The Great Storm of 1901: the thread about the tragic loss of the cutter “Active”

On the 12th November 1901 a terrible storm formed over the North Sea and battered the East Coast of Scotland. The Firth of Forth felt its full fury and by the following morning twenty men would lie dead in the cold waters of Wardie Bay, when the Royal Navy cutter Active was driven ashore and wrecked against the Granton Breakwater.

The Active was a 135 ton sailing yawl, built in Kent in 1867. For 20 years she had been stationed in the Forth as tender to the navy’s guardship at South Queensferry, the old battleship HMS Anson. She had recently returned south from secondment to the Revenue Service as a fisheries cutter off of the Shetland Islands. Her captain was Lt. Charles Culley RN, a pious and temperate man who was a “good husband, a good father and a real Christian” in the words of his widow. Culley had started out life as a pit boy in Somerset but had turned to Methodism and joined the Navy. He was therefore somewhat unusual in being a Bluejacket, having come up through the ranks and had recently learned that he was being advanced in the service and would be receiving command of a steam gunboat.

During the day on November 12th the temperature plunged and the wind got increasingly strong. Soon it brought heavy squalls of rain and sleet. The waves ran high along the Forth and were “breaking with great violence against the piers and embankments, doing considerable damage“. At the end of the eastern breakwater at Granton the green marker lighthouse and a gangway were carried away. On the quayside, part of the roof of the North British Railway station was blown off. At Trinity Crescent the sea wall was breached and the road was left impassable. On account of the intensity of the storm in the North Sea the east coast fishing fleet returned home early, boats from as far as Dundee and Aberdeen running for the safety of Granton. The Burntisland ferry was stopped, with the William Muir being kept tied up alongside at Granton. At North Queensferry the Norwegian steamer Dronning Gyda of Kristiansund was driven ashore and the Swedish schooner Tura was wrecked on the island of Inchgarvie, her crew of 7 managing to scramble ashore and seek shelter. Many vessels came into Leith Roads to seek shelter; those that could sought refuge in the harbours; those left out in the Forth were seen to be straining at their anchors. Similar stories were repeated all along the east coast of Scotland and England.

The gale swept across the city early in the afternoon and many a chimney pot came crashing down. A cartload of hay was blown over and several shop windows were blown in. Trees were brought down in the Botanics, at St. Bernard’s Crescent and on Moray Place. At the Usher’s bonded warehouse at St. Leonards the lamplighter, Donald Cormack, lost his life when an external wooden staircase he was climbing collapsed in the wind. At 74 Causewayside, twelve year old Annie Hanlan was killed as she lay in bed when the chimney breast of the tenement collapsed through the roof. A heroic effort on the part of the Sciennes firemen under the command of Lt. Grinton saw her 14 year old sister Mary, who had been sharing the same bed, rescued and taken to the Infirmary suffering from serious injuries. Two others were injured and the tenement was condemned, rendering 12 families homeless.

The maximum average wind speed during the storm would be recorded at 67mph. Beyond the city boundaries nearly all telegraph and telephone cables came down. There was no communication north, only three wires to Glasgow left intact and a single each to Newcastle and Leeds for all southwards communications. A huge backlog of messages piled up in the telegraph offices, unsent. Within the city, the telephone network was “very much out of order“, hampering the emergency response. Out in the Forth, Lt. Culley and the Active had been sent from their mooring at South Queenferry to seek shelter in Leith Roads in the time honoured way, in the lee of the island of Inchkeith. Culley had three anchors put down to secure his charge and during the day it was seen by observers on the shore to be riding out the storm as comfortably as could be expected.

Around 3 O’clock in the morning the Active was seen to be dragging her anchors. Her tiller was smashed, and orders were given to bring the spare up from below decks. Her foresail was raised to try and sail out of trouble, but it jammed and had to be hauled back down. Attempts by a Granton-based tug to reach her were futile and what few onlookers were present watched helplessly as she was soon being driven uncontrollably towards the shore. Culley let off his distress rockets to try and summon assistance and mustered the remaining men from their sleep on deck. However, before any attempt to save lives could be made, the little ship was dashed against the breakwater and “smashed to match-wood“. Observers saw her two blue marker lights disappear from view at about 4:15AM. In the last moments before disaster, Culley had ordered his men to climb the rigging in the hope of safety but of the twenty-five souls on board, only three were spared. Such had been the haste of her demise that only three men had managed to put on their cork life jackets and Ordinary Seamen W. Travis, G. Dady (or Peady) and G. Pearce would be the only men who made it off. Two of them were washed completely over the breakwater and into the harbour, being picked up by the steamer Bele who had heard their cries.

The third, dressed only in his string vest and life jacket, managed to cling to the breakwater and “through dogged persistence” crawled along it to safety. The other two survivors of the ship’s complement were Quartermaster Walsenham (or Wakenham) and the Second Mate, Boatswain John Donovan, both of whom had been allowed shore leave in Leith the day before and had been unable to rejoin ship on account of the weather.

With the telephone and telegraph systems being out of order, news had to be carried on foot to the police office at Gayfield Square from where 10 constables and two doctors were dispatched under the command of Superintendent Lamb , Inspector Cruickshanks and Sergeant Ford. By 11AM, only three bodies had been recovered, the vessel having been driven ashore on an ebb tide, which meant that most of the victims’ bodies were carried away from the shore and out into the Forth. The local fishermen, intimately in tune with the currents and habits of the Firth, pronounced that bodies would be carried to the vicinity of Elie.

All morning on the 13th, dense crowds lined the Wardie foreshore to gaze on at the macabre spectacle of wreckage and flotsam being tossed around in the bay and of policemen combing the shore with boathooks looking for survivors (or, more realistically, bodies). Rifles, cutlasses and uniforms were brought up on the slipway at Granton and large quantities of Rum had to be secured by the Customs men before they found their way into jacket pockets. Sergeant Bain of the Police was able to pull ashore the ship’s colours from the breakwater at considerable risk to his life.

On Thursday 14th, the newspapers reported that the foreshore along the coast was being searched for bodies and that divers had arrived to scour the seabed around the wreckage. The gunboats HMS Redwing and Cockchafer arrived to trawl up and down the Forth. In the aftermath, observers with the benefit of hindsight said that the Active had been anchored too close to the shore and not far enough north to be safely sheltered in the lee of Inchkeith. Some were of the opinion that she should have been brought into the safety of the harbour, however it was noted in the papers that this would have been against Culley’s instructions. Others still wrote to the Scotsman bemoaning the lack of a coastguard watch or lifeboat at Granton, Leith or Newhaven.

The first funerals took place on Saturday 16th, with a cortège leaving the City Mortuary on Infirmary Street with full naval honours on its way to the Admiralty’s plot at Seafield cemetery. The procession was led by the officers and men of HMS Anson and the band of the shore base HMS Caledonia. Thousands turned out to line the streets and pay their respects to seamen John (or Herbert) Walker, R. Pearson and E. Farrow, Carpenter’s Mate H. Williams and Ship’s Boy J. Mulvaney. The same day, a requiem mass was held for James Donovan at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea R.C. Church in Leith. All six were interred side-by-side at Seafield, the men from the Anson firing a salute over the graves. That same day, a remarkable event occurred; a glass bottle was recovered on the shore at Granton, containing a message: “H.M.C. Active, Sinking Fast. From Captain Culley. Good-bye.” Mrs Culley identified the handwriting as that of her late husband.

On Tuesday 26th of November, a further body was recovered from the mud in Granton harbour, Ordinary Seaman James Lyall could only be identified from his names stitched inside his clothing. On the 29th, tugs brought the remains of the Active to a position in Wardie Bay where they could be hauled ashore and broken up. The following day, a benevolent fund was opened for the families of the deceased by Captain William Fisher CB of the Anson and his officers, with the Lifeboat Institution making an opening contribution of £2,000. Lieutenant Culley alone left behind 6 children, the eldest being 17.

Bodies were slowly recovered in November and by the 20th, seventeen had been recovered. On 27th November, Ordinary Seaman James Lyall was buried at Seafield. A court martial into the disaster was held in distant Chatham on 3rd December. Four of the five survivors (George Pearce was still in hospital recovering) appeared, but were not charged or asked to plead. Captain Fisher of the Anson gave witness, confirming that he had ordered Culley not to risk his ship on any account, and to anchor her in Leith Roads. He did however say that Culley had not done so in the exact position he had been shown on the chart. The survivors stated that the loss of the tiller and jamming of the sails had prevented them for seeking safety, and that the Granton tugs had not approached close enough to offer assistance. The court exonerated the survivors from all blame, but noted – with the benefit of hindsight – that Culley should have “shown better judgement had he either weighed or slipped anchors and run for safety” but that when the disaster was inevitable “he appeared to have maintained discipline and done all possible to save life.” Culley’s body was not recovered until late in January 1902, and he was buried with full naval honours near his men in Seafield Cemetery.

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Ruadhadh na maidne, cala Ghranton, Dùn Èideann.

#SilentSunday #Scotland #Edinburgh #Granton #Morning #dawn #Gàidhlig #Gaelic #MastoDaoine

I walked today. Not around Dublin, although there was a swerve of shore, of sorts, at the bend of Granton bay.

My prize was that I saw the Granton Whale within Gasholder no. 1.

“…soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness..."

#Granton #Edinburgh #Gasholder #Gasholder1Park #GrantonWhale #JamesJoyce #Ulysses #Bloomsday

🌤️  Good morning Edinburgh. Today’s headlines: Little library joy, wheel falls off plane, no more parking consultations, Granton Gasholder reopens this weekend + Leith Late closes but leaves lasting legacy

⏰ Edinburgh’s ad-free local news: https://edinburghminute.substack.com/p/edinburgh-minute-weekend-4-april-2025

Photo by @TomDuffinPhotos

#edinburgh #leith #granton #scotland

🌤️  Good morning Edinburgh. Today’s headlines: Little library joy, wheel falls off plane, no more parking consultations, Granton Gasholder reopens this weekend + Leith Late closes but leaves lasting legacy

⏰ Edinburgh’s ad-free local news: https://edinburghminute.substack.com/p/edinburgh-minute-weekend-4-april-2025

Photo by @TomDuffinPhotos

#edinburgh #scotland #granton #leith

From 16th century fortification to 20th century cul-de-sac: the thread about Wardie House:

There is an interesting property listing that has recently come up for sale; “3 bed cottage for sale in Trinity” at number 2a Wardie House Lane. Offers over £550,000 if you’re interested! With “magnificent views over the Firth of Forth“, the estate agent describes it as a “charming stone built cottage requiring upgrading” but the name on the garden gate should give a clue that all isn’t quite what it seems: Wardie House. For a start, this property isn’t in Trinity, and this is no cottage – it’s actually the sole remaining part of a once grand mansion house, a reconfigured kitchen wing that survived the twentieth century wreckers’ ball.

Wardie itself is an ancient placename, recorded as far back as 1336 with spellings like Warda and Weirdie that suggest a root in the Anglian wearda or Norse varthi for a beacon or cairn. It is easy to imagine that such a structure may once have stood on this prominent position above the foreshore of Wardie Bay. The Blaeu atlas of Scotland of 1654 records the place as Weirdy along with the symbol of a tower house. That tower house had been built here in the early 16th century by the landowning family – appropriately the Touris (or Towers) of Inverleith – apparently to protect their estate to seaward. However when the English under Hertford landed at Granton in 1544 it offered little in the way of defence and was slighted, along with most of the city of Edinburgh and Port of Leith.

The tower was rebuilt by the Touris and a century later when another English invader took the city and Leith – Oliver Cromwell after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 – “the mannour place or house of Wardie” was sold for £60 by Sir John Touris to the occupiers; to be pulled down to provide construction masonry for Leith Citadel.

The Touris kept ownership of the land itself but granted a tack to the Commonwealth to quarry stone “betwixt the house of Wardie and the sea” for the construction of the Citadel and also for 100 “faggots of whins” (Scots, gorse) on the Wardie Muir (Scots, moor). The map below was made in 1682 and shows these places. The muir is recorded in 1588 when gunners from Edinburgh Castle were sent there to retrieve a cannon ball that had been fired in salute from its ramparts. It occupied most of the present-day district of Trinity on the northern bank of the Water of Leith, from Bonnington to Inverleith, and there would have been very little, if any, occupation beyond rough grazing and cutting the whins and some shallow coal pits.

In the 18th century Wardie was detached from the Inverleith estate and came into the possession of the Boswells of Blackadder, in Berwickshire, who rebuilt the house here. This holding was bounded by the Wardie Burn to its west – beyond which lay the estates of Granton (owned by the Dukes of Buccleuch) and East Pilton (owned by the Ramsays of Barnton). To the north was a short strip of coast fronting Wardie Bay and the Forth. To the south was Ferry Road and Inverleith and to the east were the former lands of Trinity, the border being on the alignment of what is now Netherby Road. In modern day toponymy many might consider Wardie to be either part of the districts of Granton or Trinity, traditionally it was in neither and was distinct. While traditionally Wardie was part of the parish of St. Cuthbert’s and therefore Edinburgh, in 1833 the line of the Granton road was taken as the boundary of the Parliamentary Burgh of Leith and thereafter it sat part in Leith and part in Edinburgh.

The Wardie estate was largely agricultural, centred on the farm with the charming name of Winnelstraelee, the winnelstrae being the Scots name for what in England they called windlestraw, a type of rough grass useful for making ropes. Remarkably this farm survived well into the 20th century, but its name was progressively Anglicised, first to Windlestrawlee and then to what Stuart Harris calls the “vapid invention” of Ferryfield.

You can see from the above map that before Granton Road, or Wardie Road, or almost any other road in this district existed, there was a road leading from Wardie House directly to the Ferry Road with a gate lodge where the two met. This road actually remains to this day, but only as an un-named stub at its southern end.

When Alexander Blackadder of Boswell died in 1812, his will disposed of his Wardie estate to one Lieutenant John Donaldson, RN, whose grandmother was in the line of the Boswells of Blackadder. A condition of his inheritance was that he take up the family name and so he restyled himself, by grant of the Prince Regent, as Captain Boswall of Wardie (note the “e” to “a” spelling change). Many streets in present-day Wardie now have Boswall in their names. Captain Boswall died in 1847 and Wardie House was split off of the estate, which remained with his heirs, and sold to Michael Anderson esq. a legal printer. On Anderson’s death in 1858 it passed in turn to a Leith merchant, Thomas Bell Yule, who had it considerably enlarged and remodelled in a Scots Baronial Revival style. Perhaps this largesse over-extended Yule, because in 1865 he was bankrupted and his creditors seized and sold the house.

Wardie House was bought at this auction by John Gillon esq., another merchant of Leith, for £3,760. By this time the area was undergoing change. The Donaldson Boswalls had allowed Granton Road to cut through their holding in the 1830s and began feuing along its length (the Scots legal term for splitting a landholding into smaller plots for sale and development). This exercise proceeded slowly but some impressive villas were built from the 1840s to the 1870s, such as Wardie Lodge (now St. Columba’s Hospice), Wardie Villas, Erneston and Queensberry Place. These somewhat overshadowed old Wardie House; being larger, grander and more impressive when viewed from the shore below. There was also commenced, but never completed, a Georgian-style crescent named Wardie Crescent. In the 1850s there was a short-lived brick and tile works in the western corner of the estate, making use of the local clay measures and potentially also the coal outcrops. As a result of this slow and somewhat piecemeal residential development of the district, the majority of the lands of Wardie would remain in agricultural use well into the 20th century.

John Gillon died in 1879 and on the death of his widow Wardie House was bought by Thomas Symington, a manufacturing chemist at Beaverbank Works in Warriston. Symington had gotten rich developing and popularising instant coffee essences and alternatives based on dandelion and chicory for the health-conscious Victorian.

Symington died at Wardie House in 1896 and once again the place found itself up for sale. It was subsequently owned from 1900 by James Roger, director of Garland & Roger timber merchants, who sold the house in 1931 to Archibald William Forbes, a retired engineer, who died there in 1953. By the time of Forbes’ death the rambling house had been split into three separate residences and was reported to be “falling down“. A mish-mash of Victorian additions on top of Georgian rebuilding on top of a Jacobean bones, it was “consumed by dry rot which ‘crumbled its flooring, warped its panelling, cracked its walls and sagged its painted ceilings“.

There was no preservation movement to step in and save it, Wardie was just another decaying old villa in a city full of decaying old villas and without the money or the will to do much about them. And so the pile was sold and all but the kitchen wing was demolished. It was survived by its garden cottages – the imaginatively named West Cottage and South Cottage and the developers erected six neat but anonymous sem-detached bungalows in its place on a suburban cul-de-sac renamed Wardie House Lane.

While most of the old lands of Wardie were finally covered in a mixture of municipal housing schemes in the 1920s, a significant portion of it escaped development entirely and remains open and under grass as it was purchased as the Wardie Playing Fields, which regular listeners will now be aware has an interesting and surprising history all of its own.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

On Granton Harbour wall this lunchtime.

#Edinburgh #Granton #harbour #photography #graffiti

“Absolutely Scandalous”: the thread about Wardie Playing Fields and the Lochinvar Camp

They aren’t in use any more, but on Granton and Netherby Roads in the north of Edinburgh there are impressive ornamental gates that lead to Wardie Playing Fields, where generations of local school children have loved or loathed playing cold and muddy games of football or rugby; have triumphed at their sports day or endured the dreaded “cross country” runs. The fields themselves are still in use, but there’s rather more their story than just 14 acres of windswept turf.

The story of these fields begins when nineteen and a half acres of feuing ground of the old Wardie estate were purchased in late 1920 by the Leith Education Authority for use as a recreation ground for its schools. Few if any of Leith’s urban schools had any playing or sports facilities of their own beyond confined, hard playgrounds and one of the last independent acts of this Authority was to purchase this ground, and that at Bangholm, for school use.

Within a year, the shotgun wedding that amalgamated Edinburgh with Leith saw the fields pass to the former Education Authority, which had a lucrative sideline in leasing it out as sheep grazing well into the 1940s. Edinburgh had also purchased at this time the rest of the undeveloped Wardie feuing grounds west of Granton Road for a public housing scheme (but that’s another story).

As it so often was, the city Corporation was slow to catch up with the population growth of its own housing schemes and the little old village school at Granton was soon at bursting point. But it was not until 10 years later, in September 1931, that a new “sunshine school” – constructed on open-air principles –was opened at Wardie for the district, taking up the southern portion of the playing fields in the process.

Our story so far has been an unremarkable one but all that was to change in 1943. That year the “stone frigate” (the Navy’s nickname for a shore base) of HMS Lochinvar – the Royal Navy’s principle school of minesweeping – found itself evicted from its base at Port Edgar along the coast and displaced to Granton Docks instead where there was already a shore training facility called HMS Claverhouse. Lochinvar had to move to make way for the pressing task of combined operations training in the run up to D-day, but it too had a vital role to play in that campaign; it trained the thousands of men to man the little ships that would keep the approach lanes and assault beaches free from sea mines.

There was plenty space in Granton Docks for the vessels of Lochinvar, but precious little for surface buildings. And that’s where the playing fields came in – an expanse of undeveloped ground just up the hill from the busy harbour and large wartime camp of Nissen Huts was quickly erected, providing everything from accommodation, catering and recreation facilities for personnel to offices, stores and workshops.

New minesweepers came up to Granton where they were allocated to a crew of largely green recruits who were then given an intensive but short period of training in the dangerous art of clearing the sea of mines and then after a few weeks they were then packed off to war. But Lochinvar wasn’t just a man’s world, there was a significant contingent of Wrens (WRNS – the Women’s Royal Naval Service) whose job it was to run the place and make sure everything from sweeps to guns were maintained in good order and would work first time, every time. In the below photo we see two Wrens in overalls – Beryl Lyster from Largs (left) and May Groosjohan of Glasow (right) – showing HRH Duchess of Kent – the WRNS Commandant of the inner workings of the Lewis and Browning Guns and Oerlikon Cannons that they are stripping and servicing for the minesweepers at Wardie. A rather pompous looking male officer looks on.

Lochinvar‘s spell at Wardie was relatively short and less than two years after it opened, at the end of the war, the complex found itself surplus to military requirements. The city’s Education Committee was raring to get the ground back, remove the huts and return the fields to school sports once more: but there was an outcry. You see it’s often forgotten that there was a critical housing crisis at the end of the war. There had been six long years of no new building and few repairs to existing stock, there was a flood of men (and women!) being demobbed and returning home and six years of pent up demand to settle down and start families. Edinburgh was no exception. Anything that could be lived in was being lived in, including properties condemned as slums pre-war. The city faced a homelessness and a squatting crisis and many families simply had nowhere to go. The Housing Committee turned its gaze to the surplus military camps to try and ease this immediate pressure. Its chairman, Councillor J. J. Robertson, said “there was no more pressing claim than the needs of the people for housing” under the headline “School Football or Housing?” in the Evening News on 18th Setpember 1945, just a month after the war’s end.

On 29th August 1946, fourteen homeless families in Edinburgh took matters into their own hands and made a night time “seizure” of the recently vacated Anti Aircraft Gunners’ camp at Craigentinny, which they took possession of as squatters. The group formalised themselves as the “Edinburgh Houseless Association” and began to take applications from other homeless families to join them. While the police investigated alleged vandalism due to stripping some huts of their interiors to improve those that were to be lived in, the residents got on with trying to better their lot and applied to the authorities to have the water and electricity supplies turned back on.

In November, the Corporation relented and the Housing Committee authorised the spending of £4,500 to put the camp in order and take over its administration – crucially, charging rents. They soon widened this action and a Prisoner of War and gunners’ camp at Craigentinny, the Cavalry Park camp in Duddingston and the Nissen Huts of HMS Lochinvar at Wardie were all taken over as housing labelled as both “emergency” and “temporary“. This was despite all of these sites all being totally inappropriate for family living – but there was nothing better and the post-war New Jerusalem would have to wait in the meantime.

Families at the optimistic renamed Lochinvar Camp at Wardie paid 12s a week for half a corrugated iron Nissen Hut, but life here was no holiday camp. Each hut had a thin internal partition dividing it up into two houses, with further thin partitions for bedrooms; this gave people only the idea of privacy. A small coal stove was provided to try and keep the place warm, but with no insulation the thin metal walls were always cold and ran constantly with condensation. You can see some photos of hut interiors here at the Edinphoto website of the late Peter Stubbs. Electricity was provided but only enough for basic lighting, residents found their wireless sets or any other electrical appliances being impounded by the Corporation’s electricians. Toilets and washing facilities were shared between six to nine families. Vermin were a constant problem and they, and the damp, ruined people’s furniture, clothing and posessions.

There was a wash house, but there were only three sinks per 50 families and no stoppers for the sinks. Cooking and cleaning facilities were communal too and centralised; mothers may have to walk hundreds of metres to and from them multiple times a day to feed their families. This would cause a heartbreaking tragedy barely a few months after opening. On October 21st 1946, Mrs Watson made one of her many daily trips to the kitchens and left 18 month old Ann and 3 year old John playing in the hut. This was not unusual and was a simple practicality of life. She was drying clothes on an airing horse by the stove which was somehow knocked over by the children and quickly caught fire. Almost everything within the hut was flammable, it had only a single door, the windows set too high for the children to reach and there was no running water. They were quickly trapped by the flames and there was nothing their mother or the neighbours could do. First the Police and then the Fire Brigade arrived, but all were beaten back by the red hot metal.

There was an outcry in the papers; the letter writers pointed the blame at the mother, the authorities, the fire brigade. The tragedy further stigmatised residents who already felt looked down upon by many. One hut dweller, Mrs Thompson, wrote in her defence to the Evening News on October 28th about the reality of life in the camp;

I am the mother of two young children and I have to go about 100 yards to cook, wash up, and clean in a communal kitchen. When I went to Castle Terrace and told them I was unable to do this, I was told the alternative was to find other accommodation.

The authorities were compelled to act and fire guards were provided for the stoves until gas and water could be laid to the huts to allow cooking and domestic tasks to be done in the home with children under supervision. The city Corporation formed a “special sub-committee to deal with the prevention of accidents in the home” and in recognition of the unsuitability of these sites for housing it cancelled plans to takeover similar camps at Muirhouse and Alnwickhill.

But although Edinburgh was one of the most enthusiastic local authorities when it came to building postwar prefab housing, it couldn’t keep up with demand for housing and the camp found itself in demand with a long waiting list. In July 1949 it was estimated that the temporary camps could be filled four times over, and one family had even taken up residence in the corridors of the city’s Social Services offices in Castle Terrace in protest. Many residents found themselves stuck in the “temporary” camps for far longer than they thought they would be – three years or more instead of six to nine months – and began to organise themselves. A Lochinvar tenants association had been set up in 1947, making an appeal in the classifieds for the donation of a typewriter to help with their secretarial burden. The Corporation set up nurseries to help watch the children while their mothers were busy or out working and social workers were sent in. Mrs Bell, one of the residents, organised sewing classes and Christmas parties for the 36 girls who called the camp home. But others had a more individualistic streak and prouder spirit and had a different response, a resident calling herself “Indignant Mother” wrote to the Evening News, outraged at the insult of being offered “public charity“.

Tensions were further stoked in the camp in 1948 when a group of German workers were installed in some huts. They were young women from the Allied Zones who had found themselves separated from families trapped in the Soviet Zone and had been brought to Edinburgh to work in mills at Musselburgh to help address a labour shortage. There were soon accusations that the Germans had gotten better huts with better heating; but this was not the case. They slept 10 or 12 to a room in dormitories and lived a regimented life of work, rations and few personal possessions. But despite the resentment, some reached out to the incomers; they found their new neighbours to be young and frightened, alone in a strange and foreign land where few spoke their language. There had little in the way of home comforts and many had no idea what had become of their parents in the Soviet Zone.

But one thing that all could agreed upon was that the camp was no fit place for housing. It was “a disgrace to the city of Edinburgh. The decent, hard-working people who have to live here surely deserve a better lot” wrote one resident to the papers in 1947. Another, calling themselves Grantonian said the site should be given instead to the newly formed National Coal Board for use as offices. In October 1949 there was a further fire at Lochinvar that left five families, eighteen people in all, homeless when a gas grill in a hut set fire to the wooden partitions. Fortunately on this occasion nobody was injured. The Evening News described the camp as “shanty town squalor” for 150 families and that conditions there were “not British“. By the 1951 the huts were well past their expected lifespans but the housing demand was such that even though the Education Committee wanted its playing fields back, it was told “no” and the camp was to remain as housing.

This was in spite of the fact the Corporation could barely keep up with the basic maintenance, never mind make improvements. In the preceding year the Lochinvar camp had an average of 176 families resident and was costing the city £4,997 for gas, £68 for coke fuel and £824 for electricity. In two years the city had run up a £19,289 deficit for fuel costs alone across its emergency camps. This was before they outlay of £55 per household (at Lochinvar) for maintenance, almost twice what each was paying in rent. Residents claimed the authorities were trying to force larger families living in huts laid out inside as one large apartment into the same sized space divided into more apartments, for which they would have to pay higher rents. Sickness rates amongst children were high and dysentery was becoming common. Vandalism was endemic and there were worrying cases of child neglect reported. Residents said that they had stopped giving out their address as being in the camps when applying for jobs as it usually saw them turned down and a case brought before the Burgh Police Court as a result of a fist-fight heard that it was brought on by the overcrowded conditions in the camp; it was “the kind of place that would make you fight with your own shadow” according to the witness.

Enough was enough. The secretary of the camp’s residents association said conditions were “absolutely scandalous” and protests were organised in conjunction with residents of the other camps and an organisation called Housing Crusade. Placards were carried with messages such as “We Want Houses, Not Promises“, “A Camp Is Not a House“, “Homes Before Festivals” and “Edinburgh – Build Your Allocation“. Residents at Duddingston Camp reported the police removed posters they had put up on perimeter fencing as a tourist bus route went past it.

At last it seemed that the city was listening and in December 1951 laid out a plan to deal with the problem of the camps. It would close down Craigentinny as soon as possible, huts in the worst repair in the other camps would be closed too and to deal with the fuel costs the huts would be fitted with coin-operated gas and electricity meters. But such was the drawn-out nature of the UK’s post-war economic malaise, in 1954 the camps at Duddingston, Sighthill and Lochinvar were still being used even though in theory each hut would be closed down when its residents left for permanent housing. It was agreed in March that year that Sighthill and Duddingston camps would be exited expeditiously by preferential allocation of new houses to tenants. But the long suffering residents at Wardie found they were overlooked, even though the place was ever more decrepit the city judged their camp to be in the best condition of the three and so they would have to stay put. Indeed, some huts that should have been permanently closed down were even brought back into use, even though it was normal practice for the resident children to commandeer the empty properties as gang huts and thoroughly trash the interiors. A similar fate befell the Wardie sports pavilion, leaving one local councillor to go on the record that it wanted a “good fire” to help improve it.

It was not until December 1955 that it was announced that they would get permanent homes and even then it took a further year for the last 71 families at Lochinvar to be moved from their “temporary” accommodation; a full ten years after it was taken over for “emergency” use. Within a year the hut bases were ploughed up and the Corporation’s groundskeepers were finally allowed back in to returf the pitches. There is nothing to be seen on the ground these days of what was – for over a decade – hundreds of houses with thousands of families passing through them.

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