Outside the Reading Room until 6th January there is a small display of leaflets dating from the 1960s,’70s and ‘80s from various Scottish activist groups.
Category: Local history
Scottish legal professions
The legal profession in Scotland has a long and distinguished history, with individuals employed as advocates, procurators, writers and notaries. The library has a wide range of publications that provide biographical and professional details of many of those who were employed in these professions. The Faculty of Advocates, created in 1532 and based in Edinburgh, is […]
Quintinshill Rail Disaster
On 22 May 1915 one of the worst railway accidents in Scotland happened at Quintinshill near Gretna Green in Dumfriesshire. Five trains were involved: a troop train carrying soldiers from the Leith Battalion of the Royal Scots, a local passenger train, a Glasgow express and two goods vehicles. Over 200 people were killed, with a […]
Bartholomew’s Large Plan of Edinburgh and Leith
In the summer of 1891, John Bartholomew & Co. launched a cartographic tour de force whose sheer magnificence continues to awe. Bartholomew’s Plan of the City of Edinburgh with Leith and Suburbs. Reduced from the Ordnance Survey and Revised to the Present Date by John Bartholomew, or the Large Plan of Edinburgh & Leith, as it’s more usually […]
Shady dealings in the whisky underworld
Robert Paterson Pattison and Walter Gilchrist Gray Pattison may sound suspiciously Gilbert & Sullivan but were in fact real life Victorian whisky and scandal merchants. Their Leith based dynasty fronted a murky world of fraud and embezzlement that when discovered, shocked all of Edinburgh and caused a sensation.