Mastodawn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh Feb 25

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

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

The former James Clark School, southern elevation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Scotsman, 15th March 1913

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Redevelopment at the James Clark School c. 1986. The name “Salisbury Court” was a figment of the marketing department’s imagination and never stuck. Photo © Colin Inverarity, used with permission

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

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

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

You certainly get a lot of view for your money.

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

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

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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh Nov 23, 2022

German thinking and London styling: the thread about Victorian Edinburgh’s school architecture

A previous thread looked at how Edinburgh’s school planners and public health officials utilised the design and layout of schools as weapons in their war against infectious diseases: the Crusade Against Consumption (Tuberculosis). But this was not the first time the authorities had tried to use school design to try and stamp out something; before Consumption they were trying to combat left-handedness!

How do you design-out left-handedness? You make sure the classroom is lit in favour of right-handedness; in a time before electric or effective gas lighting, if the windows and desks were arranged so that sunlight entered to the pupil’s left then the writing hand would cast no shadow on your page – so long as you wrote with your right hand! Any attempt to use the left hand placed the page or slate in the shadow, making it hard to see what you were doing. This was a practice copied from Germany whose school system and practices were influential in Scotland at the time that School Boards were building new schools in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Left-handedness was commonly then seen as a “defect” and something that had to be trained, forced or beaten out of children.

The Victorian Classroom, with the windows placed on the childrens’ left as they faced the blackboard for “chalk and talk” teaching. At the former Victoria School in Newhaven, now the History of Education Centre., via https://www.histedcentre.org.uk

Following the ascent of the Education (Scotland) Act 1872, which made education between the ages of 5 and 13 compulsory in Scotland, the new School Boards found themselves undertaking with big building programmes to quickly increase capacity and also replace the hodge-podge of inappropriate facilities they had inherited from their predecessors. This was particularly true in urban areas where populations were rapidly growing and Edinburgh was no different – in 1872 the Edinburgh School Board found that there were 184 day schools of all shapes, sizes and social classes within its boundaries.

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

While the Boards employed their own architects, their plans had to be approved by the Scotch Education Department (as it was then called) in London who were paying the bills. Their Lordship’s Architect was Edward Robson, also architect to the (English) Education Department.

Edward R. Robson

Robson effectively had veto on school designs in Edinburgh (and Scotland) and was very influential. Indeed in 1874 he wrote the book on the subject; School Architecture : being Practical Remarks on The Planning, Designing, Building, and Furnishing of School-Houses. School architects were still finding their feet at this time as to what a school should look like, how classes should be structured and conducted, how the building should be laid out internally etc., so Robson’s opinions carried a lot of weight.

School Architecture : being Practical Remarks on The Planning, Designing, Building, and Furnishing of School-Houses

In this book he frequently refers to the German zeal for lighting classrooms from the left and recommends that it “is of such great importance as properly to have a material influence over our plans… and cannot therefore be too clearly remembered.” This wasn’t just anti-lefthandedness, there were real concerns at the time of poor eyesight developing in childhood caused by improper classroom lighting. In 1909 it was reported that as a result of the poor lighting within the building that Bristo Public School had the highest proportion of children with “defective eyesight” in the city. Robson refers to a caricature of Germans as a nation of spectacle-wearers on account of their universal education, the eyes of the nation strained by too much education in dimly-lit classrooms.

Puck Magazine, 1900, the German American is a thinly veiled caricature of Kaiser Wilhelm, wearing enormous spectacles

How classrooms should be laid out and orientated was evolving at the same time as teaching methods. Their first schools had been more influenced by systems such as the Madras System of Leith’s Dr. Andrew Bell, in which much larger classes of mixed ages sat in a large “school room” in tiered rows – where they could all see a principal teacher at the front who led a lesson with “pupil monitors” being employed to convey the lesson around the room and assist the younger or less able pupils. The concept we are more familiar with these days of relatively small classes of defined age group being taught in their own “class room” as a cohort by a single teacher was in the later part of the 19th century another German import that was just beginning to catch on. As such, Edinburgh School Board’s first new schools hedged their bets with a mix of traditional school rooms and smaller class rooms. This soon gave way to a system of classrooms alone, first implemented at South Bridge School, and with more and smaller rooms the natural lighting became of an architectural challenge.

Dr. Bell’s School in Leith. Bell’s original school room is the part to the front, the Leith School Board later added a large extension of class rooms to the rear after 1872. CC-by-SA 3.0 Kim Traynor

In 1886, Robson exercised his powers and stepped in to order changes to the plans of the new London Street School (now St. Mary’s R. C.) by Robert Wilson, the ESB‘s architect, to ensure the “proper” lighting of the classrooms to his satisfaction.

London Street School (now St. Mary’s RC Primary)

The following year Robert Wilson was summoned to Robson’s desk in London to discuss Torphichen Street School; his initial plans had classrooms lit from the right!

Former Torphicen Street School, CC-by-SA 2.0 M J Richardson

Note the similarities between the two schools, both in an Italianate style – which is relatively unusual in Edinburgh -with a central block flanked by 3 bays on each side. Torphicen Street cleverly wraps around its irregular plot and has ornamental towers, London Street instead has a further pair of pediments on either side of the entrances. The central, second floor room at both schools has very small windows; this is because it was a room for the teaching of the practical skills of drawing and sewing and was therefore lit from above by skylights.

Infant children at an unidentified Edinburgh school, 1908. CC-by-SC NA Edinburgh Collected, Donor 0483-002

While Robson at the Scotch Education Department dictated many things about layout, it was the School Boards’ architects who were responsible for the exterior style. Such was the initial rush to build – five new schools were commissioned in 1874, with more in quick succession – that a competition was held by the Board to split the workload. The practices of Robert Rowand Anderson, Robert Wilson and William Lambie Moffatt were all awarded and this initial batch of schools were all given a suitably Victorian collegiate Gothic style.

Robert Rowand Anderson’s Stockbridge Public SchoolRobert Wilson’s Canonmills Public School on Rodney StreetWIlliam Lambie Moffat’s Leith Walk Board School

This was the sort of thing the paymasters on the School Board desired; they wanted the schools to have a uniform look reminiscent of the great ecclesiastical and educational institutions of old but were also keen to avoid the richly decorated Jacobean style of the schools they had inherited from the Heriot Trust.

St Bernard’s School in Stockbridge, typical of the richly-ornamented Jacobean styled buildings favoured by the Heriot Trust, with decorative masonry features lifted straight from the Heriot Hospital. Martin Siller, 1960 photograph, via the Edinburgh & Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries

Subsequent schools were largely the work of Wilson, who would become the house architect for the ESB, and maintained this style. There was a problem however in that it was very important to Edward R. Robson that schools should appear secular in nature. It was with significant effort that eduction had finally been wrested from the grip of “the clergyman” and into the hands of “the lawyer” and these were public institutions in which “the teaching of Dogma was strictly forbidden“. In Robson’s opinion, schools should be instantly recognisable as such, just like churches were. The prominent gothic windows, buttresses, corner towers and steeple-like ventilators did not fit with this vision. Significant departures began to be made by the Edinburgh School Board with its Castlehill and Milton House schools in the Old Town. These were given a vernacular Scotch Baronial Revival style in keeping with their historic surroundings. Crow-stepped gables topped with decorative finials, mock battlements, slender chimney stacks and corner turrets were the order of the day, with the local blonde Sandstone from Hailes Quarry being blended with imported red sandstones from Dumfriesshire to add further contrasting detail.

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

Wilson was a very capable and flexible architect, having worked in London for 10 years, and he began evolving his designs in Edinburgh to fit more with the theories of Robson. As a result, the city’s school style changed to the Queen Anne and took on a very London-like and secular appearance, emphasised by a switch to imported red standstone. A typical Wilson school in this style can be found at Broughton Public School and you can really see the London influence if you put it alongside a typical Robson school like Primrose Hill. The big exception being the use of traditional Scottish stone for the façade; Scotland wasn’t quite yet ready for public buildings finished in facing brick!

A comparison of Robson’s Primrose Hill School and Wilson’s Broughton Public School (CC-by-SA StephenCDickson)

Broughton and its contemporaries such as Bruntsfield were further influenced by contemporary English and London thinking on school layouts and adopted a “central hall” system, whereby the classrooms were arranged around a large central hall which could be used by the headmaster to give group lessons. A very nice visual juxtaposition of the evolution of design and appearance in Edinburgh schools over a very short period of time can be seen from the viewpoint of Drummond Street. Robert Wilson designed South Bridge Public School (left of image) in 1885, very much in the collegiate gothic style of the 1870s. Immediately to the southeast, just 10 years later the same architect designed Drummond Street School on very London lines. It had the central hall and was treated to a very decorative, un-Scottish Queen Anne finish.

South Bridge Public School (l) and Drummond Street Infant School (r), both by Robert Wilson but in very different styles

Wilson’s last school, he died during its construction in 1901, was at Craiglockhart. Once again the style was evolving; moving back towards something a bit plainer and more Classical like London and Torphicen Street schools from 20 years before. The influence of his assistant and successor James Carfrae may also have been important.

Craiglockhart Primary School. On the central hall model, but less gaudy than Drummond Street, and a return to a more Classical style. The work was finished by James Carfrae

After Craiglockhart, the focus of Carfrae’s schools moved away from simply getting as many pupils as possible into the space available towards adopting hygienic “open-air” design principles to try and make the school environment a healthier place. A big departure in these schools was to drop the principal of lighting the rooms only from the left, and have windows on both sides to maximise sunlight (nature’s disinfectant) and through drafts for ventilation. You can read all about this and subsequent phases of School design in Edinburgh on this thread.

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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh Feb 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scotsman, 23rd November 1931

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh Oct 28

Gilmore Place Public School: the thread about the Rise, Fall and Renaissance of Darroch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oban Times and Argyllshire Advertiser, 2nd October 1909

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trouble with Darroch, Scotsman, 8th March 1969

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

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

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

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

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

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

John G. Gray, Focus on Darroch

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

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

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

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

Andrew Ewing, Letter to the Scotsman, May 1971

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh Oct 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh Oct 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Davie Street school as rebuilt by Heriot’s in 1875

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headline, Evening Mail, 9th October 1889

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

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

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

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

Former James Clark School with its remarkable corner tower.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslie Hills, describing her first visit to Davie Street School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh Nov 7, 2022

Inter-war school design in Edinburgh: the thread about weaponising the bricks and mortar of education in the “Crusade Against Consumption”

I got a new book, which is really interesting. And I mean really interesting. It’s not just about school buildings themselves, but about the social history that goes hand in hand with them. It’s a real work of labour and love by someone who spent much of their working life in education in Edinburgh.

Fabric and Function. A Century of School Building in Edinburgh, 1872-1972, by Walter M. Stephen

Our starting point and the starting point of the book is in 1872, the year of the Education (Scotland) Act which made primary education in Scotland mandatory between the ages of five and thirteen (although not yet free). Previously education had variously been administered by the various churches – predominantly the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, Free Church of Scotland and United Presbyterian Church – but also the Scottish Episcopal Church and various burgh and parish bodies, charitable trusts etc. The Act consolidated this provision (although for now the Episcopalians decided not to join in) into some 1,000 local School Boards across Scotland, which found themselves inheriting a huge and varied array of school building stock, much of which was not purpose built.

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

Edinburgh and Leith at this time each had their own School Boards and both set about a building programme of new schools to meet the demand to educate the 18% of children who were not in regular education, as well as to replace the old and substandard facilities they had inherited: the Boards were responding both to legislation and the societal pressures at the time. It is worth considering that the extent of Edinburgh was far less than it is now, and the surrounding parishes of St Cuthbert’s, Cramond, Colinton, Corstorphine, Duddingston, Liberton, Portobello and the exotically named South Leith Landward each had their own boards, even if these only managed a handful of schools.

What is very relevant to the modern world (considering this thread was first written during the times of COVID-19) is the efforts that the Boards and their architects went to in utilising school building design in responding to infectious diseases. This became something of a guiding obsession for Edinburgh and Leith (later merged as the Edinburgh Education Authority, which would in turn become the city Corporation’s Education Department) in the first half of the 20th century. The authorities were bringing the physical structure and layout of schools into service as a weapon in their holistic war against infections diseases such as Tuberculosis, Cholera, Typhus etc.

At the turn of the 20th century the Edinburgh School Board’s latest “public school*” was typified by Albion Road (later Norton Park). These were handsome, imposing, multistorey monuments to education, frequently crammed in with quite some skill on the part of the architects to small and irregularly shaped plots in densely populated urban neighbourhoods. The capacity was usually around 800-1000 children.

* = note, in Scotland a Public School is a state school open to the general public, as opposed to England where it is a fee-paying one, public only in the sense it was open to pupils who could pay, rather than based on their religion or parental trade or profession.

Albion Road School, postcard probably dating from the time of its opening in 1905

The goal of these schools was to provide bums-on-seats capacity to educate an urban population that was still at that time growing. Their planners imagined them to be permanent monuments and as such the build quality was high and their finish was grand and monumental. Contemporaneously in Edinburgh the “the crusade against Consumption” (Tuberculosis) was being pioneered by Doctor Robert William Philip (later Sir Robert) who instituted a coordinated, multi-disciplinary and multi-agency approach to fighting the disease. He opened the world’s first TB clinic at 13 Bank Street in the Old Town in 1887 and in 1894 opened the Victoria Hospital for Consumption in Craigleith House which would soon grow to become the Royal Victoria Hospital for Consumption, a role it would perform until it became a geriatric hospital in the 1960s.

Sir Robert William Philip (1857–1939) by James Guthrie, from the collection of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

Philip’s integrated approach was “to isolate patients from family and friends and offer sun, fresh air and exercise“. By 1906 such provision in had expanded to include the City Fever Hospital – under the supervision of the city’s dedicated and energetic public health officer Robert Henry Littlejohn – on the southern outskirts and even a farm in Polton, Midlothian, for occupational isolation. Robert Morham, the City Architect, designed the City Fever Hospital on the principal of Robert Koch that “sunlight is the great germicide” (n.b. it was called the city hospital on account of it being funded directly by the city; the Royal Infirmary on the other hand was funded as a charitable institution). Voluntary notification for TB had started in 1903 in Edinburgh and in 1907 it was made compulsory; 5 years before this was the case nationally.

Edinburgh City Hospital for Infectious Diseases, “The City Hospital”

The British Government would not formally adopt Philip’s approach until 1912, so until then Edinburgh really was at the cutting edge of response and treatment. The city had an unusually high rate of TB, but this was because Philip was so successful in identifying and recording it – a good example of a sampling bias.

The schools that the Boards had built after 1872 had always paid attention to ventilation as a result of the Victorian public health obsession with miasma (“bad air“) and also because there was a fundamental snobbishness about the “unpleasant odors” of poor children. Look closely at the schools of this time and there are ventilators – both hidden and decorative – everywhere.

Albion Road, now Norton Park CentreBonnington Road, now Bun-sgoil Taobh na PàirceRegent Road, now Out of the Blue StudiosStockbridge Primary

Those ventilation cowls often hid mechanical extractors, sometimes in the form of an Archimedes screw.

Diagram by the Glaswegian engineer and ventilation pioneer Robert Boyle, from his 1899 book on the subject “Natural and artificial methods of ventilation”

A quest for clean air in Edinburgh’s schools started in 1906 with air quality testing. In 1910 an awareness conference was organised for teachers and senior pupils, followed in 1911 by 20,000 free calendars being given away in a “Crusade Against Consumption” campaign. Recognising the role that malnutrition had in weakening the immune system, experiments were made in providing free school dinners for the most needy children; initially a plate of soup and some bread. The success of this scheme saw a dedicated “feeding centre” – a central kitchen – established in 1911 in the surplus school building of West Fountainbridge. This provided free school lunches for needy children – so long as they came to school to collect their daily ticket – and was later expanded into a “penny dinners” service for those who could afford to pay the 6d a week.

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

The authorities were of the conviction that you could actually stamp out a disease, not just treat its symptoms, something we might take as a given now – but not so at the time. Although the Victorian Board schools had a focus on ventilation, frequently this was found not to work so well in practice and the schools themselves were often crowded, dark and with small, poorly-positioned playgrounds.

Playtime at a School Board era school. A crowded area with poor ventilation and lighting. Note the shadows cast by the tall school building itself, and the boy second left who has no shoes.

And so attention was turned to the design of the school buildings themselves. In 1904 an open-air schools movement had started in Charlottenburg near Berlin with the Waldschule für kränkliche Kinder (“Forest School for Sickly Children“). Here, children were taught outside where possible and the building was designed to allow as much of the outside in as possible, with the sort of extensive, inward pivoting glazing more akin to modern house extensions than an Edwardian school.

Waldschule für Kränkliche Kinder, 1904. Note how many windows there are and that they are all pivoted in to provide ventilation in addition to the rooftop ventilators

Edinburgh was not slow to recognise the possibilities and in 1911 six members of the School Board were sent on a fact-finding mission to Cologne, Munich, Zurich, Paris and Middlesex to see how to do it for themselves. On their return, such was the impression that had been made that at a stroke, school design in Edinburgh changed forever. While the fully outdoor system was rejected – on account of the city being “a northern temple of the winds” – they found other ways to implement its basic theories.

Class photo at an unidentified Edinburgh school, 1925. Such schools were typified by small, hard-surfaced playgrounds, frequently dark and oppressive from the tall walls, surrounding tenements and a general lack of consideration being given to natural lighting. This is an infants class, as after this stage of their education boys and girls were separated. CC-by-NC SA Edinburgh Collected, Donor number 0525-018

The new schools would be built on much larger plots (see the table at the bottom of this page) so that they could be reduced in height to one or two storeys, rejecting the multi-storey buildings that had become the norm to cram as many children as possible into small plots. They would be a single classroom deep to allow cross-ventilation and natural lighting from both sides. The buildings would be located on the north of the plot to put the playground in the (relative) warmth and light of the sun to the south. Schools also came to be considered less as permanent temples to education but as something more transient; they should be adaptable, cheaper to build and have room to expand as required. Bricks, wood and extensive use of glass wood take over from the traditional, solidly conservative Scots masonry.

A first, transitional step was made with the new Tollcross School by Alexander Carfrae, Architect to the School Board, in 1911. This replaced two very crowded and constricted 19th century schools at Lothian Road and West Fountainbridge. Designed for 800 children, while it was not designed entirely to open-air principles, it was laid out as two narrow blocks arranged in a T-shape, with classrooms extending the full width of the building so that they were lit from both sides. On both levels the rooms were accessed by external verandas to the rear – a rather common Victorian feature in deck access “sanitary” housing for the working classes.

The next new school on these principals was planned in 1912 as King’s Park School in the St Leonard’s district. This was similar to Tollcross but arranged as an L to make better use of the plot’s complex topography, pushed to the northeast of the site to place the playgrounds in the south and west to get the best of the sun. By the time this school was completed, WW1 had broken out and it was immediately requisitioned by the War Office for billeting for troops. By the time it was returned to the School Board in 1918 it was decided to open it as a Technical School (later called an Intermediate School, later yet a Junior Secondary) called the James Clark School.

Former James Clark School with its remarkable corner tower – it was felt by deliberately increasing the ornamentation in one focal point of the building that detail could be reduced elsewhere, resulting in a net reduction in overall cost. Notice the upper storeys are accessed by external walkways

After WW1, it would take some time before the new combined Edinburgh Education Authority (which replaced the separate School boards of Edinburgh, Leith and surrounding parishes of Liberton, Cramond, Duddingston and Corstorphine) was ready to start building schools again. The first of these were Stenhouse and Balgreen schools in the city’s new western council suburbs, opening in 1930 and 1932 respectively. These buildings, which are variations of the same basic plan, kept the two storey height, with expansive glazing to the south and open verandas to the north and arranged around a central courtyard. Classrooms were arranged along a “spine” only one room deep, with windows on both sides for maximum daylight and cross-ventilation. Again as at Tollcross, each room was accessed from an open walkway rather than an internal corridor. An additional advantage of the spine arrangement was that it greatly cut down noise within the school building; gone were the large central staircases or atria, gone were the classrooms accessed through other classrooms and gone were the thin partitions between rooms, all of which served to amplify and carry noise around the building. Facilities such as offices and store cupboards were pushed to the outer ends and for children there was the luxury of internal toilets, again sited hygienically at the ends of the blocks but no longer a chilly run across a playground away.

Balgreen Primary. Notice that the external corridors are now covered in by glazing and the library building to the right of shot

They were built of rendered brick and steel for economic purposes but the conservative outlook of the authorities was well impressed upon its architects and they still had traditional slate roofs and ventilator cowls and restrained classical detailing in stonework. Both schools are notable in including public libraries as part of the project, an early example of a community approach to education.

Stenhouse Primary. Notice that the external corridors are now covered in by glazing and the library building to the right of the frame.

By the times these last two schools were opened, the Education Authority had been merged into the city Corporation as its Education Department and school design had passed to the office of the City Architect, headed by Ebenezer James Macrae. His team developed Carfrae’s ideas further into a standard two-storey school for the city’s new housing schemes which were on unprecedently large plots up to 4.5 acres. These maintained the south facing playground and classrooms arranged along spines with an overall open arms shape, with the facilities pushed to the rear (north) side. Schools at Craigentinny, Craigmillar, Granton and others all followed this basic pattern.

Granton School. OS 1944 Town Plan, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandCraigentinny Primary School. Notice the substantial use of glass to admit the maximum possible amount of daylight. CC-by-SA 2.0 Anne Burgess

The adoption of this standardised design and the new construction methods also reduced costs. The 700 capacity Stenhouse and Balgreen came in at £43 per pupil; the “standard” schools of 800-1000 pupils reduced that to £27-32. But although the architects and accountants had gotten the upper hand in those designs, those desirous of a more pure interpretation of the “open air movement” managed to get their way with one school, that at Prestonfield, which was part of the same 1930 programme of school building as Stenhouse and Balgreen.

Prestonfield Primary School. 1944 OS Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The design was outsourced to the Derbyshire school architect Bernard Widdows and even the casual eye can see from the map above and photo below how different it is from its local contemporaries. Arranged around a central courtyard with all round verandas, it was largely single storey and was finished in red facing brick and rooftiles; its English architect was confident enough in the use of his materials not to hide the bricks away behind harling.

Prestonfield Primary School

There were wide verandahs along the sides (long since boxed in), with folding glass doors on the inside of the courtyard to open the rooms up to the fresh air, but protected from the worst of the elements. Each classroom was painted in a unique and welcoming colour and three miles of underfloor heating pipes kept the place warm. Children were encouraged to sit on the floor as a result, not just arranged in ranks on hard bench seats as in the previous generations of schools.

The inner courtyard of Prestonfield School, note the all-round verandah and the folding glass doors to allow light and fresh air into every classroom. The dormer windows provided additional natural lighting into the classrooms from above.

In 1935, the centre of the inner courtyard had an ornamental fountain installed as part of a scheme of introducing artworks into schools. This sculpture was commissioned from Thomas Whalen of Edinburgh College of Art and depicted a mother and child. It was entitled The Bath. Sadly all this came at an expense, and at £50 per head – almost double that of the City Architect’s standard – the experiment was a one-off.

The fountain sculpture, in a sunken rose bed, at the centre of Prestonfield’s courtyard. A hitherto unthinkable extravagance for the benefit of children at a public school. The sculpture of mother and child was the work of Thomas Whalen of Edinburgh College of Art

But all these schools were fundamentally an extension of the concept of the pavilion wards of Dr Philip’s consumption hospitals but in a classroom format; a maximisation of daylight and fresh air.

Pavilion Ward in a Consumption Hospital. The south aspect of the ward was open to the elements.

These principals also carried over to nurseries for the poorer neighbourhoods, including the Princess Elizabeth Child Garden of 1929 in Niddrie, again with the open verandas.

https://twitter.com/StevenMRobb/status/1485242920429047812?s=20&t=r9AbKbIVM28gTBTp1PpdTQ

And also in Niddrie was 1935 Children’s House. This was an area of the city where many people were relocated as a result of the slum clearances of the insanitary Old Town and St. Leonard’s and they brought the health and social problems they had inherited from their old neighbourhoods with them. You can see below how the whole windows swing out and each room has a door onto the playground, very reminiscent of the Waldschule für Kränkliche Kinder.

Robert Philip died in 1939 at the age of 81. In his later years he declared TB to be “on the run” in Scotland. Since 1901 the death-rate for pulmonary TB in Edinburgh fell from 165 per 100k population to 48 per 100k in 1950 and from non-pulmonary TB from 87 per 100k to 5 per 100k.

Philip’s grave marker in the Grange Cemetery. CC-by-SA 4.0 StephenCDickson

Philip made took all sorts of enlightened approaches to his crusade, one of which was hiring Miss Agnes Craig in 1906 as a health visitor; Edinburgh (and perhaps Scotland’s) first female to undertake this role. It was Agnes’ job to go into the home and explain and persuade people (mainly women) to implement preventative measures. “Her tall and stately figure was a familiar one in working class districts where she proved to be a welcome and understanding visitor.” She also listened to what the women and children she met had to say to her – they were much more open than they would have been to a male visitor – and reported this back.

Agnes Craig (standing, with hat on) at work in an Edinburgh tenement

Dr Phillip’s Royal Victoria organisation was merged with the City’s public health department in 1913 and Agnes continued her work in it, retiring in 1934 after 28 years’ tireless service. We are very lucky to have a picture of her at her work in a 1950 report by the Corporation. Anyway, the moral of the story is that over 100 years ago they knew about the importance of an integrated public health response and good ventilation and school design to combat airborne infectious diseases. And they did something about it.

SchoolYearArchitectCapacityPlot size (m² / acre)Stockbridge1877Rowand Anderson6002,180 / 0.53Canonmills1880Wilson8001,950 / 0.48South Bridge1886Wilson11002,720 / 0.67Broughton1896Wilson13604,450 / 1.10Craiglockhart1902Wilson / Carfrae10855,100 / 1.26Tollcross1911Carfrae8006,400 / 1.58King’s Park1914Carfrae8503,890 / 0.96Stenhouse1930Carfrae7009,520 / 2.35Prestonfield1931Widdows70012,940 / 3.20Granton1934City Architect1,05017,910 / 4.43Changing school sizes in Edinburgh, 1877-1934

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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh Oct 15, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

Sciennes Primary School, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Stephencdickson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A wartime anti-Semitic pamphlet issued by Alexander Ratcliffe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preston Street School, CC-BY-SA Kim Traynor

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Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh Sep 12, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Causewayside School.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anderson’s relief above the entrance to the SCEEB building

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

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

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