The thread about Spuds and Hippos: Leith and Newhaven’s key part in building the Mulberry Harbours for Operation Overlord in World War 2
This thread was originally written and published in June 2023.
Today (June 6th) is the 79th anniversary of the 1944 D-Day landings, the largest seaborne invasion in history. The huge assault was supported by a vast logistical operation, at the core of which were to be two Mulberry Harbours. This is the story of Leith and Newhavens significant part in making this military megaproject a reality.
Aerial view of “Mulberry B” at Arromanches-les-Bains (Gold Beach) in Normandy (October 27, 1944). This is photograph C 4626 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums.
Mulberries A & B – one each for the US-led Omaha British-led Gold beaches respectively – were temporary, prefabricated harbours to rapidly offload supplies onto land after the initial assault, until other ports could be captured. Each enclosed an area larger than the harbour of Gibraltar. and was made up of a range of prefabricated, interlocking parts, each with a codename; Hippos, Crocodiles, Phoenixes, Bombardons, Beetles, Swiss Rolls, Whales and Spuds. And it was the first and – most importantly – last of these where Leith came in
Mulberry Harbour : Arromanches (B, Gold Beach), by war artist Stephen Bone © IWM Art.IWM ART LD 4607
A Spud was the end of the Whale, the latter being the overall codename for the pier ends. It was the largest and technically most complex component of the whole Mulberry – the part where the actual ships tied up to offload, and of the 23 Spuds required over half would be built in Leith. And they would not be built in just any old way, they were built in record-breaking time, in a brand new shipyard, constructed “almost overnight” specifically for the purpose of producing Mulberry components, by a temporary workforce who were largely ignorant of what they were doing.
Whale floating roadway leading to a Spud pier at Mulberry A off Omaha Beach
When it had become clear after the disastrous failure of the Dieppe Raid of 1942 that any cross-Channel invasion was going to require an unprecedented logistical exercise to support it, the best minds in the country – all the way up to Churchill himself – were focussed on how to move men and supplies quickly onto the land. Brigadier Bruce White, a leading civil engineer, was put in charge of the idea of creating floating assault harbours. Looking for inspiration, he recalled an unusual dredger he had seen in operation in the Bahamas almost 20 years before, and an idea formed in his head. That dredger, the Lucayan, had three special legs or “spuds”, which it could lower onto the sea bed to make it a stable platform while it went about its digging duties, at all states of the tide. It had been build on the Clyde in 1923 by Lobnitz & Co. in Renfrew, so White roped Henry Lobnitz in to his scheme.
The dredger “Lucayan”
White asked Lobnitz to design, based on the Lucayan, a pontoon with 4 spuds that could be lowered onto the sea bed to firmly anchor it and yet allow it to rise up and down on the tide. From this secure pier head, supplies could offload in deep water and find their way onto the land down a roadway of adjoining components. Lobnitz had the design completed by December 1942, but they were not a big yard and were busy with their own work, and had nowhere to build it. Enter stage left Alex. Findlay & Co., steel fabricators and bridge makers (such as the one at Russell Road in Edinburgh) of the Parkneuk Works in Motherwell. Findlay had been building landing craft at a temporary wartime shipyard at Old Kilpatrick and were the perfect company for the job. Findlays were up to the task of leading on construction of the Spuds, but they needed somewhere to build them. There was no capacity in any existing yard, so new facilities had to be found, and a new workforce. And that is where Leith comes in.
You see in 1942, Dutch engineers had completed the Western Breakwater at Leith Docks, adding 250 acres of dock space that formed the largest enclosed dock in Scotland and crucially, this had added 30 acres of reclaimed – and as yet undeveloped – land along the North Leith shore.
Still from the film “Leith Breakwater” of 1942, showing construction,
from the collection of the BFIThis land, adjacent to docks and rails, was absolutely perfect for the construction of the large Mulberry sections, launching them into the basin,and fitting them out and storing them until they were needed. But a yard was needed, so a call went out to Hartlepool. That call was answered by two engineers, Robert William Newson and Mr E. Parkinson, who were specialists in the construction of airfields. They came up to Leith with some foremen and set about building a shipyard from scratch. Within months it was complete, with 4 berths, offices, workshops, stores, cranes and 3 miles of internal railways. You can see the remains of the yard in the centre of this 1951 aerial photo. Newhaven is at the top, North Leith on the left. The (then) new Caledonia Mill foundations are being built at the bottom.
SAW036161 SCOTLAND (1951). An oblique aerial photograph taken facing West. From Britain from Above. © Historic Environment Scotland.
Findlays oversaw the operation, but various tasks were further subcontracted. The steel sections were provided by Leith steelyard Redpath Brown & Co., who also worked out the production drawings. The Lanarkshire Welding Co. employed much of the workforce. Welding was used as it used less steel than riveting and while a riveter took years of training, a welder could be trained in days. Men and women from unskilled trades were signed up, 200 in all, to be welders. The foremen were fabricators and shipyard men, many from the northeast of England. A large contingent of skilled labour was seconded in from Henry Robb & Co., the main shipyard in Leith, who were just next door. The Robbs workers could concentrate on the more demanding and specialised tasks, leaving fabrication to the new recruits.
Construction began in November 1943 as soon as the yard was ready. Prefabricated components for the Spuds arrived in Leith by rail – from the St. Andrews steel yard of Redpaths (just up the road) from Lanarkshire and from the Clyde – where they were welded together, launched sideways into the dock basin, and floated up to Newhaven for fitting out.
Mulberry construction at North Leith in 1944. © Edinburgh City Libraries
Fitting out was done on the Fishmarket Quay at Newhaven, including all the plumbing, carpentry and electrics, and fitting the diesel-electric winches that hauled the pier section up and down on its legs to match the tides.
“Whales” : constructing pierheads for Mulberry Harbour, 1944 by war artist James Miller © IWM ART LD 4137
By the end of January 1944 the first Spud was ready and was launched sideways into the basin in full view of the residents of the tenements of Lindsay Road and Annfield, who were oblivious to what they watching enter the water.
Mulberry at Leith Yard – No 1 pierhead takes the water. © Edinburgh City Libraries
But they weren’t moving fast enough, not nearly fast enough. Operation Overlord was merely 4 months away (not that the workers knew it), so a herculean effort was commenced with round-the-clock working at breakneck speed. Four Spuds could be under construction on the stocks at once, with two more fitting out at Newhaven. The workforce rose to the task and before long they were up to speed and were launching a Spud with a loud splash of the waters of the Forth every 5 days.
Spud production line at North Leith. © Edinburgh City Libraries
The Spuds were built in record time at Leith but even that wasn’t enough, so four more were built at Conwy in Wales and five at the Cairnryan Military Port. At the latter location, civilian workers from Leith were sent across to Galloway to construct the first before the Army’s own engineers – trained in welding on break times – took over. Each unit was 200ft long, 60ft wide, 27ft high (not including its legs) and weighed 1,000 tons. Appropriately, they would be towed to England and then to the beaches by the large salvage tugs built next door by Henry Robbs in Leith during the war for the Admiralty.
Completed Spuds awaiting the Normandy beaches in Leith Docks. © Edinburgh City Libraries
When the Spuds were complete, Leith turned its attention to other Mulberry parts, floating concrete intermediate sections known as Hippos, which were sunk to the sea bed and supported road sections above them on their way to the beaches. They were 75ft long. displaced 220 tons and were produced at the rate of one every three and a half days. In just 195 days, thirteen Spuds and sixteen Hippos were built at Leith – all on schedule – and totalling over 16,000 tons, at a brand new yard by a workforce many of whom had never so much as picked up a hammer, never mind a welding torch, in their lives.
On the afternoon of June 6th 1944, 400 Mulberry components totalling 1.5 million tons, set off from the south coat of England for the invasion beaches. In the lead were Robb’s powerful salvage tugs like Bustler, Samsonia, Growler and Hesperia.
HMRT Bustler. IWM A28784
The Mulberries were put together from the 8th June onwards and were almost complete on the 19th when disaster struck and a 3 day storm, the worst to hit the Normandy coast in summer in 40 years, struck. Mulberry B – at Gold beach – was damaged and the American A was largely wrecked.
Wrecked pontoon causeway of one of the Mulberry” harbours, following the storm of 19–22 June 1944. US Navy Photo #: 80-G-359462
Mulberry B, the British one, was christened “Port Winston” and was repaired and expanded with components from the wrecked American Mulberry A. Designed to last 3 months, it ended up serving for 10. On it would be landed 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles and 4 million tons of supplies.
The workers at Leith had little idea what they had been building – although many could have hazarded a guess – but were soon rewarded with newsreel and newspaper coverage of the Mulberries once they were no longer a secret.
Newspaper article on Mulberry Harbours from 1944. Western Morning News – Monday 23 October 1944
An interesting side part of the Mulberry story was that the model railway company Bassett-Lowke had been commissioned to build scale models of them to help train the military in how they went together and were used.
‘Mulberry Harbour Models, Scale 1/4″ – 1 [foot]’ by Bassett-Lowke
The models were sent on a touring exhibition of the country in 1945 to show them off to the public. They were show in in Scotland at J. D. Cuthbertson & Co. on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, but sadly never came to Leith to show the workers the vast scale of what they had achieved.
Some of the Mulberry Harbour models by Bassett-Lowke, exhibited in London in 1945. Illustrated London News – Saturday 06 January 1945
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