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IN PEACE AND WAR

Section headings

Wartime / Expanding horizons
The declaration of war / Evacuation
The blackout / LDV (Local Defence Volunteers) warden
Hazards caused by the blackout
Gas mask issue
Air raid precautions - shelters, baffle walls and sandbags / The ‘watchie’
Fire precautions
Sinking of the Athenia / The phoney war
May 1940 - apprehension deepens again
Anti-aircraft (ack-ack) defences and the Searchlights/barrage balloons the phonetic alphabet / shrapnel
The first bombs
The makeshift school air-raid shelter
A search for shrapnel
Bombs on Hillington
Plane spotting / HMS Sussex incident
The night of 13th March 1941 - the Linthouse
landmine
Elderpark barrage balloon / An expedition to Knightswood
F.I.D.O. / Hand-grenade in the dustbin
Military vehicles/Poles in fields
VE and VJ celebrations

WARTIME, including a story of the Clydeside blitz 13/14 March 1941
The final paragraph of my first volume of reminiscences, entitled A GOVAN CHILDHOOD - the 1930s, published in 1993 by John Donald of Edinburgh, referred to Prime Minster Neville Chamberlain's constant outdoor companion, his umbrella. At that time a popular song, The Umbrella Man, was heard regularly on the wireless. It featured an itinerant umbrella repair man who went round the streets of a town calling out his trade. Part of the chorus was - ‘Any umb(e)rellas, Any umb(e)rellas, To mend today’, and was reputed to have been a tribute, or scornful reference more likely, to the effect he was creating in his negotiations with Hitler for peace. As the words imply, the song was about repairing broken umbrellas and that some would inevitably be beyond repair. Now, the implication was that his task was futile and failure inevitable.

EXPANDING HORIZONS
Towards the end of the 1930s at the age of nine I was beginning to take an interest in the wider world through newspapers and radio. What is related in this section of personal experiences of the war was absorbed in the ordinary course of life at home, at school and with pals in the street, and overhearing remarks and conversations of adults. Radio was of course the main source of information, much as television is today. But the visual effect of cinema newsreels were the most powerful if somewhat less often encountered of the media, visits to the cinema on average being once or twice a week. A general sense of apprehension among people about war breaking out became apparent at the time I returned home from a five month stay hospital in 1937. Initially muted, it gradually it became all pervasive, increasing in intensity until the event itself arrived as a baleful but intangible presence.

THE DECLARATION
It came in a crescendo of announcements on radio and in the press, in the form of bulletins, instructions, advice, and warnings. Also, in the cinemas there were 'shorts', brief information films issued by the government, about what to do and what not to do in any possible situation that may arise, from air-raids and gas attacks to invasion. They went on at interminable length about new rules and regulations being rushed through Parliament to take care of every kind of event imaginable. Familiar sounds were no longer heard; church bells were silenced; they were only to be as a warning of invasion. Whistles, tube type used by the police as well as the rattling pea type, were to warn of gas attack, while hand bells and football ricketys were only to be used as an indicator of some kind of alarm which escapes me now. Works horns, used to indicate starting, lunch breaks, and stopping times, steam operated like those fitted to ships’ funnels, were briefly silenced but were soon brought back into use to maintain production.

Because of the strategic importance of the local industry, shipbuilding and heavy engineering, the inhapitants of our district were well aware that it would be a high priority target for German bombs. Among young folk and less worldly-wise adults, a feeling akin almost to agoraphobia was induced, with people constantly glancing at the sky as if expecting something to fall on them at any moment. It dominated every conversation, and the sound of a plane, any plane, caused apprehension. Voices on the radio expounded initially on the possibility of war, then the definite threat and its imminent arrival, in at times gloomy and depressing tones, at others rather hysterical. Faintly remembered is the event on that Sunday the 3rd of September, listening to Chamberlain's 11am broadcast informing the country we were at war. The main impression for juveniles was, this must be in deadly earnest because normally nothing was allowed to disturb the peace and quiet of Sunday.

My pals and I were hoping for something exciting to happen, and the sooner the better. For most of us, in our immaturity a war seemed as good a diversion from ordinary everyday life as anything else. Some fear was generated by stories on the wireless, and of fleeting glimpses on cinema newsreels, of German dive bombers dropping bombs on and machine-gunning defenceless women and children in Spain and then Poland, but this seemed light years away. It was as if these scenes were made up for entertainment, like the rest of the programme. The feeling among most people, however, was that surely our own government and military authorities would have some effective way of dealing with any threat.

For a couple of years there had been discussion and arguments about the need for, and reluctance of, the government to spend money the country could ill afford on defence facilities and armaments. But as the threat became more ominous and the situation dire, work on warships, planes, military vehicles and equipment began in earnest. Reading today in various historical accounts of the true state of the country at the time, with the lack of resources and bad initial organisation leading to incredible waste of much of what there was in material and effort, it seems a miracle must have occurred for the outcome at the end of six years to turn out as it did. In the event, the miracle happened when America joined in on our side.

EVACUATION
Nearer home, the evacuation of women and children was affecting many families and causing turmoil among those who made up their mind to go, while others who decided to stay wondered if they would regret it. During the summer of 1939 large groups of children from every school, accompanied by a few mothers, teachers and officials, were transported by special trains to designated areas well away from cities and boarded with anyone willing to take them in. Different schools were directed to particular regions, with my school compliment, St. Constantine's in Govan, being allocated to the Kirkcudbright/Creetown district area in south west Scotland. The operation was organised by the school authorities, and boarding fees were paid by the government to householders providing accommodation, for which I think they received 3/6 or 4/- (17 or 20 pence) per week per child. While the evacuation was voluntary, a certain amount of pressure was used to persuade families to go, with the suggestion that it was the best way to avoid being injured or killed if or when the air raids began.

As an only child at the time, there is no recollection of any discussion between my mother and father on whether or not the opportunity should be taken up; in later years it seemed to me that it was simply ignored. But I can recall a personal conflict of emotions between fear of being separated from either or both parents, and a powerful urge which was developing to travel and see new places. But wariness caused me to refrain from inquiring too closely about their intention if the subject came up, so I decided to be like Asquith and 'wait and see'. To a lesser extent the turmoil affected even those who remained behind, because it meant that the reduced numbers and teachers remaining caused much reorganisation of the school curriculum. For years after it remained unclear whether a great adventure had been missed or if I was in fact fortunate.

Soon evacuees began to return home with disturbing stories of the accommodation they found themselves in, such as dirty houses, martinet landladies, poor food and other unpleasant conditions. Others, however, found a virtual paradise compared with their own home, making friends and enthusiastically taking to life in the country, village, or small town. Some people made a lifelong commitment to their new ‘temporary’ home, and even at this time of writing, after more than sixty years keep in touch with locals they first met at this time. Indeed one or two either remained there, or over the years moved to live permanently at the place to which they had been evacuated. It is recalled that over half of St. Constantine's school's population took part in the initial move, but most returned within a few weeks, with the majority of the rest gradually coming back. Of course the reason for the operation, the threat of air raids, did not happen immediately, and it was partly this that accounted for the drift back. Among my local group of friends, a few went away for a while, but all returned fairly soon so that the local squad of about a dozen chums was back to full strength by the following spring.

THE BLACKOUT
The next event to affect us was setting up the blackout. A national inspection was organised to make sure everyone knew what was required, but I am not sure when it occurred; it may have been before war was declared. Every householder, and occupiers of all other premises, were required to comply with a regulation designed to ensure that no light showed anywhere from domestic habitation or workplace at night. The authorities arranged that after dark around 8pm on a particular evening, an inspection would be made of all premises. The blackout had to be total. Air-raid wardens allocated to a district were required to go round advising people whether their blinds and curtains were suitable. In our case a combination of blinds and curtains in the kitchen were felt to be more than adequate there, but my mother had hung blue curtains of a rather thin material in the bed room, which were probably cheaper quality winter weight that in her estimation, with a slight element of doubt, were of sufficient density to satisfy the inspector. Our turn came early in the gathering gloom of an evening probably in August.

THE WARDEN
I lived with my parents ‘up a (common) close’ on the top floor of a three-storey tenement containing twelve houses, three on each landing, in a two apartment known as a ‘room and kitchen’. Leaving the lights switched on and the outer door open, the three of us went downstairs for the initial inspection to see how our windows looked from outside. All around, other householders stood about in groups in streets and back courts, studying their own and other windows and offering advice to each other on whether or not their efforts were likely to be acceptable. Our house was what was known as a ‘through-and-through, in which the kitchen window overlooked the back-court and the bedroom looked out on the street. Viewed from the back court our kitchen window appeared to be quite satisfactory with not a glimmer showing, so we walked through the close into the street, but looking up at the room window, as expected the element of the lightbulb could be seen shining faintly through the curtain material. My parents talked about this for a little while and discussed it with others, most of whom displayed a kind of forced optimism. But it was obvious that more light was showing in our bedroom than from the windows of the other houses, a situation which would become more prominent as the darkness deepened. Then, as we made comparisons and gazed up anxiously while trying to convince each other that the arrangement would do, the light went out!

We looked around in bemusement, each checking that the other two were present, that one of us hadn't slipped off from among the crowd and gone up to the house un-noticed. We were gripped with mounting consternation and puzzled apprehension in case someone was in the house. Either that or the light bulb had come to the end of its life. Abruptly the three of us rushed into the close and up the stairs, with each full of trepidation and wondering if we were being burgled, for there was no other explanation anyone could think of. Half way up the stairs we met a gentleman descending. He was formally dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and collar and tie, and wearing a tin hat (steel helmet). He held a clip-board, and slung over his shoulder was a gas-mask in its khaki satchel. An upper arm displayed a black armband with LDV (Local Defence Volunteers) in white letters. This civil defence organisation was formed in 1935, but was soon to become ARP (Air Raid Precautions). Dad angrily demanded to know if he had been in our house on the top flat? The man said reasonably that he had had to go in to put the light off for it was breaking the regulations. A brisk argument ensued on the stairs, with Dad saying things like 'You've no business entering peoples houses, and the warden making it clear that under the new regulations he was required to do just that if he thought it necessary. For a time we could not understand how he got up the stairs without us seeing him, until it was realised that he must have entered the close from the street and gone straight up the stairs when we were in the back court.

Obviously the blue curtains would not do, so mum had to search the shops for a suitable replacement. In doing so she encountered for the first time something that was to become all too common during the ensuing years; shortage of necessities formerly freely available. This was of course due to there being so many other people having been caught out needing to replace unsuitable curtains, which caused an overwhelming demand. If the exercise took place in spring of ‘39 then the urgency was less than it might otherwise have been, but some time passed before she was able to acquire material of the correct density. It was reported in the press that many miles of blackout curtain material had been sold by stores all over the country in the weeks following the inspection. In the meantime we were not entirely free from apprehension in case the warden should come back to recheck, because as autumn approached the light was needed in the room. Every establishment was affected, shops, hospitals, offices and factories. In industrial premises with large areas of glass, particularly rooflights, the only treatment feasible was to paint them over which meant them having to burn their lights continuously.
HAZARDS CAUSED BY THE BLACKOUT
Soon, other events connected with the black-out changed the environment in a way that led to danger at night. After the declaration of war and as the dark nights drew in, it was extended more strictly to the streets than before. Street lights were masked in such a way that what little illumination did escape shone straight down on the roadway as a small diffused pool of light. Vehicle sidelights of the period in normal times times were only a tiny unit on either side on top of the front mudguards, and an even smaller single red one at the rear. These were modified by having black discs with halfpenny size holes installed behind the lens. The equally inefficient headlights of the time were covered with an overall mask having a horizontally projecting section with slits on its front face, like a radiator grill. angled down. This meant that only a small section of road immediately in front of the vehicle received dim illumination. For the first six months of the war there were more road fatalities than were caused by enemy action. Recent tv docu/dramas depicting conditions during the second world war are mainly successful in portraying details, but there is one aspect of vehicle lights they continually get wrong. This is, with the headlight hoods correctly modelled, they have omitted to do the same with the side-lights.

Non-domestic lighting, including tenement stair-cases was shaded to prevent it reaching stair windows and close entrances. With the tramcars and buses, the top half of all windows on both decks were painted black. Destination screens remained lightless, with the large but un-illuminated service number, which was introduced on the Glasgow trams only the previous year, being the only indication in the almost pitch darkness as to which service the vehicle was on. Trams in particular were severely affected because their power supply was external, taken from the overhead wire, which gave them rather better lighting than buses. They had up to half their light bulbs removed and the remainder were masked.

The greatly reduced nightime external artificial light produced an unusual effect outdoors. Occasionally on clear nights of full moon it was possible to read a newspaper in the street, a phenomenon town bred people were unaware of, but one country folk were quite familiar with. When the air-raids began, periods of full moon caused deep apprehension, for it was felt that if the bombers came over all the efforts of the blackout would be fruitless. The whole country would be laid out for them to take their pick of the best targets, which everybody living in industrial or around military areas assumed would be their district. This introduced the term 'bombers moon'. Nobody seemed to consider that enemy aircraft would be at a similar disadvantage, and be rendered visible to the defending anti-aircraft batteries and fighter planes. But few people realised that at this early stage of the war these defences were few and far between.

The steps taken to counter the greatly increased number road fatalities was by the use of white paint. In the initial rush of enthusiasm for the idea whitewash was used, applied liberally as broad horizontal strips to street furniture such as lamp-posts and trees, but as an additional measure street lighting was switched off during air-raid alerts. The corners of buildings, street signs, and electrical junction and pillar boxes, were also give horizontal white strips treatment, but most important of all, broken lines were applied along kerbs on streets in busy districts where the greatest danger lay on the darkest foggiest nights. In some places similar lines were laid down as guides over routes in wide open spaces where a lot of people walked. But whitewash was soon found to be extremely inefficient as it was short lived: the first shower of rain washed it away. Oil based paint was used subsequently which was more durable but still subject to weathering, wear and tear, and getting covered with dirt so that it had to be re-done regularly. I could be wrong in this, but a later refinement here was paint made luminous by the addition of radium long before its dangers became known, which may have been used only in areas of greatest hazard.

Previous to this I had been given my first wrist watch, a cheap thing which didn't last long fortunately. It had what was imagined to be an example of the latest scientific discovery; the numbers on the dial and the hands were treated with luminous paint. Normally, the luminosity was weak, but if its face was held up to an electric light-bulb for a time the radium could be made to glow brightly for a brief period. I remember experimenting with it in the dark, and when it was at its brightest holding it up close to my face to examine the ghostly green glow, and trying to make it shine on other surfaces like that of the Dandy or Beano comic I had smuggled into bed.

THE GAS MASKS ISSUE
The gas mask distrubution was the next major operation undertaken by the authorities during the early days of the war. All supplies were kept at a central point in each district, usually in a local authority, church, or Salvation Army, hall, where every member of the population were supposed to to attend to collect their respirator. These were issued in cumbersome individual corrugated stiffened cardboard cartons, roughly of an eight or nine inch cube size, having a single-leaf flip up lid and a loop of carrying string which passed through the box of sufficient length to go over a shoulder. It was supposed to be carried with you wherever you went, which quickly made it the bane of everyone’s existence. To avoid total disintegration the box had to be kept dry, which caused much difficulty in wet weather, until waterproof covers were made available, for purchase of course.

After a time the string also was continually having to be knotted after breaking, which of course shortened the loop, and that item, string, became just another of many everyday things in short supply. Initially, corners of the boxes were sharp which caused friction by inconsiderate carriers barging about in a crowd, especially in shops. Workers and school pupils were for a time subjected to regular inspections on the premises, to check they had brought their mask. Also, there were practice try-ons during simulated alerts. There were even spot checks in the street by police and officious wardens. At the height of the invasion scare and during the period of the blitz, anyone spotted without their mask was liable to be pulled up. It occurrs to me now to wonder if they came in different sizes?

There seemed to have been two different types of masks issued, both of which when worn, were held in place by adjustable elasticated straps running over the top and round the sides to meet at the back of the head. Those in red rubber, with twin round glass eyepieces, mainly belonged to members of the forces or civil defence services, although a few private individuals had them. This type had a corrugated hose leading from the mask to the filters which were carried in a satchel. The most common kind supplied to the vast majority, one of which I had, was of black rubber, with a single curved celluloid eyepiece. Wearing it took a bit of getting used to, and I can sympathise with anyone suffering from claustrophobia, who certainly would only be able to tolerate in dire emergency. Breathing through it took a little extra effort, while exhaling caused a rude noise as pressure built up, forcing some air to escape at the point of least resistance at the cheeks. There was some envy of those with red masks among my pals, with the usual suspicion that what others had that was different might be better. But this was tempered by the thought that while they looked like frogs or toads wearing goggles, we looked like more exotic lizards. Wearers of this standard single eyepiece issue were open to ridicule as bearing a resemblance to a horse with the lower half of its face in a feed-bag.

Some time after the general issue, it was announced that a modification was required to all standard respirators, so they had to be returned to the local ARP post. The original filter was contained, as part of the mask, in a round tin-can type black metal canister, about inches in depth and four across. Respiration passed through the elements contained in the canister, which looked like white lint, via many small holes in the flat ends. The modification took the form of an addition, a similar, slightly deeper, canister which was simply taped on to the original with heavy duty sticky tape, a one minute operation. I can't recall whether this modification was made necessary because of a fault in design or manufacture, or to combat a then recent development in the form of warfare the mask was supposed to protect against.

Photographs of mask wearers can be dated to a particular wartime period by spotting whether the extra filter is visible. Not long before the time of the extra filter addition, I had been presented with a most convenient carrying case made of Rexene, a waterproof pre-plastic type material, with strap, flap and press-stud fastening, in which the mask was a perfect fit and much easier to carry. But the extra filter caused immense frustration, because the mask would no longer allow the case lid to close. In the months following the blitz urgings to carry your mask gradually abated, and quite soon after they were left to gather dust at home.

AIR-RAID PRECAUTIONS: SHELTERS, BAFFLE WALLS and SANDBAGS.
Sandbags became another very common sight. Important buildings such as police stations, ARP posts, hospitals, banks, and all establishments connected with the war effort had them built to about halfway up the windows. ARP posts in particular had them piled up in front, laid in neat layers interlocked like brickwork, often three or four deep, and buttressed along the frontages up to sometimes a quite remarkable height. Some tenement close entrances were treated in this way also, probably those having no other protection for people in the form of nearby shelters, or where no bracing had been installed within. Air raid shelters, with thick brick walls and mainly flat concrete roofs, were constructed in all built up areas. Except for the entrances and tiny air vents, they were plain and featureless, and in places where there was no space for them, tenement closes were strengthened with timber or steel bracing. At the eastern end of Skipness Drive, between Hutton Drive and Drive Road, narrow shelters were built along the centre of the street, while the closes at the western end, where we lived, were braced with timber.

On the opposite side of the tenement block from us, on the north face fronting Govan Road, brick-built shelters were put up close to the dikes in four back courts. These were of a different design from most others, in that each had four parallel compartments which were roofed individually with curved precast concrete sections forming a series of long almost semi-circular arches. During their construction a curious event occurred. The area, which had remained fenced off by the normal back court dividing railings, had been turned into a barricaded off building site for the duration of the work. Only now I wonder what the tenants of the closes affected, who had lost two-thirds of their drying green space, coped with the inconvenience. Perhaps they were able to come to an arrangement with the tenants in adjacent closes to share their drying spaces.

THE WATCHIE
On this occasion the shelter walls had been completed to roof height, leaving the tops of the walls near enough as an extension of the dikes. They were lower than and stood back a little from the dike roofs, which of course presented a challenging leap to more adventurous dike climbing boys. A watchman, men who occupy this position today are known as security guards!, was on duty between work finishing and starting times. He had the normal small low wooden framed tarpaulin covered shelter, and brazier with a supply of coke (not what's known as Coke today, Coca-Cola, but coal processed as what later came to be know as smokeless fuel). Of course watchmen sometimes became bored, and to pass time would wander off the site when things seemed quiet. And this is what happened here on one occasion in early evening. We had a grand-stand view of the incident from our top floor kitchen window.

Soon after the watchie ambled off, a group of my pals appeared and began to play on the dikes. After a time the bolder ones, realising he was absent, began to try the new jumps formed by the uncompleted shelter walls. Suddenly the watchie reappeared through a close about two back-courts away from where they were playing, but his field of vision was restricted by the new construction. He nevertheless knew from the sounds of a squad of children enjoying themselves, that they must be playing on what he was supposed to be guarding. Giving a roar, he stooped and lifted a half brick and hurried to the open space at the rear near the dikes, from where he could see the length of the site across the intervening courts. Alerted by the shout the boys ran as fast as they dared along the walls, on which the recently laid bricks were beginning to work loose and wobble, away from his apparent position, which took them to a rear, higher wall of an adjacent dike. (The dykes were the wash-houses and middens for each close in the back-courts, at the centre of the totally enclosed tenement block.)

The lads were getting clear by scrambling onto the wash-houses, and the last one, Gus Cook I think it was, had jumped across to the dike, on which, being higher, he had to land on the edge resting on his hands with arms braced vertically and legs dangling before scrambling up. At that instant the watchie came in sight of him from at a distance of about fifty feet, but the railings separating the courts prevented him from giving chase, for they were always elderly retired men and unable to leap across as a younger one might have done. Uttering threats and imprecations, the man drew back his arm and threw the half brick with the force and accuracy of a baseball pitcher, and in the instant after Gus drew his feet up, it struck the wall on the spot where they had been but a second before with such force that it shattered. Gus was able to escape, but the incident was talked about with awe for years after. The accuracy, or luck, of the throw, and the good fortune of Gus was remarkable, for if that missile had struck home it would surely have maimed him for life.

In areas of what was then modern council housing of four-in-a-block type, finding space to provide communal shelters at a convenient distance would have been difficult, so a special type called the Anderson Shelter was one of two constructed. The other was of course a smaller version of the surface brick-built type. One of the latter occupied part of the back green of the Corporation house we were allocated in Old Pollok, when we moved there in 1945; it survived until the 1960s and was used by Dad and me to keep garden tools and bikes, both pedal and motor, etc.

Anderson shelters were constructed with sections of corrugated iron, each sheet of which forming the side walls had part of one end curved through 90 degrees. With the curved ends bolted together to form an inverted U, they were set up in holes about 10x6 feet and between three and four feet deep, dug in back gardens away from the houses. The end walls were then bolted in place; these were flat sheets with the top edge corners cut off to match the curve of the roof, in one of which there was a low opening forming an entrance about four feet high at ground level. Leaving the end with the entrance clear, earth excavated from the hole was then heaped up over the structure, forming a protective covering under which the occupants would be safe from anything except a direct hit. This type, installed in the Shieldhall housing scheme, was surprisingly dry and snug, but rather cramped with plain plank seating along each side and at the rear. While thinking it would have been essential, there is no recollection of there being a protective barrier in front of the entrance.

Another form of protection against bomb blast was baffle walls, thick slab walls of brick, put up mainly on front of surface air-raid shelter entrances to shield them from blast. In some areas they were built across close mouths, the reason for this seemingly haphazard allocation of different forms of protection appeared to be arbitrary and illogical. No doubt officials examined every location and decided, from material available, which form should be allocated where. Some districts had shelters built either in the back courts or in the streets, or baffle walls were built in front of the closes, or, as in our case, the closes themselves were braced with timber, while in others steel beams were used. Sandbagging too was built up around some close mouths in such a way as to give the impression of entering a tunnel. In our locality all of these types were employed to some degree. Windows too could be treated with gummed brown paper strip stuck on in strips in X form on each pane by the occupier. Large windows of shops had the strips applied in a horizontal/vertical criss-cross large-mesh netting pattern. This was to lessen the risk of bomb blast sending large fragments and killing or injuring people.

FIRE PRECAUTIONS
One of the main threats during air attack was firebombs, or incendiaries. They were comparatively small, so a plane loaded with them could carry many more than the equivalent number of high explosive (HE) bombs. A tactic developed by bomber forces of both sides was to saturate an urban area with HE which, as well as causing structural damage which opened up buildings, frequently cut the water and gas mains. Then other planes came along behind loaded with fire bombs and spread their cargo that started fires to which escaping gas contributed, for which there was a reduced or non-existent water supply to put them out. To counter this, another precautionary measure devised was the provision of static water tanks, the painted symbols advertising the position of which, other than actual bomb damage of course, became one of the most enduring relics of the war. Anyone born before 1970 might recall seeing faded traces of the letters EWS, painted in large format about the height of a man, at street level on walls of older buildings of brick or stone, along with an arrow, all originally done in yellow with black edging. The letters stood for Emergency Water Supply, and the arrow indicated the direction in which the nearest tank lay. In one case one of these signs was still faintly visible on the tenement at the corner of King's Park Road and Carmunock Road in 1990, although stone cleaning removed it soon after.

EWS tanks were assembled from identical flanged pressed steel plate sections about three feet square, with an embossed pressing in X form at the centre to give strength. Bolted together, generally not higher than two sections, they could be assembled to whatever size of tank was needed in a particular location. The sites were clearly indicated in the surrounding area with the EWS signs, which also indicated the capacity of the tank, such as 5,000gals, 10, 20, or perhaps even in multiple in areas at greater risk, up to 50,000gals. They were open topped until drowning accidents involving children occurred, after which wire grills were welded over them. There were none in Linthouse because in common with other areas along Clydeside within reach of it, the river itself could be used, and EWS and arrow signs were painted at the corners of all the roads that ran down to the river. Few of the tanks were ever used, and as time passed they became the haunt of pond life and water plants. Of course for the enterprising youngsters, in later years the well rusted wire of the grills was easily penetrated for fishing with home made nets.

THE ATHENIA INCIDENT
The first hostile event of the war arrived with alarming swiftness. While it did not affect us directly, it was close enough to give the impression that we might be in the thick of it, on the home front anyway, from then on. The sinking of a ship was just the first of seemingly countless others to follow during the next few years, although a few months were to pass before they began in earnest. The Donaldson liner ATHENIA left Yorkhill Quay and sailed down-river late on Friday the 1st of September. On board were a thousand passengers, many of whom were children being evacuated to Canada. The ship then called at Liverpool and Belfast and picked up another two hundred, and many of the total compliment were children. It then headed out for the Atlantic, and as it was passing round Northen Ireland the declaration of war was announced. Within hours the ship was torpedoed by a U boat and sank with the loss of ninety-three lives, including many of the children.

The event was reported in the manner in which nearly all similar occurrences were to be conveyed by the now government controlled media from then on. Announced in an irritatingly obscure way, it was the first time this style of reporting of events on the home front was used, as well as those where the fighting was actually taking place. This was to be from then on the norm for security reasons. But it brought home to everyone that now the war was in earnest. It could no longer be regarded as an entertainment or depicted on news film from far away, to be faintly aware of as happening to other people, to foreigners living in remote lands. Incidentally, the word news evolved from when the first information media was set up. The daily papers gathered theirs from all round the compass, so they employed the first letters of the cardinal points north, east, west and south to coin the word 'news’.

THE PHONEY WAR
Nothing much seemed to happen during the next six months . Talk among my friends was along the lines that maybe the Germans were afraid of us after all, that nothing was going to happen and we would be deprived of the excitement of interesting events we had been anticipating. People were then much less in touch with international news than they are today. Although there was no television to convey immediate visual impressions, all cinema programmes included newsreels similar to present day television news which were supplied by the Gaumont British News and Pathe News etc. So unless you were one of the very few who never went to the 'picture house' as the cinema was then called, you had to depend on radio and the press which, effective though it was, did not carry the impact of the visual medium. Of course everybody relied on the wireless and newspapers for the latest information, because news films of the time sometimes took up to a week to reach the screen, in particular those coming from abroad. Which now makes me think that, as children, either we were remarkably well read or listened avidly to the radio. I certainly did both, and all my street acquaintances seemed to be aware of the latest developments.

MAY 1940-APPREHENSION DEEPENS AGAIN
The much talked of and fearfully awaited sinister events on the continent now began to happen in earnest with the failure of the Norwegian campaign, and the launch of the German offensive through Belgium and Holland, and on into France. The flow of events of the war can be studied elsewhere in innumerable excellent accounts, so it is unnecessary to relate them here. Highly recommend, although not unbiased, is Winston Churchill's THE SECOND WORLD WAR in six volumes, from which it has been possible to take a refresher course to clarify many points of personal interest for use in this brief account. The war began three weeks before my ninth birthday and had ended by the time I was fifteen, and reading these volumes almost fifty years after the events they portray was enthralling. They were a revelation, containing much information on a host of events of which I knew nothing, and filled in many blanks in stories only half heard or misunderstood. Some of these were of momentous importance, and how they were missed at the time is a mystery.

Because of the distances involved, up to this time air attacks on Britain were by single planes or a small number of aircraft; they were comparatively infrequent and mainly for reconnaissance. But when the Germans began to over-run the low countries and France, serious bombing raids by fleets of bombers, later accompanied by fighter planes for protection, became more frequent. This was in part due to a general intensification of the air war as they reached out from within German airspace initially, then as they captured much of the western continental landmass, they were able to use airfields nearer Britain which shortened the distance their aircraft had to travel. It was a time of panic among our people. Accommodation for Civil Defence organisations and the ARP, was provided in schools, church halls, or empty shops were requisitioned. Warning that an air raid was imminent was given by sirens installed in urban and suburban areas. The siren units were spread out through towns and cities set up in prominent places on roofs of buildings, so that nowhere in an urban or suburban area would anyone be out of hearing.

The Linthouse siren was on the roof of Elderpark Primary School at the south end of Hutton/Kennedar Drives, and over the summer and winter of 1939/40 there were many practice soundings and false alarms which at first intensified the panic. Then after a time, with no action people began to ignore them. Later, after the blitz began in earnest, the sound of the warning generated a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. When the warning sounded the more distant sirens were heard faintly, then the nearer ones started up in an approaching wave of sound, which peaked when the Linthouse unit began. Heard singly outwith a war situation the sound they produced was tolerably pleasant, but when others joined in, in turn and out of phase with each other, the discord increased the unpleasant sensation. Somehow, for me that sound produced conflicting emotions. As well as the deep feeling of terror experienced during the worst of the bombing, there was some quality about the actual sound produced that fascinated me. It was similar to the tones produced by a long since discarded toy humming top, except of course in warning mode when the sound rose and fell.

Urban dwellers born as late as the 1960s might have forgotten that they will have heard an air-raid siren. Due to the advent of the cold war they were kept in working order and tested at intervals of something like once or twice a year up to around 1970. Advance notification of date and time of the test, 3pm usually, was given in the press. In Pollokshaws the siren was located on the roof of the baths and was only removed as recently as 1993. Testing was still being conducted after we moved to a house near the baths in 1967, and for me, the sound induced that sinking feeling up to that last time of hearing.

The standard of accuracy of warning of an imminent air-raid was initially very much a hit or miss affair, for when enemy planes crossed the east coast there was no way of knowing where they were heading. The arrangement evolved went something like this. At first, when the siren sounded the warning, air-raid Imminent, everbody, including workers, had to make for the nearest shelter. But because of the serious, and usually needless, disruption caused to the war effort, this rule had to be modified into a two stage system when it was realised that there had to be a greater certainty of a bombing raid. If you think about it, an enemy plane entering our airspace say, over the Firth of Forth, would set the alert sounding over a 50 mile or so radius, and if it held a westward course this radius of alert would proceed with it. It will be seen that all the Germans needed to do was send over a small number of planes spread out at random down the east coast of Britain without taking any offensive action to completely paralyse the country. The warning was then altered to a two-stage system in which the radius of the initial warning was reduced by half, while the sirens still sounded at the 50 mile range. Until the second stage was reached only people engaged in non-essential activity made their way to the shelter, then the others, those engaged in vital work for the war effort, were required by tannoy warning to hurry to the relative safety of the shelters.

ACK-ACK AND SEARCHLIGHTS
The real-life sights and sounds of war were with us long before it began, since 1938 in fact, from the time of the Empire Exhibition in Bellahouston Park. There were ground based anti-aircraft defences in the form of guns of various calibres firing air-burst ammunition, with the heavier batteries on land and lighter ones mainly on board ships on the river. They of course could be heard practising regularly, using blank ammunition. Searchlight beams too were highly visible at night. The unit itself was a large short cylinder about five feet in diameter, mounted in gimbals so as to be easily manoeuvred. Power for the light came from a generator truck which was part of the unit consisting of truck-and-trailer, the latter of which carried the search-light.

The searchlight beam could produce an incredible, almost supernatural, phenomenon only recognised for what it was years later. When first switched on, the brilliant beam of light had to settled down, so that there were a few flickers before starting the search As the carbon arc pencils which produced the light heated up during the initial seconds, interruptions in the beam occurred as the operator adjusted the gap between them. Short breaks lasting perhaps a millisecond, a fraction of an eyeblink, caused the beam to flicker so that a break, a black section, appeared in the beam which seemed to flick up it at an incredible speed. It was the kind of event which is sometimes seen and not taken in because of failing to understanding what one is seeing.

Having on rare occasions during my life had visual experiences like this, so that because my brain did not understand what was happening, attention passed on almost as if made to do so by an external force, simply because no rational explanation could be applied the phenomenon. Later, in the course of reading about astronomy, the figure quoted as being the speed of light, in the region of 186,000 miles per second, was encountered. These two bits of information did not become connected in my mind until much, much later, for it did not occur on me that it would be possible, by any stretch of the imagination, to detect with the naked eye anything travelling at such a velocity. Certain weather conditions, such as haze or thin mist, or smoke, made them very visible. Those flickers or breaks in searchlight beams were just what I was seeing.

BARRAGE BALLOONS
Another ground based defensive measure against air raids to appear was barrage balloons. Deployed by an arm of the RAF, the Balloon Barrage Corps, their job was to send aloft a thin stranded steel cable into which, it was hoped, enemy planes would fly and be damaged and brought down. The balloons were enormous slightly elongate bags of silver rubberised fabric filled with highly inflammable hydrogen. Made in the requisitioned Kelvin Hall in Glasgow, where, apparently, the supply for the whole of Britain was produced, they had bulbous rounded fore-ends which tapered to a point at the tail. The tail end had three fins in Y formation when viewed from an end. Each balloon was tethered by a single cable run out from a drum mounted on a specially designed truck, to a pulley anchored in the ground some yards away. The tender vehicle had a drum operated by a separate engine, from which the cable was paid out, and had racks on each side (or behind the cab?) which held the cylinders containing the gas.

If there was enough of them, the balloons were supposed to be deployed close together in a ring round cities and places of strategic importance. But the number available was limited and the only place to have such a screen, so far as can be discovered, was central London. Elsewhere they were scattered at random as their availability permitted, with one located in nearby parks, Elder Park and Pirrie Park. Of course, as a defensive measure their effectiveness was limited by the height they could reach and also by weather conditions, and not a single occasion can be recalled of hearing of one actually bringing down a plane. Although there is only a hazy memory of it, a searchlight battery may have been part of the unit.

The balloon ceiling may have been about 10,000 to 12,000 feet (about two miles), so that their effectiveness could only be described as fairly efficient at night and on days when the cloud base was below that height. Cloud would hide the balloon and, in daylight, the tethering cable could not be spotted by aircraft pilots until it was too late to take avoiding action. When deployed in clear weather their presence meant that raiders had to fly above that height to drop bombs, which reduced their accuracy. Weather conditions governed the height to which balloons could be safely raised, with lightening a real hazard; a windspeed over 30 mph was another, but this was roughly in proportion to the effect on the bombers themselves. In tests before the war it was found that a tethered cable was usually ineffective in stopping a plane: the cable simply snapped. More successful was fitting weaker links near the elevated balloon and at ground level, which allowed the cable to break at these points. Small parachutes were attached to the free broken ends, which opened automatically and caused such a drag that the plane would have been forced down.

Operating the balloons and searchlights was one of the jobs in which members of the women's services played their part, probably the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) and there were a few among the local crews. I recall seeing a couple of dozen or so balloons spread out over the city, but I have no recollection of where the other units were based. Of course they held great fascination for us young ones. We all wanted to join a balloon barrage unit when we grew up, imagining that it would be great fun to play with such an enormous toy. Part of the attraction was handling the ropes, of which a number dangled from around the gasbag, for the crew of about six to hang on to when manoeuvring it on the ground. When tethered at ground level it was held down with sandbags which were hooked on to loops on the rope-ends. The three fins were actually bags made of the same material as the balloon itself, but were open to the atmosphere. They had louvres and depended on at least a breeze to fill them up so that, at ground level or aloft, on windless days they drooped in a rather sad fashion.

A major disadvantage with the balloons was they were easy to shoot down. Usually a all it took was a tracer round from an aircraft machine gun to puncture the bag for it to go down in flames. It used to puzzle me why this caused them to be set alight, for it seemed that all that should happen was that the bag would deflate slowly through the puncture holes. But tracer bullets are designed to let the gunner see if his aim is true, and their fiery element ignited the hydrogen. Another question which went unanswered at the time was, why didn't enemy aircraft just shoot them all down before a raid. However, planes over enemy territory had to fly high or low to avoid flak (the anti-aircraft) barrage), for in the region in between they were at their most vulnerable to the guns. Also, they had to be on the lookout for a much greater hazard, defending fighter planes.

Bomber pilots of both sides used to say that the time to be concerned was when the flak stopped, for that usually meant that defending fighter planes were nearby. From that it will be seen that a plane flying low enough to shoot down balloons would normally be too busy jinking about the sky trying to avoid flak, and keeping a lookout for fighters, to line up for a shot at a balloon. Of course shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells was also a hazard, and I suppose that many balloons shot down in flames which was attributed to enemy action, were actually lost in this way. By now, when a plane appeared in the sky the question on everyone’s’ lips, normally accompanied by apprehensive glances aloft, was 'is is one of ours, or one of theirs?'

THE PHONETIC ALPHABET
Ack-ack was the armed services' phonetic alphabet term at the time for AA (anti-aircraft). Through repeated use outwith the service environment that alphabet came to be known, and used by the public in general, on the basis that very soon most people knew what the most common examples meant, and it became a craze which took a long time to fade. The reason for the alphabet was to help clarify voice transmission in service wireless broad-casts, which at that stage of its development was still very much prone to atmospheric and other transmission interference. In an effort to reduce errors when transmitting orders during periods of poor reception, each letter of the alphabet was allocated a word which, in instances where vital orders or important information was being passed, could be used to stress or clarify it, thereby reducing the possibility of error. A was ack, of course, B: beer, and so on.

It became a form of slang which was used in the title of a wartime ´óÏó´«Ã½ variety radio programme for the forces called Ack-Ack Beer-Beer. A complication arose when the USA came into the war because their forces used a somewhat different alphabet, and it has to be admitted the American version was better. The British phonetics tended to use rather obscure words, whereas the Americans employed simple words in everyday use like, Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, How, Item, Jig, King, Love, Mike, Nan, Oboe. Peter, etc. Apart from the first two, the British version has long faded beyond my recall. The American version is clearly recalled, because as a signaller in the Royal Artillery during national service in 1949/50, by then it had been adopted by our military authorities and it was learned during initial training.

SHRAPNEL
Anti-aircraft shells were set to burst at heights estimated by range finders, an integral part of the battery for tracking enemy planes. Shell-bursts showed as puffs of black smoke against the daytime sky in cloudy conditions, white in sunshine, and when they exploded the shell casing fragmented, showering jagged splinters of steel over the ground below. Known as shrapnel, as well as being the main hazard to planes, it was also a danger at ground level. With the quantity of metal being fired up from the ground, and dropped and fired from the planes of both sides, it will be understood that on coming to earth, quite apart from the bombs, this lethal debris was a serious hazard to anyone in the open, and was the main reason for the steel helmets worn by home based service, police and civil defence personnel. Except during the heaviest raids, most of the din during a raid was created by the anti-aircraft defences. They were able to fire away at night using searchlight and the radar fire control systems, and during daylight this was aided by line-of-sight and judgement, depending of the experience of the gunners. There is more to this which will be related in proper sequence.

THE FIRST BOMBS FALL
According to the civil defence records available for study in Strathclyde Regional Archives, currently (2001) housed in the Jeffrey’s Room in the Mitchell Library building, the first bombs to fall on Glasgow were dropped during a daylight raid. A list is available (SRO HH50/162) running up to bomb number 228, showing where and when each one landed within the city boundary, between the first on 19th of July 1940, and the last on 25th of March 1943. However, even with my very localised knowledge errors are evident in it, so there is every reason to suspect that it is incomplete. According to the list, on that first occasion, four bombs were dropped on each of two locations within minutes of each other, numbers 1 to 4 in Yoker, each of 250lbs, and 5 to 8, each of 50lbs. off Craigton Road, Drumoyne (actually close to the Glasgow to Paisley railway line between Craigton Road and Drumoyne Road). This latter 'stick' of four (as a group of bombs dropped together was known) in fact landed in and around one of the two football parks at this location; Tinto Park, home ground of the Benburb (the 'Bens') Juniors football club, was one. The other ground, which I now think was the one affected, at that time lay nearer the railway and belonged to the Corporation Cleansing Department's nearby Destructor sports club.

In later years I had heard and read of claims by historians and others that the first bombs of the war fell on George Square. Perhaps what was meant was first in the city centre. Other archive material, in the form of files of air-raid wardens' reports of incidents, has enabled much of the detail above and below to be recorded more fully and with greater accuracy than would otherwise have been the case, taken from memory of events of more than 60 years ago.

At the time of that first raid I was in room 11 on the top floor of St. Constantine's Primary School, about a half-mile from Tinto Park. It was never explained why, for the first time (but not the last), no air raid warning was sounded before the raid, and the authorities seemed to have been taken by surprise. The time was 10.20am on that day in July 1940, two months before the George Square bombs, a date that might seem odd for why should school be in session in July. But disruption to the school curriculum, to industry and other institutions, was ongoing. The weather was clear and sunny, and we were in the course of normal classroom activity when the sound of a plane was heard. Immediately there was a noise, the first time I was to hear it, the sudden whooshing of bombs falling followed by loud explosions which shook the building and set the windows rattling.

A picture of the event is quite clear in my mind. It is of our teacher, a man, leaning off his high chair at a steep angle, the more quickly to get to his feet, and dashing to the door with a look of alarm very evident on his face, and yelling 'come on children, everybody out as quick as you can'. We were rushed out and along the veranda in a rapidly growing stream, as the other classes poured out urged on by panic-stricken teachers, to the north wing of the building and into the cloakroom there. Most of the girls, and some boys, were screaming with terror and there was a general hubbub. As we were crammed into the barely adequate space, I felt more afraid of being crushed there than of the effects of whatever it was we were fleeing from.

THE MAKESHIFT SHELTER IN THE SCHOOL
Apart from the squeeze, the cloakroom windows had been permanently covered over to comply with the blackout in winter, and illumination was by electric light which tended to heighten the sense of apprehension by making the atmosphere claustrophobic. In considering the reason behind assembling the children in one comparatively small room, of all places in the cloakrooms on each of the three floors of the building, teachers would be following directives laid down by the authorities. The idea behind this was probably that the windows of these rooms, being covered over and offering a certain amount of protection, the occupants would be unable to see the horrors of any destruction which might occur, and so spare them from that aspect. Also, the covering and the gummed paper strips with which they were treated, might help reduce flying glass and debris in the event of a near-miss. The same authorities seem now to have been quite blind to understanding that the effects of noise and vibration of said destruction, and the alarm it would generate in children.

Confinement in an enclosed place like that would be quite likely to heighten their terror. But most damning of all, surely they (the planners) did not think we would all be safer crowded together in three rooms in each wing of the building stacked one above the other? Did they really think we would be at greater risk spread throughout the building? What would have happened if a bomb had hit a wing at that moment does not bear thinking about. Apparently, the attitude then was that there was really nothing they could do, but they had to be seen to be doing something, anything!

There was much coming and going of staff as they tried to find out what had happened and what was expected of them. In truth, because it was the first time, no-one appeared willing to accept the most likely explanation, that for us the war had begun in earnest. After a while a teacher came in and called our attention, then announced that we weren't to worry for 'the noise was caused by something heavy falling in one of the (ship)yards'!. The announcement was made with a half-frightened half-sheepish look on her face, as if she knew full well the older ones among us would be aware of the deception. Scornful stage whispers were heard along the lines of 'why are we crammed in here then, half-a-mile away from the nearest yard?'

According to the gossip among the group of boys I found myself with, they were well aware what really had happened, and what was said confirmed my own thoughts. Why do people who are considered to be of sufficient level of intelligence to be put in charge of and teach children, fail in the test of understanding the corresponding level of the intelligence of those very children? Distinctly recalled is hearing the staff, in their discussions of what should be done, saying things like 'we should all be sent home to find shelter', and 'but what if there's another raid?' etc. Further discussion took place openly in front of us, ignoring the patently false 'something had fallen in the one of the yards' explanation, conducted as if we young ones were all deaf or didn't exist. After a time we were released with instructions to go straight home and report to our mothers without fail. On arriving home it was to find that my mother was ‘up the pole’ (very worried) because she was aware that the sound of the explosions had come from the direction in which the school lay.

In addition to the upheaval of the evacuation, school life was severely disrupted in other ways by the war. Like a number of public user facilities, among which were cinemas and dance halls, schools were closed for about a week initially, while contingency plans were made about how best to continue the education of children and provide for their safety. When the schools reopened different hours were tried, but over the following year things gradually returned to some semblance of normality, except that a shortage of teachers developed, brought on by the younger men being called up or volunteering for the forces. This meant half-time education, mornings 9 to 12 or afternoons 1 to 4, the two 'shifts' alternating week about, which lasted for a couple of terms.

Two of our teachers were called-up and went away, one of whom was very popular and who taught in the year ahead of the one I was in. We heard good reports about him, that he was a fun teacher, and were looking forward to having him the following term. After a couple of months he came back in RAF uniform, then off he went and we never saw him again. Daytime air-raids were infrequent even during the worst period in 1941, so there were few occasions when we had to go to the doubtful shelter of the cloakroom.

A SEARCH FOR SHRAPNEL
As soon as it became known where the bombs had landed, I was fired by a desire to see what damage had been done. That same evening or the next, we had visitors at home. Accompanying them were others who had come from London on a holiday visit. Who they were is now long forgotten, but one was a boy of around my own age, and of course the talk was mainly of the air raid. Our guests were impressed by the novelty for it was before they had experienced anything of this nature, although they were soon to suffer far worse. Nothing can be recalled about him, except that he was a friendly type. Despite the brief acquaintance of that one evening, I subsequently regretted not being able to get to know him better. He agreed to my suggestion that we go on an expedition to inspect the damage. Although it was outwith the normal range of venture with my pals, I was familiar with the district, having previously been nearby once or twice on train spotting expeditions to the railway at the top of Drumoyne Road.

When my new friend and I arrived at Tinto Park, we found a couple of holes on the low terrace embankment on the south side overlooking the railway. For bomb craters, they were disappointingly small. Being 50 pounders (as the recent research revealed they would have been not much bigger than a hole dug for the transplant of a tree of medium growth. We raked around in the bottom and searched the other craters nearby for what was the main aim of the expedition, to look for shrapnel, but found none. No doubt the local shrapnel collectors from nearby Teucharhill, Drumoyne, and Craigton had thoroughly cleaned up long before we got there.

In subsequent years I wondered what the intended target might have been. Apart from the nearby Bennie's foundry and engineering works at the top of Drumoyne Road, there didn't seem to be anything worth hitting in that neighbourhood. We thought, the plane, or planes, would surely have found more worthwhile targets in Hillington Estate or almost anywhere along the riverside. Not far away, however, to the east on the other side of Craigton Road, there were then three large wooden cooling towers of squarish irregular outline, of Glasgow Corporation Cleansing Department's destructor at Craigton Road depot. For some time I thought that these had been mistaken for some strategically important plant, such as a steel works or power station and they may have been the intended target. But knowledge gained in later years indicated that as well as the engineering works in Drumoyne Road, on the other side of the railway and actually nearest to where the bombs landed, there was a large factory complex devoted to making armaments and ammunition. It was a vast building put up around 1920 by the Scottish car manufacturing company Atholl, and could have been the real target. With the decline of industry in general during the 70s and 80s, that area became derelict until it was partly refurbished to become Craigton Industrial Estate.

Looking round there today it is obvious that a building of many bays once stood there, only a few of which remain and are incorporated in the new development. But aerial photographs from the 1930s show it as a single many-bayed building covering a large acreage. We knew of it certainly but wartime secrecy must have been very good, in that it wasn't generally known what went on there, at least to those who did not need to know. In fact it had been requisitioned by the government to become a Royal Ordinance Factory. The size of the building meant that there must have been a large number of employees, which makes it all the more puzzling for surely there must have been someone known to my family who worked there.

Our expedition to view the craters ended with a secondary thrill, a trip on a number 4 bus. The opportunity to travel by bus occurred only infrequently, and as we left Tinto Park to made our way home and were about to cross Shieldhall Road, one appeared heading west (destination Balornock), and my friend asked if it would take us home. My first reaction was who pays? for I had no money for the fare. However, he found a few coppers in his pocket so I said yes, but refrained from adding that it would carry us not much more than half way home. We were near a stop and boarded without trouble. The short journey to Langlands Road at Holmfauldhead Drive was for me as memorable as was the main objective of the adventure, in having the opportunity to actually travel on a bus for all of about six stops free from the supervising presence of a grownup.

BOMBS ON HILLINGTON
On the 24th of July, five days after the Yoker and Craigton bombs, another exciting event occurred when a stick of bombs was dropped on Hillington Estate. It was just after 6.30am on another clear morning, during the relatively uneventful period before the real blitz commenced. The house was astir as Mum rose to make the breakfast and get Dad out to work, when we heard the sound of a plane. In those days the appearance of an aeroplane, until it was identified, always generated apprehension. There was something odd about this one, that made my mother open the window near my bed in the south facing bedroom and lean out for a clearer view. She scanned the sky then became excited and began to call out. 'There is it, there it is, it's over Shieldhall'.

I was always drowsy in the mornings, and rather resented having my final hour of slumber disturbed before getting up for school, for what was probably a false alarm. Then she said, with her voice rising, 'It's dropped something, quick, come and see!' That jerked me awake, and I leapt out of bed in time to catch the merest glimpse of the plane as it disappeared westward over the roof of the Burghead Drive tenement. As I did so there were crumps of explosions which fixed in our minds rather sharply that it was a raid, again without a siren warning but which again sounded immediately after. My parents were concerned because there were relations, two families, living in the Shieldhall housing scheme.

However, reports received later about where the bombs had landed were reassuring. Rumours circulated during the day were that Hillington Estate had been hit. Of course, we thought, that's where they would be aiming for, knowing well enough that Rolls Royce were tooling up to make Merlin and Gryphon aero engines there. We were soon to become well acquainted with the constant drone from the test beds, clearly audible even at a distance of a couple of miles, which went on constantly night and day for a few years.

My Grandfather Joe Chambers suggested we go along and see for ourselves, so the following weekend, off we went to find out where the bombs had landed. There was the usual stick of four dropped if my memory serves me right, and we were directed to the south east end of Montrose Avenue in the estate. Sure enough at the corner of that avenue and either Watt Road or Claverhouse Road, looking at a street plan it's not clear which now, but the location could probably be positively identified by a personal check, we found a factory building damaged, but by no means destroyed, and apparently still in use. This was despite there being some debris and large lumps of reinforced concrete lying around, with the reinforcing steel rods showing from a factory gable. There was a crater in an area of grass nearby also, but exactly where isn't clear now. In his book The Second City, Charles Oakley states that he was involved in running a factory in the estate where Jean McGregor's Scotch Broth was being made when it was bombed, a reference probably to this same incident. These bombs landing outwith Glasgow City boundary are not recorded in the Glasgow bombs list referred to above.

PLANE SPOTTING
Amid the flood of information dispensed by the authorities at this time, one item was concerned with identifying enemy planes. Visual identification would be difficult for the inexperienced, but one of the features we were warned to look out for, was the noise made by the engine or engines. They said, most unconvincingly as far as I was concerned, that whereas our planes made a steady drone those of the enemy made a pulsating sound, which sounded to me to be false for surely all engines, with the volume and pitch sound they produced related to size, should sound similar. However, this information was to be put to the test on another occasion in 1940.

Not long after the two above related incidents, I was playing with a group of pals on a clear sunny day in Hutton Drive during a quiet Saturday afternoon. We could hear the noise of a plane, and as usual everyone paused to study the sky. Whatever it was, it was either far away or very high up, and a few minutes passed before it was spotted overhead. It really was high, I would guess at something like 15,000 feet, which would make it appear about the same size as today’s jet airliners at 30,000ft-plus cruising altitude, and it seemed to fly around aimlessly while staying in our general area.

The weather was ideal, warm, dry and calm, and the engine noise though faint was very clear. It flew around for a while giving the opportunity to be more aware of the actual sound. Immediately it was noticed by the more observant of us that the noise seemed different. Then someone suggested that it made the wawaw noise the German planes were supposed to sound like. We were understandably concerned about the possibility of a bomb or two falling on us, and were only partly reassured by the fact that there had been no air-raid alert. It went away eventually, but later there were reports that a German reconnaissance plane had been sighted over central Scotland, and we were sure that was what we had seen. Probably it was taking photographs of shipyard construction, river traffic and port facilities in preparation for the blitz, copies of which have been reproduced since in publications about the war. (See GLASGOW AT WAR by Paul Harris, Archive Publications, 1986, p53. Also p90.) I have wondered if the original frames, enlarged sufficiently, would show a particular group of street urchins at play in Hutton Drive?

The reason for the wah-wah sound made by German aircraft was explained in Alfred Price’s book BLITZ ON BRITAIN 1939-45. The phenomena occurred only with multi-engined plane like the Messerschmitt 109, Junkers 88, Dornier 217, and Heinkel 111, all of which were twin engined. Experienced pilots discovered that if the engines were run at slightly different speeds, the radio detection systems of the defenders found it much more difficult to locate them. Of course in turn, Allied pilots were able to put this knowledge to good use when over Germany.

HMS SUSSEX INCIDENT
This story concerns the cruiser Sussex. When an air-raid warning sounded, the procedure recommended by the authorities was for people in the upper floors of tenements to make their way either to a shelter, remain on the ground-floor in one of the houses, or stay in the common close. The close was regarded as being the safest place in the event of a direct hit, but that really only applied if the close itself was protected with bracing. During the night in question, early on the morning of the 18th of September 1940, the sirens hadn't sounded when we heard noise of AA gunfire, which seemed nearby, and were wondering what to do. Was it a practice shoot or a false alarm? Or was it the real thing? Then after a while we heard the sound of a plane and bombs falling. I recall the noise quite clearly. There were two distinct whooshes which came close together, but strangely the explosions were quite muffled, and although the sirens did sound the warning as we made our way downstairs soon after, there were no further frights that night. It was one of the occasions when my father refused to leave his bed. He maintained that if he was going to die, he preferred to do so in comfort!

What had happened was that the cruiser SUSSEX, berthed about a mile away in Yorkhill dock, had just finished loading ammunition and was ready to leave. A stick of four 250lb bombs (numbers 17 to 20 on the SRO list) plus two incendiaries, were dropped (which doesn't square with the two whooshes heard). One landed on Hayburn Street/Beith Street bowling green and broke through both Corporation Transport underground railway tunnels. This caused water from the nearby river to flood in which put the system out of use until the end the following January. The second bomb landed to the south of Castlebank Street, while another hit Yorkhill Quay. But it was the fourth (probably number three in the stick) that caused the greatest upheaval. While the SRO list does not indicate this, it says simply Yorkhill Basin. The bomb crashed through the cruiser's decks near a fuel vent and lodged low down in the hull, but failed to explode. If it had gone off the load of ammunition would probably have been set off as well, causing immense damage over a wide radius. It did however start a fire in the bowels of the ship which threatened to get out of control, and it was obvious to those in charge that unless it could be stopped from spreading it would certainly reach the munitions. Fortunately the order to open the seacocks was given in time, flooding the ship and causing it to settle on the bottom. This helped put the fire out which saved many unknowing lives. Of course the event was hushed up at the time but we did hear a story about a bomb falling down the funnel of a ship at Yorkhill, and oddly enough the subway was shut down just then, which indicated to us that something unusually serious had happened in the Yorkhill area.

The details of the above story were gathered from various sources over succeeding years, but a book encountered fifty seven years after the event gives a much more authoritative account. In CLYDE BUILT by John Shields, published in 1947, chapter 12 page 84, in a brief history of ALEXANDER STEPHEN and SONS, he relates that it was an incendiary device which penetrated a trunkway to the fuel tank of the County class cruiser HMS Sussex. This was probably a vent to atmosphere rising above the superstructure for bunkering. The incendiary started the fire from which the events related above followed. The account goes on 'when she was refloated it was found that the fire had caused so much damage that everyone expected the cruiser to be scrapped; but the nation was in desperate straits for naval tonnage, and it was decided to repair it. Stephen and Sons were given the job, and after many months the cruiser was once again put back in service as a unit of the Royal Navy'.

Another event which occurred shortly after the above, was seeing a cargo ship of medium size, being brought into Merklands Quay with a spectacularly damaged superstructure. A story circulated that a bomb had fallen down the funnel. The ship lay there for a few days then disappeared, probably taken elsewhere on the river for repair. Those two events taking place so close together produced a confused story of mixed details, a tale that was taken for the truth, until later reading brought for the true story of what happened to HMS Sussex. But I never found out what became of the ship with the crumpled funnel.

THE NIGHT OF 13th OF MARCH 1941 - THE LINTHOUSE LAND-MINE
This next story will show how the appalling dangers of war can come so close to individuals without directly affecting them, but which increased apprehension to an almost unbearable degree. In 1939 my recently married aunt and uncle had moved from Renfrew to a ground-floor house in the same block as us, two closes away at 16 Skipness Drive. So when the air-raid warning sounded, instead of seeking shelter in of one of the bottom flats in our own close, or simply standing around in the close passageway, we had got into the habit of going along to number 16. On the night in question, when the alert sounded at around 9.30pm, my mother, carrying my six week old sister Nancy, and I got ready to go there. My father was out attending a political meeting at the ILP hall a mile away near the dry-docks at the other end of Govan. Of our neighbours on the landing, two other families on the top flat, one of which, a newly married couple called Frew, a name engraved on my memory, lived in the house opposite. When the sirens sounded, as we went out we met the Frews, who were also leaving, to follow a habit they had adopted of going along Govan Road towards the Southern General Hospital, to the tenement block between Burghead Drive and Moss Road, where they had relatives living in a ground floor flat.

My relatives' house in number 16 was a crowded but welcoming and popular place and we were part of a large crowd of neighbours from the houses above. After a while the noise of explosions of gunfire and bombs began, which soon reached such a pitch that the building shook and the windows were rattling, and it was realised that it was going to be the most severe raid yet. The room was packed with probably twenty to thirty very frightened people, mostly women and children, and as the din outside increased there was a violent concussion which filled the room with a thick haze and deafened and dazed everyone. For many years this phenomenon puzzled me, for the bomb, or parachute landmine as it turned out, had landed about four hundred yards away and, other than a few broken windows, there was little real damage at our distance. It was realised later that the 'dust' was in fact whitewash, used in the days before emulsion paint was developed, jarred from ceiling and frieze by the concussion.

The effect of this explosion can still be seen at this location today, and must be about the last remaining example of wartime enemy action still visible in the city. Just after 10.40pm a parachute landmine (no.137 in the SRO list of dropped ordinances) struck the centre of the Govan Road facade of the tenement block nearest the Souther General Hospital. It completely demolished three closes and killed between sixty and seventy people, among whom were our neighbours the Frews. For me, a powerful memory of their funeral is being brought out to stand in the lobby along with Mum and Dad with the landing door of our house opened fully, to watch an emotional scene as the two coffins were carried out of the house and downstairs, followed by a stream of grieving relatives. Today (2004), the section cut out of the block by the landmine has been occupied at ground level for many years by a petrol filling station.

My father arrived within minutes of the event, out of breath and white as a sheet with shock. Clearly remembered is the look of relief on his face when he rushed into the house and saw we were all unharmed. When the alert had sounded the meeting he was attending broke up, and everyone made for home as quickly as possible because the ARP wardens were supposed to keep people off the streets, to avoid ack-ack shrapnel casualties as well as from bombs. The cars (trams) had stopped running so he was hurrying along Govan Road until, opposite Fairfield, things started to hot up. At that time Fairfield Shipyard's office block fronting Govan Road extended westwards not quite as far as opposite Elderpark Street. An extension there today was added post war.

As he neared Elderpark Street, Dad became aware of a landmine (no. 134 in the SRO list) descending overhead and, petrified, watched it crash through the glazed part of the roof of the yard fabrication shed immediately opposite about a hundred yards away. Fortunately it failed to explode. He was on the south side of the road, passing along in front of the shops there, at T. Austin's funeral undertaker's premises, where he was keeping as close as possible to the building for shelter. But the vibration of the mine landing, around two tons in weight, caused the plate glass window of the undertakers to crash out on top of him. However, he was unhurt and pressed on to pass along by Elder Park. But as he passed the gates of the main entrance he became aware of the parachute of another landmine descending ahead of him. When it landed and exploded in Linthouse in front of him this was what caused his panic. He said he saw it coming down, and tried with a supreme mental effort to make it veer away from the houses towards the shipyard, where it was no doubt intended to land. In the bright moonlight, the sight of the expanding dust cloud generated by the blast made him think it was our building that had been hit.

Next morning, walking round the corner from Holmfauldhead Drive into Govan Road, no words can describe the feeling induced by the sight which greeted the eyes; the still smoking heap of rubble of what had the previous day been peoples homes. Members of the Civil Defence rescue teams were swarming over the unstable mound, working frantically trying to find anyone buried there who might still be alive. The vision of ragged edges on either side of the demolished section was fraught with terror, with the rough masonry and hanging floorboards, and plaster lathing spread out like ragged fans. Sections of apartments complete, some with furnishings intact, were open to view, and there was not a trace of glass visible in any of the windows anywhere in the rest of the block. Strangely, what made the greatest impression was the sight of wallpapered walls.

The thoughts at that time was 'What would happen now. Were we going to be next?' Were all our buildings going to end up as smoking rubble and dust, with perhaps no-one left to look for survivors among the debris. Of course scenes like that were common in some cities all over the land at this time, in many cases far more extensive than our local experience, with one of the worst affected places being Clydebank. My grandparents had friends living in Scotstoun, a few miles away downstream on the north side if the river, who were far worse off than we were. Life went on as far as possible with us, and after the above event, when things began to return to normal, perhaps a couple of weeks later we set of to visit them on what was probably an ongoing standing arrangement of regular visits. I remember having juvenile thoughts like 'We have plenty to tell them, of our frightening escape from death'. But as the tram travelled along Dumbarton Road past Scotstoun goods yard we became aware of a change in the layout of the buildings ahead from the last visit.

It must seem strange in this age of instant communication, that news of events of the war relatively nearby most often could only be carried by word of mouth. Information like where bombs had landed, and the number of casualties and how many people were affected and what damaged had been caused, and other details considered likely to help the enemy was strictly controlled. A regulation about 'rumour mongering' and 'spreading alarm and despondence' carrying stiff penalties had been introduced. Air-raids in particular were referred to only in the vaguest terms by the media, like 'a town in Scotland', or 'a town in the north'. This meant that little positive news of what was going on outside our district was available. What we witnessed on arriving at Scotstoun can best be conveyed by the photographs in the Paul Harris book GLASGOW AT WAR pp55 to 57.

The Jeffreys’ lived in Earl Street, a desirable area of one- and two-storied Corporation tenements less than ten years old, and while their building was still standing, it had the appearance of having been stripped ready for demolition. All around was devastation, with Balmoral Street, where there was a tram terminus off the main Dumbarton Road, closed. Many of the buildings were reduced to rubble, and even two weeks after the event the devastation was so bad that squads of men were still labouring to clear up. In the immediate area there didn't appear to be one house left habitable. We returned home, and it was some time before the Jeffreys were located, unharmed but with stories far more harrowing than ours to tell, living with a member of their family.

Studying the records after fifty years, and examining the map which plots where the bombs landed and the destruction they caused, is enlightening. One surprising discovery, although it shouldn't have been a surprise except that these events are only now being looked at more closely, is that away from the river greater Govan escaped almost completely free from destruction compared with districts like Scotstoun, Knightswood, Yoker, and of course Clydebank. Studying the map which plots where the bombs landed, and the records in the Strathclyde Regional Archives, it was for me an eye opener to see large areas of the districts mentioned shaded with colour coded markings of destroyed and damaged property. Govan, on the other hand, had only that one example in Linthouse and one or two in the yards and to the south and west at Shieldhall, and a handful of others scattered about, half of which were UXBs (unexploded bombs).

A surprising omission from the map held in the Jeffreys’ Room of Strathclyde Regional Archives, which purports to plot all the bombs and mines dropped on the city during the war, is the ordinance which landed on Fairfield and caused the undertakers window to fall out over my father. Although it is recorded on the list under the number quoted earlier, it isn't marked on the map. One UXB landed near Rigmuir Road, Shieldhall, probably on the Fifty Pitches. The copy of the bomb list in my possession was obtained from the same SRA source.

THE ELDER PARK BARRAGE BALLOON GOES DOWN IN FLAMES
This spectacular event may have occurred on one of the two nights of the air-raids of the 13th/14th of March. Recollection is of coming downstairs after the alert had sounded with Mum and my baby sister, on the way to my Aunt's house at number 16. Already the sound of guns firing and ack-ack shells exploding could be heard, and probably bombs as well. As we approached the close mouth, passing with difficulty through the crush of people sheltering there among the timbers of the bracing, a plane was heard flying past quite low down. We hesitated for a moment, wondering if it was safe to dash the few yards from our close to number 16. Just then the sound of machine gun fire was heard so we thought there were enemy planes around, and drew back for what we hoped would be a few seconds. Shortly after this, when we made our way again to the close-mouth, we became aware of a baleful glare which rapidly increased until the sky was lit up like daytime. In the space restricted by the shoring, at the close entrance neighbours were fearfully milling about, so that in trying to see what was happening they made it difficult for a youngster to get a sight.

Worming my way to the front and straining to look south east for the source of the light, I caught a glimpse of the terrifying sight of a brilliant ball of flame, and the outline of the remains of our barrage balloon above the Linthouse Church of Scotland building, moving slowly westwards, collapsing and burning, and gradually sinking as it passed across our line of vision from the east. I was desperate to go out for a better view but someone gripped me and I was hauled back inside. During the next lull we hurried along to number 16 and joined the crowd in the O’Neils’ room, to be quizzed about 'that bright light, what was it?' for they seemed to have missed out on the excitement. This event probably happened on second night of the worst air-raids, for this occasion was less traumatic than the first night, and the balloon incident apart, it passed off relatively quietly.

However, next morning on going out into the street we were greeted by the sight of the balloon cable draped over the roofs of the tenements in giant ellipses which reached the ground between the buildings. From the balloon unit's position in Elder Park, the cable hung across the still leafless trees of the park and Drive Road, Hutton Drive, Kennedar Drive, Holmfauldhead Drive and beyond. How far it reached was never discovered. But the natural curiosity of children caused street urchins, who were out early looking for shrapnel and spent bullets, to approach it for a closer look. Nothing would be better than to be able to boast to those not around the time that we had actually touched it. We soon wished we hadn't, for it was covered with black cloying grease similar to what had been encountered in the nearby Alexander Stephen's coup, which proved impossible to clean off our hands by the normal means of soap and water. It required a hard rubbing session with the pumice stone or paraffin rag, almost till you bled. Some careless types managed to get it on their clothing so it could be assumed they had a difficult time with their parents when they got home. Frustration was engendered when the cable was recovered soon after, for I missed seeing the operation which probably took place when I was at school.

EXPEDITION TO KNIGHTSWOOD
A curious adventure kept us occupied on a day soon after the blitz. Lounging in the street with a pal one afternoon, we were startled when a 3 ton tipper lorry drew up and the driver called out to us. My friend immediately ran over and began speaking excitedly to him. After a moment he called me over, and said it was his uncle who was going across the river to where work was going on clearing bomb-sites. He was offering to take us with him for the rest of the day. Trying to reconcile the memory of that event of over sixty years ago with the fact that we ought to have been at school is difficult. It might have been a Saturday or Sunday, or maybe the Easter holiday Monday. Hesitating for only a second I eagerly accepted.

Thoughts of what might happen if my mother came looking for me to go a message, which was quite likely as she was tied down with my infant sister, caused only a momentary pang, but I took the precaution of leaving a message with my aunt at number 16. I could not turn down a golden opportunity like this, of actually getting to travel in a lorry for the very first time, by which we might venture into areas unknown and have who knows what kind of interesting adventures.

Off we went in the truck, the cab of which was comfortable but warm, noisy and full of engine reek, with sufficient room on the passenger seat for two ten year olds. Crossing the river to Whiteinch on the vehicular ferry in this novel way was savoured to the full, from where we went up Balshagray Avenue to Anniesland Cross and into Knightswood Boulevard. Somewhere along towards Knightswood Cross we turned off to the left, and immediately were amid a scene of utter desolation where an area of relatively new, good quality council housing with individual gardens had been reduced to rubble. Squads of men were labouring among the debris for anything salvageable, and to sort out by hand lumber for reclamation or burning, the rubble being carried away on lorries to a tip.

A succession of similar tipper trucks were arriving, being loaded up by hand and with shovels, then departing. A single trip was made to a coup, not a glimmer of where its location was remains in my memory. All this was of course before hydraulics came into use, when the tipping mechanism of lorries was manually operated by a hand crank at chassis level behind the cab. In later years a story that debris from blitzed buildings, reputedly from the north side of the river, was deposited at Pollokshaws in the area south of the River Cart opposite Pollokshaws West railway station has been encountered. This may have been our destination on that occasion.

F.I.D.O.(?)
On another day when out walking with granda in the comparatively remote district of Knightswood we came upon a most odd sight. It may have been in Lincoln Avenue where it passes the golf course, for there were no houses in the immediate vicinity. Lined up close together along the edge of the pavement for quite a long distance, were hundreds of what looked like identical giant stoves of the single burner paraffin heating/cooking type. They had bulbous bases and tall chimneys which stood to above adult head height, with a coolies-hat type cowl. All along the road, by these enigmatic but intriguing features, the pavement was stained dark, and there was a strong oily smell. On enquiring among passers by we were told it was a system of concealment for use during air-raids.

When required the devices were lit, causing them to pour out thick smoke that became a blanket which drifted over the land. This was supposed to hide certain targets during air raids. However, that story doesn't square with more recently gained knowledge. There was a system, known as FIDO, Fog, Intensive, Dispersal Of, which was deployed round airfields, the nearest of which was at Renfrew. Because of the vagaries of the wind this might have been difficult to achieve, or maybe it was it an experimental system for dispersing fog, an omnipresent feature of every winter at this time?

THE HAND GRENADE IN THE DUSTBIN
One day I came upon half-a-dozen boys, acquaintances a little younger than myself, behaving furtively in Holmfauldhead Drive. They were standing heads together in a tight conspiratorial group, and seemed to be examining something one of them was holding. As I approached the gathering opened up and the lad with the object, he was holding it with both hands cupped, eyes wide with suppressed excitement, 'look what we found in that midgie through there!'. He indicated the midden in the back court of the close outside which we were standing on the east side of the street near Govan Road. It was a metallic oval object about the size of a lemon, but with a regular lumpy pattern over most of its surface. It was immediately obvious that what they had found was a hand grenade with the ring-pull pin still in place. As far as what a hand-grenade should look like, boys in general are fascinated by the accoutrements of war, more so then than today because of the circumstances. Their furtiveness centred round a suggestion from one of them that they take it down to the coup at the riverside and pull the pin. Fortunately the boy in possession was more cautious, and was aware of the effect of doing that might have on the neighbourhood, relatively remote as it was, for the explosion was sure to have some official come along to investigate.

My suggestion that they hand it in to the nearby ARP post was greeted with resentment. Their attitude was they had found it and could to do what they liked with it, and they wanted to have some fun with it. No doubt they imagined they had something that would go off like a squib. Afterwards I used to flatter myself that it was my greater age and superior wisdom that made them follow my suggestion. I pointed out that, as fireworks had been banned since the beginning of the war, the bang was bound to alert anyone within earshot; the nearby civil defence authorities would be informed, they would be sure to investigate, and he and his friends might end up in the nick. That was the deciding factor. Once convinced, we all marched across the street in a group, for I didn't intend being left out of the fame the episode was sure to generate. Heavens, I might get my name in the paper, or even on the wireless.

The Air Raid Warden's post was in shop premises in Govan Road next to THE LINTHOUSE CAFE between Holmfauldhead Drive and Burghead drive. The windows of the post were plastered with anti-blast tape and festooned with warnings and advice notices, and inside, the entrance was draped for the duration with blackout curtains. Stirrup pumps and lines of red painted metal buckets of water and sand with the word FIRE painted on, rows of stretchers, stacks of picks and shovels, and long handled scoops for dealing with incendiary bombs lined the walls.

Wide-eyed and full of our importance, we marched to the post with the finder of the object leading, holding it out at arms length and the others following close behind in arrowhead formation. The humorous side of that scene, which can best be illustrated by the following analogy, has always appealed to me. In drama on film and television the situation can occur where a group of people have to walk together, and to get them all in the frame the director has instructed them to keep close together. Sometimes they are bunched so close that it looks un-natural and that they seem to jostle each other. That was how the group must have appeared on that occasion, for nobody wanted to be left out. Having passed the premises often the appearance of the interior of the ARP premises seen from the pavement was familiar to me.

A long passage, curtain lined on one side, with the above described accoutrements lying on the floor or propped against the wall on the other, narrow and dark and braced with wood like the closes, lead to a small brightly lit room with light coloured distempered walls at the rear The doorway of the room appeared, when viewed from the pavement, as a distant vertical rectangle of light. Inside there was a trestle table at which a warden was seated, while two others stood around in the cramped space, most of which was taken up by other items of equipment. On the table were their gas mask cases and tin hats and lunch boxes. Hooks round the walls held oilskin capes, to be used along with the masks in the event of a gas attack, but which also gave excellent unofficial protection in wet weather.

The scene then enacted was one of the biggest let-downs of my early years. When the seated gentleman caught sight of us, he bade us enter and regarded the grenade without expression. Taking it carefully from the bearer he laid it on the extreme edge of the table at an outer corner, then he and the other occupants studied it in silence for a few seconds. The lack of stir was a bit unnerving and we, me especially, began to wonder if we had done the right thing. Regarding us rather balefully he asked where we had found it. On receiving the answer the next query was 'Did you find anything else?'. This seemed to change the atmosphere somewhat; the group became agitated and started to edge towards the door with a single thought in mind.

Finding the grenade had diverted attention from the their original scavenging endeavour, and now the one idea of the group was to return a.s.a.p. to the midden to see if there was anything else of interest there. Perhaps something more exciting, maybe even a gun and bullets, and what adventures could be had with them. But the warden was on to us immediately (by then I regarded myself as one of the group of pseudo-heroes), making us promise to go straight home and keep away from number 3 Holmfauldhead Drive, and, most of all, tell no-one about our find.

The expected stir of excitement which was absent at the ARP post, was enacted in full with rage added, when, on returning home and disregarding the order, I told the story to my parents, although the object of anger was rather different from that expected. Who, my parents wondered with barely suppressed fury, could be so criminally thoughtless as to put such a potentially dangerous object in the midden and, anyway, where could it have come from. The answers to these questions, and what happened to the grenade and if anything else was found in the 'lucky' midden, are a blank now. It might have been that a woman had a husband or other family member who had returned from the 1914/18 war, bringing with them the grenade as a souvenir, which had been put away in a cupboard and forgotten about. Such happenings were not unheard of. Then during a clear-out, in the absentminded way of an elderly, person unaware of the significance of the strange object, it had been thrown in the bin. Maybe it was simply a harmless practice grenade. One thing is certain. Whoever was responsible could not have chosen a period of greater awareness of such lethal objects anytime before or since.

MILITARY VEHICLES
A most unusual road vehicle seen occasionally passing through Govan, was the 60 feet long Queen Mary articulated aircraft transporter. It had a low open bed with low fretted or wire mesh sides, and was used to ferry dismantled planes between the docks and Renfrew aerodrome. With wings removed and secured alongside the fuselage on the bed of the transporter, they were an awesome sight passing along Govan Road from Prince's Dock. I can only recall seeing single engine fighter planes being moved on these occasions, because anything larger would have presented a hazard to the tram overhead power supply cables. Most aircraft brought in by ship were off-loaded at Shieldhall dock and other temporary quays constructed at Braehead, but if that accommodation was full then ships had to tie up wherever there was a vacant space.

Other military vehicles passing through were convoys of dozens of 3 ton army trucks sometimes full of troops being moved between camps. Another exciting sight for me was trains of railway passenger coaches lying in the sidings at Shieldhall dock, where there would normally only be goods waggons, when a troop transporter had arrived from America. Once or twice tanks passed by after being unloaded at Shieldhall, clattering along Govan Road on their tracks on the cobbles and making the whole area shake and shudder.

POLES IN FIELDS
An odd sight I remember seeing in the countryside which is never mentioned in any of the historical accounts of the time, which endured for a year or two after the German invasion of Crete, was poles planted in fields in certain wide open areas of the countryside. They appeared to be bare telephone type poles, which were spread at out at random over land where it would have been possible for aircraft or towed gliders loaded with troops to land during an invasion.

VE and VJ CELEBRATIONS
While the final two years of the war were full of momentous events as the Allied armies steam-rollered on relentlessly, little happened on the local home front. When the Germans surrendered, the 8th of May 1945 was declared a holiday and scenes of unparalleled joy and excitement were the order of the day. When the event was depicted in the recent tv programme on C4, the 1940s House, while the celebrations were well captured, the main feature of which was bonfires everywhere. Contrary to what was depicted there were no fireworks; for obvious reasons non had been available since before the war, although they did re-appear within a few months. VJ day in August was similarly celebrated. Between those two dates, in July my family moved from the Linthouse tenement to Pollok about three miles away to the south, to a three apartment Corporation (council) terrace house with a garden.

___________________________________________________

Sender: George Rountree
Covering notes.
If anything above requires clarification or you wish to contact me, please leave a message in the forum at the bottom of this article or on the associated Personal Page. If you do not receive an answer, please notify me via my grandson's email davidrountree*hotmail.com (replacing * with @).
In 1993 my first book of childhood memories entitled A GOVAN CHILDHOOD - the 1930s was published by John Donald of Edinburgh. The above is an extract from the second book, the as yet unpublished continuation.

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