1915 in Scotland

Events from the year 1915 in Scotland.

Incumbents

Secretary for Scotland and Keeper of the Great Seal – Thomas McKinnon Wood

Law officers

Judiciary

Events

26 January – Royal Navy King Edward VII-class battleship HMS Britannia runs aground on Inchkeith in the Firth of Forth and suffers considerable damage.
19 February – Royal Navy Acorn-class destroyer is wrecked on Start Point, Sanday, Orkney.
10 March – World War I: German submarine U-12 is hunted down by Royal Navy destroyers, and off the Firth of Forth and sunk with the loss of 19 of her crew, 10 being saved.
11 March – World War I: Armed merchantman is sunk off Galloway by German U-boat SM U-27 with the loss of around 200 of her crew, 26 being saved.
18 March – World War I: Royal Navy battleship sinks German submarine U-29 with all hands in the Pentland Firth by ramming her, the only time this tactic is known to have been successfully used by a battleship.
April – Glasgow becomes the first U.K. city to employ women conductors on public transport for the duration of the War.
25 April – World War I: Gallipoli Campaign – Carnoustie-born seaman George Samson wins the Victoria Cross for his actions under fire during the landing at Cape Helles.
22 May – Quintinshill rail disaster near Gretna Green: collision and fire kill 226, mostly Royal Scots soldiers, the UK's largest number of fatalities in a railway accident.
12 June – World War I: Oil tanker is torpedoed and sunk by German submarine U-17 off Montrose.
23 June – World War I: Two German submarines sink 17 vessels from the Lerwick fishing fleet.
3 July – World War I: 15th (Scottish) Infantry Division receives embarkation orders for France.
25 September – World War I: Battle of Loos opens: Piper Daniel Laidlaw leads 7th Battalion, The King's Own Scottish Borderers in the advance on the enemy trenches, an action for which he is awarded the Victoria Cross.
27 September & 13 October – World War I: Tillicoultry-born second cousins James Dalgleish Pollock and James Lennox Dawson each win the Victoria Cross for their actions at the Battle of the Hohenzollern Redoubt.
27 October – World War I: Glasgow revolutionary socialist anti-war protester John Maclean is arrested for the first time under the Defence of the Realm Act and dismissed from his job as a teacher.
8 November – Copinsay lighthouse in Orkney first illuminated.
27 November
* Government introduces legislation to restrict housing rents to their pre-war level following Glasgow rent strikes led by Mary Barbour.
* Auxiliary cruiser HMS Caribbean sinks off Cape Wrath in a storm; 15 are killed.
10 December – World War I: Douglas Haig is appointed to command the British Expeditionary Force.
30 December – Armoured cruiser capsizes at anchor in the Cromarty Firth as the result of an internal explosion in her ammunition stores; 390 sailors and some civilians are killed.
World War I – Khaki Balmoral bonnet, known as the tam o' shanter, introduced for wear by Scottish troops in the trenches of the Western Front.

Births

21 February – John Brown, international footballer
29 March – George Chisholm, jazz trombonist
8 May – John George Macleod, doctor of medicine and a writer of medical textbooks
6 September – Calum Maclean, folklorist
27 October – Robert Alexander Rankin, mathematician
6 November – David I. Masson, science-fiction writer and librarian
8 November – George Sutherland Fraser, poet and critic
15 November – David Stirling, mountaineer, World War II British Army officer, and the founder of the Special Air Service
17 December – Stuart Hood novelist, translator, television producer and Controller of BBC Television
28 December – Jack Milroy, comedian
31 December – Neil Paterson, writer and footballer
George Campbell Hay, poet
Ernest Marwick, writer noted for his writings on Orkney folklore and history

Deaths

13 January – Mary Slessor, missionary
6 March – Louisa Jordan, nurse
9 March – Sir James Donaldson classical scholar, and educational and theological writer
19 April – Sir Thomas Clouston, psychiatrist
23 April – Robert W. Sterling, poet
8 May – Walter Lyon, lawyer and war poet
7 July – Samuel Cockburn, physician, practising homeopathy
26 September – Keir Hardie, socialist, first chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party and pacifist
2 October – Lord Ninian Crichton-Stuart, British Army officer and Unionist politician
13 October – Charles Sorley, poet
22 October – Sir Andrew Noble, 1st Baronet, physicist

The arts

August-September – John Buchan's thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, set largely in Galloway immediately before the outbreak of war and introducing his hero Richard Hannay, is serialised in Blackwood's Magazine before being published in book form in October by William Blackwood and Sons in Edinburgh.
Violet Jacob's poetry collection Songs of Angus is published.
Sculptor James Pittendrigh Macgillivray's poetry collection Pro Patria is published.