1924 in Scotland

Events from the year 1924 in Scotland.

Incumbents

Secretary for Scotland and Keeper of the Great Seal – The Viscount Novar until 22 January; then William Adamson until 3 November; then Sir John Gilmour, Bt

Law officers

Lord Advocate – William Watson until February; then Hugh Pattison Macmillan until November; then William Watson
Solicitor General for Scotland – Frederick Thomson; then John Charles Fenton until November; then David Fleming

Judiciary

Events

22 January – Ramsay MacDonald becomes the first Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, leading a minority government.
28–30 January – Curling at the 1924 Winter Olympics: The gold medal is won by a Scottish team representing Great Britain in Chamonix.
April – The Scots Magazine resumes publication in Glasgow under this title.
3 June – Gleneagles Hotel, in Perthshire, is opened by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway.
11 July – Eric Liddell wins 400m gold at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris in a new world-record time of 47.6 seconds.
28 July – At Edinburgh Haymarket railway station, a passenger train ignores a stop signal and collides with a second train; five people are killed.
15 December – The Scottish county of Linlithgowshire is officially renamed West Lothian.
Duncansby Head lighthouse, engineered by David Alan Stevenson, is established.
The London and North Eastern Railway officially names its Flying Scotsman express train, although the 10.00 a.m. service from London King's Cross to Edinburgh Waverley over the East Coast Main Line has previously been known by this title, and has operated since 1862.
Annandale distillery closed.

Births

29 January – Bobby Combe, international footballer
7 March – Eduardo Paolozzi, artist
11 March – Anne Macaulay, musicologist, author and lecturer
20 March – James Barr, biblical scholar
28 March – Robert James, actor
3 April – Murray Dickie, tenor opera singer and director
13 April – Sammy Cox, international footballer
14 April – Robert Stewart, textile designer
15 April – Rikki Fulton, comedian
18 April – Buxton Orr, composer
20 May – Stan Paterson, glaciologist
25 May – Gordon Smith, football player, the only player to win a Scottish league championship with three clubs, Hibernian, Heart of Midlothian and Dundee
1 June – Rev. Professor Alexander Campbell Cheyne, scholar of Church history
9 June – Peter Heatly, diver
14 June
* James Black, pharmacologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
* John Grieve, actor
17 June – Archibald Hall, serial killer and thief
19 July – Sir James Fraser, surgeon
15 September – Piers Mackesy, military historian
6 October – Margaret Fulton, cookery writer in Australia

Deaths

3 February – Major General William Burney Bannerman, military surgeon
6 February – Sir John Stewart, 1st Baronet, of Fingask, whisky distiller
17 April – James Brown Craven, ecclesiastical historian
27 April – James Salmon, architect
22 June – William Macewen, pioneer in brain surgery
26 July – William Robert Ogilvie-Grant, ornithologist
4 September – Constance Gordon-Cumming, travel writer and painter
17 October – Hector C. Macpherson, writer and journalist
24 November – Peter Milne, missionary to the New Hebrides
31 December – James Gardiner, Liberal MP
John Henderson, painter

The arts

April – French-born critic Denis Saurat publishes "Le groupe de la Renaissance Écossaise" in Revue Anglo-Américaine bringing writers of the modern Scottish Renaissance to wider European notice.