Böcker av Walter Burt

A fascinating pictorial history of the local area of Dunfermline through the sixties, seventies and eighties.

Kirkcaldy, long known as the Lang Toun, is the biggest town in Fife. Situated on the north coast of the Firth of Forth, it began to develop as a trading port in the sixteenth century, developing further around salt, coal mining and nail making. However, it was the linoleum industry that had the biggest impact on Kirkcaldy; first brought to the town by Sir Michael Nairn in 1877, it was a major industry there until the mid-1960s. The birthplace of Adam Smith, the economist and author of The Wealth of Nations, and of influential architect Robert Adam, home of crime writer Val McDermid and constituency of Gordon Brown, Kirkcaldy is now a major service centre for the local area. In this book, Walter Burt takes a look at the history of the town through a collection of old images, with modern equivalents to show the change that has taken place.

The Dundee & District Tramways Company began operating a service using a horse tram on 30 August 1877. In 1885, steam traction was introduced, and between 1900 and 1902 the system was electrified, reaching as far as Broughty Ferry and Monifeith at its height. In 1899 the company had become Dundee City Tramways, and in October 1956 the tram system was closed; all the services were now run using the motor buses, which had originally been introduced in 1922. Dundee Corporation Transport and its successors have run the buses in the city ever since. In this book, transport historian Walter Burt looks at the trams and buses used by these companies, and tells the story of transport in Dundee through the vehicles that used to work its streets in a collection of images that will bring back memories of Dundee from times past.

Kirkcaldy Corporation Tramways began to operate an electric tram service in Kirkcaldy in 1903, connecting with the Wemyss and District Tramways Company service to Leven, further up the Fife coast, which began in 1906. In 1928 Walter Alexander & Sons introduced a motor bus service in direct competition with the trams, as a result of which the tramways closed at the start of the 1930s. Following on from that, Alexanders' buses operated services in Kirkcaldy and central Fife until they were absorbed into the Scottish Bus Group. Using a mixture of colour and black and white images, Walter Burt, himself a bus driver based in Fife, takes us through the history of tram and bus services in Kirkcaldy and the surrounding area up to the present day, from Kirkcaldy Corporation Tramways and Walter Alexander through to Stagecoach Fife.

With the coming of the naval arms race with Germany, in 1903 the Admiralty decided to establish a naval base and dockyard at Rosyth, taking advantage of deep tidal water there. Construction work started in 1909 and the dockyard was finished in 1916, when the pre-Dreadnought HMS Zealandia entered dry dock there. The yard closed in 1925, reopening in 1938 when relations with Germany began to deteriorate again and serving throughout the Second World War. During the Cold War, Rosyth was used to refit conventional and Polaris nuclear-armed submarines as well as other warships. In 1997 Rosyth was acquired by Babcock International, becoming the first privatised naval dockyard in Britain, and is now the site where the Royal Navy's two new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers are being assembled. In this book, published in the dockyard's centennial year, Walter Burt takes us through the history of Rosyth dockyard and naval base.