing to the ships.

The next morning a larger party of men returned with 8 sleds, stopping on the ice a mile short of the ships. The flagpole enticed the men and their sleds closer, but they remained cautiously 300 yards distant, apparently in conversation. It was at this point that John stepped in. Taking a bag of gifts, and a white flag (another hopeless symbol for communicating with people who had never encountered white men before), John strode out on the ice. Dressed in the garb of a western sailor, they had no idea who he was, or what his act of removing his hat meant, and as he approached they pulled a knife on him, implored him to be on his way and made it clear that they could kill him if needs be. In return, the ever placid John offered them a British-made knife in his possession, tossing it to them. On examining it, the men were impressed and pulled their noses, a sign of friendship. John pulled his nose too, and a rapport was formed. John now presented them with a string of beads and showed them a chequered shirt. This was not just the first time the Inughuit had met white men, it was their first exposure to a Kalaaleq, a western Greenlander. After some initial difficulty, John recognised their dialect as one an old woman who once nursed him had spoken, and was slowly able to communicate. Using his natural talents and the tuition in Western art acquired from Alexander Nasmyth, John would paint a picture to capture this scene, presenting it to Captain Ross.

John, wearing the blue jacket, with his arm held in a sling and wearing a beaver cap, is seen holding the chequered shirt while two Inughuit inspect the other gifts he has presented them with, one of whom may be holding up one of the mirrors with which they were presented and which caused them wonder and delight. In the foreground, Captain Ross and Lieutenant Parry offer other gifts, receiving narwhal tusks in return. Another man is arriving on his dog sled, and two others are in the distance admiring the ships and a boat which had been hauled onto the ice for repairs. The Inughuit had never before seen a ship; indeed they were not seafaring people, had never seen a kayak and had no word for it, living entirely on the land and using dog sleds for travel and hunting. So it was with some difficulty that they were eventually enticed aboard onto these winged “Islands of Wood” (they had never before seen a shrub with a trunk wider than your finger, so the ships timbers were an incredible sight for them). The men were given a tour of the ship, before being convinced to sit in chairs (something they had never seen and whose purpose they did not understand) to have their portraits taken. They were offered ships biscuit, salt beef, plum pudding and Aquavit, all of which they thoroughly disliked.

With John acting as interpreter, they were able to learn that the Inughuit did not count beyond ten, that their knives were fashioned from iron extracted from a rock in the mountains, that they lived in family units by a form of mutual agreement between the husband and wife, but had sent their women and children into the mountains to safety; the menfolk had come forth only to ask the interlopers to leave. They had a chief – Tulloowah – to whom other families gave a tribute. They had no organised religion, but each family had a “sorcerer” who could be called upon to commune with the weather or supplies of animals for food. They had no concepts of weapons or war, or of lands and people beyond their own. They assumed that the white-faced Europeans must be some sort of ghost whose ships had flown down from the air. Before leaving, the Inughuit were presented with planks of wood that they had expressed a desire in possessing.

The Inughuit returned a few days later on the 13th of August and again on the 14th. This was a different party than those they had met before, and had come forth after seeing the gifts that the first had returned with and having received assurances that the “Islands of Wood” and their ghostly residents were not an immediate threat. More gifts were exchanged, and the leader of the party helped himself to Ross’s telescope, shaving razor and a pair of scissors, which Ross was pleased to overlook. Before their final departure, Ross gave them a portrait of the Prince Regent as a present for “their king”.

They now pressed further south and west, coming to Lancaster Sound at 74°19½’ North 78°33′ west at the end of August where he took a fateful decision. Imagining that he could see distant mountains (they were actually a mirage), he was convinced that there was no way further through by sea and turned around against the wishes of his subordinate Parry. So convinved was Ross, that he named this distant range – the Croker Mountains – and made a detailed landscape illustration of them.

Ross now headed south along the western edge of Baffin Bay, taking detailed meteorological and astronomical observations, collecting geological and animal specimens and otherwise occupying the expedition now with science rather than their stated goal of seeking the North West Passage. By the end of September they were at Resolution Island at 61°30′ North and well out of the Arctic Circle, and Ross decided to end operations for the season and head for home. A month later, on October 29th, they sighted Foula, the westernmost island of the Shetland Archipelago. On November 14th they dropped anchor for the last time, in Grimsby Roads, and Ross set off at once for London and their Lordships of the Admiralty with his logs, journals, charts and letters.

Ross, unfortunately, did not find the hero’s welcome that he might have imagined. Instead, his subordinate officers challenged his decision to turn around in Lancaster Sound, and Parry was vehemently and publicly sceptical of the grounds on which Ross made that decision. The Admiralty were convinced by Parry and his conspirators that Ross’s findings were not to be trusted, and they organised an expediction for the following year, led by Parry, and on which Ross was not invited. The press lampooned him, a particularly scathing satirical cartoon showing him pompously leading his crew, all mutilated by frosbite, carrying back nothing but specimens of animals and rocks. The implication was clear; Ross’s expedition had been a failure and the scientific results and objects he returned with were worthless.

Ross publicly praised John Sakeouse as “very intelligent and willing to learn as well as being grateful to those who instruct him. A man on whom the utmost dependence may be placed“. The satirist – George Cruikshank – unfortunately did not treat him with the same respect and credit that he merited. Instead he showed him as a deeply racist stereotype, a savage called “Jack Frost”, carrying a narwhal tusk, wearing a fur skirt, and clutching an album of his drawings. The sailors to his right, on wondering “what will they do with Jack Frost“, suggest he should have his throat cut and be stuffed. This was a sad end to the important expedition, and a cruel way to dismiss the contributions of John Sakeouse, which no other man could have made.

John did not stay long in London, and asked to be returned to his friends in Leith. Parry – although contemptuous of Ross – recognised the importance of John and arranged that he should be included again in the 1819 expedition. Unfortunately this was never to be.

John took ill at the start of the year with “a violent inflammation in the chest“. John Newton, the whaling master who had first been convinced to bring John to Leith, and his family nursed John through his illness. At first he seemed to improve, and despite doctor’s orders to the contrary – soon felt well enough to venture out in the search of fish, which he brought back to his lodgings to cook for himself.

A few days later however, he had relapsed into fever. He told his companions that his late sister had come to him in a fever dream and called to him, and that he knew now that he was dying. Calling for his Catechism – in the Danish language that he had been tutored in by missionaries – he grasped it “till his strength and sight failed him, when the book dropped from his grasp, and he shortly afterwards expired“. All of Leith mourned his loss, and a respectful funeral was arranged in the Canongate Kirkyard and paid for by his friends. “He was followed to the grave by a numerous company, among whom were not only his old friends and patrons from Leith, but many gentlemen of high respectability in this city“. His final resting place is not marked, but was given as “in the area 8 feet south of Fraser’s ground and 4 feet from the north walk“.

His possessions, including his sealskin clothing, were left to Captain Ross, who donated them to the Museum of the University of Edinburgh.

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Tod’s Mill: the thread about the mill that just wouldn’t burn down

This thread was originally written and published in November 2024.

On January 16th 1874 a calamitous fire engulfed the largest and most modern flour mill in Scotland, almost completely destroying it. £168,000 worth of damage was caused, split roughly equally between the loss of the mill itself and its stocks of grain and flour; around £24.3 million in 2023. This mill was Tod’s Mill – or to give it it’s formal name, the Leith Flour Mills – and its proprietors were A. & R. Tod.

A. & R. Tod were the brothers Alexander (1811-1888) and Robert (1826-1897) Tod, the sons of Marion Gray and James Tod. James was the village baker of Ormiston in East Lothian and his position required him to deal in grain, as at this time most bakers bought their own grain and took it to their local mill for processing into flour. James left bakery behind to pursue business as a grain merchant, in which he prospered.

The family were thus able to ensure each of their eleven children received a good start in life; their sons were all well educated and found good positions as apprentices. Alexander – and later his younger brother Robert – were apprenticed to bakers in Edinburgh, after which they followed their father and went into partnership as grain merchants. The census of 1851 records them as living in a fashionable Edinburgh townhouse at 14 Leopold Place with their parents; Alexander and his father being Master corn merchants and young Robert a Journeyman. Having established themselves in that trade, in the mid 1850s they took the lease on the water-powered Stockbridge Flour Mill on Baker’s Place. The business grew rapidly, the Tod’s earning a reputation for the best quality of baker’s flour and soon outgrew the confined premises at Stockbridge. So it was in 1859 construction began of a large, new, steam-powered mill, by the wet docks on Commercial Street in Leith. This project was completed by the end of that year.

On account of the unsuitable nature of native wheat, Scottish bakers baked with flour milled from imported foreign grain; traditionally from Europe but increasingly from Australia and Canada. With its expansive new docks and railway connections, Leith – not traditionally a milling town – was an eminently sensible place for a mill and would come to equal Glasgow as a centre for Scottish milling. The Tods’ new works cost £33,000 – about £4.7m in 2023 – and saw 27 pairs of grinding stones in operation. They were expanded only a few years later in 1861 at a cost of £50,000 (£7.6m). Demand could still not be met and so in 1869 a third extension was added at a cost of £12,000 (£1.8m). This final phase of development saw the mill operating a total of over 100 pairs of grinding stones and employing three shifts, each of around 300 men and boys. The operation ran day and night stopping only on Sundays, grinding 7,500 quarters (quarters of a hundredweight, or 28lbs – or 95.2 metric tonnes in total) of wheat a week, filling 8,000 bakers sacks of flour. The mill rose to 7 storeys on Commercial Street and its 180 foot high chimney was double that height, dominating the locality.

The story of the Tod brothers is one of restless and relentless modernisation and expansion; they constantly sought out the latest new technology for their mill. In 1869, a new granary building was added on the junction of Prince Regent Street and Couper Street. This six-storey building had a floor area of 14,000 square feet and had six cart entrances, arranged in a “drive through” manner so that carts could load or unload under cover without having to back up or turn back on themselves. This latter building is all that now remains of the mill, converted into a block of houses known as North Leith Mill.

The Tods were well respected around Leith and were generous benefactors to the community. They “never ceased to take a practical, kindly and personal interest in the welfare of [their] servants“. They ran the mill in a benevolent manner having taken all their employees into a form of co-partnership for the purposes of profit sharing. In 1872 they announced a 5% bonus on wages, raising it to 7.5% in 1873 as the result of a prosperous year. The workers respected that their employers were practical men, familiar with their shared trade having worked their way up, and they appreciated their direct manner of dealing with them in the broad Scots of country boys.

It was on the fateful evening of January 16th 1874, around 730PM, that the alarm was raised when a fire was discovered in the mill’s oldest wing. It spread rapidly and had taken complete hold of that part of the works within half an hour. Spreading relentlessly, by 10PM it had entered the third of the mill’s three wings – circumventing a fireproof boundary wall by creeping over the rooftop. By 1AM, despite desperate efforts to contain the spread, the whole of the main mill block was ablaze from end to end. The fire reached its zenith at 2AM and it was not until between 5 and 6AM that it was finally under control. It was said that Leith was so brilliantly illuminated “that at almost any point one could read with ease in the streets, and the reflection could be seen for miles around“. People turned out in their hundreds from the burgh to gawk at the unfolding calamity, reinforced by thousands from Edinburgh drawn from afar to the spectacle. They came to be thrilled and terrified by the noisy pyrotechnic display; flames, sparks and smoke were ejected out of the the hundreds of small windows and each time a floor collapsed, machinery was sent crashing into the depths of the blaze below.

The entirety of the Leith Fire Brigade (two steam engines) and much of the Edinburgh Fire Brigade attended. So intense was the heat from the fire that it was not possible to stand on Commercial Street opposite and the sandstone of the walls was seen to split and peel off in large flakes. As the masonry weakened and the internal structure tying the building together burnt out or collapsed, the external walls of the mill began to bow out dangerously. At 10PM the top 2 storeys of western gable on Couper Street gave way and collapsed onto the street below followed around twenty minutes later by the entire wall, all 450 feet in length and 4 remaining storeys of it. When it became clear that all was lost with the mill the hopes shifted to stopping the fire spreading to nearby tenements, bonded warehouses and shipping in the Queen’s Dock. The wind blew sparks and burning detritus towards these vessels and they had to be hauled to the eastern end to keep them from catching fire.

It is not too much to say that the destruction of these mills is in some respects a national disaster: for when it is taken into account that there was not a place from Carlisle to Shetland to which they did not send flour, their stoppage cannot fail to occasion inconvenience to trade and affect the grain market in a greater or less degree.

The Fife Herald, 22nd January 1874

When the flames had finally died down there was an awful spectacle to be seen: “those portions of the walls of both mills that have not fallen tower, in mid air, reminding one of the ruins of an old castle, while below there is a burning mass which still requires all the efforts of the firemen to prevent it from breaking out into a fire of considerable magnitude.” Only the fireproof boiler house, engine house and their chimney remained in one piece along with a detached flour store on Prince Regent Street and part of an adjoining tenement used as offices on Couper Street. In the month before the fire, the Tods had imported half a million quarters (6,350 tonnes) of grain into Leith. All that remained were were 500 sacks of grain and flour that workers had bravely salvaged from the stores during the blaze, now piled up in Commercial Street. Such was the extent of the destruction that a definite cause for the fire was never found; but it was thought likely that an Archimedes screw for moving flour in one of the Dressing Rooms had overheated for lack of oil in its bearings.

The Tods were fortuitous that their entire premises and stock were well insured and that their safe had been carried out of the offices before they were destroyed. Nevertheless there was a real worry in Leith that the brothers would take the insurance money and retire. Indeed Alexander, aged 63 and fifteen years his brother’s senior, decided to do just that. So it was with much local cheer that in March of 1874 it was announced by Robert that he had decided to carry on the business and that the mill was to be restored on a new plan. Determined to make it as fire-proof as possible he set off on a tour of Europe to inspect the latest in mill operations and fire-proofing.

After reconstruction the mill settled back down to a prosperous and relatively uneventful existence. In 1882 it was thoroughly modernised by converting it from grinding stones to steel rollers, with the three different wings of the mill each set up to produce a different grade of flour. The industrious new peace was shattered on Monday 5th April 1886 at 1230PM, when a “terrific explosion” erupted from the Exhaust Room, situated above the boiler house and directly below the lofty chimney stack. The explosion blew out the upper storey of the boiler house (where the exhaust room was located), reducing the two-foot thick walls of solid stone to rubble. Tragically the collapse of the walls onto the foot of Prince Regent Street killed a Leith Corporation street sweeper at work and two young brothers playing there, William and James Orchardson. A third brother – John – and another boy were scalded by the release of steam from a cracked pipe. They were pulled injured from the rubble as were three men at work in the boiler house.

The room in which the explosion originated contained machinery to vent hot air laden with fine flour dust from the mill. Somewhat ironically this was meant to reduce the risk of fire and explosion within the mill itself. Help came first from the garrison of Leith Fort, whose firefighters turned out with their engine, before they were joined by the regulars of Leith Fire Brigade. Further assistance came from the sailors of the gunboat HMS Elk which was tied up in the Queen’s Dock nearby. Despite the upper walls and roof being totally blown off the boiler house the damage to the boilers, the engines and the mill itself was minimal. Initial fears that the chimney stack might collapse proved unfounded.

Once again the mill was rebuilt. Alexander Tod died in 1888 leaving an estate valued at £97,221 4/5, or about £16.2m in 2023. After retirement he had dedicated himself to the life of a country gentleman at St. Mary’s Mount in Peebles. He spent his days fishing in the Tweed, his evenings in Edinburgh at musical concerts and allowed himself to indulge a little in politics, being a firm public supporter of Gladstone.

Robert continued to run the business for the rest of his life. He was not a man of the public stage but was known universally by the public as a man of philanthropy. He was long a director of the Leith Hospital; was a founder and trustee of the new Magdalene Asylum at Gorgie; of a convalescent home at Balerno; and of the Leith Association for Improving Condition of the Poor. Around the burgh his charitable work was extensive including supporting the Sailor’s Home, the Leith Industrial Schools and the Leith Gymnasium for Working Lads and Girls. His time and energy for these causes was matched by contributions from his deep pockets. In later life he sponsored Sunday evening concerts in Leith to try and attract those who had not attended church and who might otherwise be drawn to less wholesome evening pursuits.

In 1894, Robert converted his sole partnership of A. & R. Tod into a Limited company with the shares taken up principally by himself, his two eldest sons (Thomas and George), the general manager, the chief clerk and department heads of his mill. He died in 1897 at his mansion house of Clerwood, near Corstorphine in eastern Edinburgh. His passing “was received in Leith… with deep regret by all classes of the people… Tod’s death [was] regarded as a public loss“. He left an estate of £180,424 11/3, around £30m in 2023. This did not include the extensive land and mansion of Clerwood which passed to his son Thomas.

Despite the passing of its founding partners their Mill went on as it always had and the name Tod remained a benchmark across Scotland for quality flour. On December 2nd 1921 the mill was once again rocked by an explosion of flour dust but this time there was no fire and no injuries, damage being limited to windows blown out in the mill and broken in the surrounding streets.

The last calamity to beset the mill took place on September 6th 1943 when a granary, constructed on the corner of North Junction Street and Prince Regent Street, caught fire. It was quickly engulfed and the fire precautions failed to stop the spread across a connecting gantry to the 1869 granary over the road. The efforts of the fire brigade did however stop any spread further into the mill, an adjacent bonded warehouse and neighbouring tenements. There were no injuries but the loss of grain was hard felt during the period of wartime scarcity and mountains of charred and toasted wheat spilled out into the street through the broken windows. Fifty local residents were made temporarily homeless due to water and fire damage to their homes and were evacuated to hostels that had been prepared for air raid victims.

The North Junction Street granary was completely gutted, its roof gone, its floors and one of its exterior walls collapsed and it had to be pulled down. The 1869 granary was badly damaged above the 3rd floor level and was reduced to that height as a result. It is for this reason that in the 1944 Ordnance Survey town plan of Leith the 1869 granary is drawn as an unshaded outline, denoting an un-roofed structure, and the building opposite is missing entirely.

Flour milling was always a dangerous business; the risks of explosion and fire were an ever present hazard, not just to the Tods but to all millers. In the 100 years from 1850 to 1950, no fewer than 11 other notable fires and explosions afflicted the mills of Leith:

Once the largest and most modern mill in Scotland, Tod’s Mill was eclipsed in the second half of the 20th century by two newer and larger mills built nearby; the 1955 Caledonia Mill of Joseph Rank Ltd. and the 1970 (New) Chancelot Mill of the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society. Tod’s Mill soldiered on into the 1960s before closing, being demolished in the mid 1970s and replaced by a rather grim-looking red brick Job Centre office in 1979.

Gibsons of Leith: the thread about the enterprising fish smokers who became pioneers of Scottish aviation

This thread was originally written and published in February 2023.

In a previous thread, we looked at the Edinburgh Aviation Craze of 1910, when a few local citizens dared to dream that they might fly in machines they had crafted from their own hands. One of those men was John Gibson, and this is his story. John was born in September 1856, the first child of Margaret Forrest and John Gibson of New Street, Fisherrow, the small harbour village just to the west of Musselburgh. John (senior) was a fish curer and town councillor, like his father before him, and the family lived in a house by the name of Gibson’s Land. The family moved to Liverpool in the 1860s, business at Fisherrow having been disrupted by the coming of the railways. John Junior went to sea as an apprentice aged 14, learning that trade across the globe on oceanic sailing ships.

In August 1875, when aged just 18, he found himself wrecked off Cape Horn after the on which he was serving had to be abandoned. The Albert Gallatin of Liverpool became uncontrollable after losing her rudder and was in danger of being wrecked on the rocky shore of the Ildefenso Islands to the south of Chile. The ship’s complement of 30 took to the boats; the first mate and 20 seamen in the larger and Captain Groves, his wife and two children, and five seamen including John in the smaller. The latter boat made it safely to Islas Hermite, where they spent 9 days, before setting off again in search of something from which to construct a sail. After 2 days fruitless rowing they landed on another island, where they were reduced to a diet of half a cracker and 3½ ounces of salt beef each per day and suffered badly from exposure. They were fortuitously rescued by the ship Syren of Boston after 18 days. The other 21 men were never seen again.

John Senior moved the family back to Scotland around this time, re-establishing his fish curing business in Leith, but his son fancied his chances and headed to Australia to prospect for Gold. Not striking it rich, he soon returned home and joined the family trade, dealing in smoked fish in Newhaven. In 1897 he set himself up as a dealer of machinery and soon took to repair work and it was not long before this extended to bicycles. He entered the cycle trade at 109 Leith Walk around 1905, this business soon took the name of the Caledonian Cycle Works. These premises had substantial workshops to the rear, under the Manderston Street railway arches, perfect space for Gibson to indulge in tinkering with bikes, cars and engines.

It’s not exactly clear why, but in early 1909 John Gibson decided to get himself into the aircraft industry by building his own machines. Perhaps he was inspired by those two other bicycle repair shop proprietors; Orville and Wilbur Wright. Or perhaps it was the contemporary adventures of Scotland’s other aviation pioneers, which had been plastered all over the newspapers. The Barnwell brothers of Stirling – Frank and Harold – had been experimenting with gliders and had even tried to fit an internal combustion engine to one in 1905. In 1908, Lt. Laurence D. L. Gibbs made short, powered hops in a curious, swept-wing, “automatic stability” biplane called the Dunne D.4 in much secrecy in Glen Tilt near Blair Atholl. In July 1909, the Barnwells made the first powered flight in Scotland. Closer to home for Gibson there was a financial incentive to budding aviators too; in September 1909, the directors of the Marine Gardens amusement park in Portobello had offered a £500 prize, good for 1 year, for the first flight across the Firth of Forth by a Briton in a British-built plane, so long as it started from Marine Gardens. It was noted in April 1910 that Mr Charles Hubbard, an engineer living at Viewforth, was experimenting with a Bleriot-type monoplane of his own construction on Portobello Golf Course and had made a number of powered hops before it crashed.

Suitably inspired, Gibson’s first forays into aeroplanes were quarter-scale models, c. 10 feet long and certainly showing the influence of the Wright Brothers: being biplanes controlled by warping the wings and by a canard (a leading control surface rather than a tail), being powered by two propellers driven by chains from a single engine and by landing on skis. They were built both to hone and refine Gibson’s techniques and design, but also as demonstration pieces to be put on public show. In total he built nineteen different models, and the design of his craft evolved over this time.

The definitive model moved up to half-scale, 15½ feet long and 12 feet in span, and adopted the layout of Henry Farman, a French aviation pioneer and a type which was very popular in the UK at that time. Again a canard biplane, it had movable ailerons on the wing-tips for control, a single, 7-cylinder rotary engine and the refinement of wheels with rubber suspension added to the landing skis. This was built specifically to exhibit in London and Berlin in March and April of 1910 respectively and was sponsored by the North British Rubber Company to exhibit their rubberised aircraft fabric. The structure was of ash wood, braced by piano wires.

Even before half-sized Farman model was completed, Gibson had already moved on to the construction of a full-sized version of it – Caledonia No. 1. In July 1910 it was ready and The Scotsman reported it to be 30 feet long and 28 feet in span, with a loaded weight of 700 lbs. It was powered by a 3-cylinder, water-cooled engine of 30 hp, driving a 2-bladed propeller of 6 feet 8 inches at 1,100 rpm. The pilot sat on the lower wing, with the engine to his back and the radiators on either side. In contrast to the model, the vertical tails were mounted one above the other, rather than side-by-side. Construction was of silver spruce, with elm skids, and again it was covered in North British rubberised fabric. The aircraft could be disassembled for transport, and a photo of it exists in a field outside Edinburgh being put back together again. Gibson told the press that the only part of his machine that was not built in Scotland was its engine. He had intended to enter the machine into the Royal Aero Club’s inaugural Scottish flying meeting at Lanark Racecourse in August of that year, but the proprietors were wary of the public relations disasters experienced by other events as a result of amateur flyers who could not convince their homespun machines to take off and barred all but experienced pilots in proven aircraft. Gibson was disappointed to be excluded from the Lanark meet, but this was probably for the best as No. 1 refused to take off.

Undeterred, the machine was rebuilt as Caledonia No. 2, and in August it is reputed to have managed to make some short, controlled hops at Buteland Farm, outside Balerno, with Gibson’s 30 year old son – John G. Gibson (the G was for Gibson!) – at the controls. The main visual changes to No. 2 were the twin canards at the front and the curved supporting skids between them and the wheels (which protected the plane in the event of it nosing-over on take off and landing).

Gibson undertook some of the flying himself, but as injured in a crash and broke his leg. Thereafter he deferred most of the flight testing to his son – John G. There are mentions online of testing being undertaken on Leith Links, but I can find no references to substantiate this, and as far as I’m aware Buteland Farm was used as their test ground. The Gibsons now had a working aircraft and began soliciting for orders, charging £450 for a complete machine. Full-page spread adverts were placed in the Edinburgh and Leith post office directories:

Planes, Tails, Ailerons, supplied on receipt of measurements and other details on very short notice.
Best materials only used. Your orders solicited for Scottish-built Planes.
Spare parts or complete machines.
Wood Spars cut any length, straight-grained and free from knots.
Aeroplane Fabric, all grades, at factory prices.
We make Aluminium castings from customer’s patterns or drawings. Wood patterns made to order.
We undertake Aeroplane repairs.

Advert for Gibson’s Aeroplanes, 1910-11

Nine more machines were built by the company in the next few years, most for sale to private customers. In September 1911, Gibson reported to the press that one of his machines – Caledonia No. 11 – had accidentally but successfully performed a “somersault” in the air when being flown at Cramond by Gordon T. Cooper, the son of the secretary of the Edinburgh Aeronautical Association. In November of that year, one of the Gibson machines was included in the display of the Scottish Aeronautical Society at the National Exhibition, at Kelvingrove in Glasgow.

Of the 11 full-size machines built by the Gibsons, four were written off in crashes, one was destroyed in a fire when on display at an exhibition in Brussels and another met the same fate in the Manderston Street workshop. Progress seems then to have stalled, this is perhaps because John G. had graduated from Edinburgh University as a prize-winner and passed an entry exam to the Indian Civil Service, which gained him a prestigious appointment in London with the HM Office of Works. A larger machine was designed in 1913 and was said to be under construction the following year when the outbreak of war saw it being cancelled. This event saw John G. join the Royal Engineers, and he was twice wounded during the conflict. Post-war he took a civil service job attached to the Air Ministry.

During the war, the Caledonian Cycles business was relocated to Dalry Road and the Leith Walk premises and its workshops became the Caledonian Motor Works, with additional workshop premises being taken on Sloan Street and Jameson Place nearby. Business became focussed on providing bodies for lorries and post-war the company would become a principal agent in Scotland for Leyland lorries and buses, with premises taken in King Street, Aberdeen to serve the north-east of Scotland. Later they would become an agent for Morris Commercial Vehicles.

John Gibson (senior) died aged 79, at his home at 19 Pilrig Street in Leith on August 7th 1935. The Scottish newspapers mourned his passing and noted a surprising further string to his bow; he was an acknowledged authority on Egyptology and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquities. John G.’s younger brother – George Thomson Gibson – seems to have largely taken over the running of the company. George was a capable engineer – taking out his first patent for improvements to motorcycle frame joints in 1918. In the 1950s he took out a series of patents for improvements to refuse vehicles and these would become something of a company speciality.

Another line of business was “Gibson Towers”, which they designed and built for themselves; mobile platforms for working at height. Still based in Leith, a pleasing throwback to their aviation heritage was the continued use of “Aero, Edinburgh” as the telegram address.

George T. died in Edinburgh in 1960 aged 69. John G. died in 1970, aged 80. The company continued for a while after the death of the Gibson brothers, being closed and wound-up in 1975.

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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København: the thread about the mysterious disappearance of an enigmatic, Leith-built sailing ship

This beautiful ship is the København. She plied the world’s oceans training young men and boys to become sailors, moving cargoes from port to port until one day, some seven years after leaving her builders in Leith, she disappeared and was never seen or heard from ever again. Her fate remains a mystery to this day.

Despite appearances, the København was a creation of the 20th century; a five-masted Danish sailing barque and one of the largest sailing vessels ever built. Her primary duty was the training of officer cadets for the merchant marine. There is a tradition in a number of European countries, continued to this day, of carrying out such maritime education on purpose-built sailing vessels. To help pay her running costs she also served as a general cargo ship, long after steam had displaced sail as the primary motive power at sea. The early history of this ship is slightly confusing. She was part of an order for the Leith yard of Ramage and Ferguson by A/S Det Ostasiatiske Kompagni (the East Asiatic Company) of Copenhagen in 1913 for three large sailing barques with auxiliary motor power. This particular København, yard number 242, was to have have four masts but war intervened before she could be completed. After lying incomplete for 2 years her hull was purchased by the British Admiralty in 1916 and quickly completed as an oil storage hulk, named Black Dragon and towed to Gibraltar. Sold in 1922 to the Shell oil company, she remained in service there until 1960.

After the war Det Ostasiatiske Kompagni ordered a replacement ship of the same name from Ramage and Ferguson. This new København – yard number 256 – would have not four but five masts, displaced 3,960 tons gross, was 130m long (426½ feet), 15m wide (49⅓ feet) and had a draught of 8.2m (27 feet). Those masts were nearly 58 metres tall (190 feet) and could spread 5,200 square metres (56,000 square feet) of American cotton sails. For times when the wind was lacking or for manoeuvring in harbour she had a 4-cylinder, 650hp diesel engine specially imported from Denmark which could propel her at 6 knots. She could carry 5,200 deadweight tons of cargo or 8,100 cubic metres (288,500 cubic feet) of grain. On account of her size and towering masts she gathered much local attention; taking a walk to observe progress became the done thing to do about the burgh. She was launched – mastless – on March 24th 1921, watched by a large crowd that had assembled to see her huge white hull slide into the dock basin.

The Great Dane, as the British press came to call her, was the largest sailing vessel ever built in the United Kingdom (excluding Brunel’s sail-assisted steamship Great Eastern. Two other Clyde-built ships were marginally longer, but København had a greater displacement.) She was the last of only seven 5-masted barques that have ever been built and ranks in the top 20 largest sailing ships – by length and displacement – ever built.

She was fitted with a generator to power electric lighting throughout and a wireless (radio) set with a 400 mile range. Her regular complement was 26 officers and men along with somewhere between 45 and 60 cadets, aged between 14 and 20. In addition to her master, her crew included 4 mates, a doctor, 2 engineers, 3 cooks, 2 boatswains, a carpenter, a sailmaker and a wireless operator. At the the rear – the “poop” – of the ship, was her main saloon, captain’s and officers quarters, staterooms, wireless room and infirmary. The rest of the crew and the cadets were accommodated in a deckhouse amidships. At her figurehead she had a sculpture of the 12th century Danish warrior bishop and founding father of the nation, Absalon.

She left Leith for her trials in the Firth of Forth on September 28th 1921 under the command of Commander Niels Juel-Brockdorff of the Royal Danish Navy. Again large crowds assembled to watch the spectacle; it took four tugs to tow her out from the shipyard stern first before turning her around so that she could begin to move under her own power.

The København was brought carefully down the harbour, and the spectators had an opportunity of seeing to great advantage the graceful lines of the ship, its fine figurehead, and other decorative effects. Flags were fluttering gaily from the mastheads, and altogether an exceedingly pretty picture was presented as it passed down between the piers, its size contrasting strikingly with that of the attendant tugs.

Report on the departure in The Scotsman, 29th September 1921

After trials she headed straight to sea and on to a welcome in her home port of Copenhagen before embarking on a circumnavigation of the globe during which time she sailed 38,326 miles, not returning home until 7th November the following year. The ship was now gone from Edinburgh and Leith, but not forgotten. For the next few months one of the most popular shows at the Synod Hall on Castle Terrace starred the København as a feature in Poole’s Myriorama; a panoramic picture and special effect show.

In October 1925 she came close to catastrophe when she caught fire in the English Channel en route for Melbourne from Danzig with a cargo of timber. The fire started in the cabins at the rear of the ship, destroying much of her fine wooden fittings, but she was able to to put safely into Plymouth. After repairs she was able to carry her load to Australia without further ado. In 1927, en route from Liverpool to Chile via the Panama Canal, she lost a propeller blade on the Pacific coast of South America and had to put into Calloa in Peru to repair.

On September 21st 1928, the ship departed the Danish port of Nørresundby under the command of Captain Hans Anderson carrying a shipload of chalk and cement for Argentina. It would prove to be her final departure from home. Arriving safely in Buenos Aires on November 17th 1928, she then waited in that port for 4 weeks for an onward cargo for Australia. None was forthcoming and so the captain decided to leave empty for Melbourne, where he could load with wheat, and departed on December 14th. Depending on the source there were either 60 or 70 souls aboard, including 45 cadets, on a trip that was expected to take around 45 days. Eight days later she passed the Norwegian steamer William Blumer some 900 miles to the west of the islands of Tristan da Cunha and the two ships exchanged signals, København indicated that all was well and the cadets were preparing to celebrate Christmas as they passed south of the Cape of Good Hope. This proved to be the last time she was ever seen or heard from ever again.

However there was no immediate cause for concern. Captain Anderson had a reputation for taking a “minimalist” approach to using his radio and sailing journeys could easily take far longer than scheduled if the winds were unfavourable. Thus when København did not arrive in Melbourne on schedule nobody raised any alarm. By February 1929, the East Asiatic Company was sufficiently concerned to begin making enquiries with Lloyd’s of London for any information concerning their now long overdue vessel, but it was not until early April 1929 that they finally raised the alarm. The British Admiralty were approached for assistance and the search and rescue operation which now followed has been called “the longest, farthest reaching and most costly in the history of maritime service“. The Admiralty spread the word amongst British shipping and arranged for the Liverpool firm of Alfred Holt and Company to diverted their steamer Deucalion from Cape Town to make a search of potential landfall in southern latitudes on which the missing Dane could either have become bound or wrecked upon. These were the remote Price Edward Islands, the Crozet Islands and Kerguellen. The Admiralty also lent an experienced navigator, a high-powered wireless set and two operators to man it. The East Asiatic Company dispatched their own motor vessel, Mexico, to make her own search.

In May, news was received from the searching steamer Halesius out of Tristan da Cunha that an English preacher on that island, Philip Lindsay, claimed that he and others on the island had sighted, on January 21st, a five masted sailing ship with a white band round its hull approaching the islands. This apparition came from the south and her first two masts were seen to be broken. It then disappeared from their view towards a part of the island that was inaccessible. Objects were later found washed up on the shore but they could not conclusively be proved to have come from København. Lindsay told The Times:

The sea was rough for our boats and we could do nothing but watch her gradually crawl past and run inside the reefs to the west of the island. She was certainly in distress. She was using only one small jib [sail], and her stern was very low in the water. I estimated that she was within a quarter mile of the shore when we last saw her.

Philip Lindsay, eyewitness

The Halesius made a search of the rocky and unpopulated Gough Island to the south of Tristan, but found nothing and so carried on her way. The master of Halesius put his ship into Montevideo on June 22nd and caused a minor sensation when he was quoted by the press as having found the ship’s wreckage. He had, however, made no such claim and it was a reporting error that had mixed up facts. On the same day it was announced that the Australian steamer Junee, in Sydney, and the Norwegian motor ship Lars Risdahl, in Cape Town, had both been chartered by the East Asiatic Company to carry on the search in the Southern Ocean. They were also diverting the Mexico to Tristan to make a thorough investigation of her own, just in case.

The intensive search continued for the next two and a half months. The Mexico returned to Cape Town in the middle of July and her master spoke to the London Daily News. He told the reporter that it was his belief that the ship had washed up on the lonely desert coast of southwestern Africa and that he was refuelling before heading off on that particular search course. Every coastline and grid square was combed before the company reluctantly called off the operation on September 9th 1929, some nine months after the København had last been seen. She was officially declared missing by Lloyd’s of London on January 1st 1930. But as hope dwindled, interest in the disappearance was if anything even more widespread with the passing of time and lack of evidence.

Various theories for her imagined loss were advanced. Had she collided with ice floes and been abandoned by her crew? But ice was unlikely to have been encountered if she had passed Tristan da Cunha, so had she become lost and icebound in the Southern Ocean? Some said that the observers on Tristan were mistaken; they had not seen the København at all. No, the much more rational explanation was that they had seen the renowned South Atlantic ghost ship, the Phanton Barque. Did the København capsize in a sudden squall under her immense spread of canvas due to the lack of a heavy cargo in her hold to provide a low centre-of-gravity? This would certainly have given no time for lifeboats to be launched. Others said the ship had simply been swallowed by the ocean, it was well known amongst mariners who had sailed in the Southern Seas just how the mountainous seas and roaring winds could do such a thing. Yet others thought she would still be afloat, drifting aimlessly in the oceans, “a plaything of wind and current, a toy of unmerciful Neptune“, just waiting to be discovered.

Public interest inevitably began to wane but in April 1934 a Captain Soderlund, of the Finnish-flagged grain ship Lawhill which had just arrived in Adelaide, told newspapers that he had sighted wreckage from the København floating in the Great Australian Bight but had failed to retrieve it. Then in September 1934 the New York Times reported that a message in a bottle that had been picked up by a whaling ship on the Bonvel Islands. The message reputed that the ship had been blown into the Antarctic and the crew and boys put ashore on the ice, to watch their ship be driven by the winds to her destruction. It quickly transpired that the “diary” entries found in the bottle were copied out of a Spanish novel by a Danish journalist who passed them off as genuine.

We know our boys are dead, but it is terrible not to know how and why and where the tragedy happened. Perhaps, too, there are some who cherish a faint hope against their better judgement that some day they will come back

A statement from the parents of the lost cadets, reported in the Daily Herald, October 4th 1934

On 11th December 1934 the Belfast Telegraph reported that a Norwegian yacht, the Ho Ho, and her four man crew had arrived in Montevideo after a year long voyage across the Atlantic to search up and down the coast of South America for any signs of the København. Only three days earlier it had been announced that Ramage & Ferguson had gone into voluntary liquidation after years of financial suffering in first the post-war shipbuilding recession and then the Great Depression. One of the last ships completed by them had been the Mercator, a three-masted sail training ship for the Belgian government.

Denmark still has a national sailing training ship, the Georg Stage. Somewhat appropriately, this 1935-built ship visited Leith Docks in April 2022 and tied up alongside Ocean Terminal: a shopping centre built on the site of the Ramage & Ferguson yard.

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The Primrose Lady of Lady Fife’s House: the thread about the Ninth Day of Christmas

This part in the Edinburgh and Leith themed Twelve Days of Christmas thread is preceded by a post about the “Maiden Castle”.

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me; Ladies (dancing). There are many options to choose from with respect to Edinburgh and Leith placenames – there’s at least 16 sets of street names with a Lady or Ladie in them in the book of Edinburgh place names. I shall go somewhere close to home with Lady Fife (sometimes spelled Lady Fyfe) who lent her name to a house, a “brae”, a well, and a street in Leith. Lady Fife was Dorothea Sinclair (1739-1818), wife of James Duff, 2nd Earl of Fife.

Lady Fife’s House was more commonly known as Hermitage House and had been completed prior to 1744 in the lands of Coatfield Mains, just to the south of Leith Links between the roads to Lochend and Restalrig. The origin of the Hermitage name is unclear, but when the house was built, it was advertised as being the house “large new house in Hermitage Park“, which suggests the name was already known for the area, and was not taken from the house itself. It was described as having “Kitchen, 12 fire rooms, garrets, closets and other conveniences, all neatly and substantially finished, with a stable, hay loft and brewhouse, and other offices“. In January 1744 it was advertised for sale in the Caledonian Mercury and described as “new built” and extending to 42 acres of lands. It was at this time the property of the estate of the recently deceased Thomas Mercer of Binhall; his widow, Elizabeth Jamieson, was then still resident in it.

The house continued to be advertised for annual let from 1753 to 1760 (it’s unclear if it was formally occupied during this period) and was optimistically described as being “newly finished” at least 16 years after completion! Lady Fife had bought the house in 1794 after she separated from her husband as a result of there being no legitimate heirs (and probably helped by him siring numerous children through extramarital affair). One of the main conveniences of the house was said to be “a pipe of fine water brought into the kitchen“, making it one of the first houses in Leith to have running water. It’s not clear if the water came from the new public supply for Leith from Lochend Loch or if it was tapped off of the well of the name Lady Fife’s Well opposite the house on Leith Links. A large rookery is described as being kept in the grounds.

The distinctive cruciform footprint of the mansion, with four detached wings arranged around the main building, is clear on Roy’s Lowland Map of the 1750s, the house would have been relatively new at this time.

It is described as having “three pavilions, presently used for summer lodgings“, which I assume account for three of the 4 structures at the end of the “arms” extending from the main block of the house. It also had a walled kitchen garden that grew fruit trees and 8-20 acres of grazing.

You will notice that in the 1804 map above, the land ownership is recorded as “Miss Primrose” (the same is true in the 1817 town plan also). This is on account of Lady Fife’s mother being Margaret Primrose, Countess of Caithness; Dorothea had obviously foregone using the title of her philandering husband – at least for the purpose of land ownership. She gives this family name to the current day Primrose Street which is just to the west of where the house once stood.

By 1839, the house was in the possession of the Wood family, merchants and shipowners of Leith. The end of the Wood line of ownership was Miss Mary Wood, who died there in 1871 age 80. She left a huge legacy, including £1,000 for the Leith Ragged School, £2,000 each for Leith Hospital, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and the Blind Asylum and £15,000 for the reconstruction of St. James’ Episcopal Church and school on Constitution Street. These bequests alone totalled c. £3.3 million today.

The grounds of Hermitage House were once filled with many species of hardwood trees, but this land was gradually swallowed up by building – the first plots, those along the Lochend and Restalrig Roads, were advertised for sale for “building houses upon” as early as 1771. On these plots were built villas including Upper Hermitage, Hermitage Hill, Hermitage Cottage and Hermitage Park. A row of Georgian villas – Hermitage Place was built along the Links. In 1868 the trees of Upper Hermitage were cut down to be replaced by the model streets of the “Lochend Road colonies” houses that took their name; Oakville, Ashville, Thornville, Woodville, Woodbine, Elmwood and Beechwood Terraces. The Hermitage House itself was demolished about 1877 and the Edinburgh Cooperative Building Company was granted a warrant in October 1878 to complete the Leith Links colonies houses on the site (Rosevale Place). Hermitage Park went around 1910, when new tenements were built on Lochend Road and a new public school taking the name Hermitage Park was built on the parkland.

In Lady Fife’s day, she was reputed to be fond of taking a walk on Leith Links. Outside the gates of her house, a public well took the name Lady Fife’s Well. The Ordnance Survey Name Book of 1852-3 records the well as “a spring on the east side of the Links near to Hermitage House, [which] was a favourite walk of Lady Fife residing in Hermitage House“. Beyond the well was (and is) the raised mound of earth given the optimistic title of Lady Fife’s Brae (the latter word being the Scots for a hill, and usually a steep one).

So what is the brae? Is it natural or man made? The Ordnance Survey marked it as an antiquity, “Remains of Pelham’s Battery” on the map of 1849. Pelham’s Battery, or Mount Pelham, was one of three English siege-works constructed as artillery firing platforms during the siege of Leith in 1560. It was named after its commander, Sir William Pelham. The Ordnance Survey Name Book says of it: “An ancient fort said to have been thrown up by the English Army at the Seige of Leith, it is situation about one chain west of Lady Fife’s Well“.

The naming authority was quoted as the antiquarian, Dr. David Henderson Robertson. Robertson had produced in his 1850 book, The Sculptured Stones of Leith, a map showing the hypothetical arrangements of the fortifications of the town during the siege of 1560. It was in this book that Robertson determined that the two remaining “braes” on Leith Links were the remains of the 16th century siege batteries.

Unfortunately Robertson’s map is only partially correct and wrong in a number of respects. The outline of the fortifications he shows is directly contradicted by numerous earlier maps, including a contemporary and accurate one made during the siege. The latter map also accurately shows the siege positions, and that these do not correlate with the mounds on the Links. The mounds are much too close to the walls of Leith for instance, and they are much too small. Plotting the locations of the English siegeworks onto a modern map, based on the contemporary map evidence and subsequent research, puts Mount Pelham (reputed to be Lady Fife’s Brae) on the slopes to the south of Hermitage House. Mount Somerset was categorically not the Giant’s Brae on the Links, but in the grounds of Pilrig House.

So if Lady Fife’s Brae isn’t the last remains of an artillery fortification, what is it? I think a far more logical explanation is that these are natural. The Leith Links are an ancient raised beach system; the earliest illustration I can find of them is from a painting by David Allan in 1787 showing William Inglis, captain of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers who played that game on them. We can see Inglis is standing atop a prominent mound, with the spire of South Leith Kirk, the cones of its glass kilns and North Berwick Law in the distance. This means we are looking north across and the view is over an obviously uneven landscape.

The 1804 Ainslie and 1817 Kirkwood maps both also show the area to be extremely lumpy and bumpy, with many prominent hillocks. The most simple explanation is that when the Links was was being flattened and landscaped in the 19th century these two most prominent mounds were left behind because local lore – supported by Antiquarians – attached a historical significance to them. This is backed up by a letter of 1888 to the Leith Herald, which writes of the intention of Leith Town Council to “level the Links” as “the holes and pitfalls are still so numerous there is a chance of breaking one’s leg if there is a deviation from the pathway“. The author of this letter notes that two “braes” – those of the Giant and Lady Fife – were to be excluded, for what he called a mistaken, sentimental idea of their heritage. He thought they should also be levelled!

Unfortunately, Robertson’s theories have been taken as fact and the story of the two mounds on Leith Links being Marian siege-works have lasted the test of time. Many books have reproduced this story in good faith and the official monument plaques in the park also use this attribution. That doesn’t mean the “braes” aren’t interesting, it’s just not for the reasons that are most commonly assumed.

The Edinburgh and Leith-themed Twelve Days of Christmas Thread continues with a post about Lord Russell Place and Lord John Russell.

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

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The thread about the excavation of parts of Edinburgh’s old cable tramway system from beneath Leith Walk, what the various pieces of ironmongery were and how it all worked

This thread was originally written and published in bits and pieces between 2000 and 2022 as bits of tramway came out of the ground. It has substantially re-written here to create a coherent story.

In a previous post I covered how (and why) Edinburgh came to use cable-hauled trams in the 1880s and why Leith didn’t, and also some basics of how that system worked.

The principal of operation of a cable hauled tramway is quite simple. Between the tram tracks is a slot, in which there runs an endless loop of moving cable. The cable is powered by steam engines in a winding house, from where it runs around the system under the streets on an ingenious (and complex) series of pulley wheels. The tram car is fitted with a pair of grippers which slide into the slot; to move forward it grabs the cable with a gripper and to stop it releases the cable and applies its brakes. To move across junctions, between different cables or to pass subterranean obstructions such as pulley wheels, it can perform an elaborate ceremony whereby it grabs and releases different cables with the front or rear grippers – often with a little bit of gravity assistance.

One of the most common finds has been sections of old tramway rail. A tramway rail differs from a railway rail in that the rail has a flat top with a groove in the middle of it for the flange of the wheel to run in; a railway rail has a domed top and the wheel flange hangs over the side. The rails were relaid when the move was made from cable traction (or in Leith’s case, horse) to electric, so none of the dug up rail sections will be from cable days.

The next most common item that was seen during excavations were the U-shaped cast iron “chairs” that formed the supporting base of the conduit structure in which the cable ran beneath the street surface. To better understand what were are looking at (and for, underground), a cross-section of a cable tramway is helpful, I can’t find one for Edinburgh so one from San Francisco will do as the two were fairly similar. The chairs are coloured yellow, and sat on the concrete base of the conduit.

The Edinburgh system did not use the orange cast slot shown below; it used old rails laid on top of the cast iron chairs to form the slot. Additionally it did not have the small pink cable support pulleys; it used larger, 14inch diameter pulley wheels spaced every 50 feet.

The picture below shows a pile of these iron chairs dug out from beneath Leith Walk, plus sections of old rail that had been used to form the horizontal ties. Notice the chairs are caked in old concrete, as they were set into the conduit when it was being poured.

None of the cast iron chairs are complete; all are missing their top sections; cut and cracked off. However it was not the excavation works of 2021 that caused this, it were those of 1921! A a book kindly provided to me by Chris Wright has a photo of Hanover Street, c. 1921, on the cover. In this scene, a crowd watches workmen digging up the old cable conduit system during the switch over to electric traction (which was apparently the first use of pneumatic drills in the city). The caption explains that for ease, the workmen only removed the top section of the conduit chairs when removing them; the lower sections were left concreted into their bases. There are a couple of broken sections of chair in the pile of rubble below the boy with the cricket bat.

The cables themselves were driven from the four winding houses at each of the tramway depots; Henderson Row, Tollcross, Portobello and Shrubhill (off Leith Walk). We see the Shrubhill winding house interior in the images below. The engines, each with two cylinders and producing 500hp, are in the foreground. They are connected to the cable system by the ropes strung between the pairs of enormous drums. The larger drums, in the back ground, were connected to the 10 foot diameter cable-driving pulleys.

The cables were tensioned on weighted pulleys hung from the wall of the winding house, before exiting the building down a long tunnel from the winding house off Dryden Street at the northern end of the site to Leith Walk. The below photo shows the remains of one of these tunnels being demolished in the 1960s during works outside Shrubhill.

These tunnels ran to large brick chambers beneath the road surface and ran off up and down Leith Walk. Each cable required two pulleys; one for it on its outbound journey and one for it returning back to the winding house. Shrubhill drove two cables, so required two sets of these pulleys in chambers below Leith Walk. The diagram below shows the State Street Cable Car power station in Chicago. The winding engines are in yellow and drive 4 sets of cables. The red and blue cables head off right and left out of the power station. The two green cables are for different lines; they travel to the start of those lines “blind” (i.e. not pulling trams), which is why they are running in between the two sets of tracks, rather than between the rails like the red and blue cables. Each cable reaches the end of its line where it turns around and comes back to the power station. Shrubhill was very similar to this but drove only two cables; one for St. Andrew Square and Leith Walk, which also served the branch to Abbeyhill, the other for the Bridges to Newington.

The illustration below shows a cross section of those cables coming to and from the winding house down the tunnels, running around the pulleys in their chambers and then off around the network. The chambers are brick built, with arched steel plate roofs. This is a conceptual railway, but has two driven cables, rather like Shrubhill. Notice the return pulley is inclined so as to be able to sit underneath the outward pulley.

The below images show the destruction of the brick walls of one of the Shrubhill pulley chambers under Leith Walk. The dark patches are not tunnels, the one on the left is a recess in the chamber walls and the other seems to be a previous collapse that had been filled in with concrete.

The image below, taken of the same overall excavation hole as those above, shows the huge steel roof section of the chamber – the frame is almost identical to drawings of one for the terminal pulley of one of the Henderson Row cables. There is a supporting structure of steel I-beams that would have sat on the brick walls and foundations, and the metal sheet sections forming the roof on which the road surface lay. The large pulleys that directed the cables in and out of the tunnels to the winding house sat directly below this.

These chambers, and others around the system (particularly where there were junctions) were manned to make sure the cable was running properly. Children were in the habit of tying a can to a piece of string, then dropping the loose end into the slot in the road, where it would catch the cable and be dragged off up the road creating an amusing racket. If there was any snag or derailment of the cable, they would phone back to the powerhouse, who would disengage the cable until it could be reset or re-spliced, or the offending item untangled from it.

The excavations here also uncovered the structure of the railway tunnel under Leith Walk, where the North British Railway passed beneath. This was incredibly close to the surface (as a result of the tunnel being built after the road surface, and the Town Council refusing to allow the road level to be raised where it passed overhead); the outer skin of the tunnel is about only 30cm or a foot below the surface. Indeed, a special system had to be devised here to support the new tramway as there was not enough space to fit the standard concrete track slab. You will notice a large trough in the tunnel structure here. This, I think, is where the cable for North Bridge to Newington ran, as it was not used for traction purposes here and is described as “running blind” as far as Picardy Place, where it came in to use to go up Leith Street.

The shallowness of this tunnel totally precludes the urban myths of any tunnels under the road running up Leith Walk towards Elm Row from Shrubhill. Those tunnels are actually a single passageway, just large enough for a man to walk up, that ran under the pavement from Mcdonald Road up to Picardy Place, which was to carry the first electricity cables into the city from the McDonald Road Power Station.

When Edinburgh moved to replace its entire horse-drawn tramway with the cable system across the city, for various reasons Leith declined. Up until the last minute, it had been hoped and assumed that a compromise could be reached and that Leith would join; but it declined to do so. The Shrubhill winding house had a third winding drum for a cable round the Leith rails, but it was never used. Instead, the cable ran from the winding house at Shrubhill, turned left down the hill to the municipal boundary at Pilrig Street, and then ran back up the hill towards Edinburgh again. This meant that passengers had to change onto a Leith tram to proceed any further north (and vice versa). This 24 year inconvenience became known as the Pilrig Muddle. In the below photo, an Edinburgh cable car loads its passengers at the terminus of the line at Pilrig Street. In the background, the electric cars of the Leith system wait for the exchange of passengers heading the other way. exactly where this pit is.

There was another one of these awkward interchanges on the network, at Joppa, which I like to call the Joppa Jumble. Here the cable line from Portobello met Musselburgh’s electric system and again a change had to be made for through travel. But this was at least at the network end, not the middle of a principal route, and traffic here was much lighter

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnmightycat/5967127413

The terminus of the cable car lines was always on a short, single line siding of track on a slight incline. If the terminus was a downhill incline; the car would disengage from the cable and run by gravity into the siding, where it would pick up the cable running back the other way with its other gripper. The process was reversed for an uphill terminus; it ran into the siding on the cable, and ran out of it by gravity to the return cable. This was required as the cable could not be gripped where the it ran around the huge terminal pulley to change direction. This is shown by the diagram below, where the terminal pulley is in blue, inclined so as to fit below the street surface. The cable (red and white dashed line) is guided to and from it by the orange pulleys.

Much excitement erupted at the Pilrig Muddle in August 2021 when unexpectedly (considering this shoul dhave been discovered way back during the first round of tram works), an almost completely intact terminal pulley chamber was uncovered, with not one but two huge pulleys, each totally complete and in remarkable condition. Both were still sitting on their original bearings, just as they had been left almost exactly 100 years before when they were covered up and forgotten about!

The Pilrig Muddle pulleys are unusual for two reasons. Firstly, they are mounted vertically, usually they were horizontal. Secondly, they are back to back, which makes little sense for the terminus of the line. I suspect they are vertical as the street is narrower here, so there was less room to fit them in horizontally. And I think there are two back to back in anticipation of the cable being extended down Leith Walk into that burgh (which of course never happened). The red pulley on the right would have returned the Edinburgh red cable back up Leith Walk to Shrubhill. The blue one on the left would have returned the blue Leith Walk cable back down to the Foot of the Walk. If the cable had been extended to Leith, at Pilrig trams coming uphill from Leith would have swapped from the blue to the red cable here as they crossed the civic boundary. Because Leith was never added to the cable system, if I am correct the blue pulley would therefore never have been used.

The below animation shows how a car would have swapped cables here. A car travels with its front gripper engaging the cable. As it approaches the end of the cable, it is released before the gripper gets dragged into the pulley. To move onto the next cable it can either use its momentum (known as a “fly shunt”), can use gravity if it is running down hill, or it can push itself off the cable onto the next one by using its rear gripper. When the front gripper is over the next cable, it can be re-enaged and the car sets off again. This was a laborious (and potentially hazardous) process, so by design a cable car network keeps junctions and switching between cables to a minimum.

If you look closely to the left of the archaeologist squatting on the ground peering into the chamber you can see the conduits for electrical wires on the wall along with a box. This is either for electric lighting or the communication telephone.

Pilrig was not “de-muddled” until 1922 after the amalgamation of the Burgh of Leith and its Tramway into that of the City of Edinburgh. Edinburgh quickly decided to adopt the electric system of Leith and rapidly converted one to the other. The picture below shows the Muddle being converted. A cable car has reached the terminus at Pilrig Street and is about to return back up the hill. You can see the slot between the tracks for the cable. The tracks on the right are being relaid for the electric trams and a new junction to connect down the Leith Corporation tracks on Pilrig Street is being incorporated. The centre poles for the overhead wires are already in place. I suspect the reason that the Pilrig pulley chamber was left in such good condition, with its pulleys still in situ, was the speed with which the switchover was made. There was no time to demolish the chamber, remove its pulleys and infill it. The new tracks were simply built over it and connected together one night to allow for running of the electric trams the next day.

When Leith Corporation rebuilt its horse tramway for electric traction in 1904-1905, it constructed a large new depot on Leith Walk. This later became the Leith Depot of Edinburgh Corporation Tramways. Sadly the depot structure was demolished for no good reason about 4 years ago now, but the depot office building remains. During excavations at the rear of this, the brick outlines of inspection pits appeared, where the running gear could have been checked and maintained without having to lift the tram body off of it. The tram rails would have run along the top of these walls, see the lower picture for an example.

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

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The thread about Leith’s lost “Eagle Buildings” and what connects them to the building of the Forth Bridge

This thread was originally written and published in September 2020.

I saw a photo tweeted by the excellent Scran resource and was struck by the coincidence that I had looked the place up only a few days before when I had come across some other photos of it on Flickr.

https://twitter.com/Scranlife/status/1308652327373606912?s=20&t=RiEzrm-6XhDoBt2_yhUtig

The Eagle Buildings were at 5 Tower Street in Leith, next to the Sailor’s Home (now Malmaison Hotel).

Here they are in 1992, when it was being used as a workshop and store by a shopfitter. The photographer suggests demolition was in 1997.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cagiva1994/14016906377/

Most of that “sandstone” front was mock and was actually a showcase of the Portland cement wares of its occupants, Currie & Co. Ltd, Building-Trade Merchants in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leith and across the Scottish central belt.

Currie & Co, Ltd. had been incorporated in April 1898 by the merger of two similar building supply and cement merchant businesses owned by John Patrick Currie:

• Currie & Co. of Glasgow, founded in 1873, headquartered in Wellington Street. Subsidiary companies included the North British Asphalt Company, the North British Coal and Firewood Company and the Eagle Portland Cement Co. This is the eagle connection; it was a brand to sell cement.
• Joseph A. Currie & Co. of Edinburgh and Leith, founded in 1875 and headquartered in Bernard Street in Leith. This business had been bought in 1893 by John Patrick on the death of his brother Joseph Allan at the age of only 42.

This 1911 advert reveals that they had a lineage going back to the late 18th century through A. M. Ross & Sons, slate merchants in Glasgow.

The headquarters had moved from Glasgow to 19 Rose Street in Edinburgh around this time, that building too was called the Eagle Buildings and it remains so to this day. If you crane your neck and look up as you pass, you’ll see an eagle watching over you high above in its “eerie”.

Joseph Allan Currie was born in Cupar, Fife, in 1851. At the age of only 21 he was appointed manager of the Waltham Abbey Gas Works in London. He returned north and settled in Leith two years later, bringing with him a new trade of Portland cement merchant. Cement was not manufactured in Scotland at the time, but was imported from the Medway. Leith was therefore the perfect base for such a venture. Joseph Allan added plaster of Paris, pavement stone, lime, fireclay and earthenware to this business, becoming a successful builders merchant, growing the business to become one of the largest in Scotland. In 1894 his company was reported as being the largest suppliers of roofing felt in the region; an increasingly popular product due to the increasing cost of roofing slate and timber.

His obituary described him as having “indefatigable energy, strong personality and business tact“. Joseph was remarkable as being the sole suppliers of Portland cement for both the Forth Bridge works and the ill-fated first Tay Bridge.

The construction of the Forth Bridge required some 20,000 tons of Portland cement, which was manufactured on the River Medway and was brought by sea to South Queensferry. Here it was transferred to an old hulk that Currie had purchased called the Hougomont; a ship that had been built in Burma as a convict transport for Australia. The Hougomont could store 1,200 tons of cement, which had to be stored for a certain number of days before it was used. When smallpox broke out amongst the workers in 1886, the Hougomont was moved to Port Edgar and used as an isolation hospital, helping the outbreak to be quickly dealt with.

John Patrick Currie – born 1848 – continued to run the business and became the largest Scottish building merchant and cement distributor, Scottish agents for I. C. Johnson & Co. Isaac Charles Johnson and his business partner had painstakingly reverse-engineered existing cement products, improved them and then produced a different product that they were careful to make sure was not subject to existing patents.

An 1894 description of the company in a trade publication states:

The commodities which Messrs. Currie & Co. deal in principally are: Portland cement, Scotch and Irish limes, pavement, freestone, crushed granite, Arran sand, slates, fireclay goods, barytes, umber, plaster of Paris, whiting, &c. In all these lines Messrs. Currie & Co. hold large stocks, and are ready to meet any demands with promptitude. Their standing is accepted as a guarantee of quality, and they spare no effort to maintain their high reputation for reliable material. The business in every department receives the direct personal attention of its founder and sole proprietor, Mr. John P. Currie, a gentleman whose commercial capabilities are well demonstrated in the success that has attended this influential concern. The business in which Mr. Currie is now so actively engaged derives its support from a thoroughly representative and increasing connection, and continues to develop.

Rivers of the North – Their Cities and their Commerce.

It seems that the Curries named nearly all their properties Eagle Buildings, with at least 3 in Glasgow.

John Patrick died at home in Edinburgh in March 1919 at the age of 71. After his death, the company seems to have moved its headquarters to another Eagle Buildings, this time in Dock Street, Dundee. By this time it was an agent for the Cement Marketing Company, which would eventually rename itself after its most famous product; Blue Circle Portland Cement. The company was still trading in 1953, after which the trail in newspaper archives goes cold.

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

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The thread about Leith Fort and why it was soon abandoned as a defensive position

Historic Environment Scotland released a very nice 3D model of a 19th century gun from Fort George mounted on a “traversing frame“.

In case you didn’t know, there was also once an artillery fort in Leith – Leith Battery or Redoubt (but for simplicity’s sake we shall call it the Fort) – and most of its guns were mounted in this manner. The animation shows a 32pdr weapon and Leith originally had smaller 24pdrs (pdr, or pounder, was the weight of the shot in pounds, the method by which such artillery was classified).

The Fort had been built in something of a panic commencing in 1780, after Leith and Edinburgh had been threatened by the squadron of the American John Paul Jones in 1779 during the War of Independence. A temporary battery of cannon was placed in North Leith to cover the entrance to the Port of Leith from seaborne assault; the tidal nature of the harbour meant any ship intent on entry had to navigate a relatively narrow and defined channel. When the dust from the John Paul Jones panic had settled it was decided to formalise this battery into a permanent defensive fortification. It was somewhat unusual in origin in that it was largely paid for and constructed by not the military but by the City of Edinburgh and the town of Leith. It was further unusual in that its architect was the mason James Craig – better known for his plan of Edinburgh’s New Town – who was not a military engineer. Captain Andrew Frazer, the Army’s Chief Engineer for Scotland who had designed and superintended the construction of Fort George, therefore oversaw the practical details. The Board of Ordnance completed the construction and fitting out of the Fort after it was handed over to them by the Town Council only completed up to the level of the first storey. It took until 1793 until everything was finalised and it was formally occupied by the Royal Artillery.

I have read more than once than the Fort was something of a folly, incapable of fulfilling its intended purpose of defending the Port of Leith. But if you plot the fields of fire of its artillery you get a good idea of how advantageously sited it actually was; the intensity of the red shading shows how many guns can be trained to fire at that particular point. The effective range of the 24pdr weapons was just shy of 1,000 metres; any ship making an attack on the port therefore had to transit a considerable distance under the overlapping fire of the Fort‘s guns. A newspaper report of artillery practice in 1840 confirmed the guns were capable of firing on practice targets located at 200 to 1,200 yards distant with some degree of accuracy.

A contemporary account notes;

The Battery will effectually command the range from one mile to one mile and a half of the road for shipping and the entry to the harbour

John Smith’s Houses and Streets of Edinburgh

An original survey of the fort made by the Board of Ordnance in 1785 gives details of its planned artillery. The principal battery, annotated at a and b were the eight 24pdr cannons; those at b were on traversing frames, those at a on wheeled carriages. The traversing frame offered the advantage that the gun could be rapidly trained to aim at the target, the wheel carriage was quite cumbersome and required block and tackle to shift its aim. If you follow the link to this Youtube video, it shows such a 24pdr cannon on a traversing frame being loaded, aimed and fired by re-enactors at Old Fort Henry in Ontario, Canada. Notice it takes the best part of 3.5 minutes to complete the loading and firing drill although regular gunners in the 18th and 19th century would have probably had this down nearer to a minute.

At c was a colossal 13 inch mortar: that distance being the diameter of the bore, not the length of the weapon! The mortar was a terrifying weapon, more suited to siege work and with a very slow rate of fire thanks to its huge 195lb (90kg) explosive bombs. But even a near miss from one of these would have made it very difficult for any small boats caught in the blast, or for ships trying to anchor outside the port or come alongside its piers. In addition it could fire a special “ball light” shot to help illuminating the scene for night actions. You can read a full information leaflet about the 13 inch mortar here.

In addition to all this firepower there was a trainable 18pdr weapon to protect the seaward entrance and a single 68pdr Carronade mounted at the lower level. The Carronade was for point-blank use against ships trying to force their way into the Port of Leith. It was a compact but very powerful weapon intended to cause extreme damage at shorter ranges. It took its name from its inventors, the Carron Company, a pioneering Scottish ironworks which was further up the River Forth, near Falkirk. Coincidentally they had a foundry in Leith at this time.

To protect the Fort from naval gunfire it had two broad parapet walls, faced and backed with masonry. The inner parapet, of the battery itself (at B on the diagram) was further protected with a ditch, through which ran a fence.

Protection from the ravages of the waters and storms of the Firth of Forth – which had reduced the seaward walls and bastions of Cromwell’s nearby 1655 Citadel to rubble in a matter of years – came from a sea wall was constructed in front in 1785. To reinforce this and to secure it against direct assault by small boats, 3 rows of large wooden posts were driven into it.

The rest of the Fort‘s defences all pointed landward, with loopholes along the walls and corner bastions to provide enfilading fire (i.e. they can shoot lengthways along the face of a wall, to prevent any attackers from taking refuge up against it from the defenders above). As well as its 100 gunners, there was accommodation for a squad of 12 defending soldiers and their sergeant. It was not designed or intended to resist a siege, this was purely self defence to prevent it being overwhelmed before regular forces from Edinburgh could come to its relief.

There is a single contemporary image of the Fort that I am aware of, a sketch made in 1784 looking from the west towards Leith. In it we can see the grass-covered battery wall, with the notches cut in it for firing the guns through, the flag pole, and some of the accommodation buildings to the right.

Helpfully, it confirms that the Fort was actually armed, one of the 24 pounders can be seen poking through its loophole.

In 1805 and 1806, it is recorded that Leith had five 24pdrs and four, later siz, 18pdrs. The 24pdrs were still there, on more modern carriages, around 1843 when David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson took some calotype photographs of some of the weapons and men of the Fort. A newspaper report in the Caledonian Mercury of April 1847 noted the strength at Leith Fort was seven 24pdrs, four 18pdrs and a 10 inch mortar.

An 1860s newspaper illustration shows the City of Edinburgh Artillery Volunteers practising at the Fort, but their weapons look to be rather larger than the 24pdrs and on more substantial carriages than the iron ones shown in Hill and Adamson’s photos. It was reported that in February 1860 that three 32pdr and three 64pdr cannon were delivered to Leith from Woolwich; judging by the scale the weapons below are the 64pdrs. The Volunteers were raised in 1859 on the back of an invasion scare, and there was much enthusiasm to join; 9 batteries were formed in Edinburgh and Leith alone. Their role was to man the home defences in times of invasion and to provide mobile support to the regulars, using agricultural horses to haul their weaponry to where it was required.

A side-effect of the invasion scare was that the military stockpiled immense quantities of gunpowder and ammunition in both Leith Fort and Edinburgh Castle. Leith found itself being used as the main ordnance store for all of “North Britain”. The Town Councils of Edinburgh and Leith were alarmed to discover in 1865 that there were one hundred and thirty barrels at Leith, each containing 100lbs of black powder. This 130,000lbs amounts to 59 metric tonnes, “sufficient to blow the whole town into the Firth of Forth” as Mr Wishart, a Leith Town Councillor, put it. Official remonstrations to the government resulted in Blackness Castle, further up the Forth, being converted into a central gunpowder store for Scotland and by 1870 the stockpiles had a much safer new home, away from the centres of population and industry.

Hill & Adamson’s pictures also show a number of small, horse-drawn field artillery pieces. These would have been suitable for rapid deployment to firing positions outwith the Fort in the event of action.

Between 1795 and 1815, there are thirteen recorded substantial repair and improvement works at Leith, including making provision for it to hold French prisoners during the Napoleonic wars. However the Fort‘s life as an artillery battery was cut short. When the new wet docks began to be constructed in Leith along Commercial Street in 1801 by John Rennie they blocked the field of fire of the Fort and rendered it “useless as a work of defence“. These docks would take some 16 years to complete and ended in a government bail-out of the near-bankrupt Edinburgh Town Council, requiring that the latter cede land to the Naval Board who moved the Leith Naval Yard from Constitution Street to a more advantageous position directly below the Fort.

New defensive bastions were constructed on the sea wall of the wet docks, where cannons could be mounted in times of threat. The outer approaches of the harbour were to be defended by a Martello Tower, work on which commenced in 1809. Left also to the City of Edinburgh to finance and construct, it took them a whole 29 years before they handed it over to the military; unfinished! The Fort was ultimately re-purposed as an artillery depot, as a barracks and as a muster and training depot for artillery volunteers. By the end of the 19th century, the weaponry allocated to the Fort was a mixed bag of older weapons for drill purposes. It continued to serve as an artillery depot right up until the 1950s and its final occupants, the Royal Army Pay Corps, paraded out in 1956 and the location was locked up and abandoned.

It was afterwards re-purchased by the City of Edinburgh and it formed a core part of the Leith Fort Comprehensive Redevelopment Area, its inner buildings apart from a pair of guard houses were demolished and an infamous housing scheme was constructed within it’s tall, oppressive walls.

This scheme, which had all the ambience and aesthetic of a prison (and in later life, most of the social ills of one), was demolished in 2013 and a much more pleasant housing development replaced it, with the Fort’s oppressive walls much reduced in height. Somewhat appropriately, the new streets within are called Guardhouse Parade, Cannon Wynd and John Paul Jones View.

For a comprehensive paper with detailed research on the Fort and the Napoleonic defences of the Forth, you can download The Fixed Defences of the Forth in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1779-1815 by Gordon Barclay and Ron Morris from the Tayside and Fife Archaeological Journal. This has proved an invaluable source for me on some of the details of how Leith Fort was actually used and equipped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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Coastal Evolution: the thread about a view of Leith’s disappearing Sands and their industrial past

It’s not easy to get your head around where the shoreline was in Leith at a given time, the natural coast has been altered beyond all recognition by human activity in the last 500 years. Slowly and gradually at first, and then it marched northwards into the Forth in ever-expanding dock building activity in the 19th and first half of the 20th century. The best way to visualise it is, naturally, with a visualisation.

The earliest view showing the shoreline and Leith Sands that I can think of is a beautiful sketch by John Slezer made around 1693. The sands are on the right where the figures are; notice that already by this stage there is a prominent and solid masonry breakwater. This defends the Timberbush from the sea. From the French word Bourse – for exchange – this was where imported timber was sorted, stored and traded. The stacks of timber can be seen and as this was a very valuable commodity, and the principal import source for Scotland, it had to be defended from nature. The harbour pier is a mixture of stone, turning into timber. The buildings of the Shore are on the left, the prominent tower belonging to the King’s Wark, which was brought down not long after this picture was made.

One hundred and fifty years after John Slezer’s sketch was made, Dominic Serres painted the scene. Here the artist is positioned alongside the pier, looking south towards the Shore with the Tower of the “Windmill” at its head. We can see that the pier itself has been reinforced in a rather ramshackle manner by timers and masonry. Small boats have been brought ashore, with the catch of the day being sold directly to assembled hawkers on the sands. And in he foreground we see a supply of timber; it was the old custom to float it ashore on the tides before storing it in the Timber Bush. Leith Sands ran off to the left (east) from here.

While today the shoreline of Leith is almost entirely concrete and boulder breakwaters, with the little strip of sand strictly off limits behind the Dock security fences, it was not always this way.

One hundred and fifty years prior to this, this spectacular 1886 photo by Begbie (no, not that one, I mean Thomas Vernon Begbie) shows the palisade retaining wall on the sands, formed to level the ground behind for the coming of the Edinburgh & Dalkeith Railway to South Leith in 1835. On the left we see the industrial chimneys and kilns of the glass manufactory, gas works and chemical works.

It’s actually two photos, intended to make a panorama, and each was taken stereoscopically. I’ve joined them together and put them through a colourising app. Now, I usually avoid these apps as a matter of principle but on this occasion there is an obvious benefit in helping the features we see stand out.

Let’s take a look up closer. On the left we can see the glass bottle kilns or “cones” of the Edinburgh and Leith Glassworks. Glassmaking arrived in Leith with the English occupation by Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate in the 1650s, establishing itself in the Citadel of that force. It really got going a century later when it moved across the river to South Leith. Beyond are the chimneys of the Leith Gas Works and the row of vertical tubes which were the condensers. The light coloured building on the right of those is the passenger building of South Leith Station. The various sidings for the goods yard fan off to the right.

In the middle, the proud looking fellow in his pale work clothes and a waist coat stands amongst the shoreline rocks and the whins. Note that the chemicals used in camera plates at this time were often insensitive to certain blues, and working clothes often come out looking pure white but were more likely to have been pale blue-grey denims. We see the Tower down on the Shore on the left, peeping out between the chimneys. By this time it was used as a signal station for communicating with ships entering the port, the masts of which can be seen in the distance. Behind our fellow are the goods sheds, timber sheds, railway wagons etc. of the busy dockland. Another group pose behind the palisade on his left.

To the right we see a family picnicking amongst the whins – this scrubby, bushy coastal rough ground of coastal grasses and gorse were the natural flora of the shoreline. Children, squatting down, are scratching about in the sand on the right. In the distance,”bathing machines” make their ponderous way in and out of the sea in the middle ground, and further away still is the dock breakwater and Martello Tower. The smudge of smoke might at first suggest that there is an occupant in the tower, but it was likely never armed or garrisoned at this time, and it’s probably a passing steamship.

The people of Leith have a long history of using the sands for leisure. The annual highlight of the Leith year (and a fixture in the Scottish calendar) was the Leith Races, which you can read about on their own thread.

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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Blitz! The thread about WW2 air raids in Edinburgh and Leith

An air raid on Leith on the night of Monday April 7th 1941 saw extensive property damage caused in North Leith. But it wasn’t just bricks and mortar that suffered: three people were killed and 118 injured in the raid which makes it the 10th most deadly such event (by total casualties) in Scotland during the war.

Note, there was deliberately limited and non-specific press reporting of the details and casualties of air raids during the war itself. Some such reporting only took place, retrospectively, after the war but understandably details were occasionally incorrect or overlooked. For accuracy and out of respect I have endeavoured to cross-reference everything below that refers to individuals with the official civilian war death records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Scotland’s People.

One of those who lost their lives in the raid that night was 17 year old Anstruther (Ernie) Smith, a delivery boy from 15 Graham Street who also worked as a messenger for the Leith ARP (Air Raid Precautions – civil defence). On hearing the sirens he had assisted his elderly neighbours to a shelter before reporting for duty at Leith’s Town hall a few streets away where Ferry Road meets Great Junction and North Junction Streets. It was here that he lost his life when a bomb landed nearby and exploded. He was fondly remembered in his community as someone who freely helped the elderly; checking in on them on his way to work each morning to light their fires and make them a cup of tea, and running errands for them. The Anstruther Pensioner’s Club was formed after the war in his memory, it was held in the very room in the Town Hall where we died and it attracted 300 members and a waiting list of 200.

Also killed by the same bomb that claimed Ernie was 85 year-old Jane Notman Young, who died in her house by the Town Hall at 21 North Junction Street. Lastly a 19 year-old apprentice draughtsman and Home Guard volunteer, Kenneth James Anderson, died in hospital the following morning after his house at 5 Largo Place was badly damaged in the blast. This block would later have to be demolished.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/15989027951/

Mercifully the death-to-injury ratio was substantially lower than other comparable attacks on Scottish cities; Leith had been hit by two bombs known as Luftmines – large weapons that were dropped on a parachute and intended for use against dock areas to attack shipping. These as it turned out were not very effective against other targets such as buildings, despite their size. Never the less, three hundred people in North Leith were rendered homeless due to the damage caused to housing in the neighbourhood. £1,500 was allocated to Leith from the National Air Raid Distress Fund, which provided emergency clothing, bedding and canteens to raid victims.

The bombs that hit Leith damaged the three principal public buildings of the burgh; its Town Hall (which included its main public auditorium), its Library – both of which were hardly 10 years old – and the large David Kilpatrick (“DK“) School adjacent. As well as the tenement houses, the Norwegian Seaman’s Lutheran Church, North Leith Parish Church and a railway embankment and signal box of the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) all suffered varying degrees of damage. The gallery below shows some of these:

The main lending room of the library was not fully repaired until 1956 although the reference room had been re-purposed to serve as such in the meantime. The Town Hall and its auditorium had to wait until 1961, a full 20 years after the bombs had fallen. The city’s apparent neglect in restoring the public buildings of Leith after the war caused much local consternation at the time. This damaged caused to the outbuildings of the DK school, which were in use as a nursery school, became known locally as the Bombies and was apparently where pupils would gather to sort out their differences with fists. It would not be replaced until much later and this in turn was demolished, along with the rest of the school, in the 1980s.

Although Leith was marked as a bombing target on German maps, the intended target of this raid had actually been Clydebank almost 50 miles to the west, where 20 souls lost their lives and 313 were injured that same night. This attack was a follow up to the Clydebank Blitz of March 1941 but the raiders had become scattered and twelve other targets across Scotland, including Leith, were hit that night with a total of 49 killed and 456 injured. Most of the deaths night were in Gretna in Dumfriesshire where a lone aircraft jettisoned its bombs and hit a Masonic Lodge, killing 22 and wounding 18. Other bombs were dropped as widely as Bankfoot and Stanley in Perthshire, Loch Nevis in Knoydart, Fife and Arbroath in the east of the country and Greenlaw to the south in the Borders; a huge margin of error. Closer to Leith were the mainline railway leading to the Forth Bridge near Turnhouse and Braehead House in Cramond with thirty four incendiary bombs between these points. These were 1kg aluminium tubes filled with a compound called Thermite which burned at around 2,500°C and were intended to set fire to wooden structures and the timber flooring and roof structures of buildings. These were a far cry from the ineffective rope and tar incendiaries dropped on Edinburgh and Leith by a German Zepellin in 1916.

Although this raid caused the greatest damage to property in Leith during the war, it was not the worst in terms of the loss of life. The previous summer, on the evening of July 18th 1940 at 7:45PM, seven people were killed on George Street in North Leith (now known as North Fort Street). At 8 George Street David Lennie Duff (a 33 year-old basket maker) and his sister Lily Duff (a 23 year-old biscuit packer); Catherine Helliwell (a 61 year-old housewife) and her son-in-law Robert Thomson (a 25 year-old baker); Catherine Fallon Baird (74); and Catherine Redpath (41) who had been visiting the address from her home at 20 Gorgie Road were killed. Over the street at number 13, 15 year-old Jane (Jean) Bauld Rutherford from number 17 was killed when the bomb shelter she was in was hit. The fatal damage had been caused by bombs intended for the Victoria Dock, one of which hit the foot of Portland Place where a nearby tramcar was fortunate to miss getting a direct hit that would surely have resulted in more fatalities.

Number 8 George Street, where six people had lost their lives, had to be demolished along with its neighbour at number 10 and was not rebuilt until 1959. The rest of the tenements of George Street – apart from the northern corner blocks – were later levelled by the city planners as part of the Fort Area Comprehensive Redevelopment not long afterwards.

Four days later, on July 22nd, a raid on Leith Docks killed Robert Hume of 45 Glover Street (aged 33), a fireman with the Auxiliary Fire Service at the Albert Dock. Also on this night Mary Fulton Riach (aged 65) of 23 Woodbine Terrace and Catherine Leishman (aged 68) of 4 Meadowbank Crescent both died from heart failure during the raid, the official cause of death being put down to “war operations“. Two months later, on September 29th, a single stray bomb fell on the block of number 21 – 27 Crewe Place in East Pilton killing the young McArthur children; brother and sister Morag Elizabeth (aged 5) and Ronald Egbert (aged 7) from number 27. Their neighbour Charles Fortune Wilson (aged 69) of number 25 would die the next day in hospital. The landlords and builders of this housing scheme, Mactaggart and Mickel, rehoused the now-homeless survivors and had rebuilt the house at their own expense within 6 weeks. A wartime shortage of timber meant it was given a flat roof, the only such house on the street and the only clue to its sad history.

Another single, stray bomb dropped that evening hit a bonded whisky warehouse of the Caledonian Distillery on Duff Street in Dalry. The distillery was home to over a million gallons of highly-flammable spirit and an immense fire erupted, so ferocious that the reflection on the clouds in the night sky was apparently visible to German aircrew flying over Middlesborough, 150 miles (240km) away to the south. The bond was totally destroyed, as was one adjoining tenement of fourteen flats at 28 Springwell Place.

A week later around 745PM on October 7th, five small bombs were dropped in the district of Marchmont, landing at 29 Roseneath Terrace, 20 Meadow Place, 16 Roseneath Place, 13 Marchmont Crescent and 21 Marchmont Road. Eleven people were injured by flying glass and splinters. Three weeks later on the morning of October 26th, Margaret Ridley Stuart (aged 72) died at her flat at 45 Tolbooth Wynd in Leith from a heart attack brought on by another air raid leaving her husband Thomas, a retired dock labourer, a widower.

The following month the animal population of Edinburgh Zoo was reduced slightly when, on November 4th, two stray bombs hit the park killing six budgerigars and a wild rabbit (as reported by Zoo Director T. H. Gillespie to The Scotsman, Friday 20 December 1940). The craters were left unfilled and became a visitor attraction. A crater caused by a bomb dropped on the lawn of Holyrood Park was used by enterprising locals to raise money for a Spitfire Fund by charging for access to view it.

The month after the raid on North Leith which had killed Ernie, on the night of 6th May 1941, five lives were lost in the suburban bungalows of Duddingston on the outskirts of the city. One large bomb, three smaller ones and 100 incendiaries fell on Niddrie Road (now called Duddingston Park South), Milton Crescent and the Jewel Cottages at around half past midnight. Leonard Arthur Wilde (aged 39), an Air Raid Warden, was killed in his home at number 27 Milton Crescent along with his neighbours Joseph Watson (aged 40) of the Home Guard and William Dineley (aged 37). Lilias Tait Waterston (aged 69) was killed in her house at 26 Niddrie Road and her neighbour Barbara Thomson (87) was killed at number 30.

The last bombs of the war which caused fatalities in Edinburgh fell on Loaning Road in Craigentinny on the night of August 6th 1942, demolishing the Corporation tenement at number 35. Two people were killed; Elizabeth Veitch (aged 13) at number 35 and Robert Wright (aged 66), the janitor of Craigentinny Community Centre next door. A replacement tenement was built here post-war.

You can see in the first picture where the bomb has left a crater (green arrow), upended an “Anderson” shelter (blue) and the entrance to another shelter (orange). Note the white painted poles, so you don’t run into them in the dark

Edinburgh and Leith were mercifully spared most of the horrors of aerial bombing meted out to other cities during WW2. Altogether there were 21 civilian deaths and about 210 injuries caused directly by aerial bombing. At least 5 further deaths were recorded as being due to “war operations” when people had heart attacks brought about by the shock and stress of experiencing an air raid.

If this thread has proved interesting you may be interested in a thread on the first aerial raids and shooting down of German aircraft over the UK in WW2 which took place over the Firth of Forth in view of Edinburgh and Leith or a thread detailing some of the anti-aircraft defences of the city during the conflict.

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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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

O Felicem Diem! the thread about the Leith Banking Company and its unusual banknotes

Today’s auction house artefact is this Leith Banking Company Twenty Pounds note from 1825, issued to the payee James Ker.

James Ker of Blackshiels esq. was the general manager of the Leith Banking Co. and lived at a fine Georgian townhouse at no. 24 Royal Circus in Edinburgh. His father, also James Ker of Blackshiels esq., had been one of the founding partners of the bank in 1792. The Kers were Jacobites and kept in the family’s possession an ornamental and incriminating drinking glass engraved with the royal cypher of the claimant James VIII of Scotland. Their predecessor, once again James Ker of Blackshiels esq., had acted as a banker to Charles Edward Stuart, the Bonny Prince and had been financially ruined as a result. But clearly along the lines the family fortune and status had been somewhat restored by the late 18th century (unlike the Stuarts!).

So it’s rather unusual that a note made out to Ker is also signed on behalf of the bank by… Ker! As a director of the bank with which he held an account, he was fundamentally issuing his own pocket money (and that’s what it literally was, paper money that a gentleman could carry on his person)

At this time, banks issued notes to clients of sufficient standing on an individual basis, and the bank would number, sign and date every note by hand. This note has also been embossed with a 2 Shillings stamp, I’m not clear if this added or deducted that value to/from it .

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

Bottom left is the mark of the engraver, John Beugo. Beugo is best known as the engraver of the portrait of Robert Burns by Alexander Naysmith. While mainly an artistic printmaker and engraver, he did turn his hands to banknotes, also doing work for the Commercial Bank of Scotland and British Linen Banks.

These notes were made on hard-wearing linen paper, which was produced in both Balerno and Penicuik (at mills both named Bank Mill for obvious reasons). Linen rags were a very important feedstock for the paper industry at this time (it’s where rag merchants made their money, see my thread about Asa Wass for more on the riches of this trade.) When you presented your note at the bank, it would be honoured. Deductions could be made from it, and interest or dividends paid on it, this was all noted down (by official stamp and by hand) on the back.

These rather plain notes were promissory notes issued to the gentlemen of means that were customers of the bank. General notes of a fancier design were also issued. In 1822 the Leith Bank issued the world’s first commemorative note to mark the arrival of King George IV. The main image was based on Alexander Carse’s painting, which hangs in the Trinity House in Leith.

Two interesting features on this note. Firstly, at this time the Leith motto of “Persevere” was not in official use, instead the Latin “O Felicem Diem” just means “oh happy day!” in reference to George IV’s visit. And bottom left, “Fàilte don Rìgh“; “Welcome to the King!” I understand that this was the earliest use of Gaelic on a Scottish banknote; the Caledonian Banking Company did not open until 1836 and used “Tir Nam Beann, Nan Gleann, S’Nan Gaisgeach“, or “Land of Mountains, Glens and Heroes“. Walter Scott is known to have been a customer of the bank (from signed cheques that he drew on it), and one wonders if it was his influence on them that stimulated this romantic highland nostalgia in a lowland organisation.

Anyhoo, the Leith Banking Company was established in 1792 by 18 merchants of Edinburgh and Leith, who were its partners. It was based in Quality Street . Here we see James Ker (senior) was the original manager. Pattison and Pillans were two of the more prominent merchants in Leith.

In 1805 it moved from Quality Street to a purpose-built headquarters office in the style of the day, the architect was John Paterson (see also Seafield Baths).

At this time, this was one of only 3 banks in Leith; the other two being the British Linen Company and the Commercial Banking Company of Scotland. All were established very close to each other in the commercial centre of the town, set amongst its finest buildings. The Leith Bank as it was known, prospered for a while, and extended branches to the bright lights of Callander, Dalkeith, Galashiels, Langholm and Carlisle.

It had an agent in Glasgow and a travelling tent that visited provincial cattle and agricultural marts. The Lloyds Bank archives note that the Carlisle branch was registered as an English bank but was illegal according to an Act which forbade English provincial banks from having more than 6 partners! Trouble was brewing though, and the recession brought on by the “Panic of 1837” hit the bank’s business hard. The Glasgow Union Bank offered to buy it out but this was declined.

The bank soldiered on for a few more years until in 1842 it failed after a run caused debts of £123,582, including £10,000 of Leith notes in circulation. It was one of three Scottish provincial banks to fail that year, alongside the Renfrewshire and Shetland companies. According to newspaper reports of the time:

It was a very old established concern, but the business seems to have been dwindling away for some years, so that it has lately been considered of very little importance. The explanation which it is said has been given is, that one of the shareholders having retired from the concern, took the precaution of advertising his retirement in the newspapers, and that the depositors having taken alarm at this, a run on the bank commenced, and continued till it was deemed advisable to wind up its affairs

Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, April 28th 1842

A further report stated that the partners possessed sufficient funds to pay all creditors and that “the public [were] not likely to lose any thing“. The dividends were 13s 4d per £1 on winding up, the partners were left “a reversion, a handsome one, we trust to themselves.” The Bank of Scotland took over the valuable agricultural and country clientèle at the Callendar branch and its remains were divided up by the Clydesdale Bank, its former headquarters on Bernard Street sold off to the National Bank of Scotland. The creditors of the the partners in the bank (JAmes Ker, Henry Johnston, George Craig and John Bisset) did not receive their dividend until 1848.

Footnote – in the archives of the Royal Bank of Scotland, there is something called the “spike file”. This is the sequential record (file) of the payment of promissory notes by the Drummonds Bank from 1781. When a client presented their bank note, the clerk would check their account balance, debit the relevant amount and cancel the bank note (the promissory notes were single use only) by defacing it, with a punch or cutting off a corner. It was then “filed” on a giant iron spike

The spike was retained as a record in case there was any quibble over payment, you could always go back to it and retrieve the note, on which the date and details of its payment would have been written by the clerk. The Drummonds’ spike got “filed” in a basement cupboard and forgotten about, which was then later walled up and forgotten about a bit more until recovered during renovations centuries later by which time the owner was the Royal Bank of Scotland.

And to bring us back round in a circle, Andrew Drummond of Drummond’s Bank was an Edinburgh goldsmith and financier who later established a bank under his name in London. Like the Kers, the Drummonds were Jacobites; his father was outlawed in 1690 for supporting James II, his brother died at Culloden.

The (Andrew) Drummonds were not the same as the (George) Drummonds who were – appropriately – Hanoverians, supporters of King George. It is George Drummond for whom Drummond Place and Drummond Street in Edinburgh are named. George Drummond was a government loyalist who helped negotiate the Act of Union, was a 6-term Lord Provost of Edinburgh, a driving force behind the New Town and other public works of the “Modern Athens” such as the North Bridge and Royal Exchange – and ironically one of the founders of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

The thread about Junction Road Church in Leith and its long and complicated journey through different church and congregation schisms and mergers

This thread was originally written and published in March 2022.

Today’s auction house artefact is this silver church collection plate, inscribed “To the glory of God and in loving memory of Miss Jessie Gray, died 18th Nov. 1961, Dear sister of Rev. Joseph Gray. Easter 1964. Junction Road Church.“

Junction Road Church stood on Great Junction Street. The building is still there, a rather plain, Neoclassical block, but the congregation merged into Leith St. Andrew’s Church of Scotland at the foot of Easter Road in 2006. It is now used by the Mohiuddin Jamia Masjid (Mosque) and education centre.

As a church, it is yet another one of those born out of the various 18th and 19th century schisms in Scottish Presbyterianism and had quite a ride before it joined the established Kirk (Church of Scotland) in 1929. Junction Road Church started out in the Relief Church, an organisation that split off the Kirk in Fife in 1763 as the “Presbytery of Relief” for the “Relief of Christians oppressed in their Christian privileges” over the right of congregations to choose their own minister. The Leith congregation of the Relief Church sat in the old North Leith Kirk of St. Ninian as a temporary home when it formed in 1822. The parishioners were Leithers but had up to this point been worshipping in a Relief congregation at St. James Place in Edinburgh.

The congregation is reputed to have been “a great Kirk for Captains and Company Porters“, the seafaring and dock-working men of Leith (and their families). In March 1824, the foundation stone of a new Relief church in Leith was laid on what would become Great Junction Street – except then was known either as Junction Road (or even St. Anthony’s Road). The Junction Road name stuck for the church, even though when the whole road scheme was finally completed in 1827 it was called Great Junction Street. At this time the congregation numbered 269, so this was quite a financial undertaking.

The church opened on the Sabbath, 30th Jan. 1825 at a build cost of £4,000. The minister was Francis Muir of Strathaven who preached “Lord, I have loved the habitation of Thy house and the place where Thine honour dwelleth.” in thanks to its temporary home. Reverend Muir was joined by a 2nd minister – Deans – in 1865 to assist with the burden of duties of a congregation approaching 900. Muir died in 1871, aged 75, after 49 years with the congregation. Deans resigned in 1878 owing to ill health brought on by the burden of his work.

The new minister – Duncan – was called in 1879, but resigned 3 years later owing to being unable to manage the large congregation that had been held together largely by their loyalty to the long serving Muir. The next minister – McLeod – died suddenly in 1886 after only 3 years service. His replacement – Scott – suffered a schism in the congregation in 1890 over the issue of unfermented communion wine. The dissenters left to form the Ebenezer Free Church down the street.

At the close of 1899 the Junction Place Church had a healthy congregation of 1,187. By this time it was part of the United Presbyterian Church, (the U. P. Church you will see on old Ordnance Survey maps) the Relief Church having merged with the United Secession Church in 1847 (Any excuse to bring out this diagram!)

Over this time, the Church that had sat on the fringes of Leith in orchards and market gardens when it was opened was swallowed up by the burgeoning burgh, and enclosed within dense housing and industries.

In 1900, the United Presbyterian Church joined with most of the Free Church to form the United Free Church. To celebrate, a new pipe organ was installed in 1903. (A motion to use a harmonium instead of an organ was defeated by “overwhelming majority“)

The Church had also built itself a new hall to its rear, facing onto Bonninton Road, in 1894 and ran a very active social program from here. This included a literary society, a savings bank, clothing scheme, children’s work lessons, temperance band, mothers’ meetings etc.

A new minister – Rev. Joseph Gray – was inducted in 1921 in time for the church’s centenary. The congregation followed most of the United Free Church by joining the established Kirk in 1929. It is Gray’s sister to whom the collection plate is dedicated.

By 1975, long term population shifts (an ageing, depopulating Leith) and changes in worshipping habits saw Junction Road merge with the nearby St. Thomas’ on Mill Lane to form St. Thomas’ Junction Road. St. Thomas’ building would become home to the Sikh Gurdwara

Writing in 2003, “We- Ministers, Elders, Managers and Members of Junction Road Church-do not know what the future has in store for us as individuals and for us as a Congregation”. The future held a merger with Leith St. Andrew’s at the foot of Easter Road, the congregation moving into the latter building. The future of even this merger of mergers Church is now once again up for debate, with the real prospect that the Church of Scotland will consolidate into a single Leith congregation at the South Leith Kirk.

This thread is one of an occasional series with the vague working title of “just why are there so many old churches in Edinburgh and Leith.” You can read a bit more in the thread on Leith Communion Tokens.

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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NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

The thread about a Leith “Beggar’s Badge”; when the Scottish state sanctioned begging as a privilege for a select few

This thread was originally written and published in December 2020.

Today’s Auction House Artefact is this Leith beggar’s badge or token. It is inscribed on the front with an earlier version of the emblem from the Burgh coat of arms and motto Persevere. The date 1565 which refers to the date of Mary Queen of Scots writing permission for Leith to erect its Tolbooth, and on the back with “Leith Poor No. 10.” It’s not date stamped, but I would wager this is from the second half of the 19th century, given the better quality of the token, the style of the crest and the fact the Persevere motto does not appear in use until around the 1860s.

“The growth of a large class of beggars in medieval times led to the necessity for limiting the numbers of those
officially entitled to beg“. This was put into Scottish law by an Act of Parliament as early as 1424. Only those with a badge were allowed to beg, and it had to be worn on outer clothing. Begging was seen as a privilege for certain “deserving poor” and restricted to such charitable cases as widows, the aged or those with disabilities or injuries that precluded them from working.

Anyone found begging without a badge was liable to be dealt with severely by vagrancy laws. Sheriffs would round up “masterless men” and arrest them – these might itinerants such as wood or wool gatherers. They would be given 40 days to find a master or craft, under pain of either imprisonment, banishment from the county (which may involve the hand being branded) or being sent into bonded labour such as coal mining or salt panning. “Egyptians” (gypsies) were in particular persecuted, being banished from Scotland if they did not renounce their itinerant ways. Landowners and heritors in the 17th and 18th century were subject to a tax called “Vagabond Money”, which was to pay for the employment of vagrants as labourers. The words vagabond and vagrant both come from the Latin vagari, to wander.

Parishes and burghs all over Scotland issued these badges, as they were responsible for the maintenance of their own poor. It allowed the bearer to beg in the burgh or parish that issued it, and protected them from the force of the vagrancy laws. The parishes and burghs were resentful of having to support “idle beggars” or “sturdy beggars” from other areas, and so wanted to be able to identify their own. Begging was thus an official and strictly controlled activity.

Beggar’s badges were generally lead, pewter, copper or some other easily cast, cheap metal. Stone and pasteboard are also recorded. Not many survive, they usually have a serial number. Dates are less common and the holder’s name is almost never seen. There are at least four further Leith badges in public collections. The National Museum of Scotland lists three. Two are shown below, the third is described as “A lead circle, featuring the arms of Leith, similar to the one at the start of the thread, numbered No. 9“:

I believe the Hunterian collection in Glasgow has a No. 4. And there are a wide range of other designs from across Scotland. Interestingly, as far as I’m aware no tokens from the 2 largest burghs (Edinburgh and Glasgow) are known to survive, this may be because they were melted down and recycled whenever they were renewed.

The other authority which could issue beggar’s token was the Crown. Such “King’s Bedesmen” were first appointed by King James VI. They were commonly known as Blue Gowns, on account of the official cloak that they were issued with, or Jockies. They had a lodge house outside the city of Edinburgh; the Jockies Lodge – this is where the neighbourhood of Jock’s Lodge takes its name from. Every birthday of the reigning monarch, each Jockie received a new cloak, their tin badge with the motto “pass and repass“, a Scots shilling for every year of the monarch’s age and their dinner. “Pass and repass” referred to the holder being allowed to pass freely through the land, not being subject to the local begging laws and being charged with vagrancy. The artist David Allan sketched many of the common folk of Edinburgh in the 1780s, including a blue-cloaked and badged Bedesman. Paul Sandby, whose work in the city in the 1750s clearly influenced Allan also drew numerous beggars and vagrants, and frequently colours their coats blue.

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

This thread was originally written and published in September 2020.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ropewalk, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1858

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

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

And ropes for power transmission and winding;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

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

This thread was originally written and published in October 2021.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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The Burning of the “Brilliant”: the thread about the loss of a Leith steam packet and the death of Captain Wade

The PS Brilliant was one of the earliest steamships in Scotland, built by James Lang in Dumbarton for the Leith & Aberdeen Steam Yacht Company (of Leith) way back in 1821 – just nine years after the pioneering Comet introduced this type of vessel to the world. Her owners were based at 22 Bernard Street in Leith, the commercial quarter of that town and where many a shipping and merchant company based itself.

Apart from the addition of the steam plant and paddle wheels, the Brilliant wasn’t really that different in form or construction from a sailing coaster and in common with early steamers was also rigged as a sailing vessel, for times when either there were favourable winds (to increase the speed or make her more economical) or when the mechanical propulsion broke down. She was fairly small; displacing 159 tons, being 120 feet (36.6m) long, 20.5 feet (6.2m) wide 8in the beam, with an 8 foot (2.4m) draught below the waterline and had a crew of 10

The little ship proved successful and reliable vessel in service and plied the east and north coast of Scotland over the years following her launch, originally between Leith and Aberdeen and soon adding intermediate stops in Fife or Dundee along the way. Summer saw her sailings extended to Inverness and even Wick. She was joined in service by sister ships the Sovereign and Velocity. An advert in the 1839-40 Edinburgh and Leith Post Office directory shows that the company’s ships sailed from Leith to Aberdeen every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with reverse journeys departing on Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday, with a 14s fare for cabin passage or 7s for steerage. Her master was Cawfield Wade.

Coastal steam packets proved themselves in service – they could move against the wind as well as with it – and could therefore keep a faster, more reliable timetable. Before there were long distance railways in the country, they were the fastest way for people and trade to move (so long as you wanted to keep to the coasts). The industry saw a flurry of speculative investment followed by the realities of business, which resulted in a consolidation of the various companies. In 1826 Brilliant‘s owners merged the rival Aberdeen & Leith Shipping Company to form the Aberdeen & Leith Steam Packet Company and a little over ten years later in 1837 it merged with others to become the Aberdeen, Leith, Clyde & Tay Shipping Company, usually shortened to just the Leith & Clyde Co. Under this ownership we can find Brilliant in the fateful year 1839 in Lloyd’s Register.

Brilliant’s usual southern terminus was of course the Port of Leith. In the engraving below after a painting by W. H. Bartlett we see a paddle steamships arriving at the quayside – note the boarding gangway hung off the back of the paddle box – and we can allow ourselves to imagine that this might be the Brilliant (although the position of the funnel and single mast says otherwise…)

Because of the poor state of the Port of Leith in the 1820s and 30s the ship often sailed instead from the Trinity Chain Pier, which had been built as a speculative scheme to provide a steamship pier less affected by the tides of the Forth. She could quite possibly be one of the small steam ships seen in the picture below.

By 1839 Brilliant was sailing thrice a week from her home port of Aberdeen, to Leith, under Captain Cawfield Wade. The journey took about twelve hours, although she had managed it with the wind at her back in only ten and three quarters, and called at intermediate piers along the Fife and Angus coast. The schedule was well maintained, intermediate stops took only 5-10 minutes and were conducted offshore: passengers who wished to join or leave the steamer were rowed out to meet her from those ports. Once a week in the summer she would make a run from Aberdeen to Inverness and back again.

Of Captain Wade we know relatively little as his death predates statutory registers and surviving census records. In 1835 he was the master of the Aberdeen & London Shipping Co.’s smack Aberdeen Packet, sailing between those ports. He had then been a mate (officer) in steamships on the Aberdeen and Leith route before being promoted to master of the Brilliant, which seems to have been his first command in that company. He married Lilias Reid in Aberdeen in 1837, a farmer’s daughter from Alford, and we know he had a brother William, also “a mariner in Aberdeen“. I can find neither of these men in Scottish parish birth registers however Wade is an uncommon name in these parts at the time. The Caledonian Mercury would however later describe him as a son of Stonehaven.

On the afternoon of 11th December 1839, Captain Wade took the Brilliant out of Leith and headed north on what should have been just another one of her thrice-weekly scheduled runs. In the picture below we can see a steam packet departing Leith in choppy seas.

The little ship headed into a choppy Firth of Forth and began her scheduled calls along the Fife coast, but weather conditions were worsening.

Up in Aberdeen Captain Morrison, the Aberdeen harbour master and pilot, was awoken from his bed by a terrible storm. It was this maelstrom into which the Brilliant would sail early that morning.

Struggling through heavy weather and violent seas and almost within sight of Aberdeen, disaster struck. At around six O’ clock in the morning when she was off the welcome site of Girdle Ness Lighthouse the deck was suddenly swamped by an unexpected wave. Cawfield Wade, at his station on the quarterdeck, could do nothing to stop himself being swept overboard and disappeared into the sea, never to be seen again. But the troubles were not over yet – the approaches to Aberdeen harbour had a fearsome reputation in Victorian times, one which was well earned. Brilliant was now wallowing through the storm towards it without her master and was about to become the first steam-powered victim of this entrance.

The sea was rushing on from the beam (her sides) as the little steamer approached the harbour entrance. Passing through a feature known as The Bar her helmsman was not able to keep her clear of the churning water around the head of the pier and she was driven side-on into the harbour wall, just below the Fittie (Footdee) lighthouse.

The Brilliant was mortally wounded and this was quickly apparent to all onboard. The call to abandon ship was given but in his haste to get to safety the ship’s engineer failed to draw the fires from her boilers, which quickly began to run dry. Overheating due to a lack of water they soon set the wooden vessel ablaze. The artist J. Faddie captured the remarkable scene that night for us.

Miraculously, all on board – except the tragic Captain Wade – were saved. Salvage parties were even organised to return to the burning ship and recover most of her cargo: the bow of the ship was stuck fast on pier allowing them to work in (relative) safety while the stern burnt out. We can see them on deck in the painting above. The mainmast was deliberately cut down about ten O’ clock in the morning, to stop it collapising on the workers, and an hour later the funnel and mizzen (after) mast did collapse.By sunset on the twelfth of December the ship had burned down to her waterline and the pounding of the seas was beginning to make short work of scattering her remains across the seabed and shoreline.

The body of Cawfield Wade would never be found. His will shows he left an estate of £50 (about £5,000 today), about a year’s pay for someone in his position and to his wife Lilias he left their household goods worth around £40. To his brother William he left his “suit of coloured clothes“, his best jacket and his watch (although it’s likely he may have taken these with him to his watery grave). To a man described as brother-in-law he left his “suit of black clothes“: his Sunday and mourning attire. These bequests were made with the unusual condition forbidding his “nearest in kin from troubling or molesting” his widow. Lilias lived out a long life as the “Widow of the Late Captain Wade“, running various lodging houses in Aberdeen. She died at the age of 87 in Old Machar parish in Aberdeen, her last address a respectable granite house in Margaret Street. This way of supporting herself would have been one of the few options open to her beyond remarrying.

William Wade is never heard of again, although a woman Martha Wade and a child, William Wade, are in the 1841 Aberdeen census; they may have been a wife and child or sister and nephew. That William Wade junior would become a seaman and get a master’s ticket in later life.

The entry to the harbour would prove to be treacherous for the Aberdeen steamers. Nine years later in 1848, Brilliant‘s sister – the Velocity – would be wrecked in almost exactly the same spot and circumstances, driven onto the Fittie wall by heavy seas. Again all aboard were saved but the ship and all cargo were demolished within an hour and scattered along the Torryside. In 1853, the Duke of Sutherland – at the end of a long journey from London – was wrecked in the harbour entrance with sixteen lives lost.

In 1863 the Prince Consort would also come a cropper. She broke her back but miraculously was salvaged, repaired and returned to service only to be finally wrecked nearby on the Hasman Rocks, a few miles south of Girdle Ness, four years later. Fortuitously there was no loss of life in either accident.

The Aberdeen, Leith, Clyde & Tay Shipping Co. would go on to prosper, becoming the North of Scotland, Orkney & Shetland Steam Navigation Company, more commonly known as just the North Company, which connected the ports of Orkney, Shetland and the north of Scotland with Leith.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Leith Police Dismisseth Us, a version from 1927

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

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

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

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

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

The thread about #NowAndThen photo montages of old railway stations, tramways and bridges around Edinburgh and Leith

This thread was originally written and published in December 2017 and a further part in May 2019.

This thread features #NowAndThen photo-montages of long gone railway stations, tramways and bridges in Edinburgh and Lieth; period photos overlaid on the current streetscape to show just how much or little things have changed over time.

Duke Street in 1954 on the last day of service for the No. 25 tram. This service ran from Corstorphine to Portobello King’s Road via Leith Walk and the Links. Not much else has changed on this side of the road, although the occupants of the buildings certainly have. On the left was the Palace Cinema, with a snooker hall above. It is now a J. D. Wetherspoon pub.

Commercial Street in 1955. The No. 17 tram from Granton passes the “Highland Queen” bonded warehouse of MacDonald and Muir. It is running across the railway lines that crossed into the docks from the former North British railway at North Leith / Leith Citadel station. The bond is now flats, through the West Dock Gate where the railway ran is the now the Scottish Government building – Victoria Quay. The Old West and East docks are infilled, unimaginatively used as car parks. The Victoria Dock is cut off from the harbour basin and is a sterile and bleak water feature in front of Victoria Quay.

King’s Road at Portobello in the 1950s. The No. 12 tram from Corstorphine via Leith, it has just passed the ghost of a car heading the other way to Portobello. The background is dominated by the great red brick lump of Ebenenzer J. Macrae’s Corporation electric power station.

Tollcross in 1956. There was a tramway depot here – where the central fire station now is – and the route was also a junction where 3 routes from the suburbs converged and then split immediately into two to head into the city by different routes. As such this was always a busy place on the network and this scene is busy with shoppers and tramcars. The tenement on the right and the castle are all that remain of the original buildings in this shot now.

Trinity Crescent in the 1950s. A no. 17 tram squeezes under the bridge carrying the railway from Trinity Station along Lower Granton Road to the docks. The low bridge and tight S-shaped turn of the road meant that the tramway here was single line in the middle of the road, with the overhead line lowered. A set of traffic signals allowed only 1 tram at a time into this short section and warned motor vehicles that a tram was about to pass as their route swung onto the right lane to make the turn.

And Trinity again in 1986. A ghost train crosses Trinity Road on track removal duties. Click on the link to the EdinPhoto website to see more images of this series.

Moving on to animated transitions, here is Balgreen Halt station. A 1934 addition to the suburban railway network by the LNER (London & North Eastern Railway), it was closed in 1968. Estimate the old photo is early 1960s.

And at the end of the line at Corstorphine. Always a hard one to get your head around as no hint of the stations presence is left under the 1980s housing, beyond the name “Station Road”

Side fact, Corstorphine had extraordinarily long platforms for a suburban station (250m, sufficient for a 12 coach train of 60 foot stock), I believe this was because the railway company hoped that a new barracks to replace the Georgian cavalry establishment at Piershill would be built nearby. The new barracks were ultimately built at Redford instead but Corstorphine was left with its overly large station. There were 2 full platforms and 2 full length carriage sidings. As a result it was used to stable and clean coaching stock overnight and on occasions such as rugby and football matchdays.

Another overlooked Edinburgh suburban station; the awkwardly located Piershill at the foot of Smokey Brae, between Meadowbank and Restalrig. The road here running under the bridge is Clockmill Road, which connected to the Clockmill Lane. This was the ancient route from the Canongate to Restalrig, cut in two by the London Road when it was built in the early 1820s. The road was obliterated and the bridge cut off by the groundworks for the 1970s Commonwealth Games stadium, the velodrome being built on top of the road. The bridge is now blocked up as a garage, but may be re-opened as a through route in the future when the eastern end of the stadium site is redeveloped as housing.

Leith Walk station – no, not the big one at the Foot, but the one called Leith Walk towards the top.The demolished tenements of Shrub Hill and Shrub Place are in the background, plus an intriguing belfry. I’m guessing it was the old school next to Pilrig Model Buildings, which later became the “Royal Caledonian Bazaar”.

Now the site of the Inchkeith House multi-storey flats, the Royal Caledonian Bazaar was a “posting and livery establishment”; basically a horse transport depot. The proprietor was one John Croall. The Croalls were established in the horse business and were pioneers of motoring in Edinburgh. They gave their name, unsurprisingly, to Croall Place, the tenement at the top of Leith Walk where it meets Macdonald Road. Croall & Croall later built car and bus bodies and had a number of works around the West Port and Lothian Road. They later became part of the SMT (Scottish Motor Transport) empire.

Granton Road, once an important suburban commuter station and tram route. It was much more conveniently located for the wealthy suburb of Trinity than the station of that name, and later for the big new housing scheme at Boswall.

There’s an old cast iron column just outside where the station was, I always assumed it was a tramway pole for the overhead wires. This photo shows it supported no wires – there’s an actual tramway pole right behind it – and it had a crown-shaped vent cap. It’s not a pole or a lamp post at all, it’s actually a sewer vent – a stink pipe – which is why it has survived.

We move on to Granton station itself. One of the first in Edinburgh and originally the site of a pioneering train ferry to Burntisland before the Forth was bridged. It closed in 1925 as an economy as there was little need by this time for a passenger station in the middle of the docks – most people taking the ferry across the Forth found the electric tramway much more convenient to get into the city than taking the train.

The slip for the train ferries is still used by the Royal Forth Yacht Club. Thomas Bouch’s Floating Railway was an ingenious and effective solution to bridging the Forth before the technology allowed a permanent structure. Basically an early, steam-raised linkspan that lowered a ramp on to a special ferry boat, allowing wagons and carriages to be run aboard. The whole apparatus, rails and all, was on a great wheeled carriage, allowing it to move with the tides. The rails were in short sections, bolted together in such a way that they could flex.

Thomas Bouch is an engineer remembered for his greatest and most infamous creation, the first Tay Bridge, but he had a long career in which he constructed many pioneering and innovative solutions to the problems of getting railways across obstacles.

I’m quite chuffed with this image, which shows the evolution of the Upper Drawbridge at Sandport Place. Not only is the river much higher now since the docks were dammed, but the deck was widened and the central arch of the current bridge replaced the lifting section.

The Water of Leith is no longer a tidal river, as in the 1960s a set of lock gates were installed at the mouth of the docks to keep the dock basin always filled with water to allow bigger and deeper ships to use the port, and not be so restricted by the tides when coming and going. The water level these days is frequently within a foot of the central arch but you can still see the “river bed” in the right conditions only a few feet below that, there must be a good 20 foot of mud and silt and sludge built up on the river bed, unable to be washed out by the tide.

The next image is the same spot as before but looking the other way, to St. Ninian’s Wharf (named for the old North Leith Kirk behind, with its distinctive Dutch tower). The site of a dry dock and boatbuilding yard in the 1850s and 60s.

The photo confused me for a good while, as I assumed that the ship must be in the dry dock, which was one of the first dry dock in Scotland so pre-dated the photo by about 100 years. I later realised that the ship being built in the picture is not in the dry dock at all, but on a building slip alongside, with a temporary coffer dam following the line of the river wall – marked in red on the Town Plan below.

That ship may even be on a “patent slip”, a Leith invention.

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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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

The thread about Conder Tokens; when Edinburgh and Leith issued their own money

This thread was originally written and published in September 2020.

Today I have found out about Conder Tokens. Did you know about Conder Tokens? Until yesterday I didn’t know what they were and until today I didn’t know what they were called

Long story short, in 18th century Britain there was a chronic shortage of small denomination coinage due to excessive counterfeiting and low production of non-precious coins by the Royal Mint. But demand for them was soaring due to industrialisation and the need to pay workers and that there were ever more consumer goods around for people to buy. As a result, counterfeit coinage boomed, perhaps two thirds of all low-value coins may have been forgeries. The Royal Mint’s response was to simply stop producing copper coins and for 48 years from 1773-1821, they struck no copper coins.A Welsh industrialist – Thomas Williams of Llanidan, “the Copper King” – proposed an anti-counterfeiting edge to the coins to the Royal Mint so long as they used his copper, but they declined.

Clearly a modern industrial country could not function without a means to pay and buy, so industry, led by Williams, resorted to simply producing their own coinage. Such coins, or tokens, could be traded freely at the denoted value and presented to some wealthy sponsoring merchant, industrialist or local worthy for exchange as required. Most people didn’t travel far or hold on to money for long, so these tokens were an ideal way for them to be paid and for them to buy things.

The idea quickly caught on. The tokens were of a much higher quality than official coinage – indeed they are instantly recognisable to us as a variation of our modern pennies – and as they were issued by prominent businessmen the provenance could be trusted. The value of the copper content also made them less susceptible to being speculated on than promissory notes or other cheap tokens – they had an intrinsic value of their own. One of the biggest manufacturers of such coins was the industrialist Matthew Boulton (James “Condensing Steam Engine” Watt’s business partner).

Boulton had the machinery, the capital, the interests in copper mines, a personal stock of copper bought in a slump in the market and the contacts. He established the Soho Mint in the West Midlands in 1788 and went into volume minting of quality tokens. His machines were of his own patented design and were driven by steam engines. Each could mint 70 to 85 coins per minute.

Such was the demand for small coinage, these tokens quickly spread and were issued on a town-by-town, county-by-county basis. As such they are often called Provincial Tokens. The name Conder Token comes from James Conder, an issuer of such coins who soon became an avid collector and cataloguer of them.

In 1797, the Government finally came to its senses about the financial crisis and issued Boulton a contract to mint official copper coinage and so provincial tokens began to wane. Production ceased by 1802, with a brief return in 1811-12, before finally being forbidden in 1817. Many Scottish municipalities joined in issuing local coinage during this time. The table shows the number of different coins known for each area of the country. The financial capital in the Lothians and the industrial capital in Lanarkshire were unsurprisingly the most prolific, alongside the trade centre in Dundee (Angus).

And so this is how we come to there being such a thing as a Leith Ha’penny. This one, of 1797, shows a sailing ship on one side – an obvious Leith connection – and Britannia on the rear.

And the John White (a merchant of the Kirkgate) Leith ha’penny, wishing “Success to the Port” with another nautical scene, showing a ship entering the Port of Leith, and featuring the stuff of profitable trade on the back; gin and tea.

So of course if Leith has Ha’pennies, of course Edinburgh has to have them to! Notice that Britannia is a gain a common theme, as are recognisable civic buildings. WRIGHT DES on the front refers to James Wright, an engraver from Dundee who designed many tokens. He was a correspondent with Conder, himself and was as keen a proponent and collector of them.

And another version, earlier from 1790, featuring the municipal coat of arms and motto, thistles, and St. Andrew himself. Note the anchor on the rear, a symbol of both Edinburgh’s merchant prosperity and also its dominance over its port at Leith. These tokens were produced by Messrs. Hutchinson of Creech’s Land, an important old building at the west end of the Luckenbooths where Alan Ramsay had his book shop and had opened Scotland’s first circulating library in 1725.

The Campbell’s Snuff of Edinburgh Ha’penny, the Turk’s Head being a connection to smoking. if you squint you can make out the name “James” below the head, for the engraver Charles James. Campbell’s shop was apparently the business of Euphame Campbell, which makes this doubly interesting as it must have been very rare to have a token in the name of a woman.

The Archibald, Seedsman of Edinburgh Ha’penny. The coin features an Archibald family coat of arms on the front and an advert for his wares on the back. This Archibald was Joseph Archibald of West Nicolson Street, a burgess of the city, who kept a shop at 88 Chapel Street and a nursery at Lauriston, where a street, Archibald Place, is named for him.

Harrison of St. Leonards, Ha’penny. Henry Harrison was a bucklemaker on St. Leonard’s Hill. Harrison’s cypher is on the reverse, with the anchor of trade on the front.

Anderson, Leslie & Company Ha’penny from 1797, featuring the then new college building of the University on South Bridge. Again James Wright was the engraver. The wording around the edge of the reverse translates as “Nor let even the poor and infertile grounds lie neglected” and features a gardener. Not surprisingly given this design and wording, Anderson, Leslie & Company were also Seedsmen, based opposite the Mercat Cross in the Old Town.

The Scran archive has a wide range of photos of other Scottish Conder tokens (If you have a library card issued by most Scottish councils, you can log in using your library card number to get more meta content and bigger pictures) – click here.

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

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The thread about Edinburgh and Leith under occupation; when “Gardyloo”, Christmas and being rude to Frenchmen were banned

From 1548 to 1560, the Port of Leith was occupied by a French garrison in support of the Queen Regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise. During that time the French fortified the town and made themselves generally unpopular with the locals. Such was the mutual bad feeling that in 1555 Mary of Guise’s Parliament made it an offence to speak ill of Frenchmen. I am not sure if this act has been repealed yet…

One of the reasons for the French being so unpopular was their constant requisitioning of ships – this was a town that relied on the sea for its prosperity and in doing so the occupiers were directly impoverishing its occupants. As a result of this, shipowners were in the habit of making their vessels be spontaneously elsewhere whenever they got wind that the French might need them, which created logistical problems for the garrison commander. In 1550, the French governor in Leith employed two pynours (porters) to remove and impound all the rudders of the ships of Leith to prevent them from slipping away without his say-so. Twelve days later, all Scottish vessels from Kinghorn to Crail were ordered to leave for Leith within three hours or face being forfeited with their masters put to death.

Opposing the French in Leith were Scottish Protestant lords – the grandiosely titled Lords of the Congregation, or The Faithful – backed by an English army. An English general, Randolph, noted in 1560 that “in no other country were ever seen so many particular quarrels, which daily cause many to keep off who mortally hate the French“: Randolph could not understand how the Scots resented the French occupiers so much but yet were so reluctant to fight with the English against them. He had money to finance 2-3,000 Scots troops to eject the French but could not get them “for love nor money“. The English ended up assaulting Leith under an incompetent commander, with untrained recruits and ladders that were too short to scale the walls. This amateurish attack was repulsed by the stretched, starving but competent and well entrenched French garrison. Further bloodshed was spared when Mary of Guise died shortly thereafter and a short peace was agreed, allowing the French to leave.

Less than 100 years after the exit of the French, Leith would find itself once again under military occupation after the calamitous defeat in 1650 of the Scottish Covenanter forces at the hands of Oliver Cromwell in the Battle of Dunbar. Relations between occupier and occupied this time were less strained; although English rule was firm and uncompromising there appeared to be more mutual tolerance on both sides, probably both were just exhausted from nearly 12 years of bloody warfare. The population and economy of Leith had also been shattered by a plague in 1645 that killed nearly half its population.

Cromwell entered Edinburgh on Saturday 7th December, just days after victory at Dunbar. Although the remnants of the Scottish army fought on it had abandoned the city to wage a protracted war of retreat across the country. The occupation was initially marked by restraint on the part of the victors and under Cromwell’s direct orders on 27th December three of his men were publicly flogged through the town by the “Provest marschellis men” for the offence of plundering houses without orders. Another unfortunate Roundhead was strapped to a horse with a pint jug tied around his neck, his hands bound and muskets tied to his feet, and ridden around the town for 2 hours for the offence of drunkenness. In May 1652, an English officer had his ear nailed to the public gallows and thereafter cut off for toasting the King’s health.

Civilian administration in those days was relatively limited, but the English were sensible enough to allow that of Edinburgh to continue to function – under close observation. Leith however had no such local authority of its own beyond that of Edinburgh and so was ruled directly through military courts headed by English officers “without partiality or favour“. In November 1651 they hung one of their own troopers at the Market Cross “a gallant, stout fellow” for robbing a butcher. A soldier found drunk and swearing in Leith was bound, hit repeatedly in the mouth and tied to a pillar with “a paper bound to his breast” specifying his crimes. Relations in Leith with the English seemed to be downright cordial at times (perhaps because the locals were pleased to be relieved of the constant political and economic interference from Edinburgh) but things ended up becoming too cordial. In October 1651 English soldiers had to be forbidden from marrying Leith women without the written permission of their Major and in February 1652 this prohibition was extended to the keeping of female servants!

In Edinburgh, although the town itself had been easily taken, the Castle garrison had held out and was being besieged by Cromwell’s New Model Army. Anyone found treating with the garrison was dealt with severely. A gardener at the West Kirk (now St. Cuthbert’s Parish Church) was accused of giving intelligence to the Castle; he was taken to the city guardhouse and hung from his thumbs with burning slow matches (the sort used in matchlock firearms) between his fingers until they were “burnt to the bone“.

In March 1651 the English soldiers in Edinburgh mutinied due to the lack of provisions and pay; what had been sent to them by sea had been turned back by unfavourable weather. They put their own commanders in jail and “ran through the markets of Edinburgh, plundering and robbing the people of the town, so that few would go out on the streets“. General John Lambert arrived in Edinburgh at the end of November that year to restore order and to make arrangements for quartering of his army in the city over winter. He seems to have made a positive impression with the locals; on finding out that there was no local magistrate in place to dispense justice, he reinstated some of the old ones. He also ordered the Incorporated Trades to choose their own Deacons (the principal officers of the Trades, who formed a core of the Town Council). He did however maintain a right of veto over appointments and kept the appointment of the Castle’s governor to his personal choice.

In December, Lambert ordered citizens in both Edinburgh and Leith to hang out lanterns and place candles in their windows or doors from 6PM to 9PM on account of the disorder being committed by the soldiers. This was observed but cost the inhabitants dearly as candles were an expensive commodity. Anybody found not complying was to be fined 4 shillings sterling, with the master or mistress of the house being thrown in the city guardhouse until it was paid. He also set about the perhaps impossible task of the cleaning up of Auld Reekie. Orders were given on the 24th December that the streets, closes and wynds in Edinburgh were be cleansed within 13 days and “no filth or water should be thrown forth from their windows upon pain of paying immediately 4 shillings sterling“. The proceeds of such fines were to be split equally between the informant and the poor of the town. Clearly it did not have a long lasting effect as just three years later the city was ordered to procure carts and horses for the carrying away of the filth.

On December 25th 1651 the English authorities in Leith ordered that Christmas should be banned. The point being made here was probably moot however given it was not something that would have been openly observed or celebrated in Presbyterian Scotland. Indeed the Kirk, the usual incumbent authority on moral matters in Scottish towns and burghs, had banned its celebration back in 1640. However ten years later it had nothing like its former authority, especially in Leith where it had been evicted from its church buildings and relieved of its civic duties by the occupiers.

On February 7th 1652, under orders of the Commissioners of the English Parliament who were at that time resident in Dalkeith, the symbols of the Stuart Kings’ arms, crowns and royal unicorns of the city were taken down wherever they were to be found. They were stripped from the King’s pew at St. Giles’ Kirk, from the Mercat cross, the Netherbow Port, Parliament House, Edinburgh Castle and the palace of Holyroodhouse. They were then taken to the gallows and publicly hung.

In May 1654 General Monck, who had been Cromwell’s military commander in Scotland until 1652, came once again to Edinburgh to proclaim the union of England and Scotland as the Commonwealth. He was received by the Lord Provost and Bailies of the Town Council (the most senior members of the civilian authority) in their finery. Perhaps they were mindful of the rape and pillage of Dundee committed by Monck’s men back in 1651 and set out to woo the General lest they incur his wrath. They conveyed him to a “sumptuous dinner and feast, prepared by the Town of Edinburgh for him and his special officers. This feast was six days in preparing, and the bailies of Edinburgh did stand and serve the whole time of that dinner“. They also laid on a “great preparation” of fireworks which were set off from the Mercat Cross between 9PM and midnight, “to the admiration of many people“.

Cromwell also left it to Monck to resolve the interminable squabbles between the city of Edinburgh and Port of Leith. The latter wanted freedom to trade without interference from its neighbour, the former wanted to assert its historic legal rights to her port. An English merchant in Leith at the time said that the town had been “under the greatest slavery that I ever knew” and should subject to under Edinburgh no more than “Westminster to London.” As part of his overall strategy to pacify and control Scotland, Monck proposed enclosing Leith in fortifications as a garrison town – probably reconstructing the 1560 walls and bastions. The prospect of this terrified Edinburgh, as it would make it substantially easier for Leith to act independently. Edinburgh shrewdly counter-offered that it would pay £5,000 instead for a standalone Citadel outside of Leith – or it may be that the it was Monck being shrewd and he had played Edinburgh off against Leith to get them to finance his scheme. In the end the £5,000 citadel apparently cost many times that to build. The city would later buy it back for a further £5,000 from Charles II, so ended up paying for it twice. Although it was well engineered it was soon abandoned as a defensive fortification; the seaward walls and bastions had been impossible to protect from erosion by the sea and had collapsed within 30 years.

By May 1660, the Commonwealth was over (assisted in no small part by Monck) and the Houses of Parliament had proclaimed Charles II to be King. Orders were sent to the Governor of Edinburgh castle to fire 3 volleys from the guns, one for each of the Three Kingdoms. The chief gunner at the Castle gave the orders to his men but one refused saying that “The devil [would] blow him in the air that loosed a cannon for that purpose” and “if he loosed any cannon that day sum man should repent it“. The complainant was transferred to a gun overlooking the West Kirk. The first volley was duly fired and when this man went to reload his weapon, he recharged it with powder only for it to spontaneously discharge while he was doing so, there being a smouldering ember in the barrel. He was blown clean over the castle walls and off the Castle Rock itself, falling over 250 feet to his death. He was buried near where he landed in the West Kirk.

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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A “saga of procrastination and sharp practice”: the thread about Leith’s Tally Toor

If you were to go down to Leith Docks and venture where security won’t let you go, you would eventually come across a squat, circular and very curious masonry structure. What you have just found is the Tally Toor, the Leith Martello Tower. You would be forgiven for not realising it was there or for never having heard of it. It doesn’t look like much of a tower, but that’s because most of it has been buried within the reclaimed land behind the Easter Breakwater of the Port of Leith. There was a time when this once stood proudly upon the rocks in the Leith Roads.

Martello Towers were a response to the threat of coastal attacks or even invasion during the Napoleonic period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They were built throughout the British Isles and out into the Empire, but Leith is one of only three that were constructed in Scotland. The word Martello (or Tally to Leithers) is an Anglicisation of Torra di Mortella – a medieval Genoese round tower in the north of Corsica. This fortification caused the Royal Navy such disproportionate trouble to overcome it during the Siege of Saint Florent in 1794 that it was taken as a model defensive outpost for home use. The thirty-three men at Mortella had resisted bombardment of British warships and had held off the 700 men sent ashore to take it that it inspired a home grown variant as a model defensive outpost.

The basic design of the British tower is rather like a squat lighthouse and they were to be located at advantageous coastal positions. Entrance was via a raised door accessed through a retractable ladder to make capture from the land more difficult. Inside, behind the thick stone walls, were two floors of accommodation and storage for an officer and about twenty-five men. Buried within the foundations would be a well and/or water cistern and perhaps a storeroom. But unlike a lighthouse, instead of a navigation beacon on the top instead there was an open fighting platform fitted with two or three heavy guns that could pivot be trained to attack approaching targets. The height of the tower meant it fired down upon ships, affording a raised and protected position for observation and signalling.

The Tally Toor was not the first Georgian-era fortification to defend Leith. In 1779, Leith and Edinburgh had been threatened by the squadron of the American John Paul Jones during the War of Independence and the city had responded to the threat from the sea by building Leith Fort to guard the harbour entrance. The Fort was never entirely satisfactory and for most of its life was used as an ordnance depot, a drill barracks for artillery volunteers and as accommodation for army administrators. In light of its deficiencies in 1807 the Board of Ordnance proposed a thirty-two foot high Martello tower on the rocks at the mouth of the Port of Leith to improve the defences.

Somewhat unusually, the tower was not to be built by the military but was left to the Corporation of the City of Edinburgh to construct. Work began in 1809 but due to a “saga of procrastination and sharp practice” and it was not finally handed over to the Board until nearly 30 years later in 1838. The below painting by Robert Norie shows the end of the outer breakwater at Leith as it then was, with the tower being accessible across the interidal rocks at low water. The incomplete base storeys are being used as a handy mooring point for fishing boats.

It had cost £17,179 18s 4½d, and it wasn’t even finished! Plus ça change for a construction project by the council in Edinburgh! The final structure was 45 feet high, with 16 feet of foundations built down into the rocks. The base diameter was 80 feet and the gun platform at the top was large enough to accommodate not one but three pivoting cannons. As a result of this, from the top the tower has an elegant cloverleaf (or fidget spinner!) appearance on account of the three overlapping gun positions.

Within the foundations was a single central chamber and there were two staircases within the walls, leading up to the gun platform. Due to the relative peace with other European powers by the time it was completed the tower was not finally made ready to accept its guns until 1853, thirty-five years after it was first planned, prompted by the crisis of the Crimean War.

According to “Martello Towers Worldwide” (where would one be without a copy of that handy?) at that time it was armed with two 32-pdr cannons and was occupied (when required) by a detachment from Leith Fort until 1869 when it was mothballed. The 32-pdr was so-called because it fired a shot weighing thirty-two pounds and was the Royal Navy’s standard heavyweight shipboard weapon. The handy diagram below shows the main parts including the rammer, wad and pricker (no giggling at the back!)

These were the same such guns as were also mounted at Leith Fort itself, as can be seen in a series of earlier photos made there by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson.

The 1849 Ordnance Survey Town Plan clearly shows the tower and also one presumes the obvious route for the garrison to reach it should they ever need to across the barrier of intertidal rocks known as The Weir” the same route as shown in Norie’s painting.

The rocks on which the Tower was situated, once the Mussell Cape Rocks, became known instead as the Martello Rocks. Further, smaller towers for the Forth were planned at Cramond Island and Inchkeith but were judged not to be a pressing need and so work never started; given how long it took and how much it cost to build the first, that was probably a sensible decision. These would have carried two 24-pdr cannons rather than the three 32-pdrs at Leith. In 1854, the Inspector General of Fortifications prepared a report on the Forth defences in which he stated:

At Leith there are at present twelve heavy guns, mounted for the protection of the harbour and roadstead at Leith Fort and on a tower; it would be, however, very desirable to establish two batteries and a small barrack on the Island of Inch Keith.

Burgoyne’s report

After 1869 the disarmed tower was abandoned, just 15 or so years after it had finally been completed and occupied. Thereafter its main function was an interesting navigation marker for the approaches to Leith.

As war clouds gathered and dispersed again on the horizon, there were occasional plans to re-establish the Tower as a defensive position. It was proposed in the 1880s to mount a 6-inch Rifled Breech Loader (RBL) gun on top, which appears never to have been completed. In 1891 an even bigger 9.2-inch Breech Loader (BL) gun was proposed but by 1894 it was instead suggested to place two 6-inch BL guns on the dock walls. In 1899, approval was given for two 4.7-inch Quick Firing (QF) guns for the Tower but once again these do not ever seem to have been installed. The following year it was back to two 6-inch pieces but again these remained paper plans. All these proposals are detailed in The Fortification of the Firth of Forth 1880-1977 by Gordon J. Barclay and Ron Morris, published by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 2019.

In fact it does not seem that the Tower was ever actually re-armed to defend the Port against intrusion from the sea ever again. The citizens of Leith were however left with a curious object to explore, one which was easily accessible at low tide, and it became a source of fascination for generations of children. The picture below shows the scale of the abandoned fortification. Check out the boy in his swimmers looking over the parapet!

But that was not quite the end of the story for the Tower as a defensive position and it finally went to war in 1939 when it was reconfigured to act as an anti-aircraft gun platform. The insides were modified with hastily-built brick partition walls to reduce the risk of blast damage and on the top were mounted three concrete and cast iron positions for the guns.

After the war the Tower’s splendid isolation out at sea was about to be terminated. From the late 1930s onwards the Leith Docks Commissioners had been building vast new breakwaters around the harbour in an attempt to make it non-tideal and they were slowly edging towards the tower. By 1951 it was still outside the sea wall, but only just.

The sea wall finally enclosed the tower in 1972 and with the land behind being built up by reclamation it appeared to be sinking lower and lower into the ground, when in reality the ground was rising higher and higher around it. The diagram below indicates just how deeply the tower was buried within the new docklands.

The slow march of Leith Docks out towards the Firth of Forth can be visualised in the below animation based on maps. It also shows how useful a defensive position the tower initially was when it was built, any ship wanting to enter the docks had to come around the Eastern and Middle Craigs and the Black Rocks, therefore had to pass close by the Tower’s guns.

We can no longer get anywhere near the Tower thanks to the stringent security at the docks, which has been stepped up significantly in recent years. Forth Ports, the current landowner, used to open it once a year to visitors but it’s been around a decade since anyone was afforded that privilege as far as I know. But we can still see the tower in art, look at enough paintings of Leith Docks and it pops up again and again.

And if you are ever fortunate enough to get the chance to get up close and personal with it, look out for the mason’s marks left behind by the Irish Navvies who were engaged in its construction:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/davydubbit/37503950394/in/album-72157688932723074/

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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Take the “High Line”: the thread about Leith’s unbuilt park through the rooftops

I found something very interesting hidden away in a cardboard file in a corner of Leith Library. The title – City of Edinburgh, Leith Local Plan, Draft Final Report, April 1975. Volume Two. Schedules and Appendices. – was so snappy that I couldn’t help but start reading it. This was the plan for a £90 million redevelopment and rejuvenation of Leith, which by this time was suffering badly from industrial decline, urban depopulation, poor housing stock and a general lack of public amenities. As part of this plan it was proposed that the Edinburgh Corporation as it then was (after 1975 it was Edinburgh District Council) would purchase the abandoned trackbed of the Caledonian Railway which ran from Pilrig Park to Seafield via Restalrig, over Leith Walk and Easter Road. This would be converted into a landscaped walkway through the area, what nowadays we might term a linear park.

This section of railway, formally known as the Leith New Lines, was one of the last to be built in the city and did not open until 1903. Its purpose was to give the Caley access from its existing line into Leith Docks from the west to the expanding eastern portion of the docklands. It would cut its way through the dense industrial heartlands of Leith and Bonnington, serving these with large and convenient new goods stations.

On paper this was a sound proposal but by this time the best potential routes through Leith were already well built on, therefore it had to take a winding and circuitous route requiring substantial and expensive engineering. There were numerous cuttings and viaducts required plus skew girder bridges over thoroughfares at Bonnington Toll, Leith Walk and Easter Road. As if that wasn’t enough, it also had to cross three different North British Railway lines, the Water of Leith and cut beneath Ferry Road.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/40040319893/

This railway never fulfilled its potential, a planned passenger service was never introduced and its twin tracks soon singled. The western section between Newhaven and Bonnington closed in 1965. In 1968 the low bridge over Bonnington Toll was removed and the goods station off Leith Walk at Stead’s Place (Leith Walk West) was closed. For a few years the eastern section at Seafield lingered on giving access to the Leith East goods yard at Salamander Street but this too closed in 1973, making the entire line redundant. British Rail gave notice at this point that it intended to demolish its monumental girder bridges over Leith Walk and Easter Road plus a smaller one over Halmyre Street to reduce their maintenance burden.

The 1975 path scheme saw the opportunity to purchase the route from British Rail before they proceeded with demolition and proposed to replace these large, expensive structures with lightweight footbridges and to retain the smaller bridge over Halmyre Street. This would give an elevated walkway from Pilrig Park, across the arches of the viaducts at Jane Street, Manderston Street and Gordon Street and from there along the embankments and cuttings all the way to Seafield.

The bridges at Easter Road and Manderston Street would be removed in early 1980, with that over Leith Walk following in September that year.

It have assumed that because the bridge over Halmyre Street was to be retained that the viaduct between there and Easter Road, which cut its way rudely through the back greens between Gordon Street and Thorntree Street would have been kept too.

This ambitious urban realm scheme of course never came to pass. By the time an updated version of the Final Plan was published in 1980 it had been quietly dropped. One assumes this was because of the disruption caused to local government when the old unitary Corporation of the City of Edinburgh was replaced in 1975 and split up into the two-tier system of Edinburgh District Council and a combined Lothian Regional Council. Instead there was a cut back scheme to purchase the trackbed between Seafield and Easter Road and to landscape it as a pathway with funding from the Scottish Development Agency (SDA). While this at least did come to pass, the word “landscape” is doing a lot of heavy lifting and in reality this path was really just a strip of compressed dirt covered in dog mess and rubbish, with obstructive barriers to try and stop you cycling it without getting off and pushing. This would not be remedied until around 2010 when it was properly surface, the barriers were removed, new access points were added and lighting was provided.

Item 26 on the above list, the railway embankment through Pilrig Park, did also ended up being achieved although the link through to Leith Walk never happened. The viaduct from Pilrig Park to Leith Walk remains fence off, although recent redevelopment on the site of the former Leith Walk West goods yard means there is now a rather roundabout connection some 45 years later through an access road.

Item 27, the second walkway which was planned in both 1975 and 1980, along the old North British Railway trackbed alongside the Water of Leith, from Coburg Street to Warriston, would come to pass. This opened in June 1982, making it the first old railway track to formally be converted to a foot and cycle path in Edinburgh, and the first of many more miles to come.

The opportunity to do something between Pilrig Park and Easter Road is one that has never been properly grasped. In more recent times (although over 10 years ago now!) there was a semi-serious attempt to drum up interest in reviving the idea, with a connection between Pilrig Park and Halmyre Street achieved by building a show-piece timber and cable bridge across Leith Walk. How serious this actually was I do not know, I don’t recall any funding ever being in place even for planning, and providing level access to street level at the Thorntree Street end remains a difficult proposition. Even if it had been approved, like other schemes such as the section of Railway between Powderhall and Meadowbank, there’s a very good chance that it would still find itself in development limbo.

But if you happen to find yourself walking along past the garages which occupy the Manderston and Gordon Street arches, it’s easy to forget that there’s actually a railway station platform up there above your head, one which was built over 120 years ago but never actually opened. Although some lucky souls in the path have at least had the chance to get off a train there and head down its stairs to street level…

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