A slow and rainy run today. Got caught in a brief drizzle between the wind and sunshine. But, a run is a run. 🤷

#running #runnersofmastodon #leith #edinburgh #scotland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This thread was originally written and published in September 2020.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And ropes for power transmission and winding;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Moorish Church: the thread about Leith’s Turkish Baths

This thread was originally written and published in November 2019.

There’s a building just off the foot of Leith Walk that looks much like any other mid-to-late 19th century Scottish Baronial Revival tenement, but just a little bit less in the Scottish or Gothic tradition and with just a few more unusual architectural flourishes than usual. It’s a modern church now behind the façade – but that’s not what it was built as. Do you want to hazard a guess as to the original purpose?

If like many people you were picking up a distinct Ottoman/ Turkish/ Moorish/ Islamic influence, then you’re on the right track. No it was not a mosque…

12 Casselbank Street was built at what was 12 Hope Street in 1885 (renamed in the 1960s to avoid confusion with a street in Edinburgh of the same name) as a Turkish Baths by George Beattie and Son. The proprietors were a John William Hodgson and a William Nixon. Casselbank refered to Walker Cassels, a merchant in Leith from whose estate it was feud. It was laid out as Hope Street which was probably a family connection. In reality it should have been named Casselsbank, as his name wasn’t Cassel.

Turkish Baths were copied from the hammam of the Islamic world; places of public bathing, particularly steam baths. Guests would first “bathe” in hot, dry air (not steam) to cause them to perspire. They would then move to a hotter room before a plunge into a cold pool and then washing in cold water. After washing and a massage from an assistant, they retired to a cooler room to relax. They were a popular pseudo-medical treatment, as well as a recreational activity.

The baths were built as a single storey, raised to 3 storeys a few years later in 1894, at which time Mr Nixon is noted as the “late proprietor” and newspaper adverts for the establishment dry up. They may have replaced an older establishment on Hope Street (but not at number 12, and not one I can find on the valuation rolls). The pediment was re-used and the onion-domes added either side. I think it’s a really clever mix of the Turkish influence with traditional Scottish masonry construction and the Baronial revival styling and that was so popular at the time.

I don’t have any pictures of the interior, but the relatively contemporary Stafford Street Turkish Baths in Edinburgh included this engraving of their interior in their Post Office directory advertising.

And the washing room of the Moray Lodge Turkish Baths in Camden Hill, London:

In the 1920s, it was converted to another fashionable leisure activity, a cinema, nicknamed the plaster screen because of the projection screen fashioned from that material. It’s official name was the Central Kinema, a nod to it being within shouting distance of Leith Central station. The shareholders include J. W. Hodgson, the Turkish Baths proprietor, and he was one of the directors. and it opened almost exactly 99 years ago (when this was written on November 22nd 2019). On December 2nd 1920, when it opened, the programe was from 6PM continuous to 10:30PM, or from 3PM on Saturdays. The feature attraction was a A Man’s Fight Against Tremendous Odds starring Dustin Farnum, supported by a Gaumont serial Barabas and a “first class musical programme”. Capacity was 500 and tickets were 9d, 1/- and 1/6.

There are lots of lovely photos of the interior here on the Scottish Cinemas archive, although all this ornate plasterwork is from its days as a cinema, not a bath house. You have to wonder if there is Victorian bathhouse tiling lurking behind it… The plaster screen is a rare survivor; they were usually demolished and replaced by a fabric one to install sound equipment behind, but the Central Kinema closed before it was converted for “Talkies”.

By 1934 the Central Kinema Co. Ltd. was in liquidation and the premises were being advertised for sale for an upset price of £2,200. It was soon taken over by the Edinburgh Pentecostal Church; the ready made amphitheatre suiting its needs. It was in appropriate company, next door to the Leith Trinity Free Church and along the street from the Leith Spurgeon Memorial Baptist Church. More recently, the Elim Pentecostal Church was been replaced by the Destiny Church; the Turkish Baths having spend the best part of its working life not as a bath house or even a cinema, but as a place of worship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Big Pipes: the thread about the water supply to old Leith

This thread was originally written and published in August 2019.

Yesterday’s library trip was surprisingly productive on the subject of the water supply of old Leith. What I already knew was limited to the facts that it was unreliable, that it was supplied from the loch at Lochend and that it went from there via pipes to a reservoir at the foot of Water Street (hence the name).

So what new things did I learn? Let’s start with some of the problems Leith faced when it came to getting drinking water. Traditionally the obvious source of water would have been the Water of Leith, but at this time it was tidal quite and so you had to take any water quite far upstream. But the principal problem was its water was also heavily used for milling by villages upstream and would have been badly polluted by the time it arrived in Leith. The other streams passing through the burgh, the Broughton Burn and the Greenside Burn, were fundamentally natural land drains and have been entirely unsuitable as a steady source of water.

Sourcing water was a serious problem for Leith industries too; distilling, soap making and sugar refining all suffered from a lack of the stuff and migrated upstream on to Bonnington where there was a well. Big houses would have kept their own wells and there were wells at Yardheads too for the brewers, but the supply was meagre and upredictable. There was a good reason brewing never figured as a big Leith industry beyond meeting the residents’ own needs and disappeared altogether once Edinburgh had excess capacity to supply it. So where else could water have been sourced from? There is a description and a number of images of water being carted in from the well at Restalrig, the “holy” well of St. Triduana and/or St. Margaret. However supplying enough water in this manner would have been exceedingly difficult given the limitations of transport, so this might have been more of a niche trade than a serious supply of potable water.

In 1752, the Incorporation of Traffickers of Leith (the Leith Company of Merchants) heard that Edinburgh was petitioning parliament for the right to levy a tax on ale of 2d per pint brewed. This would cover Leith too as Edinburgh exercised the rights of taxation over it. Leith saw an opportunity here and lobbied Edinburgh to try and gain access to some of the collected revenues of this taxation to improve the water supply in their town. Surprisingly Edinburgh agreed, if Leith drew up a schedule of costs and the plans themselves. The only realistic source of the water was obvious, it was the only substantial body of standing fresh water in the whole parish of South Leith; the loch at Lochend. Conveniently this had been made available for sale by the Crown who had confiscated it after the Jacobite rising of 1745. The previous proprietor of the Barony of Restalrig, Arthur Elphinstone, 6th Lord Balmerino, had forfeited this estate and his head for his part in that rebellion.

The cost of the scheme was to be £600 and the plan was to lift the water out of the loch by a pump and siphon, and draw it from there down the gradient to Leith in wooden pipes to a cistern at the junction of Carpet Lane and Rotten Row1 (which would become Water Lane). Wooden pipes sound odd to modern ears, but were actually cheaper and lighter than the alternative; lead. Whole elm trunks were used as they were resistant to rot, and they were hollowed out and joined with leather seals, you can see some contemporary originals in the Museum of Edinburgh. It was reported in 1922 that wooden water pipes from this scheme were still in the possession of a “Leith Museum”.

The cost was to be met half each by Leith and Edinburgh. A campaign for public subscription in Leith raised only £110, so the Trade Incorporations had to foot the remaining £190. The contractor was a local plumber, however had no experience of laying a public water supply. They also had no capital of their own and thus work proceeded piecemeal as the money came in and they could pay for labourers and pipes. A contemporary writer wrote critically of the whole initiative:

The Loch was too small and unhygienic. The contractor he said was “a fool“, and laid the pipes so deep (15 feet) that cost was too high, progress was too slow, and the inevitable repairs were difficult.

The pipes were laid either under, or alongside, Lochend Road which at this time ran through open fields. Water descended by gravity, but a pump house with a simple chain pump was constructed at the loch to lift the water out initially and start the siphon action. That pump house is still there. It’s very intriguing, a small, octagonal structure. If you peek inside you will see it goes down below the current ground level and there are signs of where the pump was within. If you look around at the pump house from the outside you may notice on the south wall there are signs of where a pipe has once entered the building and investigate the ground heading off north towards the park entrance you can trace a line of stone slabs in the grass, which undoubtedly covered the wooden water pipe.

It is worth noting that the surface of the loch back then was about 5-10 feet higher than it is now (depending on the season), and therefore its surface reached much further into the grounds of the park than it does today. This also meant that the pump house was inside the loch, not distant from it. The drop in level is a combined result of the abstraction of water, building drains into it and some of the underground springs feeding it were reputedly cut through by railway construction. Water reached the pump house from far into the water by way of an inlet pipe, the remains of which can be seen on the late 19th century postcard below.

The end result of this endeavour was that Leith now had it’s own piped water supply! But immediately, there were problems; the pipes were too narrow; the cistern was too small. There just wasn’t anything like enough water! So at the expense of Leith it was all dug up again within months and relaid with larger bore pipes. A larger cistern was constructed further south and this area appropriately became known locally as “The Big Pipes“. A bar of this name stood until cleared away with most of the rest of old central Leith in the mid 1960s.

Six wellheads were provided within the town for public use, the locations of five being;

• on the Kirkgate at Brickwork Close
• in the yard of The Vaults
• on the Coalhill at the bridge
• on the Shore at the New Quay
• and at Bernard’s Neuk on Bernard Street.

The well at the Shore was to be used for watering ships, but the task of filling casks lead to long queues of locals (mainly women and girls) with stoups (narrow leather buckets suspended from a yoke) and so ships were forbidden to water between 5am and 8pm. Notice that North Leith (the part of the town to the north and west of the Water of Leith) is excluded from all this as it was a separate parish from South Leith at this time and to many intents and purposes administratively part of Edinburgh. In 1771 a Police Act for Edinburgh included South Leith parish. The concept of Police at this time covered powers of sanitation, lighting, cleansing and the prevention of infectious diseases, rather than law enforcement. The Act made provisions for the paving, watering, cleansing and lighting of areas of South Leith including St. Anthony’s, the Kirkgate and Yardheads. One of the provisions was a new water cistern reserved exclusively for shipping at the Ferryboat Steps on the Shore. It would cost £850 and ships could get water for 1 shilling per ton. Clearly a lot of water would need to be provided to cover the costs.

But the basic problem persisted for Leith that Lochend was not a satisfactory reservoir and even the Big Pipes were insufficient. The inlet pipe was sunk deeper into the loch but silted up and had to regularly be cleared. As a result of this deeper and increased abstraction, the Loch would start to dry up in summer. Various schemes were mooted to resolve this, including constructing a dam across the Back Drum – the area of high ground to the west of the Loch on which Easter Road Stadium stands. This would have used a steam-driven pump to lift clean, silt-free water from the loch up the hill and from where it could run by gravity to the wells and cisterns in Leith. Instead and after much lobbying a two inch lead pipe was provided from Edinburgh’s own precious water supply to supplement that of Leith. Leith of course had to pay for this privilege and £1,000 was billed to the Leith Police Commissioners. Not long after this connection was completed a drought in 1793 resulted in Edinburgh cutting off the pipe. Chalk up another example in the long history of Edinburgh messing with Leith!

The water situation in Leith remained dire. Money was really the problem, the Commissioners had the powers but not the funds as Edinburgh kept a tight and uncooperative hand on the purse strings. All that changed in 1799 when John’s Place, a fashionable new development of merchant class villas, was constructed in Leith along the western edge of the Links as the town slowly and tentatively began to expand from the confines of its medieval boundaries.

The proprietors of this development wanted to match the New Town and that meant having piped water. So they proposed to the Commissioners that they would lend them the money for water improvements at 5% interest, if they would also lay supplies to them at John’s Place. The Commissioners jumped at the chance as the residents would also pay annual dues to them for this supply. On hearing this, “every heritor on the line of the pipe from Lochend” also got on board and wanted water. Each would pay 1 guinea per annum, and the required money was therefore lent to the Commissioners. Work to improve the supply and provide the private supplies took 2 years, but finally it was complete. On the grand day, the private stop cocks were opened and the public cistern promptly ran dry! That’s the problem with tapping off your water supply upstream before it reaches its destination! And so the private supplies were all shut off and could only be opened as and when the town cistern was filled.

And so the supply remained poor and the water quality was doubtful. Finally, in 1869, the Corporations of Edinburgh, Leith and Portobello made the sensible decision to combine their water interests and took over the Edinburgh Water Company to run it for themselves. Thus the Edinburgh District Water Trust came into being (look for EDWT street furniture at your feet) and Leith finally got a proper water supply.

I have used some educated guesswork to determine the likely route of the Big Pipes into Leith from Lochend and followed that on the 1849 Ordnance Survey town plan. Lo! and Behold, you can find a line of public water pumps and troughs along it near John’s Place!

By this time Leith was finally a municipal burgh in its own right and retained the rights over the Loch as a water source even after it was abandoned for the drinking supply in 1869. It was still useful to some industries as it was softer water than the drinking supply so better for use in boilers. The Roperie was allegedly the last user of the Lochend supply, as late as 1922, as a source of cooling water. Leith exercised its rights in Parliament in 1906 when Edinburgh put forward a Parliamentary Bill which would have allowed it abstract water from the Loch for the condensers in its electrical power station at McDonald Road and return it to source warmed up. This was a threat to The Roperie and so although the Loch was partly within the municipal territory of both Edinburgh and Leith, the rights of the latter, junior burgh were successfully defended.

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Those Magnificent Leith Men and their Steaming Machines: the thread about early steam-powered road transport

This thread was originally written and published in April 2019.

WHAT?!

“On the 3d of February, 1824, a patent was granted to T. Burstall and John Hill, of Leith, for a locomotive steam carriage; an account of which was first given in the Edinburgh Journal of Science“. “We think we are warranted in saying, that there is considerable degree of ingenuity, as well as originality, in many of the details, and also in the general arrangement of the machinery.”

Oh it gets better! “By the present improvements, the boiler is to be placed upon an additional pair of wheels, so that the whole machine may run upon six wheels instead of four.”

Isn’t this just the best thing?

Wait! Haud the bus! (Well, the steam carriage anyway). There’s more! In an effort to drum up support for their contrivance, Burstall & Hill went on a sales tour with a working scale model. Here’s the handbill (from the University of Glasgow’s Special Collection)

BURSTALL & HILL’S
PATENT
Steam Carriage Model

MAY BE SEEN AT WORK IN
THE BLACK BULL HALL
ENTRANCE BY VIRGINIA STREET

On Monday, the 7th January 1828 , and Following Days,
From 11 to 4, Afternoon, and by Gas Light, from 7 to 9.
Admittance, One Shilling.

From Grace’s Guide: “When the writer saw this interesting model at work, he was informed by the partner of Mr. Burstall, that it had, during the preceding 8 days, ran as many times round its circular course as amounted to 250 miles… and that during all that period it required no fresh packing or repair whatever. ” The best bit of the model of course is that the passengers were provided with complimentary yards of ale to chug”

Despite the sales effort, Burstall & Hill don’t appear to have had much success, it’s clear from just looking at the drawings that their design was impractical, and it was ahead of the limits of boiler, engine and wheel technology. In 1827, while exhibiting in London, the model overturned and injured Burstall’s younger brother. He submitted a design for the Rainhill Trials, “Perseverance” (a nod to his former Leith business partner?). It took 5 days to make it work and only made 6mph, but got a £25 prize.

By 1841, Timothy Burstall is recorded as an “Engineer and Dealer in Patents” in Somerset, with his sons Timothy Burstall (11) and Timothy Burstall (3). It’s not recorded why his sons had the same name or how he differentiated them! He died aged 84 in Glasgow, 1860. Hill moved to England, but what became of him is not clear. But that’s not the end of the story for Scottish experimentation in steam transport. Enter stage left, John Scott Russell (better known for building steamships and describing the Soliton wave).

Before he became better known, Scott Russell was a mathematics and engineering prodigy, teaching at the Leith Mechanics Institute at the age of 17. By 24 he was elected professor of Natural Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, although refused to stand for permanent employ. Concentrating on his engineering, Scott tinkered with boilers and steam engines, and came up with a method of constructing a flat-sided boiler (rather than a dome or cylinder) with internal stays. By 1834, success was sufficient that Scott Russell formed the Steam Carriage Company of Scotland to produce his perfected steam carriage. The square boiler can be seen slung under the wheels, with a 2 cylinder vertical engine on top.

Russell’s company built 6 carriages “well-sprung and fitted out to high standard“. From March 1834 they offered an hourly service from George Square in Glasgow to the Tontine Hotel in Paisley. An unheard of speed of 15mph could be made (Burstall & Hill could make 6mph). The Mitchell Library describes the machine. “carried up to 40 passengers… a crew of 3 green-uniformed men. The engineer sat above the engine and boiler at the rear… The fireman stood on the step below him… A steersman sat on the front perch …The carriage pulled a trailer which carried coal, water, and more passengers. Mechanically it may have been successful, but the carriages apparently upset the trustees of the turnpike roads, who felt they caused damage in excess of the charges paid.”

What happened next is a matter of conjecture, either the trustees deliberately obstructed the road to impede the carriage, or it was purely accidental, but in the Glasgow trades fair, a carriage hit an obstruction and overturned. The boiler failed and the explosion of steam killed 2 passengers and injured several more (note, the BBC attributes the below device to Goldsworthy Gurney, but it was a Scott Russell contraption). This is sometime attributed to being the first fatal automobile accident.

The service was withdrawn and 2 of Scott Russell’s carriages found their way to London for service there. The man himself quickly moved on to greater things, first the description of the Soliton (standing wave) and later as I. K. Brunel’s shipbuilder on the Great Eastern.

Scott Rusell’s time in Leith keeps up our connection between pioneering road steam carriages and the burgh, and there’s more to come! The next comes via the Kincardineshire town of Stonehaven in the form of Robert William Thomson, an engineer and inventor up there with Scott Russell and contemporaries in his imagination, inventiveness and skill. From a family of the new industrialist middle class, he was to be sent to the Kirk but being unable to master Latin he instead was sent to live with an Uncle in the United States where he apprenticed as a merchant.

Returning to Scotland in 1838, in between engineering apprenticeships, he taught himself chemistry, electrics, astronomy and mathematics and engineering with the help of an educated weaver. He settled in Edinburgh and his inventions and patents are a-plenty, including electrical detonators for blasting explosives, a self-filling fountain pen, a reversible washing mangle, a ribbon saw, an elliptical rotary steam engines and a hydraulic dry dock. Thomson also tinkered endlessly with improving steam engines and boilers to the point where they would (unlike the previous examples up this thread) actually be feasible for road transport.

Thomson patented the first pneumatic tyre in 1846. Not the vulcanised rubber tyre perfected by Charles Boyd Dunlop that we recognise now, but the first practical air-filled tyre. Thomson’s tyre was an inner tube of canvas rubberised with India Rubber which was encased in a stout leather outer tyre that was physically bolted to the rim of the wheel. It was ahead of the rubber technology of the time, but it worked in principal.

Frustrated by the shortcomings of his tyre, he turned instead to solid rubber tyres, and when he put these together with his advances in steam engines and boilers, he had a winning combination in the Thomson Road Steamer. The “tyres” were solid blocks of rubber attached all around the rim of the iron wheels. This allowed the heavy road steam engine to use the public road without damaging it and gave it the grip to get up inclines.

“But Thomson was a Stonehaven man living in the New Town of Edinburgh” you say. “What’s the Leith connection?” you ask. Well he had his road steamers built by T. W. Tennant at the Bowershall Iron Works in Leith, just off the Bonnington Road at (appropriately) Tennant Street.

Unlike those before him, Thomson’s Road Steamer actually really worked. To prove it, he had a rubber-wheeled Steamer called Enterprise hall a train of rubber-wheeled coal wagons of 40 tons from Dalkeith to Edinburgh. The contraption made about 8mph.

So it could pull coal, so what? Next, Thomson demonstrated its abilities in passenger haulage by pairing it with a bizarre, single-axle, double-decker carriage (with patented rubber wheels) and ran it between Edinburgh and Leith, the “New Favourite”

Weighing about 5 tons and with about 8 horsepower at its disposable, the Thomson Road Steamer could pull about 40 tons up the 1 in 18 gradient of Granton Road, or about 100 tons on the flat. “One morning a road steamer was taken down on to the sea sands at Portobello, and ran up and down there at the rate of ten miles an hour, the rain pouring all the time in torrents.“

Thomson’s machines, built by Tennant, were a global hit and were exported across the globe. He had worked for the Dutch improving their sugar refineries in the East Indies and they bought some for Java. The Indian government bought four of them too. Such was the success that Tennant’s couldn’t keep up with demand, and he also had them built by Robey & Co. in Lincoln, Ransomes, Sims & Head in Ipswich and Charles Burrell & Sons of Thetford. Ultimately, the solid India Rubber tyre although a success was an evolutionary dead end. It was extremely expensive and not particularly hard wearing. It was also useless when confronted with mud. But Thomson showed the way, and technology eventually caught up and allowed others to perfect a hard-wearing pneumatic tyre. Appropriately enough he’s commemorated in Stonehaven at a tyre-fitting garage.

Thomson died in 1873 and you’d think that would be the last of Leith’s connections with mad steampunk road machines. You’d think, but you’d be wrong! Enter “Mr Nairn, Engineer, Leith” and his patent 1871 steam omnibus!

Nairn’s bus is recognisably to modern eyes as a double-decker. Sure it’s only got 3 wheels and it’s got a boiler and pistons instead of a diesel engine, and a chimney that runs along the top deck and hangs out the back, but it’s all there. Nairn stuck with solid wheels, but tackled the problem of ride quality by using a relatively advanced suspension of leaf springs mounted on stacks of rubber washers (ahoy Moulton fans!). His 3-cylinder machine, Pioneer could carry 50 passengers in (relative) comfort at up to 12 mph. Nairn ran it between Edinburgh and Portobello and it could make 11 or 12 trips per day. “It is doing exceedingly well. No horse-drawn ‘bus is more under control than this one; its safety and capabilities of doing excellent work are beyond cavil, and invite investigation. Its general construction is a great step in advance.”

So why did this modern-looking, high-capacity, relatively fast and apparently successful steam bus remain a one-off for a single season? There are two reasons. The first is probably pure economics. In 1871, horse-hauled trams came in to use in Edinburgh. A horse consumed less in feed than a steam bus did in coal, a tram car was much cheaper to produce and horses were more reliable than proprietary steam engines. The second was more fundamental; the tramway had no legal running powers for mechanical traction.

You’d think that would be the last of Leith’s connections with mad, steampunk road machines. You’d think, but you’d be wrong! Enter “Mr Leonard J. Todd, Engineer, of Leith.” and his patent steam omnibus of 1872. Not only does it have 4 (yes, 4, count them all!) wheels, it has 2 funnels (1 a false one). And check out the opulence of the lower saloon.

Mr Todd insited that solid wheels were the way forward and could make a comfortable 20mph journey if they were appropriately sprung. He used a system of leaf springs, rubber washers and “volutes” (vertical spiral springs – not coils). I’m not convinced he was right to be honest. Todd also designed a “Silent Street Tramway Locomotive” which he said would be able to pull a train of two 40-passenger carriages up a 1 in 40 gradient at 10 miles an hour.

And he also designed a 3-wheeled, steam-powered post van called “Centaur”. Again solid wooden wheels and iron tyres. It was designed to pull mail and passenger in a carriage at “high speed” wherever rails couldn’t go. The technology was mainly lifted from railway practice, including such features as the wheels built up from wooden blocks to reduce vibrations.

Thank you to Becky Taylor for pointing me in the direction of Leonard J. Todd and his marvellous machines.

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.

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

Morning run to Newhaven and Western Harbour. A lot warmer than expected this morning, loads of folks out and about 🙌

#running #runnersofmastodon #leith #edinburgh