1917 in Scotland
overview of Scotland-related events during the year of 1917
Events from the year 1917 in Scotland.
Incumbents
Secretary for Scotland and Keeper of the Great Seal – Robert Munro
Law officers
Lord Advocate – James Avon Clyde
Solicitor General for Scotland – Thomas Brash Morison
Judiciary
Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord Justice General – Lord Strathclyde
Lord Justice Clerk – Lord Dickson
Chairman of the Scottish Land Court – Lord Kennedy
Events
3 January – Ratho rail crash in which North British Railway H class locomotive 874 Dunedin in charge of the Edinburgh to Glasgow express train is in collision with a light engine at Queensferry Junction, leaving 12 people dead and 46 seriously injured. The cause is found to be inadequate signalling procedures.
5 January – Stornoway Gazette first published.
29 January – Royal Navy steam-powered submarine HMS K13 sinks on trial in the Gare Loch with the loss of 32 men; 48 are rescued.
7 February – the Clyde-built Atlantic liner SS California (1907), homeward bound for Glasgow from New York, is torpedoed and sunk by SM U-85 approaching Ireland. 41 are killed but around 162 survivors return to Glasgow.
9 April–16 May – Battle of Arras on the Western Front (World War I) – 44 Scottish battalions advance alongside seven Canadian Scottish battalions.
1 May – Imperial German Navy Zeppelins L 43 and L 45 conduct reconnaissance patrols over the North Sea off the coast of Scotland, above the Firth of Forth and Aberdeen, respectively.
26 June – First branch of the Scottish Women's Rural Institutes founded in Longniddry.
“1917 in Scotland” enters the record as overview of Scotland-related events during the year of 1917. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Scotland, overview and Scotland-related can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16150157. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1917 and 1907.
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This entry incorporates text from “1917 in Scotland” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.