The Marine Gardens

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On the afternoon of 2 March 1945, Mr. A.F. Palmer Phillips, the Sales Director of Vauxhall Motors Ltd and ex president of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders Ltd performed the ceremony of launching two landing craft at the SMT war construction factory at the Marine Gardens.

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A fortnight later women welders were chosen by their fellow employees at the Marine Gardens, to launch two landing craft. The ceremony was performed by Miss Margaret Horner, 4 Wellington Place, Joppa, a former waitress at the Liberton Golf Club and Mrs. Jean Mathieson, 16 Craigmillar Castle Terrace, wife of an RAF man.

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In the immediate aftermath of the war the Marine Gardens played its part in the reconstruction.

There was a desperate need for housing and the Government imported prefabricated timber houses from Sweden. The first were brought over from Sweden to Leith by the steamer Porkel on 22 February 1946. She was the first of five or six vessels which were expected at the port within the next week or two.

Altogether 200 houses were delivered. They were stored under cover in the Marine Gardens and there the sections, which were all code numbered, were sorted out ready for distribution to the various sites. The houses were of one storey and two storey types.

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The last official event at the Marine Gardens took place on 21 December 1949 when a prototype of a mechanised landing craft built during the war and launched at the Gardens in November 1944 by the then Lady Provost, Miss Diana Falconer, was presented by Mr. C. Cambage, General Manager SMT to Mr. D. McIntyre V.C., Under Secretary of the Ministry of Works.

The craft was engined with two high power petrol Packard motors and was built to carry two small fighting tanks or one large one, complete with infantry platoon.

The prototype was placed beside a model of a landing craft used in the Napoleonic wars in the Scottish United Services Museum, Edinburgh Castle.


After this, there are no further references to the Marine Gardens in the Scotsman Archive.