The thread about Spuds and Hippos: Leith and Newhaven’s key part in building the Mulberry Harbours for Operation Overlord in World War 2

This thread was originally written and published in June 2023.

Today (June 6th) is the 79th anniversary of the 1944 D-Day landings, the largest seaborne invasion in history. The huge assault was supported by a vast logistical operation, at the core of which were to be two Mulberry Harbours. This is the story of Leith and Newhavens significant part in making this military megaproject a reality.

Mulberries A & B – one each for the US-led Omaha British-led Gold beaches respectively – were temporary, prefabricated harbours to rapidly offload supplies onto land after the initial assault, until other ports could be captured. Each enclosed an area larger than the harbour of Gibraltar. and was made up of a range of prefabricated, interlocking parts, each with a codename; Hippos, Crocodiles, Phoenixes, Bombardons, Beetles, Swiss Rolls, Whales and Spuds. And it was the first and – most importantly – last of these where Leith came in

A Spud was the end of the Whale, the latter being the overall codename for the pier ends. It was the largest and technically most complex component of the whole Mulberry – the part where the actual ships tied up to offload, and of the 23 Spuds required over half would be built in Leith. And they would not be built in just any old way, they were built in record-breaking time, in a brand new shipyard, constructed “almost overnight” specifically for the purpose of producing Mulberry components, by a temporary workforce who were largely ignorant of what they were doing.

When it had become clear after the disastrous failure of the Dieppe Raid of 1942 that any cross-Channel invasion was going to require an unprecedented logistical exercise to support it, the best minds in the country – all the way up to Churchill himself – were focussed on how to move men and supplies quickly onto the land. Brigadier Bruce White, a leading civil engineer, was put in charge of the idea of creating floating assault harbours. Looking for inspiration, he recalled an unusual dredger he had seen in operation in the Bahamas almost 20 years before, and an idea formed in his head. That dredger, the Lucayan, had three special legs or “spuds”, which it could lower onto the sea bed to make it a stable platform while it went about its digging duties, at all states of the tide. It had been build on the Clyde in 1923 by Lobnitz & Co. in Renfrew, so White roped Henry Lobnitz in to his scheme.

White asked Lobnitz to design, based on the Lucayan, a pontoon with 4 spuds that could be lowered onto the sea bed to firmly anchor it and yet allow it to rise up and down on the tide. From this secure pier head, supplies could offload in deep water and find their way onto the land down a roadway of adjoining components. Lobnitz had the design completed by December 1942, but they were not a big yard and were busy with their own work, and had nowhere to build it. Enter stage left Alex. Findlay & Co., steel fabricators and bridge makers (such as the one at Russell Road in Edinburgh) of the Parkneuk Works in Motherwell. Findlay had been building landing craft at a temporary wartime shipyard at Old Kilpatrick and were the perfect company for the job. Findlays were up to the task of leading on construction of the Spuds, but they needed somewhere to build them. There was no capacity in any existing yard, so new facilities had to be found, and a new workforce. And that is where Leith comes in.

You see in 1942, Dutch engineers had completed the Western Breakwater at Leith Docks, adding 250 acres of dock space that formed the largest enclosed dock in Scotland and crucially, this had added 30 acres of reclaimed – and as yet undeveloped – land along the North Leith shore.

This land, adjacent to docks and rails, was absolutely perfect for the construction of the large Mulberry sections, launching them into the basin,and fitting them out and storing them until they were needed. But a yard was needed, so a call went out to Hartlepool. That call was answered by two engineers, Robert William Newson and Mr E. Parkinson, who were specialists in the construction of airfields. They came up to Leith with some foremen and set about building a shipyard from scratch. Within months it was complete, with 4 berths, offices, workshops, stores, cranes and 3 miles of internal railways. You can see the remains of the yard in the centre of this 1951 aerial photo. Newhaven is at the top, North Leith on the left. The (then) new Caledonia Mill foundations are being built at the bottom.

Findlays oversaw the operation, but various tasks were further subcontracted. The steel sections were provided by Leith steelyard Redpath Brown & Co., who also worked out the production drawings. The Lanarkshire Welding Co. employed much of the workforce. Welding was used as it used less steel than riveting and while a riveter took years of training, a welder could be trained in days. Men and women from unskilled trades were signed up, 200 in all, to be welders. The foremen were fabricators and shipyard men, many from the northeast of England. A large contingent of skilled labour was seconded in from Henry Robb & Co., the main shipyard in Leith, who were just next door. The Robbs workers could concentrate on the more demanding and specialised tasks, leaving fabrication to the new recruits.

Construction began in November 1943 as soon as the yard was ready. Prefabricated components for the Spuds arrived in Leith by rail – from the St. Andrews steel yard of Redpaths (just up the road) from Lanarkshire and from the Clyde – where they were welded together, launched sideways into the dock basin, and floated up to Newhaven for fitting out.

Fitting out was done on the Fishmarket Quay at Newhaven, including all the plumbing, carpentry and electrics, and fitting the diesel-electric winches that hauled the pier section up and down on its legs to match the tides.

By the end of January 1944 the first Spud was ready and was launched sideways into the basin in full view of the residents of the tenements of Lindsay Road and Annfield, who were oblivious to what they watching enter the water.

But they weren’t moving fast enough, not nearly fast enough. Operation Overlord was merely 4 months away (not that the workers knew it), so a herculean effort was commenced with round-the-clock working at breakneck speed. Four Spuds could be under construction on the stocks at once, with two more fitting out at Newhaven. The workforce rose to the task and before long they were up to speed and were launching a Spud with a loud splash of the waters of the Forth every 5 days.

The Spuds were built in record time at Leith but even that wasn’t enough, so four more were built at Conwy in Wales and five at the Cairnryan Military Port. At the latter location, civilian workers from Leith were sent across to Galloway to construct the first before the Army’s own engineers – trained in welding on break times – took over. Each unit was 200ft long, 60ft wide, 27ft high (not including its legs) and weighed 1,000 tons. Appropriately, they would be towed to England and then to the beaches by the large salvage tugs built next door by Henry Robbs in Leith during the war for the Admiralty.

When the Spuds were complete, Leith turned its attention to other Mulberry parts, floating concrete intermediate sections known as Hippos, which were sunk to the sea bed and supported road sections above them on their way to the beaches. They were 75ft long. displaced 220 tons and were produced at the rate of one every three and a half days. In just 195 days, thirteen Spuds and sixteen Hippos were built at Leith – all on schedule – and totalling over 16,000 tons, at a brand new yard by a workforce many of whom had never so much as picked up a hammer, never mind a welding torch, in their lives.

On the afternoon of June 6th 1944, 400 Mulberry components totalling 1.5 million tons, set off from the south coat of England for the invasion beaches. In the lead were Robb’s powerful salvage tugs like Bustler, Samsonia, Growler and Hesperia.

The Mulberries were put together from the 8th June onwards and were almost complete on the 19th when disaster struck and a 3 day storm, the worst to hit the Normandy coast in summer in 40 years, struck. Mulberry B – at Gold beach – was damaged and the American A was largely wrecked.

Mulberry B, the British one, was christened “Port Winston” and was repaired and expanded with components from the wrecked American Mulberry A. Designed to last 3 months, it ended up serving for 10. On it would be landed 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles and 4 million tons of supplies.

The workers at Leith had little idea what they had been building – although many could have hazarded a guess – but were soon rewarded with newsreel and newspaper coverage of the Mulberries once they were no longer a secret.

An interesting side part of the Mulberry story was that the model railway company Bassett-Lowke had been commissioned to build scale models of them to help train the military in how they went together and were used.

The models were sent on a touring exhibition of the country in 1945 to show them off to the public. They were show in in Scotland at J. D. Cuthbertson & Co. on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, but sadly never came to Leith to show the workers the vast scale of what they had achieved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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Educating Newhaven: the thread about the Victoria and other Schools

Since at least he late 16th century, education in the village of Newhaven has been conducted under the auspices of the Society of Free Fishermen. This was the local fraternal society, one which jealously guarded the privilege of maintaining their own poor and providing for the community. Their first known schoolroom in School Close (now called Lamb’s Court) off of the Main Street, the building and teacher paid for by the Society. Its pupils – all boys at the time – paid a fee, which could be waived at the discretion of the Boxmaster; the elected official in charge of the Free Fishermen’s poor box.

By the early 19th century the old schoolroom was dilapidated and so in 1817, under the spiritual guidance of the Rev Dr Ireland of North Leith Parish Church (where Newhaven then worshipped), the foundation stone for a new schoolhouse was laid at the west of Main Street: where the Free Fishermen’s meeting hall would later be built. The Society raised £140 towards the cost, the City of Edinburgh (the notional civic authority) contributed £10, £5 each came from the Duke of Buccleuch and Lord Melville, and twenty cartloads of “best rubble” were donated by the proprietors of Craigleith Quarry. The teacher who was employed was not up to his task however and the Rev Ireland took an ever increasing role in oversight to ensure the children’s literacy was sufficient for them to read their catechism and the bible, thus progress in their religious and moral education. In 1822 the minister instituted the Newhaven Education Society, which the following year took over complete control of the school. By 1825 girls and infants (aged three to seven) were being admitted, the latter being unusual at the time and of great value in a community where the menfolk were away at sea much of the time and the women and older girls daily worked far from the village.

In 1828 the charge of North Leith Parish was taken up by Rev Dr James Buchanan at which time the school had one hundred and sixty pupils. The new minister began to conduct mid-week services at the schoolhouse for the benefit of the elderly and infirm, which grew in popularity to such an extent to make the case of building a church in the village itself (its previous – Catholic – chapel had fallen out of use after the Reformation in 1560). In October 1836 a new Chapel of Ease was opened on the New Cut (the northern extension of Craighall Road) as a mission of North Leith under Buchanan. Newspaper reports note that the undercroft was to house a school, but whether this was a day school or a Sabbath school is not clear. In 1838 the church was raised to the status of a Quoad Sacra Parish (that is one in only an ecclesiastical sense, without the civic functions of a civil parish) under its own minister, the Rev James Fairbairn.

The Rev Buchanan left North Leith for the High Kirk of Edinburgh in 1840 but had likely instituted a committee before his departure to try and acquire a feu of land to build a new village school. These plans came at a turbulent time in the religious life of Newhaven (and Scotland in general): at The Disruption of 1843 the majority of the parishioners followed their minister and walked out of the Established Church of Scotland (the Kirk) and into the new Free Kirk. In this case the walk-out was figurative as well as literal – the Free Kirk congregation refused to give up the use of the parish church until they were removed by legal action in 1849 (allegedly the communion silverware mysteriously “disappeared” at this time). In the midst of this upheaval the site for a new school was secured at the east of the village on Newhaven Links from the City of Edinburgh. This spot was at that time home to a dilapidated boat shed called the Life House, which housed a lifeboat eschewed by the fishermen who preferred and trusted their own boats for mercy missions and never used it. The map below shows that this school’s boundary wall was on the high spring tide mark.

The foundation stone was laid in 1844 and it is likely that the Free Kirk was involved in the establishment as they maintained privileges of using the premises as a Sunday School and it served as a temporary home while their new church was erected on Pier Place. It was however not a denominational school: the Ordnance Survey Name Book of 1853 records it was superintended by ministers of both village kirks. The building was a simple affair; a single storey, single room, Gothic-style affair by the architect John Lessels. The Building Stones of Edinburgh lists its stone as coming from Grange Quarry in Burntisland, which corresponds with anecdotal evidence that the steeple of the Free Kirk had its stones brought across the Forth from Fife in the fishermen’s boats. The Caledonian Mercury in February 1846 refers to it as the New Schoolhouse however it would soon acquire the name of Victoria School in honour of the monarch, confirmed in the aforementioned Name Book:

A neat and substantially built schoolhouse in the Village of Newhaven, it was erected in 1835 and is under the superintendence of the Ministers of Established & Free Churches, the attendance is about 80 scholars and the schoolmaster’s salary consisting of school fees and other amendments amounts to about £50

The date of erection given above – 1835 – cannot be correct, however it may suggest that the school had its origins in an earlier establishment before it removed to the 1844 building; perhaps it is that mentioned as being held in the undercroft of the parish church? Naming the new school after the reigning monarch would not have been an unusual thing to do, however Newhaven had a special place in its heart for her on account of a diary entry she made on the occasion of her visit to Edinburgh:

…the fishwomen are the most striking-looking people, and are generally young and pretty women – very clean and very Dutch-looking, with their white caps and bright-coloured petticoats.

The Victoria School operated alongside the old Free Fishermen’s school for a time, however by the dawn of the 1860s the latter was no longer up to its task and so in June 1861 factional differences were put to one side and both village ministers jointly presided over the laying of the foundation stone of another new school. £1,100 had been raised towards this locally and it was to be located on ground behind the parish church on the New Cut, although was to be non-denominational. Unfortunately work was brought to a stop by the untimely death of a key promoter – Dr Robertson, Professor of Church History at the University of Edinburgh – that caused that the organising committee to overlook applying for the necessary government grant, leaving half the required funds wanting. The building was therefore only partially completed when it opened in 1862 for its first 200 scholars and a great fund-raising effort took place across Edinburgh to help finish it, which took place in 1863 with the aid of funds from the trust of the late Dr Andrew Bell (see also Dr Bell’s School). For this latter reason it became known as the Madras School as it adopted Bell’s Madras System of monitorial education, i.e. where a single, large, multi-age class was presided over by a teacher whose instruction was relayed to the pupils by monitors; older children more advanced in their studies. The 1861 census recorded 605 children of school age in Newhaven at that time, 300 of which could be taught in this new school.

Alterations were also made to Victoria by Lessels in 1861 and its school role increased to a point where infant classes had to be moved back to the old Free Fishermen’s School; probably what is referred to as St John’s Infant School in some newspaper mentions. Newhaven continued to provide for the education of its own children in this manner for the next decade or so, until everything changed with the passing of the Education (Scotland) Act 1872, which both made education compulsory for children between the ages of five and thirteen and also formed School Boards (largely along parish or burgh boundaries) to organise it. Newhaven was placed within the new Leith School Board, who surveyed the state of affairs in the village and found there were 291 children in the Madras School, 110 at Victoria, 141 in the infant school and 53 in the Free Kirk’s school; a total of 595. There were also children attending a school to the west on Lower Granton Road but this had been allocated to Cramond School Board who could not come to terms with the Leith Board and so they were unceremoniously barred from the former. At this time the Board found 22% of all children of school age in their district were not in education so their immediate priority was to find capacity for accommodating this absent fifth of scholars.

Looking at Newhaven’s schools, the Board found it could not acquire the Madras School as it was built on land vested in perpetuity to the Church, so they left it to continue to be run under its existing management and instead took over the Victoria School in 1874. At this time they extended the building and to this end 705 square metres of Newhaven Links were acquired from the Leith Dock Commissioners on very favourable terms. The Board’s architect George Craig added a new wing to the rear bringing capacity up to about 300, with associated entrance vestibules and toilets to bring the place up to the required standards of the Scotch Education Department (grants towards funding were dependent on the Boards meeting the standards for buildings set out in the Department’s Scotch Code). At this time the playground was also expanded and divided into separate spaces for boys and girls.

By 1879 the roll at Victoria was 294 with an average attendance of 257: at 12% the absence rate was the lowest across the Leith district, which averaged 18%. With the school reaching capacity in 1884 the Board spent £2,854 to expand it again, increasing accommodation to 503 pupils. No additional land was available for the expansion so architect George Craig had to build up, adding an additional storey. This required three external stair towers to access the upper floor, segregated for boys and girls, as the original building lacked an internal stairwell. Infants and juniors would remain on the ground floor, the senior children going upstairs. Particular attention was paid to ventilation – an obsession to Victorian school designers – with inlet vents added at floor levels, patent fanlights at the tops of all classroom windows and a large fleche-style ventilation cupola on the roof crossing, in which a gas burner created a through draught to extract classroom air through vents in all the classroom ceilings. At this time a small belfry was added above the west stair tower for the school bell and a hot water heating system was installed, the boiler located in a basement at the rear.

To raise the height of the building the original decorative buttresses on the south elevation had to be expanded to take on a practical function and support the facade of the upper storey. Craig kept the additions in the Collegiate Gothic style that was then in vogue for school architecture and added carved date panels which read: 1843 VICTORIA 1885, LEITH SCHOOL BOARD. At the formal re-opening on Monday March 2nd 1885 the Chairman of the School Board, Dr Mitchell, delivered a rather patronising address to parents along the lines of the new school being bigger than the village deserved and they should therefore “second the efforts of the Board by seeing that their children attended.“

In his assertion the Chairman would very soon be proven wrong: within a year the managing committee of the Madras School wrote to the Board informing them of their intention to close down for want of funds. The Government inspector had condemned their building as below standard and with the founding endowment almost exhausted there was no money to bring it up to code, which would result in the loss of state grants. If the Madras school were to close its two to three hundred students would suddenly become the Board’s responsibility to house and educate, but they were reluctant to simply take over its running as they too would have to expend money bringing it up to standard while trying to find a long term solution. Ultimately, the Board dithered during which time the roll at Victoria grew: to 623 in 1887. This was well in excess of the nominal capacity and was kept manageable only by a high absence rate of 35%, meaning average attendance was only 406. This was result of a severe outbreak of measles in the village, one which would take over two years to bring under control.

Frustrated at the Board’s lack of action – and possibly pushed by the parish church wanting to get their hands on the building – Madras’ management brought matters to a head and announced that with only £100 remaining the school would shut at the end of summer term 1888. A consequence of this would be £50 of the remaining funds would have to be returned to Dr Bell’s Trust as it was originally granted as a loan for which time the school remained opened. The Board now had no option but to temporarily take on the lease of the school and make what improvements they could, representations were made to the Education Department who agreed to maintain the grant temporarily on condition that a plan was submitted in writing. Things didn’t start well for the Board’s when their appointed headmistress, Miss Menzies, turned the job down! The school was therefore temporarily supervised by the headmaster at Bonnington Road Public School for the start of the 1888-89 term, at which time its roll stood at 248 (but with the high absence rate, average attendance was only 151).

Leith School Board had bought itself time to plan for the future and its preferred solution was a grand new public school on Craighall Road with a capacity of 1,600 pupils, which would be more than sufficient to absorb the excess from Newhaven and other local schools But before these plans could be advanced an even greater crisis landed in the Board’s in-tray: the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1889, which was preparing for state-provided education being made free (under the 1872 most children were still charged a nominal fee, unless in receipt of poor relief) and in doing so altered the arrangements for state-aid for endowed schools (those supported financially by a founding bequest).

Such schools included those of Dr Bell’s Trust, of which there were two examples in Leith; on Great Junction Street and South Fort Street. At a stroke the changes meant these schools ceased to be financially viable and the trustees sought to wind them up – making them too the problem of the School Board. The Board closed South Fort Street, its pupils transferred to a very crowded North Fort Street Public School. Reluctantly Great Junction Street was adopted by the Board, which they would enlarged into Junction Place Public School, universally remembered locally as just Dr Bell’s. This issue, while while not directly impacting Newhaven, distracted the attention and stretched the finances of the Board for a good while.

The foundation stone of the new Craighall Road Public School was as a result not laid until July 1891 and it would not open for business until 4th September 1893, by which time there was a capacity crisis in Newhaven such that 100 children were not able to get a school place. Despite the Board’s hopes, the new school provided no answer as many parents shunned it: it was felt to be too far from the village and more importantly it charged fees (Boards were allowed to charge fees in a small number of their schools after 1890). With North Fort Street full and the Madras School closing imminently the state of affairs in Newhaven was only going to get more acute. Once more, the Board felt it had no option but to once again ask George Craig to draw up plans to expand the Victoria School.

By good fortune in 1892 the Leith Dock Commissioners had obtained parliamentary authority to make improvements to Newhaven harbour that included land reclamation around the Links. The Board therefore negotiated with the Commissioners for a feu on some of this reclaimed land around the school, allowing the size to be almost tripled to 2,670 square metres. In 1896 work commenced at a cost of £5,064 to add 288 more places to the school, bringing the roll up to 800. On the enlarged plot a new three-storey extension was added to the east, with the rear of the 1885 extension being increased in height to three storeys too. Further extensions were added to the rear and the enlarged playgrounds had playsheds to give children some shelter from inclement weather; the despite the land reclamation the school still backed onto the Forth coast.

While the Board’s preferred solution for Newhaven would have been a new build school to the west of the Village, for economic reasons this was never possible and Craig’s repeated expansions to the school over three decades made the best economic use of a small site. Because the same architect underook all this work it was possible to maintain a coherence to the building which can make it difficult for modern eyes to unpick the multiple layers and additions: one might easily assume that the various tiers, cupolas, stair towers and projections were done intentionally, rather than just as a practicality.

The school is very efficiently conducted, and discipline and general tone are excellent. In the junior section the results of examination were on the whole highly creditable, the only notable weakness being in the written work of the lower division of the third class. In the senior section, both oral and written work of the fourth and fifth classes were very good, with the exception of the the fifth class, which was not more than very fair. The class work of the sixth class leaves room for improvement: reading and recitation were too hurried, and history and nature knowledge were not strong.

Leith School Board ceased to exist as a result of the Education (Scotland) Act 1918, which abolished these bodies and merged them into a smaller number of Education Authorities; for Leith this was the Edinburgh Education Authority. The rest of the municipal functions of Leith, and by extension Newhaven, soon followed and were amalgamated (seized against their will, generations of Leithers will tell you) into Edinburgh in 1920. In 1925 the girls of the school won the accolade of “Overhead Ball Champions of Leith“. This was a relatively new game that was very popular with girls. The basic premise was akin to a form of Rounders played with a football and with the participants arranged into a “batting” and a “fielding” team. The batting team stood in a line and its leader would hit the ball by hand in a random direction at which point the leader began to run rings around their line. It was the job of the fielders to get the ball, arrange themselves in a line behind whomever had the ball and quickly pass it back, hand over head, to the back of the line at which point the umpire blew their whistle. The fielders scored a run for each circuit of the line that their leader had run.

The Education Authorities were a transitional body, and as a result of further local government re-organisation in 1927 it became the Education Committee of the Corporation of the City of Edinburgh. George Craig’s additions served Victoria School well, until 1930 by which point updated accommodation was needed – the convenor of the Corporation’s Property and Works Committee labelled it as the “worst” in Edinburgh “in regard to size, light and intercommunication“: it was “very difficult to get into… and more difficult to get out“. And so yet again an expansion was planned on land reclaimed from the sea, which would take the plot size up to 2,650 square metres; some seven and a half times that of the original 1844 school. In 1932 a new infant department for 200 children was opened at a cost of £14,471 in the east of the enlarged playground. This new structure was a break with the Victorian “Barracks” of the School Board era and instead what emerged was a low, wide, single-storey L-plan structure that sought to make the best use of natural light and ventilation.

This addition coincided with a tipping point for the village’s fortunes: after a very good 1924 season the inshore fisheries were set on an irreversible path of decline due to overfishing. The larger, more modern and mechanised trawlers that were needed to fish ever further out to sea passed Newhaven by and headed instead for Granton which displaced it as the principal fishing port in the locality. The village’s prosperity had always followed that of the herring and the sprats, and the oysters before them, and after four centuries began to dwindle. In July 1935 Dr Sym of the Corporation’s Education Committee provoked outrage when he proposed its school needed special classes for “backward children” on account of seventy percent of its pupils being “normally slow“. His colleague Councillor Allan said this was due to “inter-marrying” by which he implied inbreeding. Newhaven folk had largely always wed other Newhaven folk but this was a practicality; Marriages were as much a business union as one of love and the inherited skills of fisherman and fishwife were mutually complementing but only acquired by growing up into them. Public protest meetings were convened in the Free Fishermen’s Hall, on the site of the 1817 school, to demand an apology to which representatives of the Committee were invited. Councillor Allan attended and apologised, Dr Sym declined to do so.

The school remained open during World War II, although some children were evacuated in 1939 to Fort William. In 1944 its centenary was marked with the unveiling of a wooden copy of the “Armada Stone” presented by Leith shipyard proprietor Henry Robb, unveiled by Lord Provost William Y. Darling. The original stone can be found in the wall of the flats nearby at Auchinleck Court and a metal copy is on the school’s south gable as a war memorial.

A pageant was held in the Usher Hall retelling the history of the village since its foundation by King James IV in the 16th century; the children dressed in period costumes and many of the girls wore their Fishwives’ Braws, the boys their knitted fishing Ganseys. The children raised £2,000 through their own efforts for Leith Hospital, sufficient to endow three cots in the Children’s Ward.

As Newhaven’s fortunes continued to decline post war, the City Corporation hastened its demise by designating the village a Comprehensive Development Area (CDA) in 1959, giving itself powers of compulsory purchase over most of the village in order to demolish most of the old houses (which it had deemed “unfit” and constituting slums) and rebuild them. Like many such schemes done with good intention from a far off desk in City Chambers, ultimately it lost sight of the fact that a community is much more than just its buildings and by dispersing its people to new housing elsewhere it irreversibly altered the character of the place. Families with children were given priority for re-housing and this meant those left behind were frequently the elderly: as a result the population of school age children in the village went into a steep, and what seemed like terminal, decline.

The work of the CDA in “improving” Newhaven continued into the 1970s with a new bypass road built to the north of the village in an attempt to reduce traffic along Main Street. Originally this was called Newhaven Place but is now an extension of Lindsay Road and required the school boundary to be moved a few metres south. To compensate for this loss, a portion of land to the east of the school was incorporated into the playground. Unfortunately the heavy traffic – much of it lorries from Granton or Leith Docks – now passed close behind the school buildings and damaged the foundations of the 1930 Infant Department to such an extent that it had to be demolished in the late 1970s or early 1980s. By this time the school’s declining roll no longer required the space, but it did mean its most modern facilities were lost.

An existential threat to the school came in February 1983 when closure was mooted by the Conservative-led administration of Lothian Regional Council, its pupils would have been split between Wardie and Trinity primary schools. This proposal was voted down by the joint Labour and Liberal Alliance opposition but did nothing to reverse the decline in the school’s fortunes, which declined with the spirit of the village of Newhaven. As the old ways began to fade into memory, an awareness of heritage began to flourish locally and concerted efforts were made to reverse the decline. The traditional galas were revived in 1985, with pupils playing an important part performing songs and dances, the girls in their traditional Braws costumes. A small museum was put together in the school by pupils in 1986 to showcase various exhibits of local historic interest to the public which had accumulated in the building over the years.

The school celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1994, but its future was still anything but assured. By 1997 the roll was just 131 children and ten years later it dipped below 100. This might have been the end, but salvation came from the sea – or rather by the reclamation of it. Mass house building had been taking place behind the sea wall of Western Harbour since 2003 and as families moved in and children became of school age after 2007 the roll at Victoria began to increase for the first time in decades. It has never looked back; back above 100 in 2008, in 2012 it passed 150 meaning a return to “full stream” – having seven individual classes, one for each age group. The increase was helped by the closure of nearby Fort Primary School in 2010 – a rather short-sighted cost-cutting move, which very quickly precipitated accommodation crises at both Victoria and Trinity Primary Schools!

As a short term solution four new classrooms were added in a modern building in the playground in 2014 and in 2016 the Council decided to build an entirely new and much larger replacement school. As had always been the case, they looked to reclaimed land for space. The speculative residential development of Western Harbour had largely stalled after the 2008 financial crisis and there was plenty land available and so the new building, on Windrush Drive, is sited on a very generous 14,750 square metre plot – five and a half times that of the old school and over forty times that of the 1844 school! It has a capacity to grow to “three streams” (three primary classes in each of the seven age groups) and is forecast to reach its capacity of 500 within a decade. When the old building closed in 2022 it was by far and away the oldest still in educational use by the city (the next oldest were all 1875 School Board builds).

Often the future of the old school buildings in Edinburgh is uncertain and they are either left to the vandals or turned over to housing developers. However the old Victoria had a very different prospect when it closed and was taken over by Community Asset Transfer by the Heart of Newhaven Community CIC, funded by the Scottish Land Fund. This preserved the Victorian building and converted it into a mixed-use community centre and base for artists and small businesses. Heritage is one of the Heart of Newhaven’s key founding aims and to this end it maintains the old school museum and houses the History of Education Centre and its Victorian School Room.

If you are interested in seeing inside this very interesting old building and its numerous heritage exhibits, there are tours each week that I can highly recommend.

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

This thread was originally written and published in February 2023.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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Explore Threadinburgh by map:

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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.

i'm helping organize this show in #newhaven with fellow fedizen @proto ! and some other people who i don't think are on here, but all in the "experimental electronic" umbrella. oh, and i'm doing visuals. should be a fun time!

https://palomakop.tv/events/2026-02-21_imaginary-prisons-ruby/