Blitz! The thread about WW2 air raids in Edinburgh and Leith

An air raid on Leith on the night of Monday April 7th 1941 saw extensive property damage caused in North Leith. But it wasn’t just bricks and mortar that suffered: three people were killed and 118 injured in the raid which makes it the 10th most deadly such event (by total casualties) in Scotland during the war.

Note, there was deliberately limited and non-specific press reporting of the details and casualties of air raids during the war itself. Some such reporting only took place, retrospectively, after the war but understandably details were occasionally incorrect or overlooked. For accuracy and out of respect I have endeavoured to cross-reference everything below that refers to individuals with the official civilian war death records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Scotland’s People.

One of those who lost their lives in the raid that night was 17 year old Anstruther (Ernie) Smith, a delivery boy from 15 Graham Street who also worked as a messenger for the Leith ARP (Air Raid Precautions – civil defence). On hearing the sirens he had assisted his elderly neighbours to a shelter before reporting for duty at Leith’s Town hall a few streets away where Ferry Road meets Great Junction and North Junction Streets. It was here that he lost his life when a bomb landed nearby and exploded. He was fondly remembered in his community as someone who freely helped the elderly; checking in on them on his way to work each morning to light their fires and make them a cup of tea, and running errands for them. The Anstruther Pensioner’s Club was formed after the war in his memory, it was held in the very room in the Town Hall where we died and it attracted 300 members and a waiting list of 200.

Also killed by the same bomb that claimed Ernie was 85 year-old Jane Notman Young, who died in her house by the Town Hall at 21 North Junction Street. Lastly a 19 year-old apprentice draughtsman and Home Guard volunteer, Kenneth James Anderson, died in hospital the following morning after his house at 5 Largo Place was badly damaged in the blast. This block would later have to be demolished.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/15989027951/

Mercifully the death-to-injury ratio was substantially lower than other comparable attacks on Scottish cities; Leith had been hit by two bombs known as Luftmines – large weapons that were dropped on a parachute and intended for use against dock areas to attack shipping. These as it turned out were not very effective against other targets such as buildings, despite their size. Never the less, three hundred people in North Leith were rendered homeless due to the damage caused to housing in the neighbourhood. £1,500 was allocated to Leith from the National Air Raid Distress Fund, which provided emergency clothing, bedding and canteens to raid victims.

The bombs that hit Leith damaged the three principal public buildings of the burgh; its Town Hall (which included its main public auditorium), its Library – both of which were hardly 10 years old – and the large David Kilpatrick (“DK“) School adjacent. As well as the tenement houses, the Norwegian Seaman’s Lutheran Church, North Leith Parish Church and a railway embankment and signal box of the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) all suffered varying degrees of damage. The gallery below shows some of these:

The main lending room of the library was not fully repaired until 1956 although the reference room had been re-purposed to serve as such in the meantime. The Town Hall and its auditorium had to wait until 1961, a full 20 years after the bombs had fallen. The city’s apparent neglect in restoring the public buildings of Leith after the war caused much local consternation at the time. This damaged caused to the outbuildings of the DK school, which were in use as a nursery school, became known locally as the Bombies and was apparently where pupils would gather to sort out their differences with fists. It would not be replaced until much later and this in turn was demolished, along with the rest of the school, in the 1980s.

Although Leith was marked as a bombing target on German maps, the intended target of this raid had actually been Clydebank almost 50 miles to the west, where 20 souls lost their lives and 313 were injured that same night. This attack was a follow up to the Clydebank Blitz of March 1941 but the raiders had become scattered and twelve other targets across Scotland, including Leith, were hit that night with a total of 49 killed and 456 injured. Most of the deaths night were in Gretna in Dumfriesshire where a lone aircraft jettisoned its bombs and hit a Masonic Lodge, killing 22 and wounding 18. Other bombs were dropped as widely as Bankfoot and Stanley in Perthshire, Loch Nevis in Knoydart, Fife and Arbroath in the east of the country and Greenlaw to the south in the Borders; a huge margin of error. Closer to Leith were the mainline railway leading to the Forth Bridge near Turnhouse and Braehead House in Cramond with thirty four incendiary bombs between these points. These were 1kg aluminium tubes filled with a compound called Thermite which burned at around 2,500°C and were intended to set fire to wooden structures and the timber flooring and roof structures of buildings. These were a far cry from the ineffective rope and tar incendiaries dropped on Edinburgh and Leith by a German Zepellin in 1916.

Although this raid caused the greatest damage to property in Leith during the war, it was not the worst in terms of the loss of life. The previous summer, on the evening of July 18th 1940 at 7:45PM, seven people were killed on George Street in North Leith (now known as North Fort Street). At 8 George Street David Lennie Duff (a 33 year-old basket maker) and his sister Lily Duff (a 23 year-old biscuit packer); Catherine Helliwell (a 61 year-old housewife) and her son-in-law Robert Thomson (a 25 year-old baker); Catherine Fallon Baird (74); and Catherine Redpath (41) who had been visiting the address from her home at 20 Gorgie Road were killed. Over the street at number 13, 15 year-old Jane (Jean) Bauld Rutherford from number 17 was killed when the bomb shelter she was in was hit. The fatal damage had been caused by bombs intended for the Victoria Dock, one of which hit the foot of Portland Place where a nearby tramcar was fortunate to miss getting a direct hit that would surely have resulted in more fatalities.

Number 8 George Street, where six people had lost their lives, had to be demolished along with its neighbour at number 10 and was not rebuilt until 1959. The rest of the tenements of George Street – apart from the northern corner blocks – were later levelled by the city planners as part of the Fort Area Comprehensive Redevelopment not long afterwards.

Four days later, on July 22nd, a raid on Leith Docks killed Robert Hume of 45 Glover Street (aged 33), a fireman with the Auxiliary Fire Service at the Albert Dock. Also on this night Mary Fulton Riach (aged 65) of 23 Woodbine Terrace and Catherine Leishman (aged 68) of 4 Meadowbank Crescent both died from heart failure during the raid, the official cause of death being put down to “war operations“. Two months later, on September 29th, a single stray bomb fell on the block of number 21 – 27 Crewe Place in East Pilton killing the young McArthur children; brother and sister Morag Elizabeth (aged 5) and Ronald Egbert (aged 7) from number 27. Their neighbour Charles Fortune Wilson (aged 69) of number 25 would die the next day in hospital. The landlords and builders of this housing scheme, Mactaggart and Mickel, rehoused the now-homeless survivors and had rebuilt the house at their own expense within 6 weeks. A wartime shortage of timber meant it was given a flat roof, the only such house on the street and the only clue to its sad history.

Another single, stray bomb dropped that evening hit a bonded whisky warehouse of the Caledonian Distillery on Duff Street in Dalry. The distillery was home to over a million gallons of highly-flammable spirit and an immense fire erupted, so ferocious that the reflection on the clouds in the night sky was apparently visible to German aircrew flying over Middlesborough, 150 miles (240km) away to the south. The bond was totally destroyed, as was one adjoining tenement of fourteen flats at 28 Springwell Place.

A week later around 745PM on October 7th, five small bombs were dropped in the district of Marchmont, landing at 29 Roseneath Terrace, 20 Meadow Place, 16 Roseneath Place, 13 Marchmont Crescent and 21 Marchmont Road. Eleven people were injured by flying glass and splinters. Three weeks later on the morning of October 26th, Margaret Ridley Stuart (aged 72) died at her flat at 45 Tolbooth Wynd in Leith from a heart attack brought on by another air raid leaving her husband Thomas, a retired dock labourer, a widower.

The following month the animal population of Edinburgh Zoo was reduced slightly when, on November 4th, two stray bombs hit the park killing six budgerigars and a wild rabbit (as reported by Zoo Director T. H. Gillespie to The Scotsman, Friday 20 December 1940). The craters were left unfilled and became a visitor attraction. A crater caused by a bomb dropped on the lawn of Holyrood Park was used by enterprising locals to raise money for a Spitfire Fund by charging for access to view it.

The month after the raid on North Leith which had killed Ernie, on the night of 6th May 1941, five lives were lost in the suburban bungalows of Duddingston on the outskirts of the city. One large bomb, three smaller ones and 100 incendiaries fell on Niddrie Road (now called Duddingston Park South), Milton Crescent and the Jewel Cottages at around half past midnight. Leonard Arthur Wilde (aged 39), an Air Raid Warden, was killed in his home at number 27 Milton Crescent along with his neighbours Joseph Watson (aged 40) of the Home Guard and William Dineley (aged 37). Lilias Tait Waterston (aged 69) was killed in her house at 26 Niddrie Road and her neighbour Barbara Thomson (87) was killed at number 30.

The last bombs of the war which caused fatalities in Edinburgh fell on Loaning Road in Craigentinny on the night of August 6th 1942, demolishing the Corporation tenement at number 35. Two people were killed; Elizabeth Veitch (aged 13) at number 35 and Robert Wright (aged 66), the janitor of Craigentinny Community Centre next door. A replacement tenement was built here post-war.

You can see in the first picture where the bomb has left a crater (green arrow), upended an “Anderson” shelter (blue) and the entrance to another shelter (orange). Note the white painted poles, so you don’t run into them in the dark

Edinburgh and Leith were mercifully spared most of the horrors of aerial bombing meted out to other cities during WW2. Altogether there were 21 civilian deaths and about 210 injuries caused directly by aerial bombing. At least 5 further deaths were recorded as being due to “war operations” when people had heart attacks brought about by the shock and stress of experiencing an air raid.

If this thread has proved interesting you may be interested in a thread on the first aerial raids and shooting down of German aircraft over the UK in WW2 which took place over the Firth of Forth in view of Edinburgh and Leith or a thread detailing some of the anti-aircraft defences of the city during the conflict.

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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The thread about a charity shop book that lead to the story of Captain William Thomson Dawson and the loss of the Leith tanker “Peder Bogen”

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

I was recently fortunate to acquire this book on the history of the Trinity House in Leith at my favourite charity book shop (St. Columba’s in Canonmills, go visit them!), for a very reasonable price.

It is signed on the inside cover, not by the author as I first thought, but by a “Captain Dawson OBE, the Master of Trinity House”.

The award of the OBE piqued my interest enough to look up our Captain Dawson, and it did not take long to find him: William Thomson Dawson. This is why his signature reads “W. Thomson“. Captain Dawson was a local man, born in Leith in 1910, the son of Margaret Alexander and James Dawson – a merchant navy officer. He was named after his grandfather, a Leith shipmaster. Our Captain Dawson was master of the Leith tanker SS Peder Bogen, a tanker owned by Leith’s Christian Salvesen shipping line. This steam-powered ship was 480 feet long, 62 feet wide and drew 37 feet (146 x 18.9 x 11.2m) with a gross tonnage (a measure of the carrying capacity of a merchant ship) of some 9,700 tons.

The Peder Bogen had been built in the Dutch city of Dordrecht in 1925 for the Norwegian whaling company Johan Rasmussen, being sold to the Salvesen’s whaling subsidiary The South Georgia Company in 1933, along with the base of Stromness on that island. She was a supply ship supporting the Salvesen’s whaling operations and fleet at South Georgia, carrying fuel and goods south and whale oil north, with the seasons.

When war broke out, the Peder Bogen found itself called up for convoy duty, bringing precious fuel oil east across the Atlantic, for which purposes she was given a token armament for self defence. She had made a number of such passages during the first years of the war until on 19th March 1942 she left Port of Spain in Trinidad, heading for Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she would join an eastbound convoy across the Atlantic. On board she had 11,000 tons of fuel oil for the Admiralty 52 crew (including Dawson) and a single passenger, the radio operator of the French tanker SS Melpomene, which had been sunk a few weeks previously en route from Belfast to Baton Rouge.

The journey north proceeded quietly for 4 days, until on the 23rd March she was hit without warning by two torpedoes from the Italian submarine Morosino, about 700 miles northeast of Puerto Rico and 745 miles southeast of Bermuda, in the position 24° 25′ 48″N by 57° 26′ 24″W.

The ship was holed, and with water pouring into her tanks and machinery spaces and the prospect of the 11,000 tons of oil (not to mention the ships own 2,000 tons of fuel) catching fire, Dawson assembled his crew on deck. He ordered the crew to take to the lifeboats, but asked for volunteers to stay aboard and form a skeleton crew to see if there was a chance of saving the tanker and its precious cargo. He and five others remained on the Peder Bogen, relit the boilers, raised steam and began pumping the water out. They fought a losing battle, and when there was 16 feet of water in the engine room had to abandon the fight and join the lifeboats too. The two little boats then retreated a safe distance to await rescue. For the second time in 3 weeks, the unlucky radio operator of the Melpomene found himself abandoning a torpedoed tanker.

Three hours later, the Peder Bogen had still neither sunk nor caught fire, so once again Dawson and his volunteers made the brave decision to board her and try to save her. The Morosini however had been stalking them, and as they made to do this she surfaced just a mile distant and opened fire with her two 4″ deck guns. The Italian’s gunfire was inaccurate, and it took them 40 rounds to score 5 hits, enough to set the tanker on fire and seal her fate.

The crew were all safe however, and spent a rather unhappy night watching the remains of their ship and its cargo on fire. The next day the two lifeboats set a course for the Virgin islands before becoming separated. They were well equipped for their journey, with food, water and survival gear, and the weather was favourable, so their chances were good. After 4 days rowing against the winds, Dawson’s boat was sighted by the “Clyde-built” Spanish ship Gobeo, which took all aboard. The Spaniards were sympathetic to the plight of the British merchant mariners and treated them well. They landed them in Lisbon, Portugal, 3 weeks later. The men of the other boat, carrying the remains of the Peder Bogen’s crew under First Officer Duncan were picked up the following day after becoming separated. The Argentinian ship Rio Gallegos took them to New York, where they landed 4 days later on March 31st.

On April 14th 1942, The Scotsman reported the happy news to Leith that all onboard the ship had been saved. A table at the bottom of this page lists the names, home towns and ranks and roles of all of the men, as reported by the paper.Captain Dawson was awarded the OBE in 1943 for his part, having “showed splendid courage, resource and leadership and made determined efforts to save his ship in circumstances of great difficulty and danger “. Three of the engineering officers were awarded the MBE and two Firemen recieved the BEM.

Dawson was made Master of Trinity House in 1964, a position he held until 1977. His medals, cap and ephemera were sold at auction in December 2022.

The Morosini was lost at sea on August 8th 1942 with all hands, to causes unknown. In a curious twist to the tale, Captain Dawson’s father, Captain James Dawson, was almost certainly the Captain James Dawson of Leith who was master of the steamer Fingal when she was sunk by a torpedo or mine in the North Sea in March 1915. Six of the crew lost their lives that day. James Dawson, father to the 5 year old William, did not abandon his ship until it slipped under the water but survived.

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.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

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.

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