Much has been written on the enigmatic Portobello Marine Gardens pleasure park, seen below in its glory days.
Below is a particularly interesting and well illustrated thread about them shared on Twitter.
As a little addition to that story, in 1940 or thereabouts, the Scottish Motor Traction Company (universally known as SMT) bought part of the Marine Gardens site for use as a bus coach-building works. You can see it here on the northern half of the site in the 1962 Edinburgh Libraries photo. SMT were a vast organisation that spanned Scotland, running a significant share of the country’s public bus services, ran long distance coaches, briefly ran an airline, was involved in the car trade and had coach-building operations making bus and coach bodies.
If you zoom right in, you can read the ghost sign of “Marine Gardens Ballroom” on the front 23 years on from its closure.
An advert in the Sales by Auction listing in the Scotsman on 6th August 1942 noted “Monday 10th August at 11… Within the yard of Messrs. Adam Currie & Sons, ltd. West Saville Terrace. Ballroom and Restaurant Furnishings, Removed from The Marine Gardens, Portobello“.
In addition to the old ballroom, SMT greatly extended the site on behalf of the Admiralty, who paid for 87,200 square feet of modern factory buildings to be built to the west. They built some 60 Bedford OWB “Utility” bus bodies here (with no aluminium used and austere bodywork and finishes for economy’s sake) and also undertook work for Edinburgh Corporation. If you look closely at some older maps and aerial photos, you can see that the old racetrack was being used as a test track, and that there was a slipway into the Forth across the beach.
So why a slipway? Buses don’t need slipways… What were they doing in the factory? The answer is that it had been turned over to war work and they were building amphibious Landing Craft, the LCA or Landing Craft Assault, to be precise.
The LCA was a small, mass-produced craft which was used in the invasions of Sicily, Normandy, south France and Walcheren and the Scheldt, as well as across the far east. It was built largely from wood; a steam-bent keel of Canadian elm, magohany frames, double diagonal teak planking forming the hull shell over which some armour plating was bolted. This sort of construction suited small boat builders used to making wooden yachts, rowboats, fishing boats etc. Another sector it suited was bus builders, who were skilled in assembly techniques and were more than familiar with the Ford V8 bus engines that powered it.
Such was the importance of the LCA to the war effort, the Admiralty wouldn’t allow its designer – Thornycroft – to manage production and instead a huge network of subcontractors was organised; bus and coach builders, furniture & cabinet makers, joiners… Anyone who could work wood. I have anecdotal evidence that businesses around Portobello were involved in producing teak body parts, which were taken to Marine Gardens for assembly onto the hull frames. The largely complete LCAs were launched into the Forth and towed to a shipyard (probably up the coast to Granton or Bo’ness, east to Cockenzie or across the Forth to Burntisland and St. Monans) for final fitting out. About 2,000 LCAs were built across hundreds of assembly yards and thousands of subcontractors and although I can’t find any specifics about Portobello’s contribution by the time of Operation Overlord in June 1944, some 60 a month were being turned out.
I haven’t yet found any further details about Marine Gardens during the war years – they may also have been assembling military trucks – but a little insight can be found on Canmore: architects drawings for air raid shelters and emergency decontamination showers (a bucket on a pulley and string!). Note extent of female v. male facilities indicating the wartime workforce composition.
After the war, SMT retained about half of the site based on the old Ballroom as its bus works. The government-financed factory was put up for disposal and in 1947 was allocated to Hayward Tyler Ltd. to boild oil pumps and to Graham Enock Ltd. to build milking, milk bottling and bottle washing machinery. SMT rebuilt their works in 1962 and shortly thereafter they were joined by the Edinburgh Corporation Transport’s Marine Garage on the site next door, which had been the Marine Gardens football and speedway stadium.
SMT became part of the state-owned Scottish Bus Group, with its organisation restructured into area bus operating companies, trading as Eastern Scottish in these parts. Eastern was reorganised in 1985 ahead of deregulation of the industry in 1986. Marine Works was placed into an engineering subsidiary called SBG Engineering Ltd. They did work for the various SBG companies as well as contracting, including body panel and spray painting work for British Rail’s nearby Craigentinny depot. When the privatisation of the Scottish Bus Group was planned in 1989, it was decided that SBG Engineering (which also had major works in Motherwell, Kilmarnock, Kirkcaldy and Inverness) was not included, and Motherwell and Marine Gardens were unceremoniously shut down.
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