An air raid on Leith of April 7th 1941 saw extensive damage done to a number of tenements, the Town Hall, the Library, the David Kilpatrick (DK) school and nursery, the Norwegian Seaman’s Lutheran Church, North Leith Parish Church, the LNER railway embankment and a signal box, and to many other properties in North Leith.

Three people were killed and 118 injured in the attack, the 10th most deadly air raid (by total casualties) in Scotland during WW2. Note, there was very limited and non-specific press reporting of the details and casualties of air raids during the war. Some took place retrospectively after the war, but understandably details were occasionally incorrect or overlooked. I have endeavoured to cross-reference everything below with the official records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and death registry entries on Scotland’s People.

Of those who lost their lives in the raid, one 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 Town hall. It was the landmine that fell nearby that claimed Smith’s life. He was fondly remembered as someone who freely helped the old people of his community in Leith, 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 the room in the Town Hall where we died in his memory and had 300 members and a waiting list of 200.

Also killed were 85 year old Jane Notman Young who died in her house at 21 North Junction Street, and a 19 year old apprentice Draughtsman and Home Guard volunteer, Kenneth James Anderson, who died in hospital the following morning after his house at 5 Largo Place was badly damaged in the blast. The block would later have to be demolished.

Mercifully the death to injury ratio was substantially lower than other comparable attacks on Scottish cities. Leith had been hit by two Luftmines – 500 or 1,000kg bombs that were intended for dropping in dock areas to attack shipping and descended slowly and silently on parachutes, exploding 25 seconds after landing on a timer.

Three hundred people in North Leith were rendered homeless due to the damage caused to tenements in the neighbourhood. £1,500 was allocated to Leith from the National Air Raid Distress Fund, which provided emergency clothing, bedding and canteens.

The target of this raid had been Clydebank where 20 died and 313 were injured on that same night. This was a follow up to the “Clydebank Blitz” of March 1941 but the raiders had become scattered and 12 targets across Scotland were hit that night, with a total of 49 killed and 456 injured.Most deaths that night were in Gretna, where a lone aircraft jettisoned its bombs and hit a Masonic Lodge, killing 22 and wounding 18. Other bombs were discarded as widely as Bankfoot and Stanley in Perthshire, Loch Nevis in Knoydart, Fife, Arbroath, and Greenlaw in the Borders.

The bombs damaged three principal public buildings of Leith; its Town Hall (and main public auditorium), its Library – both of which were hardly 10 years old – and the David Kilpatrick School. Here is a picture of the damage inside Leith Theatre at the time:

And of the library during post-war repairs:

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 auditoriums had to wait until 1961, a full 15 and 20 years after the bombs had fallen.

This bomb also damaged outbuildings of the DK school next door, which were in use as a nursery school. This site became known locally as the Bombies and was apparently where the pupils of the school would gather to sort out their differences with fists. It would not be replaced until much later, and was demolished, along with the school, in the 1980s.

The Luftmines that fell on Leith were extremely powerful weapons although not entirely suited to use on land. If they landed in water they would sink and be activated by the magnetic field of a ship passing overhead. As a measure of their power, on the night of 21st November 1939, the Royal Navy’s brand new 11,500 ton cruiser HMS Belfast detonated one in the Forth, which broke her keel, wrecked an engine and boiler room and seriously warped her hull – putting her out of the war for 2 years.

The press and population took to calling these weapons landmines. On the same night the railway to the Forth Bridge near Turnhouse and Braehead House in Cramond were hit by 34 x incendiary bombs, – 1kg aluminium tubes filled with Thermite which burns at ~2,500C and a far cry from the ineffective rope and tar incendiaries dropped on Edinburgh and Leith by a German Zepellin in 1916.

---

This was not the worst raid to hit Leith during the war however. In the previous summer, on the night of July 18th 1940, Six people were killed at number 8 George Street in North Leith (now known as North Fort Street), with a further fatality across the street at number 13. Those who lost their lives that night were:

• At 8 George Street
  • David Lennie Duff, a 33 year old basket maker and Lily Duff, a 23 year old biscuit packer, where they lived with their parents
  • Catherine Helliwell, 61
  • Catherine Fallon Baird, 74
  • Catherine Redpath, 41. She had been visiting and lived at 20 Gorgie Road
  • Robert Thomson, 25
• At 13 George Street, Jane (Jean) Bauld Rutherford aged 15 was killed when the bomb shelter she was in was hit. She lived at number 15 and was buried in Seafield Cemetery

The damage had been caused by two 250lb and six 50lb bombs intended for the Victoria Dock – not these are almost certainly incorrect weights, as all German bombs were classified in KG, and there were no weapons corresponding directly to these Imperial dimensions. One of these bombs hit the foot of Portland Place where a nearby tramcar was fortunate to miss getting a direct hit – which would surely have resulted in more fatalities.

Number 8 George Street, where 6 people had lost their lives, had to be demolished along with 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.

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 in Edinburgh and Leith caused directly by aerial bombing during the war. At least 5 further deaths were recorded as being due to “war operations” when people had heart attacks brought about by the shock of experiencing an air raid.

Date of Air Raid	Location	Fatalities
18th July 1940	8 &13 George Street, North Leith	7
22nd July 1940	Albert Dock, Leith	1
29th September 1940	25 & 27 Crewe Place, Granton	3
7th April 1941	North Leith	3
6th May 1941	23-27 Milton Crescent & 26-30 Niddrie Road, Duddingston	5
6th August 1942	35 Loaning Crescent, Craigentinny	2

On July 22nd 1940, an air raid on Leith Docks saw a 1,000lb bomb (again, the weight may be wrongly given) dropped near the Albert Dock, killing Robert Hume (33), a fireman with the Auxiliary Fire Service. On this night Mary Riach (65) of Woodbine Terrace and Catherine Leishman (68) of Meadowbank Crescent both died from heart failure during the raid, the official cause of death being put down to “war operations”.

On September 29th, a single stray bomb fell on the block containing 21 – 27 Crewe Place in Granton, killing the young McArthur children; brother and sister Morag Elizabeth (5) and Ronald Egbert (7). Their neighbour Charles Fortune Wilson (69) would die the next day in hospital. Another single stray bomb dropped earlier that evening hit a bonded whisky warehouse on Duff Street in Dalry and caused a fire so ferocious that the reflection was apparently reported as being seen by German aircrew flying over Middlesborough, c. 240km away, at the time.

The month after the raid on North Leith, on the night of 6th May 1941, five lives were lost in the suburban bungalows of Duddingston. One large bomb, three smaller ones and 100 incendiaries fell on Niddrie Road (now called Duddingston Park South) and Milton Crescent, as well as Jewel Cottages at around half past midnight. Leonard Arthur Wilde (39), an Air Raid Warden, was killed in his home at number 27 Milton Crescent, along with his neighbours Joseph Watson (40) of the Home Guard and William Dineley (37). Lilias Tait Waterston (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 for Edinburgh fell on Loaning Road in Craigentinny on the night of August 6th 1942, demolishing the Corporation tenement at no 35. Two people were killed; Elizabeth Veitch aged 13 at no. 35 and Robert Wright, aged 66, janitor of the Craigentinny Community Centre next door. A replacement tenement was built 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

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) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

---

_{These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur}