1945 in Scotland
overview of Scotland-related events during the year of 1945
Events from the year 1945 in Scotland.
Incumbents
Secretary of State for Scotland and Keeper of the Great Seal – Tom Johnston until 23 May; then The Earl of Rosebery until 26 July; then vacant until 3 August; then Joseph Westwood
Law officers
Lord Advocate – James Reid until August; then George Reid Thomson
Solicitor General for Scotland – Sir David King Murray until September; then Daniel Blades
Judiciary
Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord Justice General – Lord Normand
Lord Justice Clerk – Lord Cooper
Chairman of the Scottish Land Court – Lord Gibson
Events
March – Bruce Report (First Planning Report to the Highways and Planning Committee of the Corporation of the City of Glasgow) published, proposing massive regeneration and rebuilding in central Glasgow.
13 April – the Motherwell by-election results in the first Scottish National Party Member of Parliament, Robert McIntyre, being elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom after taking the seat from Labour.
14 April – German submarine U-1206 sinks off Peterhead.
7 May – at 23:00 the SS Avondale Park is torpedoed and sunk by German submarine U-2336 off the Firth of Forth with two killed, the last British-flagged merchant ship lost to German action.
8 May – V-E Day is celebrated throughout the U.K.
10 May – German U-boats begin to surrender at Loch Eriboll.
12 May – official inauguration of Churchill Barriers on Orkney.
20 May – 30 surrendered German U-boats are escorted into Kyle of Lochalsh from Loch Eriboll for onward movement to Londonderry Port.
30 May–6 June – 64 surrendered German U-boats from Norway are processed at Scapa Flow for onward movement to Londonderry Port or Cairnryan. Until 30 June, U-boats are escorted directly to these ports from Norway and Germany via the Pentland Firth.
“1945 in Scotland” enters the record as overview of Scotland-related events during the year of 1945. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Scotland, overview and Scotland-related can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1945 in Scotland” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Scotland, overview and Scotland-related provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16150400. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1945 and 1206.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “1945 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.