大象传媒

My name is Tam Cairns and I am 63 years old. I was born on the 5th May 1942.
This is obviously not my story as I was born 14 months after these events took place. No, these are the memories of my mother, Mary Cairns (nee Haggerty) born August 1918 and sadly deceased Feb. 2000, and I am glad to have this opportunity to have her account of this time to be publicly documented.
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The events which took place in this part of my life happened when I was a young woman of twenty one, and we were at war with Germany. You may well ask why I'm putting it down on paper after all these years. Well, people of my generation who can recall the events of these two nights of terror are getting fewer and fewer and I think it should be remembered just what the people of Clydebank went through. I would like to think that maybe my Grandchildren will tell their children, or perhaps let them read my little story and so keep the memory alive.
There are many different stories of the Clydebank Blitz and all are better than mine, but this is a personal account of what happened to the Haggerty family ( my family ) and therefore may be of interest to my Grandchildren and friends.

THURSDAY NIGHT 13TH MARCH 1941

It was a lovely moonlit night when the German air force(Luftwaffe)paid us a visit and left behind them death and destruction. Clydebank would never be the same again.
The evening started just like any other night. Owenie, my future husband, came down to my house in Dalmuir and we decided to go to the Pictures. We were sitting in the Regal cinema when the air raid sirens went off. Of course we had heard them many times before, but the sound still sent shivers down my spine. It was a loud eerie wailing sound like lost souls in torment, but this time the Germans were not just flying over Clydebank taking photographs, no, they were trying to deliver a knockout blow to the many shipyards and war effort industries along the river Clyde. The picture continued running and as we watched Shirley Temple and Jack Oakie on the screen we never suspected for a moment what was about to happen before morning came. Eventually the film ended and we were advised to remain in the picture house until the "all clear" sounded. I thought my sister Agnes was in the theatre so I went on a tour to see if I could find her. I asked a few friends if they had seen her, one of them being a girl called Mary Loughlin who was with her boyfriend. I must have been one of the last people to speak to them, as they were both killed that night. I heard days later that her father dug and pulled at stones and debris with his bare hands until he saw Mary's hand. He recognised it by the engagement ring on her finger.
I couldn't find Agnes in the picture hall and decided she must have gone home. Owenie and I sat on in the Regal and a lady called Mrs Gallagher started up a sing song, not knowing then, the sorrow she was going to feel the next
day. However, the sing sing soon came to an abrupt end as we heard the terrible sounds of bombs exploding. The whole building seemed to be shaking and we realised the Luftwaffe were dropping their bombs on us. I went to the toilet and the window had been blown in, so I looked out and couldn't believe my eyes. The sky was lit up, like it was day and there was white stuff flying everywhere like snow. Singer's woodyard was ablaze. I saw all this through the window and a hole in the wall and thought " My God, What's happening out there?". I hurried back into the hall and I remember saying to Owenie, "Oh Owenie, I think the whole town is on fire".
We Decide to leave and try to get home. What we saw was unbelievable. There was not a shop with their windows left intact. We were running on a carpet of broken glass and I could feel it crunching under my feet. The searchlights were scanning the skies, and I could hear the drone of aeroplanes above us, but who's? We kept running and heard a voice shouting at us to get off the street but we hadn't far to go to reach my house in Pattison St. When we got to my Tenement close, my father, John my brother and Agnes were standing there. When my father saw me he said ,in relief, "Thank God, Mary ,you're safe. I've been worried about you."
By this time the bombs were falling fast and furious and I could hear them whizzing through the air and landing with a terrible thud. To say it was very frightening was a gross understatement, and I do know we were all horror stricken. Imagine all of us sheltering from that with a three storey block of flats directly above our heads, huddled in a doorway between the font close and the back court. Every door had a sand bag on the ledge above it which was intended to be used for incendiary bombs and when a bomb exploded not far from where we were sheltering, the sandbag fell off and hit me on the head. I lifted it up and ran out onto the street with it. One of the wardens told me to get off the street so I put the sandbag on top of a smouldering piece of metal which was lying there on the road and ran back into the close. I don't know what made me run onto the street in the first place.
The bomb had landed closer than we thought, in fact, just yards away where it hit No.12. We were in No.11 across the street. The way it landed, all the people who had been in the bottom left flat managed to get out before it started burning, but the people on the bottom right took a direct hit and they were all killed. The piece of burning metal I put the sandbag on must have been a part of the bomb. We realised we couldn't stay in the close, but where to go? In the back courts were the stone shelters but we always said we would never use them as they were death traps but it was all we had.We went into the nearest one to our close. It was dark in the shelter and we could hear the bombs falling. I knew by their sound that they were very near and again one landed very close. There was a terrible bang and I swear that our shelter went straight up in the air and back down again and we thought that it couldn't have did this and still stay in one piece. As it happened, the shelter next to ours had been hit and all the men in our shelter had to go and try to dig out any survivors from under the rubble. People had sheltered in the brick wash-house and it ended up as a pile of rubble. Everyone in it had been killed. Owenie, John and my father tried to help and they said it was a horrendous sight but they didn't talk much about it. I think they were too shocked. By this time it was beginning to get light and soon the sirens sounded the "all clear and we came out the shelter to a different world. I had read in the papers about places being bombed but this was now in my back yard,literally!. This had happened in my street. This was where I had played kick-the-can, ralease and all my other childhood games. I had grown up here and I felt so angry that the Germans felt it so necessary to drop bombs on it and kill neighbours. No.12 was burning, but there were no fire brigade to put out the fires. They would be busy elsewhere. Not that it mattered as there was no water, the mains supply being ruptured.
Owenie said he would have to try and get home to his own family because he was worried about them. Someone told us that the oil storage tanks at Old Kilpatrick were on fire. Going up the stairs to our own house we noticed all the staircase windows were blown in and the doors were blown off their hinges. I looked out the window into the back court and the large metal container we used for our ashes and rubbish, we called it the midden, was lying on top of the wash house. It had been tossed up there by the vibrations of exploding bombs and I thought to myself "That midden looks awful funny up there" but nobody was laughing.
Our Agnes asked one of our neighbours, a survivor of No.12, I remember her name was Mrs Keane, to come up for a cup of tea but when we walked through the door, my God, what a mess! The fireplace was lying in the middle of the floor and we couldn't see the carpet for soot and rubble. There was no gas or water and soot covered everything. Poor Agnes. I remember her picking up an ornament which amazingly wasn't broken, blowing off the soot and putting it back on the mantlepiece. She must have been thinking that she would never get the place clean again.Well we never did get that cup of tea,in fact we never ever had another cup of tea again in our home. We just stood at our window, or should I say, the wide open spaces that used to be our window and watched No.12 burning. I never saw any bombs fall but agnes said at the start of the bombing, when she was standing in the close, she saw a parachute coming down and she called to my father " Look Da, isn't that lovely". He pulled her into the close and said " Agnes, that's a landmine". I wonder if that's the one that fell on Singer's woodyard and caused all the white ash I saw when I was in the Regal.
I later heard that because of the oil tanks being on fire, Mary Loughlin couldn't get home to Old Kilpatrick, so she turned back and went to her boyfriend's house, where a family party was interrupted by the German bombers. There they, along with the Rocks family,from Granny through to the grandchildren were killed. It was a terrible tragedy for the surviving Rocks family. Mary was just one of many friends killed that night and the night still to come. Relatives of our family, the Dunns were killed in Second Avenue.

FRIDAY NIGHT 14TH MARCH

As the day wore on, now at No.7, a wide pend that went all the way from the street through to the back court , started filling up with dead bodies placed there by rescue workers. Those worried about missing relatives could come to the pend to see if they were there. Thank goodness I didn't have to do that. Agnes met Mrs Gallagher, the lady who started the sing song in the Regal, and asked if everything was all right. She said no, she couldn't find her daughter, Delia. Seemingly they were all sheltering in their close, No.10 when the bomb hit No.12 and Delia ran out and into No.9. She must have been killed by the bomb that hit their shelter and I don't think they ever found her body.
My married sister, Nellie, came down to see if we were all right and she and Agnes went up to our flat and packed curtains and bed linen into 2 suitcases then walked the whole road to Nellie's house in Clydebank 2 miles away. Obviously there was no transport of any kind and the roads were full of wrecked buses and trams. I don't know what I did that day. Just stood around in a daze and talking to my friends, I suppose.
Soon it would be night again and with it the Luftwaffe would return to finish the job they started the night before. We didn't know where to go but knew we had to get away from the tenement buildings that had taken a terrible pounding. I thought that if another bomb falls on our street all the buildings will collapse, for there was a massive crack running all the way up our close to the top flat. We decided to spend the night up on the hills north of the town. We walked along the road to the hills, meeting other people who were as likeminded as us, as on the previous night everyone in Clydebank had been taken by surprise being caught in picture houses, dance halls or out on the streets and decided to get out of town.
I remember walking along the canal bank with the moon shining brightly once again and lighting up the pathway we could plainly see many fires still burning. a perfect target for the Germans. Then the sirens started up, their wailing sound warning us that the bombers were on their way once more. Some people lay under hedges at the side of the road but we kept on walking towards the open ground. Agnes was carrying a white blanket under her arm and my father said "you'd better put that blanket out of sight, Agnes, if you don't want a bomb to hit you".
We came across a stone hut which must have been a shelter for cattle. Well this was our shelter for the night and we were glad of it. I remember it was very noisy, as we were quite near an Ack-Ack battery and the guns were firing all night. The night seemed endless but at last we realised that the guns had stopped and the "all clear" was sounding. We started our journey home, walking down onto the Great Western Rd. where we had to be careful where we walked as it was full of large craters. I noticed that the park which ran alongside was also peppered with bomb craters. Later on I heard that the bombers had, in the moonlight, mistaken the wide road for the waters of the Clyde. If this was true, and I think it was, then this saved us from a massive knockout blow. If all the bombs that fell on the Great Western Rd. had landed on the town there wouldn't have been a house left standing and the casualty rate would have been horrendous.

SATURDAY 15TH MARCH 1941
Our close was declared unsafe and neither Agnes nor I were allowed into our house to get our clothes. Later my father persuaded a warden to let him into the house. We lived 2 storeys up and he managed to save my trunk which contained all the things I had accumulated for my own house when I got married to Owenie. He also took out my brother's radiogram and I don't know how he managed to manhandle them down all those stairs on his own. The following day he borrowed a van and was determined to go back and save as much of our belongings as possible but when he got there the close was a mass of flames. He said he just stood there and watched it burning while the tears ran down his face. It must have been terrible to see the home you brought your family up in destroyed before your eyes. My father never had another home of his own after that as he died before he could be allocated another house.
This is just a little story of what happened to one family in Clydebank. We lost our home, and most of our possesions but the Haggerty family survived the Blitz.
I don't think it was a successful operation as far as the Germans were concerned, for when you think of the massive amount of bombs dropped there was very little damage done to the war effort industries like the Shipyards and munitions factories along the Clyde. I don't think the ships being built were seriously damaged and Singers,which was a massive munitions factory and a very big target only sustained the woodyard fire. We always thought the bombers would return but they never did and I always wondered why? Maybe they thought we had ceased to exist.
End
Mary Cairns