I see the rear of the Teviot also got an upgrade during the recently finished refurbishment
https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/55139382167/in/photostream/lightbox/

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #StreetPhotography #EdinburghUniversity #Teviot #BlackAndWhitePhotography

Library
https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/55140446703/in/photostream/lightbox/

Lowering sun & surrounding buildings creating interesting mix of light and shadows around Edinburgh University Library

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #StreetPhotography #Library #Bibliotheque #BlackAndWhitePhotography #GeorgeSquare #EdinburghUniversityLibrary #EdinburghUniversity

The Edinburgh Hostels for Women Students: the thread about their wartime role as Internment Camps for “Enemy Aliens”

This thread was originally written and published in January 2023.

An intriguing image was tweeted today, with the caption “WWII Prisoner of War Camp, Scotland, November 1939“:

Where was this camp? The soldier is very obviously equipped by the British Army, but the building doesn’t look very Scottish, does it? In fact it looks more like a French chateau. Is it a school, a hospital wing or a sanatorium? I didn’t know, so I shared the picture and quickly the answer came back (thanks Sean McPartlin, Graeme Dickson and Ian “Silverback”). It is the Suffolk Road Halls of Residence or to give them their proper name, the Edinburgh Hostels for Women Students. These were used as an internment camp for “enemy aliens” at the start of the war.

A 20 acre site in Newington, which had formed part of the the Craigmillar Golf Course, was purchased in 1913 for £10,000 by the Edinburgh Association for the Provision of Hostels for Women Students for a purpose-built accommodation hostel – or halls of residence. The Association was a joint venture between the Edinburgh Provincial Committee for the Training of Teachers, Edinburgh University, the Edinburgh College of Art, the Edinburgh Merchant Company and the Edinburgh Episcopal Training College. The hostels were “for the more satisfactory housing of women students” and were intended to eventually have a capacity for 350, with 250 reserved for teaching students at Moray House College. There already existed two small halls of residence for women medical students, converted from houses, on George Square.

Each hostel had a common room, library and dining room and 52 separate study bedrooms. They were grouped around a quadrangle which had a hockey field and tennis courts. The architect was Alan Keith Robinson. This was the first large commission for Robinson and his partner Thomas Aikman Swan, but would be his last. Both volunteered to fight in WW1 and Robinson refused a commission so that he could fight “in the line”. He was severely wounded and was invalided out of the army in 1917. He attempted to restart his practice and partnership but his wounds prevented him properly realising this and he died from them in May 1925.

The first three hostels (Buchanan, Balfour and Playfair) were opened in June 1917 by Sir J. Alfred Ewing, Principal of the University at a cost of with £79,000; £44,000 from the Treasury and the bulk of the remainder from the Carnegie Trust. The running costs were to be met entirely by fees, in 1917 this was an annual £30 (about £2,600 in 2023).

The glory of the Scottish Universities is that they are open not simply to the rich but to those of very moderate means indeed. In Scotland we have always been proud of the fact that we have to cultivate the Muses on a little oatmeal, and even at the present price of oatmeal a Scottish University Education is cheap! There will, I feel sure, be a great satisfaction to all that a comparatively new side in university life will be developed in Scotland, namely the communal life; true education is not simply a matter of listening to lectures and studying books.

Two further hostels – Carlyle and Darroch – were added in 1928 to Robinson’s original designs by Frank Wood, at a cost of £60,000, adding 120 additional bedrooms.

So how did the hostels end up in the photo at the top of this page, fenced off behind barbed wire and with armed guards in watch towers? A brief notice in the Edinburgh Evening News of 30th October 1939 states that the hostels had been “taken over for national purposes.” But the “prisoners of war” in the picture are not servicemen, they are interned civilians. Most were sailors who had been caught in – or en route to – British ports, or in service on ships of Allied-aligned nations at the outbreak of war. Others were simply people of German birth who had been resident in Scotland but now found themselves to be undesirables; “enemy aliens“.

One of the latter category was Adolf Theurer, an hotel chef at the North British Hotel in Edinburgh who “hated the war, and hated the Nazis, but was a German.” Theurer, 61, had lived in Scotland for 44 years and had been at the NB for 37, but had never become naturalised – with war approaching he felt his poor health and good record as a citizen would stand in his favour. He had been interned during WW1 for 4 and a half years and had declared to his family that we would “rather be put against a wall and shot than be interned again“.

However, when he appeared at the “Aliens Tribunal” on October 12th 1939 they found against him and interned him at East Suffolk Road. Those subject to appearance at the tribunal were allowed no legal representation, but Theurer’s manager at the hotel had attended and spoke in his favour. He never saw his family again, and died 5 days later, “broken hearted”, from a heart attack. His family, at 16 Claremont Crescent, were only informed after his death and had not been allowed the opportunity to visit him during his final illness.

Theurer had been an active member of the German Congregation of Edinburgh, which had been forced to disband during WW1, and had assisted in the sale of its chapel to the Brethren after the war, an order in which he was also active. His wife – Johanna Becker – was also German (although her mother was Aberdonian and she was born in London) and they had three children in Edinburgh; George Adolf, Christina and William. His family were not allowed to take possession of his body, instead it was kept in the police mortuary. He was tragically unlucky; at this early stage of the war, relatively few Germans had been incarcerated. In May 1940 the Minister of Home Security, Sir John Anderson, informed the House of Commons that of 73,535 “aliens” in the country, only 569 – less than 1% – had been interned. There was an outcry of public sympathy for him and his funeral at Piershill Cemetery was well attended. John Mcgovern, the Independent Labour Party MP for Glasgow Shettleston raised a question in the House of Commons about the circumstances surrounding his death. Anderson replied that a “report would be prepared“.

This was not even the end of the Theurers’ travails however; on Friday 10th May 1940, two detectives knocked on the door of the Theurer house in Edinburgh while the family were eating a meal and requested that Johanna Theurer pack a case and follow them. Despite her protest, she was taken to Saughton Prison and sent into internment too. Her younger son, William, was a promising footballer who played with Blackpool and in Edinburgh, St. Bernards and later Hibs. He was a British citizen and was exempted from war service as a conscientious objector, telling his tribunal “I am not a member of any church, but my father was a member of the Plymouth Brethren. The horrors of war have been brought to my own door by his death“. He accompanied his mother to the prison gates.

William’s younger brother, George Adolf, went on to become a successful wigmaker in Edinburgh after the war. He was usually known as Adolf, one wonders if this was a direct tribute to his late father given the connotations such a name would have had at the time. He became a local politician, town councillor for Broughton Ward for the Progressives, 1959-74, senior Baillie and Deputy Lord Provost of the city and, after political reorganisation, Lothian Regional Councillor 1974-82.

An observation about the photo was made (by Adam Brown of the Scottish Military Research Group) that some of the men were dressed rather like sailors; zooming in we can definitely see men dressed in what look like peaked caps, sweaters and trousers tucked into sea boots! Contemporary newspaper reports confirm that all inmates were required to sew a circle of contrasting coloured cloth on to their outer garments and that most of the 100 kept at East Suffolk Road at this point were merchant seamen – unsurprising given the trade between the Port of Leith and the Baltic.

On November 18th, three men escaped from the camp, described as “a bow-legged boy of 15 and two others aged 17” The 15-year old was Rudi Platta and the other two were Walther Bartels and Gunther Berger. They were merchant seaman and had managed to steal khaki uniforms – including caps and boots – from off-duty guards while they slept, climb through a window, climb the barbed wire fence and a 10 foot high wall to escape under cover of darkness. Without money, with no English spoken amongst the three and with no real idea where they were going, their chances were not high. They were found 10 hours later walking along the road to Peebles some 20 miles away after a motorist who had passed them heard of their escape on returning home.

Further embarrassment was caused to the authorities (and further sensation was reported in the papers) just 3 days later when two men escaped on the night of 21st November. The pair – George Sluzalek (24) and Franz Feltens (22) were in their civilian attire and again had no money or food, little English, and no plan of where they were going. They became lost, thinking they were heading for the sea but actually they were moving inland. They resorted to eating turnips from a field that had been left out for wintering sheep and were later found nearby, cold and wet, hiding in a yew tree near Dalkeith by an alert gamekeeper.

A second pair of men – Eber Hord Rolf Fischer, aged 23, and Max Waderphul, aged 38 – also escaped that night, parting company with Sluzalek and Feltens after their breakout. Again they had little idea where they were and had no resources with them, but managed to make an impressive distance on foot. Around 430PM the following day they knocked on a cottage door to the south of Edinburgh to beg for tea in broken English. Although they aroused the suspicion of the householder, she showed them kindness and welcomed them in to her house and made them a small meal of bread and butter, cheese and cold mutton, telling reporters “I never saw anyone so grateful in my life“. They left after 15 minutes and she phoned the police; the men had disappeared by the time they arrived. They were on the run for 36 hours and a man hunt of hundreds of police and soldiers combed the Lothians looking for them. They were recaptured cold, wet, hungry and exhausted by the search parties near Heriot, some 22 miles south of Edinburgh and seemed glad to have been found.

Remarkably, a further three men almost escaped on the 21st but were spotted by a sentry who fired his rifle in their direction, raising the alarm. They were quickly captured by the camp defence unit. Some of the escapees were allowed to answer questions by press. when asked if they “had anything to complain about of the treatment they were receiving at the camp, one of them said emphatically, ‘No‘”. All of the men were reluctant to be drawn into answering questions about the quality and availability of food in Germany vs. Britain.

The Corporation of Edinburgh was deeply unhappy about the location and security of the camp, and at a meeting on the 23rd November it was resolved to make a formal request to relocate it out of the city boundary; Lord Provost Steele was able to tell the assembled councillors that he had already been given notification of the intention to move it. On Monday 4th November, the Aberdeen Evening Express announced that a “motley company” of almost 200 German men had left Edinburgh at Waverley station from “an internment camp on the south of the city – the camp which has been so much in the news recently because of escape bids.” The prisoners were reported to be in good spirits and waved and smiled to morning commuters. Some conversation was made between men who could speak English and railway employees, and cigarettes were shared with the captives.On Tuesday 5th, the Daily Record reported that in total 300 German internment prisoners had left Scotland for England “for the duration of the war”.

On 28th December, the Edinburgh Evening News reported that the camp would now be formally closed, with transit accommodation for processing prisoners “for no more than 48 hours” having been arranged at an unspecified hospital. The East Suffolk Road Hostels were turned over to the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) officer cadets; the women’s branch of the British Army.

The requisition had caused something of a crisis for University Accommodation, which also saw 200 cadets billeted in its other accommodation. As a result most students who kept up their studies in wartime had to stay “in digs”, with the Scotsman reporting they were now sharing 3 and 4 to a single bedroom. The hostels were quickly returned to civilian use post-war, with adverts being taken out in the local newspapers for new wardens in August 1945. Later, they became the Newington Campus of Moray House Teacher Training College, closing in 1997 when this institution merged with the University of Edinburgh. They have since been converted into private housing.

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

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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

Edinburgh Makar Michael Pedersen has written a poem to mark the 300th anniversary of the University of Edinburgh’s medical school. A short film of the poem, animated by students from Edinburgh’s College of Arts, is available to watch via The Scotsman

https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/watch-michael-pedersens-poem-to-mark-300th-anniversary-of-edinburgh-university-medical-school-5492523

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Edinburgh #EdinburghUniversity #MedicalSchool #HistoryofMedicine

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics #Codebases

calcQPI: A versatile tool to simulate quasiparticle interference

Peter Wahl, Luke C. Rhodes, Carolina A. Marques

Paper:
SciPost Phys. Codebases 61 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCodeb.61

calcQPI-v1.0:
SciPost Phys. Codebases 61-r1.0 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysCodeb.61-r1.0

#BonnUniversity #StAndrewsUniversity
#RoyalCommissionExhibition1851 #EdinburghUniversity

“This study shows conclusively that the HPV vaccine prevents the changes that can develop into cancer.”

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://theorkneynews.scot/2025/11/05/this-study-shows-conclusively-that-the-hpv-vaccine-prevents-the-changes-that-can-develop-into-cancer/

Edinburgh University begins compulsory redundancies and closes Institute for Academic Development.

(Apologies for the Tab link) https://thetab.com/2025/10/31/excl-edinburgh-university-begins-compulsory-layoffs-with-department-set-to-be-axed

In the final months of writing my thesis I relied on IAD resources for information that I simply could not find through my department or school.

Feeling for the staff facing compulsory redundancy; wtf at the UofE so symbolically disregarding academic development.

#EdinburghUniversity #UofE #Academia #PhDLife

New #openaccess publication #SciPost #Physics

Stochastic resetting and large deviations

Martin R. Evans, John C. Sunil
SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 103 (2025)
https://scipost.org/SciPostPhysLectNotes.103

#EdinburghUniversity

Now that´s reflection...

Blogpost on taking time to reflect, build education community, and work toward better education in general. This is my second study-trip with my Educational Leadership cohort, and I take so much home from these. New ideas about co-creation, education models, and what goes right and very wrong with reflection.

https://rebeccanordquist.edublogs.org/2025/10/03/now-that-is-reflection/

#higherEd #reflection #UtrechtUniversity #education #ProfessionalDevelopment #Edinburgh #EdinburghUniversity @faculteit_diergeneeskunde

Bristo Public School: the thread about “one of the worst” schools in and its journey to further and higher education (by way of a car park)

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

Bristo Public School was located on Marshall Street in that old district of the city known as Easter Portsburgh. It opened in 1877 with a capacity for 600 children at a time when the Edinburgh School Board was rapidly trying to expand education provision in the city at the same time as dealing with a legacy of inherited and substandard properties. The School Board was formed as a result of the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 which made education compulsory for children aged between 5 and 13 in Scotland (but not free). The school occupied a site where once had stood the General’s Entry lodgings of Robert Burns’ paramour Clarinda – Agnes Maclehose – and took its name from the adjacent Bristo Street, itself an old Edinburgh place name dating back to the early 16th century.

The land was acquired from the Edinburgh Improvement Trust as part of an early civic improvement and slum clearance scheme that swept away some older closes and built a westward extension of of Marshall Street between the Potterrow and Bristo Street. Construction was intended to begin in 1875 but was delayed on account of the original cost estimate of £8,760 being far in excess of what the Board had budgeted per capita. The final cost, including purchasing the land, ended up at £26 10s per head, a huge sum for the time compared to other new schools. In the meantime, the School Board leased premises at 4 Nicolson Square to open a temporary school. The purpose-built Bristo School was designed by the architect to the Board, William Lambie Moffat, in the Collegiate Gothic style that was then in favour for schools and was extremely similar to his Leith Walk School.

Serving a densely populated neighbourhood, in its early days Bristo School was frequently overcrowded. Just three years after opening it had 840 pupils, some 40% more than it was designed to take, and the adjacent Marshall Street Halls had to be taken over in 1885 as an annexe and a new school was begun at South Bridge to provide additional capacity. Matters came to a head in 1896 when the school suffered a negative inspection on the grounds of the overcrowding and the substandard nature of the annexe and the Scotch Education Department cut its grant. On investigation the School Board found that almost half of the pupils actually lived closer to another of their schools than Bristo and so by redistributing them closer to home it was possible to both deal with the overcrowding and close the annexe.

The capacity crisis may have been solved but the school continued to cause the Board problems. On account of its north facing position, cramped plot and being surrounded all around by tall tenements, it was particularly dark inside and had a very small playground which was also very dark. The lack of natural light and ventilation – very important to Edinburgh’s Victorian school designers – soon saw it labelled as “insanitary“. Furthermore it lacked any hall and the arrangements of its classrooms were unsuitable to cope with class sizes; there were too many small spaces. As early as 1900 the School Board were exploring options to replace it and an extension was added to the rear as an interim solution at a cost of £4,350, further decreasing the playground space. In 1909 it was reported that as a result of the poor lighting within the building that it had the highest proportion of children with “defective eyesight” in the city. A special experiment was carried out from 1930 onwards whereby entire year groups were transported to Liberton Playing Fields by tramcar, one day per week in the spring and summer, to have their education outside, far removed from their usual oppressive and dark surroundings.

In 1925 the school found itself caught up in the Sciennes School Strike saga and it was observed at this time that it was under capacity. By 1927 its roll was in steady decline on account of slum clearance in the district which transferred much of the populace to new housing schemes in the southeast of the city. By 1933 the population of school age children in the Southside was declining at 10% per annum and there were 1,228 vacant places in its schools. As a result Bristo, described by Edinburgh Corporation’s Education Committee as “one of the worst” of its schools, was closed in 1934. The remaining scholars were transferred to Sciennes and South Bridge. In 1935 it was proposed to re-open the school by transferring pupils from the condemned St Ignatius’s Roman Catholic (RC) school in Glen Street and St Columba’s RC – the former Causewayside School – into a new Intermediate RC school for the district. Nothing came of these plans except sectarian controversy until final approval in 1939 but war quickly intervened and put them on hiatus again, this time permanently. Instead, after closure it was used for a variety of purposes including evening classes, a day centre for the long-term unemployed and hosting community groups such as the Boys’ Brigade.

In 1938 the Clarinda Club – a local appreciation society of the poet Robert Burns – marked the school being built upon the site of her lodgings by unveiling a commemorative bronze plaque on its walls. During WW2 it served as training centre and headquarters for First Aid and Air Raid Precautions. Another more unusual purpose was established which was the Nursery Equipment Centre. This had first been established by the WVS (Women’s Voluntary Service) at Castlehill School and was set up to produce soft and wooden toys, clothing and playthings for young children at the public nurseries that had been set up to allow their mothers to undertake war work. These items were largely no longer being produced by industry during wartime. In 1941 part of the school also became a British Restaurant – a municipal wartime canteen – operating under the name Clarinda’s.

The Nursery Equipment Centre attracted a significant number of volunteers with disabilities which prevented them from undertaking war work and became something of a specialist centre in helping people adapt their lives to work. Such was the success of the scheme that it – and the school – was taken over by the government’s new Disabled Persons Employment Corporation as a work training centre for the disabled – a Remploy Factory – until purpose-built premises were completed at Sighthill.

When Remploy vacated the school in 1949 it was taken back by the Education Department and repurposed as the Bristo Technical Institute. This was a training centre for apprentices in engineering trades, either on day release from their workplaces or taken as evening classes. It taught specialist skills that could not gained on the job such as technical drawing, physics and chemistry and also basic certificates in maths and English to bring candidates up to standard. After 1959, much of this part of the city was threatened by the comprehensive redevelopment plans of Edinburgh University, which wanted wholesale demolition of the area but the old school survived where much did not. The institute closed in 1966 after the opening of the new Napier Technical College at a purpose-built campus in Merchiston, with most of the city’s pre-existing hodgepodge of technical further education being transferred to it. The building was then leased by Heriot-Watt College, which was at this time on nearby Chambers Street and about to gain university status, as its Department of Industrial Administration. Heriot-Watt University began its move to its new Riccarton campus in 1969 and left its Bristo Building around 1974. By this time the old school was the last remaining building on the western portion of Marshall Street and it was quickly and one old educational institution was unceremoniously demolished by another just shy of its centenary; Edinburgh University replaced it with a windswept car park that was perennially covered in puddles.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/georgeupstairs/6004096117/in/photolist-2kv1F4n-QgTH16-2jVXWem-a9yyAz-ai75jg-ai9SE1-25VNJbP-ai75ac-44cRz1-6aZhqo-4aECh1-2jvFhCR

The car park was meant to be a temporary measure, but I clearly remember parking there in the 1990s when my Dad would take me to the Museum on Chambers Street; the University scheme for which it had been cleared never came to fruition. This most wantonly destructive of Edinburgh institutions would not finally build upon the gap site until the 21st century. The final part of the development – the School of Informatics’ Bayes Centre – was opened on the site of Bristo School as recently as 2019. It was perhaps some small consolation that the site was at last returned to educational use again.

Want to read more about Edinburgh’s Lost Board Schools? The next instalment covers Canonmills Public School; where thrift and self-denial were taught

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

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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