1915 in Scotland

Incumbents

• Monarch – George V
• Secretary for Scotland and Keeper of the Great Seal – Thomas McKinnon Wood

  Law officers

• Lord Advocate – Robert Munro
• 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 Kingsburgh, then Lord Dickson
• Chairman of the Scottish Land Court – Lord Kennedy

  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 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
• 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, practicing 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.