大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War site by Allan Price on behalf of Dugald Cameron and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was born on the 4th of October 1939, just after the outbreak of the WW2, in the Royal Maternity Hospital, Rotten Row Glasgow.

My personal memories of the war are very few, mainly of being in the air-raid shelter with our neighbours in Braden Avenue, Yoker. The white pebbled ground sticks in the mind. This must have been during the Clydebank blitzes of March and May 1941 during which some houses in the neighbourhood were hit by German land mines and incendiaries. Clydebank got a pasting. My mother (Irene) took me off to Blackpool.

VE and VJ nights I remember from being taken out at night, in (Andrew) my father's arms to see the celebrations in the avenue. The smell of the night was a new experience and as was meeting a banana for the first time. I didn't like it.

My father, having served his time there, was working in the John Brown shipyard as a "marker-off". When Rolls-Royce opened their shadow factory at Hillington for the production of their superb "Merlin" engine in 1940 my father trasfered there as an inspector exchanging his ruler for a micrometer and his wage of 拢2.50 for 拢4.10 (I think) - "the best decision I ever made".

He had become a time study engineer or ratefixer, a job not usually the most popular among the men yet on his retiral the Queensferry Hotel in East Kibride was packed. Never a management man, he believed in trade unions and was an early member of ASSET.

Anyhow, it was the change in family circumstances that enabled me to go to the High School in Glasgow - my mother a Yorkshire lady was determined that I would not go inot the yards as would have been likely. It also let them buy their own house. When I was appointed Director of the Glasgow School of Art, he still wondered if I had got a "proper job" yet!

My personal passion for aviation was fostered from about the end of the war with my father taking me across to Refrew to see the DH Rapides of BEA and, in the late 1940s, the Spitfires of 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron.

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