Carnage in the Great Fire of Edinburgh

Two hundred years ago today, Edinburgh’s Old Town was a notorious medieval tinderbox of towering tenements where families and businesses still powered by the naked flame were crammed together in mortal danger, living with the constant dread of catastrophe.

When fire took hold in an engraver’s workshop on that fateful November night, it sparked one of the most devastating conflagrations in the city’s history – lasting as long as the Great Fire of London two centuries earlier and proving more deadly.

By the time the blaze was finally extinguished after raging for more than four days, a large area of the capital’s historic centre had been razed to the ground.

13 people lay dead and hundreds more were left severely burned, injured and homeless.

Yet, unlike the London fire of 1666 – immortalised in a children’s nursery rhyme – few people are familiar with the terrible events which would come to be known as the Great Fire of Edinburgh.

Fewer still may be aware that this was the first big test of what is widely recognised as the world’s first organised municipal fire brigade, founded just weeks earlier by a young building surveyor, James Braidwood.

His ‘Pioneers’, as they were known, bravely battled their inexperience and the chaos and confusion of a terrifying blaze to underline how indispensable a properly drilled fire service would become to the safety of any modern society. 

What follows is a minute-by-minute account of how the tragedy unfolded:

James Braidwood statue in Parliament Square

Monday, November 15, 1824

9.55pm In the second-floor workshop of James Kirkwood’s copperplate engravers in Old Assembly Close, one of the Old Town’s many narrow medieval alleys leading off the Royal Mile, disaster is about to strike. 

A blistering hot pot of linseed oil, used in the preparation of copper plates for the maps and banknotes in which the firm specialises, bokep has boiled over and ignites a worktop piled high with papers. 

Within moments, the flames are raging out of control.

10pm The dreaded cry of ‘Fire!’ rings out across the night sky as terrified neighbours spot clouds of smoke billowing out of Kirkwood’s premises in the seven-storey building.

10.05pm Edinburgh’s new fire service swings into action, having been founded only weeks earlier by 24-year-old surveyor James Braidwood. 

Until now, tackling fires has been an unfocused affair with only the wealthy affording watchmen to raise the alarm and summon a crew to try to douse the flames.

Braidwood hopes to change that with the first fire brigade in the world – paid for by the city, free to the public. 

His uniformed brigade – among them carpenters, slaters, masons and mariners – arrives quickly in custom-built fire engines, but they are woefully under-prepared for the scale of devastation they are about to face. 

What awaits them is a true baptism of fire.

Princess Royal at 200th anniversary of city fire brigade

10.10pm Braidwood’s men suffer an early setback as the wells in the High Street are not natural but require refilling every morning from the reservoir on Castlehill. 

It means the firemen cannot find sufficient water to feed through their studded leather hoses.

It is an hour before enough water is brought and the engines are primed for action – a fateful delay during which the fire tightens its grip.

11pm The heat is intense and flames spread quickly on the freshening southwesterly breeze, engulfing the upper six storeys of Kirkwood’s building before leaping across the narrow close to two adjoining tenements. 

The speed of the fire is astonishing. People flee their homes in panic, throwing furniture and clothes into the street to try and save them from the flames. 

The firemen struggle to reach the source of the blaze due to the narrowness of the streets.

11.30pm From his home on Princes Street, eminent advocate Patrick Tytler has rushed out to help, fearing the illustrious Advocates Library in Parliament Square, one of the great working law libraries, is at risk. 

The library escapes unscathed, but Tytler later describes the raging blaze enveloping one building as like ‘a perfect hurricane’, with dense smoke and showers of burning debris hampering firefighters and volunteers alike.

‘Fire was sprouting from every window, while the wind, with a roar louder than the loudest thunder, was pelting against the doomed edifice,’ Tytler later notes.

Tuesday, November 16

Midnight Two hours in and the fire has spread so rapidly across the narrow streets that the whole of High Street’s south side is ablaze. 

Buildings damaged include the Stationery Warehouse in Assembly Close and Abraham Thomson’s bookbindery, which had just been rebuilt following an earlier fire. 

Painter Alexander Nasmyth and his 16-year-old son James are among a group of privileged people, including Sir Walter Scott, granted permission to climb the tower of St Giles’ Cathedral, from where they watch scores of chimneys set ablaze by flying sparks.

‘The puny efforts of the fire engines, summoned from all over the city and from neighbouring towns, could not quench the flames,’ recalls Naysmyth.

‘Whole ranges of lofty old houses were roaring with flames. Floors crashed and threw out embers, walls of narrow buildings acted like a huge funnel… and walls melted in the intense heat into a sort of glass.’

3am The fire is now raging out of control. The height of Edinburgh’s ancient tenements and the narrowness of its medieval streets continue to hamper efforts to quell the blaze.

A 109-year-old army veteran is carried to safety on the back of his daughter, herself clearly no spring chicken. Much of Old Fishmarket Close and Assembly Close have been reduced to ashes.

Embers rain down on other buildings in the High Street. The offices of the Edinburgh Courant, one of the city’s leading newspapers of the day, are quickly consumed.

5am The upper part of the façade of the Courant building collapses into the street.

Members of the North East Scotland Fire Heritage Trust before a commemorative service to mark 200 years of Scottish Fire and Rescue Service