From John Gray Centre

This month’s photos have been generously supplied by Fran Woodrow from the John Gray Centre Archives in Haddington. They all represent some aspect of Dunbar’s history.

Belhaven Hill School was founded in 1923 in a building on Belhaven Hill which was formerly known as Winterfield House as it was the “big hoose” for Winterfield Mains farm.

There are many photos and postcards of Dunbar Swimming Pool (good photos) or Dunbar Swimming Pond as it was also known. The person in charge of the pool was entitled Pondmaster. This photo is unusual in that it shows the roof of the pool and people sunbathing on it. The enlarged photo also shows the diving boards in front of the Doo Rock, with the castle and harbour behind. This meant that the Dunbar pool was one of the most scenic in Scotland. It was also, as many gallus Glaswegians who dived headlong into the deep end before testing the water, one of the coldest, as the sea water was only filtered and not – like North Berwick pool (good photos) – heated.

This photo of Dunbar High Street in 1953 is one of the many shots of the High Street but this is the only photo that Jim Herring has seen with George Low & Son’s van. There is a chapter in Dunbar in the 1950s on George Low’s business and might have been included. The St George Hotel is next to the van and this Canmore site states “The St George Hotel, first built in 1625, was rebuilt in 1826. Where it had once been the resting place of mail-coaches which ran between Edinburgh and Berwick, it now became a commodious holiday residence”. Next to the hotel is A T Smith’s grocer and wine merchant’s shop, which was famous for its Belfast Ham. In the 1950s and 1960s, many visitors to Dunbar enjoyed Mr Smith’s ham when eating at the St George Hotel.

This photo shows the camping and caravan site at Barns Ness (geology) and you can see the lighthouse  (history) in the background. The site was later expanded and upgraded with a building (and shop?) at the entrance and better facilities for caravans in particular. You can tell by the vintage of the cars and the combi van in the foreground that the photo was taken in the 1960s. The people in the photo could definitely not have imagined that 15 years later, if they looked to the southeast, that they would see the enormous Torness Power Station looming on the landscape.