The real story of the “Penny Tenement”: the thread about slum landlordism in 1950s Edinburgh

The story of the “Penny Tenement” is a (relatively) well known one; a slum tenement whose owner couldn’t give it a way to the City Corporation . Its very dramatic and well publicised collapse on November 21st 1959 seared it into the public consciousness, something that (just about) lingers on locally to this day. But its very nature also held the public gaze in a certain direction and meant much of the story got simply overlooked, its full details obscured. This thread is a valiant attempt at a fuller re-telling of the tale of the Penny Tenement; or Landlordism in 1950s Edinburgh.

The short, accepted version of the Penny Tenement story was that it was a condemned slum in the St. Leonard’s district of the city, so called because its owner tried (and failed) to sell it to an MP for that amount after the Edinburgh Corporation refused to take it off his hands. Everyone knew it might fall down – and then it did. Fortunately no one was badly hurt. And none of that is untrue, but there’s more to it than that. Much more. And while it happened over 65 years ago, it’s still remarkably pertinent to the city’s housing situation and the state of some of its old tenement housing stalk. So gather round, let’s start at the beginning shall we and see how the long version of the story unfolds?

Number Six Beaumont Place, to give it its proper name, was part of a row of basic tenements built in 1812 and 1813, adjoining an existing 1780s tenement at 200-202 Pleasance. It is the four storey plus attic tenement to its right in the 1927 photo below. Post-WW1 slum clearances saw some demolition and rebuilding in the worst of the Southside. The demolition order for 200-202 Pleasance came in 1931, and it was for that reason it was part of a photo recording project at that time.

The removal of this end block on Beaumont Place required those massive and dramatic wooden buttresses to shore up the party wall with no. 6 (no. 4 was the ground floor shop beneath the flats). So to be clear, in 1959 when the photograph was taken, these were old buttresses, which had been there 25 or more years. Ironically, this part of the building did not collapse! But they make a great photo and draw stark attention to the neglected condition in partially-cleared districts where progress had stalled and which had been left like this for decades.

Number Six (and adjoining numbers) was bought by a local man, Donald Rosie, in 1952 for all of £50 (c. £1,190 in 2024). He owned similarly decrepit tenements in Leith on Bangor Road and had some in Union Place at Greenside too. One of the first facts that has been missing in this story is that Donald Rose bought Beaumont Place knowing full well his purchase was condemned “as unfit for human habitation” – he was a slum tenement landlord and speculator. In 1935, the gable end of a tenement in adjacent Carnegie Street had dramatically collapsed, but nobody was hurt and it was simply demolished. But many neighbouring houses, including those on Beaumont Place, were condemned at this time. But that didn’t really mean much; they could still be bought and sold and let out to tenants. There was still money to be made out of this sort of housing; rents to collect and repairs to ignore if you didn’t let the ethics of it get in your way. The photo below of the Carnegie Street collapse is sometimes mistaken for that of the Penny Tenement, but it was 100 metres to the north of it and 14 years earlier.

The valuation rolls for number 6 show that in 1940 it had 23 flats and brought in £222 a year in rents. By 1953 that was £266 (c. £5,700 in 2024( or just a little over five times what Rosie paid for it. In December 1952, the same year he bought it, Donald Rosie publicly tried to sell the tenement to the Labour MP for Camlachie, William Reid, for a penny. He told the Courier & Advertiser that the condition of the sale was “[William Reid] will maintain the property, as I am expected to do, on the clear rents only, execute all repairs, meet all owner’s obligations and prove to the public that this can be done on the rents“. This was a stunt; Rosie said he wanted to show MPs how hard it was for landlords to repair and maintain tenements on the rental income alone, with fairly strict rent controls still in place after World War 2. Reid naturally refused. The fact here is that Rosie wouldn’t put any of his own money into the property. Indeed, he is on the record multiple times in both print and in Court saying that the problem was the rents, after taxes and costs, wouldn’t not pay for any repairs. It must not have occurred to him to improve his building at his own expense. The position of the landlords was that they should be allowed to increase rents first, to allow for repairs and maintenance to be improved (rather than the other way around, as was the Government position).

Because of this stunt, the Penny Tenement name stuck in the press. Rosie now tried to simply give it away to the Edinburgh Corporation (a Progressive, i.e. Tory administration). But they too declined; taking the liability of decrepit properties on for themselves and repairing them or rehousing residents to allow demolition wasn’t part of their rather gradual slum clearance plans. Perhaps Rosie had overplayed his hand somewhat now with the city authorities as as in June 1953 the City Prosecutor took him to the Burgh Court for failing to comply with a repair order from the City Engineer that had been issued in February that year. Rosie didn’t trouble himself to appear before the Magistrate. He sent his lawyer, who said it was estimated the repairs would cost £600 to complete. The City Engineer told the court “Nothing has been done so far as the roof work is concerned and the position has greatly deteriorated… Within the last day or two the ceiling in one of the houses fallen down and children have been injured to a minor extent“. Rosie’s lawyer said his client would pay “every penny of free rent” into the repairs and asked for a 3 month extension, which was granted.

Three months passed. Nothing happened. The Court summoned Rosie again for failing to comply. Again, he sent his lawyer along. The City Prosecutor said he “could not allow more latitude” and so a trial was set for October 2nd 1953. At the trial, Rosie tried but failed in a bid to call the Town Clerk, City Engineer and Housing Executive Officer as witnesses. The Magistrate Bailie Mrs K. Cameron found him guilty of “failing to comply with a Corporation order” but gave him another 3 months to make the repairs. those three more months passed. Nothing happened and Six Beaumont Place remained neither wind nor water right.

In January 1954, the Burgh Court once again summoned Donald Rosie to appear for non-compliance. He sent them a letter instead and so in his absence a trial date was set for January 29th. At this he claimed to have made £74 of repairs but the City Engineer had made an inspection and told the Court no work had been done since 1953, and that residents had made two further complaints about the building to him while he was there. Rosie was found guilty (again) of failing to comply with the repair order. The Magistrate handed down a fine this time – of £2! Yes, that’s not a typo. Two Pounds. The landlord got a £2 fine for failure to carry out £600 of essential repairs. You can see now how landlords could and did act as they did with relative impunity.

Two months later, on 19th April 1954, Donald Rosie was in front of the Magistrates yet again. This time he was charged with failing to make repairs at a tenement he owned at 76 Bangor Road in Leith. At this time we now come upon another overlooked fact. One month after this, in May 1954, Rosie formed The Bangor Tenement Co. Ltd. with a capital of only £100, himself and mother as directors and himself as company secretary. Into this company the ownership of his tenements were placed. By doing this, he was cutting off his personal financial liability towards them. This was a smart financial move as he could probably see the Corporation and Courts were now intent on pursuing and making an example of him.

One assumes Rosie finally made enough repairs to keep the City Engineer off his back for a while, but not for long. Two years later, in April 1956, the Dean of Guild Court ordered repair work to be carried out by the Bangor Tenement Co. after a petition by the Procurator Fiscal. But yet again, no repairs were made. At this time, Rosie claimed to have asked the Corporation to take 6 Beaumont Place off his hands or demolish it again. But if he did try this, again they didn’t want it.

It was around this time that Rosie now adopted a new tactic. He started “selling” flats at Beaumont Place to their residents. This was a clever scheme, it diluted Rosie’s ownership and liability and made the Corporation’s legal paperwork a lot more complicated. Instead of dealing with 1 owner, the Corporation were now dealing with a multitude of owners; it was top-level obfuscation. Except these “owners” weren’t really owners, even if they were entered as such on the Valuation Rolls – Donald Rosie kept the deeds. He admitted so much himself later in Court. Local councillor Pat Rogan, who we will meet further on in our story, described these “sales” as being conveyed on “scraps of paper” with transactions recorded in plain notebooks. This sort of scheme again was fairly common amongst slum landlords. The tenants stumped up a sizeable amount of their cash (from £14 to £100 was noted at Beaumont Place) and in return they got to lived in a slum rent free. But they owned it only at the discretion of their landlord and had no real security. Many tenants knew what was going on and entered willingly into such transactions; there was an attraction to the prospect of rent free living and there was hope that progress would come along soon and sort things out for them. Others also hoped – naively or cynically – that voluntarily living in a condemned slum would get them a council house sooner.

Over the following 2 years, Rosie managed to “sell” at least 14 of his condemned flats on Beaumont Place to their residents. But the City Engineer eventually lost patience with the repairs and had some of the basic essentials carried out themselves. In January 1958 they sued Rosie for £12 14/- to recoup the cost of these. No surprise, Rosie didn’t pay this and went before the Sheriff Court (the next step up the Scottish legal system from the Burgh Court). He contended that as the City had declined his free offer of Number Six and as they had refused him a “closure order” on it, they were obliged to acquire it off of him instead. He lost this case and the City got its £12 14/-.

Two more years passed, in which time Rosie managed to “sell” at least 14 of his condemned flats on Beaumont Place. The City Engineer lost patience with the repairs though and had some basics carried out themselves. In January 1958 they sued Rosie for £12 14/- for these. But the wheels of progress in the St. Leonard’s district by now were now (slowly) beginning to turn, interminably. In February the following year, 1959, the city issued Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs) for the worst of the housing around Beaumont Place. This extended to 391 flats with 538 different owners, superiors, occupiers and holders of heritable security (in Scottish property law, mortgage lenders) to deal with. The Landlords had helped conspire to make the ownership of property in the Slums incredibly complex and it was now slowing everything down. All this legal paperwork was just for a few streets, with scores more like them in the neighbourhood. As a result, it took a full 9 months to sort the mountain of paperwork out for the “Carnegie Street areas A & B“. It was not until the 19th November 1959 that the CPO finally crossed the desk of the Secretary of State for Scotland, Rt. Hon. John Scott Maclay MP, and was approved.

The Penny Tenement would now be purchased by the Corporation for a lot more than a penny and demolished, and it would no longer be Donald Rosie’s problem. But there was a catch; CPOs did not become operative until 30 days after signing. So he had better hope nothing happened in the next 30 days. The tenement had stood for 145 years, surely it could manage one more month?

It started to rain.

It rained a lot in fact. It was mid-November in Scotland after all. It rained all the next day, November 20th. In the evening, local Councillor Pat Rogan was called to Number Six by concerned residents. He was well known and popular locally; “one of us“, a son of the district. Although he was a Labour councillor and the Progressives held power, Rogan was not content to just sit in opposition made and made slum clearance his personal priority. He was energetic about his duties and did what he could to help people in his ward. He was on good terms and first names with Corporation officials and workers and was able to swing many favours to not circumvent the usual channels and get things sorted for people. “Pat” was also a builder by trade and by his account had become something of an “out of hours” housing service for his constituents. On occasions where he couldn’t rouse a member of the City Engineer’s department to deal with an issue, he had been known to go to his own yard to get materials to make emergency repairs. So there wasn’t anything that unusual in the residents of Six Beaumont Place summoning a city councillor to their tenement one evening to look over something with his builder’s eye and to see if he could get anything done.

At Number Six, Rogan took one look at the way the back wall of the tenement had stated to bulge and did not like what he saw. As it was late, he advised its occupants to sleep as close to the centre of the building as they could that night and that he would arrange for the City Engineer to make a visit first thing the following morning. Rogan went home to bed, but at 4AM the following morning received a call from the Parish priest to say the back wall of the Penny Tenement had just collapsed…

It was around 3AM when John Kernachan, 27, was awoken by his wife’s screams to find himself watching the back wall of his flat disappearing before his eyes. As he got out of bed, the floor beneath him gave way too. He managed to grab on to something, anything, and pull himself up and out to safety with his wife and young child. The Brocks family, on the third floor, were not quite so lucky. Five year old Catherine fell through the floor and landed in the flat of William Cranston below her. He was able to bundle her up and out the door before his floor too disappeared down with the rest. Catherine’s little sister, two year old Margaret, fell clean out of the flat and onto the pile of rubble forming in the back green below. Her mother, Betty, jumped after her and pulled her to safety before more came crashing down. The pair were bashed, cut and bruised, but miraculously otherwise unhurt and the only casualties.

When the dawn broke it was clear quite what a catastrophe had been narrowly averted. Where once there had been a scrap of back green there was now a pile of four storeys of back wall, floors, windows, furniture and assorted possessions. There were 20 occupied flats (out of 23) at Six Beaumont Place and yet nobody had been seriously injured.

All the adjacent flats on that side of Beaumont Place were evacuated on the spot; residents were advised to go to friends or relations, or offered emergency accommodation in the City homeless centre in the former City Poorhouse at Greenbank. A police guard was put on the street to keep spectators at a safe distance. The City Engineer’s men moved in to clear the worst of the rubble and shore up the back wall with scaffolding. The Housing Committee and Lord Provost came on an inspection, with the City Engineer pointing out the huge crack in the end gable of Dalrymple Place facing the disaster site.

That crack was inspected closer. On November 27th, 22 families at the end of Dalrymple Place were given 2 hours to pack up and leave. Within days, 100 flats had been condemned in the surroundings streets and 250 people made homeless.

This was a huge headache for the city, but what is remarkable is that the day after the collapse of the Penny Tenement, 18 of the 20 families who had lived there found themselves in new council houses in Niddrie & Craigmillar, with the other 2 declining and making their own arrangements. A huge operation had swung into effect for the other displaced people. Vacant council properties were turned around in a fraction of the usual time.; the Housing Department’s key cabinet at City Chambers was literally emptied. “Let us have every key you can lay your hands on“, the City Architect’s department was told and new properties approaching completion were rushed to finish and made ready for occupation. The gas, water and electric board employees worked round the clock to make the necessary services connections. The Civil Defence sent a mobile HQ to St. Leonards to coordinate operations, communicating with the City Chambers by shortwave radio. The Women’s Voluntary Service sent their Meals on Wheels mobile too, to provide workers and residents tea, soup and sandwiches. The Cleansing Department provided lorries to move people’s possessions to their new houses. By 30th November, all 250 residents in the district who had been evacuated in the preceding 9 days were now in council homes where they wanted them, with 80% of them being kept in their preference of the south of the city.

On December 1st, the Housing Committee went on another walkabout tour of the slums. They got short shrift: “Why don’t you drop a bomb on this place?” yelled one resident in Leith’s Kirkgate at them. “Come inside instead of walking about” another demanded from her window in Arthur Street in Dumbiedykes. At the “Grand Committee on Scottish Affairs” at Westminster, Edinburgh Central Labour MP Tom Oswald asked if the Secretary of State would intervene to help speed up Compulsory Purchase Orders and provide compensation to the evicted. He declined on both points. At the City Chambers, Labour passed a motion to try speed up city centre rehousing and slum clearance. The Progressive majority on the Housing Committee defeated it 8-4. Pat Rogan condemned the “procrastination” and stated certain houses were “crumbling and insanitary prisons“. He later gave an extreme example; when they were evacuating the tenements around Beaumont place, in neighbouring Dalrymple Place they found a windowless basement flat with no bed, only a mattresses on a stone floor. Living here they found two young women caring for two babies. Both were working as prostitutes, in shifts, with one out on the streets while the other was in the cellar with the babies.

On the 4th of December, the Edinburgh Corporation served demolition orders at 4 to 8 Beaumont Place. The principal owner was Donald Rosie’s “Bangor Tenement Co.”, but thanks to his “sales”, there were now were 14 other quasi-owners in total. To his credit, Rosie fessed up at the Dean of Guild Court that the others weren’t actually legal owners (despite them already telling the Clerk of Court that they thought they were!). He alone held the title deeds and he alone should be appearing. The owners were given 2 weeks to start demolition, and 6 weeks to complete it – at their own expense. The Compulsory Purchase Order would not come into action for 17 more days, until then they were still liable.

It was as if the slums themselves were now trying to keep up the momentum that had finally driven the city authorities to action. On December 16th the same day (and in a scene oddly reminiscent of recent happenings in Edinburgh) 21 families were given hours to evacuate from 2 tenements in Greenside Row when cracks appeared in the building and the road was closed off by the police…

They needn’t have bothered; the tide had now thoroughly turned in Edinburgh against the slums and their landlords. The Scotsman’s editorial drew parallels to the “Fall of Heave Awa Land” back in 1861 and wondered aloud as to how this was happening in the “age of Dounreay and Chapelcross“. The wheels of civic machinery had been set in motion. On December 19th 1959, the Dean of Guild Court petitioned the owners at Beaumont and Dalrymple Place and also Bangor Road in Leith (where Rosie was an owner) for repairs that had not been made. Ten days later, more demolition orders were served for demolition around Beaumont Place where owners were refusing to make properties. A week later, January 6th 1960, Donald Rosie – true to form – appealed to the Court of Session against demolition orders served on him.

He wanted a delay of one month; this would allow the Compulsory Purchase Order on his properties to come into force before anything had to be demolished – he feared that once the bricks and mortar of his “assets” were gone, he’d have no bargaining position regards the price. Dragging his heels in the courts was the only thing he could do here. The Court have him 2 weeks instead. This seems to have sped things up and the CPO went through; the city bought up the slums of Dalrymple Place, Carnegie Street and Beaumont Place and demolished the lot. The owners didn’t get what they wanted, but they got shot of their demolition liability. A year later, the Evening News printed a stark photo (below) of these streets; Beaumont Place is in the foreground, the roadway of Dalrymple Place runs into the distance on the left. In the distance beyond the fence is Carnegie Street and further beyond that on the left is the Deaconess Hospital. On the right we can see numbert 1-23 St. Leonard’s Hill.

The end was nigh for most of St. Leonards and Dumbiedykes. In 1962, tenants were warned not to clean their windows in case the frames fell out of the walls onto the street. One woman narrowly avoided being killed by falling masonry as she stepped into a corner shop. Housewives reported hoarding boxes in case they had to flit in an emergency. Roofs leaked, walls gaped. “HERIOT MOUNT TENANTS ARE AFRAID HOMES MAY COLLAPSE” said the headline. But by now, Pat Rogan found himself chair of the Housing Committee due to local political deadlock and it being a difficult job nobody really wanted. He set about this immense responsibility with his usual single-minded determination and practical approach. His policy was simple (simplistic, even); demolish thoroughly, build quickly. Construction land for council housing was freed up quickly by prioritising the replacement of the low-density, postwar prefabricated bungalows and a crash-building programme of tower block construction was initiated. By 1964, 1,500 houses had been demolished in the St. Leonards and Dumbiedykes area after it was designated a Comprehensive Development Area.

On the site of the Penny Tenement, an award-winning new development by Ross-Smith & Jamieson of 63 houses for 200 people was erected from 1964-67 called Carnegie Court (after Carnegie Street). The rest of Beaumont Place wasn’t redeveloped until 1989. At this point, the District Council decided that the street name had been spelled wrong since 1815 and should actually be Bowmont after an ancient landowner here, Robert Ker, Duke of Roxburghe and Marquesses of Bowmont. And so they changed it.

You may well have got to the end of this thread and yet are still thinking “just where on earth actually was the Penny Tenement?” Well, this composite overlay image might just help answer that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You certainly get a lot of view for your money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

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City of Brewing: the thread about 150 years of brewery opening and closure in Edinburgh

In December 2019, the Edinburgh Evening News ran an article about a new brewery planned for the city which it claimed “will be the first major brewery to be built in Edinburgh for 150 years.” (and also the biggest).

By my count (luckily, I keep a handy spreadsheet of such things for such counting eventualities) there were actually fifteen major breweries built in Edinburgh in the last 150 years and a good number of these were larger. So let’s take a closer look at them.

Starting us off at number 15 is the Caledonian Brewery – universally known as The Caley – it was opened by Lorimer & Clark 150 years ago (at the time of first writing) in 1869 in Shandon. This was one of the first Edinburgh brewers taken over by an English firm, Vaux, in 1947, who closed it in 1985. It reopened soon after in a management buyout and was one of the pioneers of the real ale revival locally. It was still going strong currently under threat of closure closed by then owners Heineken in 2022 and will likely be sold off for housing.

At number 14, G. & J. Machlachlan’s Castle Brewery opened in the Grassmarket in 1875, some 144 years ago. It relocated out to Craigmillar in 1901 as the New Castle Brewery (not to be confused with the Newcastle Brewery!). The Grassmarket site was sold in 1913 and was used as a mines rescue and research station by a consortium of Lothians mining companies. It is now part of the site of George Heriot’s School.

A non-mover at number 13, Jeffrey’s opened the New Heriot Brewery at Roseburn in 1880. This replaced a facility in the Grassmarket along from the Castle which was known, unsurprisingly, as the Heriot Brewery and took its name from that nearby school (see picture). Brewing took place at Roseburn until 1992, by which time it was an outpost of Glaswegian lager manufacturer Tennent Caledonian. Coincidentally the Grassmarket brewery was built on top of the Crawley Pipe which brought water into the town. That little brown wooden door you can see to the left of the gateway gives access to the conduit in which the pipe runs.

Holding steady at number 12, brothers Thomas & James Bernard opened the New Edinburgh Brewery on Robertson Avenue in Gorgie in 1888. For obvious reasons the firm used a St. Bernard dog as its mascot and logo (a Saint that has a local connection too), except with a bottle of their beer around its neck instead of a flask of brandy. They were bought up by the industry giant Scottish Brewers in 1960 who shut them down in order to reduce the competition and industry over-capacity.

At 11, the Edinburgh United Breweries of 1889. This company consolidated the existing smaller brewers of David Nicolsons; Robin, McMillans; Dishers and George Ritchies. The Robin, McMillans site at the Summerhall was demolished to make way for the new buildings of the Royal Dick Veterinary School, Dishers’ facilities were sold to rivals Aitchisons, and brewing was consolidated at Nicolson’s Palace Brewery at Abbeyhill and Ritchie’s Bell’s Brewery at the Pleasance. EUB’s remaining assets were acquired by Jeffrey’s in 1935 after what was (at that point) the UK’s largest tax duty scandal; the firm had been brewing off the record out of hours for years and avoiding taxation.

Sneaking in at number 10, the Craigmillar No. 1 Brewery was opened in 1891 by the firm of William Murray & Co. Murrays were an old, established brewer in the town of Jedburgh at the Caledonian Brewery but Mr Murray and his Wife died on the same evening on Wednesday 6th January 1886 leaving no living partner to take the firm on. The business was sold and its new owners relocated it to just outside the (then) city boundary at Craigmillar in 1890, where transport links were good, as was the water, and land was plentiful. This was the first brewer to locate to what would become a hotspot of this industry in this district. This operation was bought by United Breweries in 1960 and closed in 1963 by which time they were United Caledonian.

Holding steady at number 9, Drybrough’s were one of the bigger Edinburgh brewers. They were long established on the North Back of the Canongate but followed the lead of Murrays and joined them in the Craigmillar suburb in 1892 at the Duddingston Brewery. They were bought out by the firm of Watney Mann in 1965 as the big English brewers moved north of the border to expand into the Scottish market and were closed by Allied Lyons in 1987. Most of the brewery buildings remain here, in various uses as workshops, storage and offices .

A new entrant at 8, Daniel Bernard was a son of the T. & J. Bernard family, but fell out with the other partners in that business in 1889 in an acrimonious dispute that ended up in him leaving the firm and taking them to court. He set himself up in business in the Canongate as Bernards Ltd, and moved to a site in the Damhead area of Gorgie in 1893 where there were some good wells, just down the road from the family’s New Edinburgh site. When Daniel died in 1901, there was nobody to take it over. It was used for a while as a distillery before pharmaceutical company T. & H. Smith of Canonmills moved there in stages between 1904-1908. It is still in use for those purposes by their successor company.

At number 7, Pattisons were a big new name in the Leith whisky distilling, blending and bottling industry. Formed from the dairy of Pattison, Elder & Co., they were also the sole Scottish agent for St. Anne’s Well beer from Barnstable in Exeter and decided to enter the brewing market for themselves. This they did in 1896 at Craigmillar, the third such operation in the district. They were known for lavish spending on facilities, advertising and their directors personal lives. But their empire was built too quickly and built on sand; sand sitting atop a huge financial bubble which collapsed in spectacular stile 1899, bringing down much of the Scotch whisky industry with it. The Pattison brothers ended up in court for mixing cheap grain whisky with malt and passing it off as mature malt to increase their profits and ended up in jail. Their brewery assets were taken over by Robert Deuchar, a name now associated with Edinburgh brewing but actually from the northeast of England. Deuchars were closed by Scottish & Newcastle in 1961.

Up one at 6, Somerville’s joined the growing brewing suburb at Craigmillar in 1897 when they opened the North British Brewery. Messrs. John Somerville & Co. were an established wine and spirits merchant on Quality Street in Leith who amalgamated with Blyth & Cameron, a company formed that same year by business partners of Somerville to build the new brewery at Craigmillar. The consolidated firm was known as John Somerville & Co. Ltd. Neighbouring Murray’s took it over as the Craigmillar No. 2 in 1922 and when United Breweries took over Murrays in 1960 they quickly shut it down.

We’re in the top 5 territory now. Robert Deuchar (whose name would later be given to that pioneer India Pale Ale of the 1980s real ale revival in Edinburgh) built their own premises at Craigmillar in 1899 to complement those they had recently taken over from Pattisons. Deuchar is an old Scottish family name from Lauderdale in the Borders, but their brewery was established in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1888. They made the move up the railway to Edinburgh when they bought Pattisons and would transfer all their brewing operations north in 1920, but kept their tied public houses in the northeast of England. They were bought by Newcastle Brewery in 1954 and closed by that firm’s successor, Scottish & Newcastle, in 1961.

Straight in at number 4; T. Y. Paterson & Co. opened the Pentland Brewery, the smallest of the Craigmillar breweries, in 1898. Thomas Yule Paterson was a brewer and maltster established in Glasgow’s Bridgeton in 1884 who decided to move to Edinburgh when the advantages of the Craigmillar location became obvious. They were bought out by Edinburgh brewer Aitkens in 1936 and the site was used for other purposes thereafter. Only the gates remain now.

Another entry for Maclachlans in at 3. They moved from the Grassmarket to Duddingston (a bigger site, a more modern brewery and a rail connection beckoned) in 1901 at the New Castle Brewery. In 1960 the company were bought by Glasgow’s Tennent’s, a move which made sense as Maclachlan’s main market was in that city (as was their head office). But this was a period of rapid industry consolidation and Tennent’s in turn was in turn taken over by London’s Charrington United in 1963. A further reorganisation took place, with Charrington merging their Scottish subsidiaries – United Caledonian – with Tennent’s to form Tennent Caledonian. But it did not end there; in 1967 Charrington merged with Bass of Burton-upon-Trent to form Bass Charrington, under whose ownership the New Castle was shut down, Edinburgh operations of Tennent Caledonian were instead concentrated at Jeffrey’s former New Heriot Brewery in Roseburn

At number 2, W. & J. Raeburn were the last to open a brewery at Craigmillar, in 1901. Raeburn’s Brewery relocated from Merchant Street off the Cowgate in the Old Town where they had brewed since 1863. They were bought over by Robert (not William!) Youngers in 1913. They in turn sold it to the Brewer’s Food Supply Company of Fountainbridge in 1919, formed by a syndicate of Edinburgh brewers. They turned it over to dry waste brewers malt, enriched with surplus yeast, for use as cattle and poultry feed. The Inland Revenue took exception to the missed tax potential of turning a waste product into a commodity and took them to court, but lost. The War Office requisitioned the site over in 1939 to produce industrial yeast. It was returned to the BFSC and later found its way into the Scotish & Newcastle empire and the site seems to have closed around 1975.

And no surprises and still at no. 1, for the umpteenth year in a row since 1973, Scottish & Newcastle built the then ultra-modern Fountain Brewery in that year to replace the older William McEwan brewery of the same name on the other side of the road. S&N dominated the Scottish brewing scene and, along with the big English brewer, bought it up bit by bit then slowly tried to kill it. They very nearly almost did.

The graph below charts the rise and fall of the brewing industry in Edinburgh – note there would have been many more brewers operating prior to 1800, but small concerns rather than on an industrial scale. Treat the earlier end of the timeline with caution therefore. It can be seen that by numbers alone, the 1890s were the peak but there was a long, slow decline thereafter, with things falling off a cliff after the 1950s.

It’s worth noting too that many of these were, even by the standard of the day, relatively small concerns and overall production would actually have increased into the 1960s even though numbers were dropping due to modernisation of the larger breweries on the periphery of the city and closure of older, smaller, less-efficient city-centre sites.

If you look in the right places, it’s not hard to find the evidence of many of those old breweries not already covered in this post. Alexander Melvin’s at the Boroughloch Brewery has surviving outer walls and buildings, with tenement flats long ago built within its courtyard. If you get a chance to see it, the former brewery office off of Boroughloch Lane has a cracking Melvin’s frosted glass window still in place.

Robert Younger , one of the three Youngers of Scottish brewing, brewed at St. Ann’s in Abbeyhill. Their brewery site was converted into sheltered housing, with some of the original buildings preserved. Look out for the RY monogram above the former office door on Abbeyhill.

Archibald Campbell, Hope & King were an ancient name in brewing and distilling, they brewed at the Argyle Brewery off of Chambers Street, but which was at one time Argyle Square. They were one of the last old surviving city centre brewers when they were closed in 1970 by their new English owners, Whitebread. Many of the buildings have now been incorporated into the University of Edinburgh.

Someone later built the King’s Theatre on top of it, but Taylor, Macleod & Co. brewed on the old site of Drumdryan House at the Drumdryan Brewery, an old placename that you can still find in a neighbouring street. Drumdryan comes from the Gaelic – Druim drioghion – a ridge covered in thorn bushes, describing the local topography at one time. Interestingly the nearby street Thorniebauk comes from Scots and means exactly the same, also called Brierybauk at one time.

Steel, Coulson & Co. brewed at the Croft-an-Righ Brewery at Abbeyhill, next door to Robert Younger’s at St. Ann’s. Croft-an-Righ, named for the adjacent old house, at first glance seems an ovbvious Gaelic name meaning “King’s field” but is actually romantic corruption of an older Scots name, Croft Angry – with a possible German root. Some of the buildings were preserved and are in use by Historic Environment Scotland as workshops. These are called St. Ann’s, despite note being on the St. Ann’s brewery site, as St. Ann’s Yards is an even older placename for this area.

Charles Blair started brewing in the Canongate around 1886 at a site known as the Craigwell and within a few years it was rebuilt and expanded into a model Victorian brewery; the Craigend Brewery. In 1898, Blair combined with his relatives James and Charles Blair who brewerd in Parkhead in Glasgow and with James Gordon, a wine merchant in that city, to form Gordon & Blair Ltd. The firm was taken over by local firm Mackay’s in 1955 and closed before 1963 when the latter were bought by Watney Mann. It was used as a cash & carry warehouse before being sympathtically convereted into flats in 1986.

Thomas Carmichael’s Balmoral Brewery was on what is now Calton Road but was then the North Back of Canongate. This place appears to have always struggled financially (apparently due to water supply problems) and the site was used principally for its maltings or sublet to other brewers before being bought by Charles Blair in 1895 for use as the maltings for the Craigwell over the road.

And lastly, until recently you could still see the ground storey of the Calton Hill Brewery on Calton Road in use as a rental car garage. The brewery went through a variety of ownerships, apparently founded in the first half of the 19th century by John Muir & sons before it too was taken over by Charles Blair in around 1890 to be incorporated with the Craigwell. The remains were demolished around 2019 to be replaced by student flats.

In terms of numbers and production, Edinburgh was second only to Burton-on-Trent as the Empire’s second city of brewing. Most cities had breweries but to serve their local market, Edinburgh was notable as serving not just the whole country but also world. The McEwan’s logo, before the recognisable Laughing Cavalier, was a self-confident declaration of the Globe being supported by the strong hand of the Union Flag and the Royal Standard. This was as a result of the importance to McEwan’s business of export and military sales.

Long story short. Don’t let your local paper fool you into believing things about the history of brewing in Edinburgh!

Footnote. My personal ambivalence towards S&N is sincere; I believe they were a good company who lost their way and lost sight of what they did, and tried to grow fat by eating themselves; in the end nothing much was left worth mourning. I also have absolutely nothing against Innis & Gunn. Personally I think their beers taste of a mix of soap and marshmallows, but I also really like Tennent’s lager so I’m no authority on the matter of what “good beer” tastes like.

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New blog post: Personal websites from Hastings & St Leonards-on-Sea (UK)

https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/personal-websites-from-hastings-st-leonards-uk

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