Nostalgia: A city couple died and buildings were damaged as the hurricane of 1968 wreaked havoc

Published on Saturday 25 April 2009 10:10

FOUR decades may have passed since it tore through Edinburgh, leaving the city looking like a war zone, but the memories of the 1968 hurricane remain as strong as the winds on that fateful night.

Twenty Scots were killed and untold damage caused to homes, cars and even churches, when the hurricane hit on January 15, 1968.

The storm, in the early hours of the morning, hit Edinburgh hard – more than 300 emergency calls were made that night.

The impact of the hurricane on Edinburgh is often overlooked – Glasgow bore the brunt of the damage and deaths, with at least 100 people injured and 300 made homeless overnight – but the Capital endured its own share of damage and tragedy, as one of the storm's survivors told the News this week.

Elsie Greenan was just 21 when her parents, William, 54, and Elsie Anderson, 56, died as tons of masonry smashed through the roof of their home on Northcote Street, Dalry.

The tragedy, which also features on a BBC Four programme, Winds, to be screened on Monday, left the street looking like a "bombsite" with tiles, chimney pots and shattered masonry littering the road.

Emergency services worked round the clock to attend to the injured and make buildings safe again. Thirty four people – including ten children – had to be evacuated from their tenement in Balfour Street after a chimney stack fell through a skylight and tore away part of the internal stairs. Four families were trapped on the top floor for five hours before firemen could rescue them.

Hundreds of cars were damaged, with many completely crushed by incidents of falling masonry.

In Bruntsfield Gardens four cars were wrecked when two chimney heads crashed into the street, and Alexander Hay's garage in Burdiehouse had its roof ripped off, damaging four cars inside, while three outside were wrecked when a 10ft wall collapsed.

Carrick Knowe Primary School was also badly damaged, with two auxiliary classroom huts being blown right into the gardens of five houses in Carrick Knowe Avenue.

Work had to come to a stop on an extension to the Forth Port Authority's grain silo at Albert Dock, Leith, when a 120ft Bierrum tower crane buckled in the gale.

Not even religious buildings were safe from the storm. One of four small turrets around the main tower of the Abbey Church fell more than 60 feet and dug six inches into solid concrete in the grounds of the church, while plate glass windows at Burdiehouse Church were blown in.

And one of the pinnacles from the 80ft-high first tier of the Scott Monument crashed to the ground, smashing a floodlight and sinking 12 inches into the ground.

The storm was described as the fiercest to hit the country in living memory, and thankfully Scotland has seen nothing like it since.