#murrayfield — Public Fediverse posts

50-40, but I think we can forgive the errors now we have won. Sloppy in parts though. The dug thinks he needs a celebratory swim so that will be us off down to the river. I might even get in myself.

#RFU #Scotland #France #Murrayfield #HoldingMyBreath #BorderCollie

Bloody hell. Just as I was going to type 33-14 and try not to hold my breath for too long, its 40-14 and Nouchi gets a yellow card with 20 minutes to. I think France might need to hold up and wave the white baguette at this point..

#RFU #Scotland #France #Murrayfield #HoldingMyBreath

The thread about The Mound's Electric Blanket; keeping buses (and rugby) running in the face of "winter's fierce onslaught" https://threadinburgh.scot/2025/12/24/the-thread-about-the-mounds-electric-blanket-keeping-buses-and-rugby-running-in-the-face-of-winters-fierce-onslaught/ #Accidents, #Buses, #Edinburgh, #EdinburghCorporationTransport, #Electrical, #Electricity, #Murrayfield, #PublicTransport, #Road, #Roads, #Rugby, #Snow, #TheMound, #Transport, #Transportation, #Winter

The Mound’s Electric Blanket: the thread about keeping buses (and rugby) running during “winter’s fierce onslaught”

Once again we somehow find that it is December in Edinburgh, temperatures are forecast to drop below freezing within the week and it is only be a matter of time before Edinburgh Live treats us to doom-laden predictions of the “exact time” we will be hit by “Arctic blasts” and “snow bombs“. Relatively speaking our city isn’t actually a particularly cold one and it is even less a snowy one, but when the temperatures do drop the steep gradients of its north-facing streets can prove treacherous if the council hasn’t been out with its gritters. Seventy-odd years ago, the authorities faced a particular headache from one such street: with few surrounding buildings and a deliberately adverse camber, factors conspired to make The Mound an accident black-spot, one so prone to icing that it was the most intensely gritted road in the city.

The Mound is one of the most dangerous street surfaces in winter for the motorist.

William Scott, chairman of the Edinburgh Accident Prevention Council, 1958

The Mound posed a particular risk to buses. Three people were injured in April 1940 when a single decker Corporation bus skidded in wet weather and hit one of the bollards on the outside of the bend. In October 1945 a double-decker had an even more dramatic accident; losing grip in the wet it skidded across the road and flopped over onto its side: a plummet down the precipitous embankment and onto the railway below being arrested only by the slender cast iron railings. Although 29 people were injured, the railings held and a real catastrophe was avoided. They held again in the winter of 1951 when two more buses ended up being caught by them but it was time for the authorities to act. A particular problem was the adverse road camber, which had been deliberately engineered so that any horse carts which ran away downhill would be directed into the kerb and naturally brought to a halt. In an age of faster, heavier, motorised vehicles this meant that those travelling downhill were pushed outwards towards the kerb by the laws of physics and were more prone to skidding.

The Corporation spent £2,500 altering the camber on the corner, lowering the roadway on the inside of the curve, a change which explains why the pavement here now has two courses of kerbstones and a double step down to road level. One part of the problem had been dealt with but the risk from cold weather remained and – with buses rapidly replacing tramcars as the city’s public transport of choice – was actually increasing. Tired of the effort and expense of gritting, the city sought a more permanent solution. Harold Wilson’s “White Heat of Technology” speech was still a few years away but it was the heat of technology that the Corporation sought to harness. Encouraged by experiments in carriageway heating conducted by the Ministry of Transport on the Chiswick fly-over in 1956 and with the newly-formed South of Scotland Electricity Board (SSEB) keen to support anything electrical, in December 1958 a proposal was made to install the UK’s first operational sub-surface road heating system on The Mound. Approval was forthcoming from the Corporation’s Works Committee for the installation of 372 mats formed of 47 miles of electrical wire and covering some 5,500 square yards of the road surface, buried one and a half inches beneath it and fed by 760 kilowatts of heating power from a dedicated sub-station, discreetly tucked into the embankment with West Princes Street Gardens.

The heating was to be sufficient to raise the ground temperature to 35°F (1.7°C) when the ambient temperature was as low as 20°F (-6.7°C). Even before the scheme had come before the committee for approval the papers had taken to calling it an “electric blanket” and the name stuck – even though one Scotsman journalist pointed out that this was “a complete misnomer” and it was in fact “merely a simple grid of wires“.

The contract for £4,556 plus a further £1,000 on the control equipment was awarded to Messrs George Wimpey Ltd. and included the removal of the now redundant tramway rails and relaying the surface with a special smooth tarmac that would not damage the wires embedded within it. The electrical equipment was sub-contracted to E. N. Bray Ltd. of Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire and was installed by William Allan, Smith & Co. of Edinburgh. This was a significant capital outlay in lean times, but it was hoped it would be offset by a £300 annual reduction in the gritting bill.

Work to lift the tramway and granite setts of the old road surface commenced in January 1959 with installation of The Blanket beginning on 22nd September. Progress was swift and the system was ready for commissioning by mid-December, a short ceremony being held on the 17th to mark the occasion. Bailie Bruce Russell, chairman of the Corporation’s Works Committee, threw an oversized, novelty switch on a temporary kiosk on The Mound to energise the substation, remarking that it demonstrated the Corporation were “pioneers in this field“.

Those keen to see how (or if!) the expense might prove worthwhile did not have long to wait. A cold snap hit the city on 18th January 1960 and proved to be the coldest since the treacherous winter of 1947. Blizzards swept across the east of Scotland and The Scotsman reported “chaos and crashes on the roads” across the country with 150 people hospitalised as a result in Dundee alone. The Blanket was run for two consecutive days and kept the road surface clear to such an extent that the same paper declared it had “triumphantly defied the winter’s first fierce onslaught” and that while some buses were “floundering and skidding all over the place in Morningside, others sailed serenely and steadily down the Mound”.

Despite the obvious success of its first winter of operation, the £300 reduction in the city’s gritting overhead was more than cancelled out by the Blanket’s electricity bill of £1,018; more than twice what had been anticipated! The City Engineer, Mr W. P. Haldane, remained positive however and told the Works Committee that this would be reduced significantly in future by the commissioning of an automatic controller that would only switch the system on when both the temperature dropped below zero and humidity was sufficient to allow ice to form. This concept was later commercialised by the Penicuik-based firm of Findlay, Irvine Ltd. as the Icelert.

For the first three years of its life The Blanket actually remained the property of the SSEB, not being handed formally over to the city until they were fully satisfied. A ceremony was held on 8th October 1962 when the key to the substation door was handed over by Mr C. H. A. Collins of the Board to the chairman of the city’s Works Committee with a small speech that declared it to be a complete success, one that had “contributed greatly to road safety in Edinburgh”. It would now face its ultimate test – the “Big Freeze” of 1963. During one of the coldest winters on record, from mid-December all the way through to early March, the Blanket was run for a total of over four hundred hours and kept the road free of snow and ice throughout.

Such was the interest generated in The Blanket that before shovels were even in the ground other institutions were already wondering if they too could benefit from some sort of subterranean heating. A few miles away at Murrayfield, the home of Scottish Rugby, the SRU realised that such a thing could be a real boon to them too and a significant improvement of their current frost-prevention method of covering the playing surface with tons of straw and erecting marquees heated by paraffin stoves over the pitch before winter games.

Once again the SSEB was keen to propose an electric solution and in stepped a benevolent Glaswegian distiller – Charles A. Hepburn – who put up £10,000 to install the first under-soil heating at a British rugby stadium. Again the equipment was provided by E. N. Bray and 39 miles of electric wire were laid 6 inches beneath the turf late in 1959, sufficient to keep the 6,000 tons of grass and soil from freezing. The system took only a week to lay using a specially adapted tractor that cut a channel, laid the cable and then covered it back over with turf all in one action.

The running costs to the SRU of £100 a day were not cheap, but were less than the old methods and in the bitter 1963 season it more than proved its worth. There were twelve consecutive weeks when all rugby games in Scotland were cancelled – all except those at Murrayfield, where play continued uninterrupted. As a measure of how cold it had been, the frost was so severe that it caused £10,000 in damage to the concrete terracing of the stadium! The other national theatre of sport – Hampden Park – would not get a “blanket” until 1979.

The success of Edinburgh’s Blankets compelled one Scotsman reader to pen a verse in their honour:

Now may the Lord be thankit
For my electric blanket:
We’re a’ as pleased as can be,
The Mound and Murrayfield,
AND ME.

Poem submitted to the editor of The Scotsman by David Griffiths, published 9th January 1963

The installation at The Mound was expected to last twenty years but at the age of just fifteen there were already several sub-surface breakages which proved uneconomical to repair. The only realistic option for refurbishment was lifting and relaying the entire carriageway for which there was no political or economic appetite. With little ceremony therefore in April 1975 it was announced by the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee that the system was to be abandoned. Coincidentally, less than a month later, on May 16th, Corporation of The City and Royal Burgh of Edinburgh also found itself redundant, replaced by a two-tier system of local government. Roads and highways were now the responsibility of the new Lothian Regional Council who were now responsible for keeping The Mound free of snow and ice by old-fashioned gritting.

Being laid under turf and with nothing heavier than the forwards of the First Fifteen pressing down upon it, the system at Murrayfield was less prone to breakage and easier to repair and it lasted in use until 1991 when increasing maintenance costs saw it replaced during the reconstruction of the stadium.

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 Edinburgh Radium Bomb: the thread about the Beechmount Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

[10:11] Peter O’Mahony returns to Ireland team for Six Nations clash against Scotland

Ireland interim head coach Simon Easterby has made two changes to his team for Sunday’s Six Nations clash against Scotland in Murrayfield, as Robbie Henshaw and Peter O’Mahony earn starts.

https://www.independent.ie/sport/rugby/six-nations/peter-omahony-returns-to-ireland-team-for-six-nations-clash-against-scotland/a267340224.html

#Ireland #SimonEasterby #two #Sunday #SixNations #Scotland #Murrayfield #RobbieHenshaw #PeterO’Mahony

[10:11] Peter O’Mahony returns to Ireland team for Six Nations clash against Scotland

Ireland interim head coach Simon Easterby has made two changes to his team for Sunday’s Six Nations clash against Scotland in Murrayfield, as Robbie Henshaw and Peter O’Mahony earn starts.

https://www.independent.ie/sport/rugby/six-nations/peter-omahony-returns-to-ireland-team-for-six-nations-clash-against-scotland/a267340224.html

#Ireland #SimonEasterby #two #Sunday #SixNations #Scotland #Murrayfield #RobbieHenshaw #PeterO’Mahony

[10:11] Peter O’Mahony returns to Ireland team for Six Nations clash against Scotland

Ireland interim head coach Simon Easterby has made two changes to his team for Sunday’s Six Nations clash against Scotland in Murrayfield, as Robbie Henshaw and Peter O’Mahony earn starts.

https://www.independent.ie/sport/rugby/six-nations/peter-omahony-returns-to-ireland-team-for-six-nations-clash-against-scotland/a267340224.html

#Ireland #SimonEasterby #two #Sunday #SixNations #Scotland #Murrayfield #RobbieHenshaw #PeterO’Mahony

[10:12] O'Mahony and Henshaw selected for Scotland encounter

Peter O'Mahony and Robbie Henshaw return to the Ireland side for their Guinness Six Nations encounter against Scotland at Murrayfield on Sunday.

https://www.rte.ie/sport/rugby/2025/0207/1495272-omahony-and-henshaw-selected-for-scotland-encounter/

#PeterO'Mahony #RobbieHenshaw #Ireland #GuinnessSixNations #Scotland #Murrayfield #Sunday