by Maggie Craig
Fear of air raids was high. Nobody could forget Guernica. In 1938 Spanish cities were still being bombed. Terror at the prospect of a gas attack went back to the trenches of the First World War. Everyone had seen the pitiful photographs of soldiers blinded by mustard gas, able to shuffle forward only because each had a hand laid on the shoulder of the comrade in front of him.
On the Clyde, the Queen Elizabeth was launched by the lady for whom she’d been named, the late Queen Mother. It was a low-key affair. This Cunarder was destined to spend her first years afloat painted in the drab colours of the Grey Funnel Line, the Royal Navy.
In Clydebank and Glasgow people tried to reassure themselves and each other that the Germans would never bomb the west of Scotland. It was too far away from Germany. Their planes couldn’t carry sufficient fuel to make it. Pioneered by Scotsman Sir Robert Watson-Watt, radar was still in its infancy. How would the Germans ever be able to find the Clyde among all the other rivers, lochs and inlets of the West Coast?
There was a strange atmosphere, one of fear and gallows humour, a sense that the fight needed to come, that there had to be a showdown with Hitler. After his second meeting with the Nazi leader, Chamberlain made his famous speech: ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.’
With the benefit of hindsight, the policy of Appeasement has been much criticized. Yet it’s all too easy to forget how desperately Chamberlain and so many other Britons wanted to avoid another European war. Memories remained vivid of the last one, in which Chamberlain himself lost a brother in the trenches. Despite Spain, despite the rise of fascism, young people didn’t want to believe there was going to be another war. That horror was something which belonged to their parents’ generation.
At Munich on 29September 1938, Chamberlain, French leader Daladier and Italy’s dictator Mussolini met Hitler. Together they decided the Sudetenland would be incorporated into Hitler’s Germany within the space of the next two weeks. Neville Chamberlain flew home with his now infamous piece of paper and a promise of peace in our time.
The tension of the long, wet summer exploded into acclaim for the Prime Minister. He was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. When Chamberlain entered the House of Commons, only four MPs did not rise to their feet and applaud him. James Maxton was one of them.
When Maxton did stand up to contribute to the debate, he spoke of the ordinary people of Germany, allowed no voice under Nazi rule, and of his German socialist friends, some now in concentration camps, some now in exile. Maxton reluctantly congratulated the Prime Minister on what he had achieved but told him and the House that this was only a breathing space. Not everyone had the courage to look so clearly into the future.
The celebrations for the last night of the Empire Exhibition at Bellahouston Park in October 1938 were euphoric. They danced ‘The Lambeth Walk’ in the rain. They gazed open-mouthed at the sky as three aircraft staged a mock attack on Bellahouston Park. Caught in searchlights manned by the City of Glasgow Squadron of the RAF, the bandits were successfully driven off.
Then the lights went down and the vast crowd fell silent. Only Tait’s Tower was lit up, standing out like a lighthouse in a dark ocean. The crowd sang ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’. The Union Jack on the tower was lowered and the lights began to fade. Once the darkness was complete, a voice rang out: ‘Let the spirit of the Exhibition live on!’
It was over. The future beckoned. Whatever it might hold.
30
The Clydebank Blitz
Make for where the fires are greatest!
Some came from Beauvais in France, flying up the Irish Sea towards their target. Most travelled through the March night from Holland, northern Germany, Norway and Denmark. As they crossed over the Scottish coast near Edinburgh, people on the ground heard wave after wave of them pass above their heads. Every ten minutes there were more.
The drone of their engines could be heard as far south as Hull and as far north as Aberdeen. They were Heinkel 111s and Junker 88s. There were 236 of them and they were the German Luftwaffe, intent on dropping their deadly cargo on the shipyards, oil depots and munitions factories of Clydebank. The idea that the Germans would never be able to find the Clyde was proved horribly wrong on the devastating nights of 13 and 14 March 1941.
Clydesiders had watched the relentless bombing of London and other English cities over the winter of 1940 and shivered. The generation which lived through the Second World War came to have immense respect for the courage and resilience of Londoners, pounded by German bombers night after night for months on end.
The hideous whooping-banshee wail of the air-raid siren went off shortly after nine o’clock. It was a chilling sound but there had been a lot of false alarms and for a moment everyone thought this was just another one. In Singer’s, turned over for the duration to the making of munitions, there was a daily sweepstake as to when the alarm would go off each night. It soon became clear this one was for real.
Those whose job it was to watch for such things had been pretty sure Clydebank was going to be bombed that night, first picking up the telltale signs of a German radio navigation beam and then spotting individual Luftwaffe reconnaissance flights. A decision was made not to alert the population. That might cause panic and a trek up into the Old Kilpatricks, the hills behind the town. Civil disorder might ensue. This was Red Clydeside.
One young woman whose father worked at John Brown’s was already in bed and asleep in the family home close to the shipyard down on Dumbarton Road. Working long hours as a nurse, she was trying to catch up on her sleep. Wrenched from her much-needed rest, she demanded irritably that whoever was slamming those doors should kindly stop right now. Then she realized the banging doors were sticks of dropping bombs. The people who experienced the Clydebank Blitz use a distinctive word to describe the sound of death and destruction falling to earth. Crump. Crump. Crump. Like the footsteps of a malevolent giant, drawing nearer each time, the ground trembling with the impact.
Civilians headed for the shelters. Civil-defence volunteers made for the control centre in the basement of Clydebank’s public library on Dumbarton Road. They’d just come back from it after weekly training. One ARP warden who’d already undressed reached for the trousers he’d laid over the back of a chair. There was a bomber’s moon that night but inside a small house the darkness of the blackout was all-encompassing. The ARP warden slid both legs down the same trouser leg and promptly fell over. He swore comprehensively and started again.
The main squadron of Luftwaffe bombers was preceded by pathfinders. They dropped flares and then hundreds of incendiaries to light the way, bathing the town in an eerie greenish glow. One young woman who saw the flares float down thought they looked pretty, like fairy lights. Only later did she realize what a risk she’d taken by standing there and watching them.
Clydebank was soon to be ablaze with light. The timber yard at Singer’s was hit, creating a huge bonfire. The distillery at Yoker went up, setting fire to the whisky, the sweet smell drifting over the town.
Up in Glasgow’s maternity hospital at Rottenrow a junior nurse was told off for standing looking out of the windows. Criss-crossed though they were with brown parcel tape, an explosion some distance away could still shatter them into a thousand pieces. A nursing sister tried to reassure anxious mothers of newborn babies: ‘Don’t worry. It’s Clydebank that’s getting it.’ One of the young mothers became distraught. She was from Clydebank.
Some bombs fell on the west end of Glasgow, one in Dudley Drive in Hyndland, others on Hillhead and Partick, another in Napiershall Street, off Great Western Road. An expectant mother living in a flat there took shelter in the crypt of a church at the top of Byres Road, in what is now the Òran Mór theatre.
That young woman’s husband was working the night shift as a railway shunter in Rothesay Dock, at Clydebank. He and a w
orkmate took shelter under a wagon, from where they squinted up at the night sky. In a surreal situation, the young man found himself thinking that the colours lighting up the sky were quite beautiful. The two men later discovered the wagon under which they had taken cover contained explosives.
When the workmate returned the next morning to the Holy City he found that his home no longer existed. The German bombers devastated the flat-roofed houses which had reminded the sailor of Jerusalem. Hundreds died here. Only yards away, the nearby cinema, always called ‘the La Scala’, survived the onslaught. People in Clydebank have talked ever since about how strange that was.
While the bombs were still dropping a nurse went to Radnor Park Church Hall, where casualties had been taken. ARP warden Mrs Hyslop was in charge there. Whether she was the same Mrs Hyslop of the Clydebank rent strikes is not clear. A young nurse appeared, saw there was no doctor and took an injured baby in an ambulance she had commandeered up to the Western Infirmary, in Glasgow. The Western’s accident and emergency department was busy dealing with the local casualties of the raid. Plenty of qualified doctors were on duty, to the frustration of a group of medical students who were desperate to help.
When the young nurse appeared the students made the decision to head for Clydebank. As they were all unqualified, although only nine days away from their finals, the Western’s medical superintendent refused to give them any medical supplies. They approached a nursing sister, Isabella MacDonald.
In his definitive The Clydebank Blitz I.M.M. MacPhail relates how Sister MacDonald immediately gave them what they needed: ‘a comprehensive range of medical requisites, tied up in eight bedsheets like washerwoman’s bundles’. The only thing she was not prepared to give them was morphine. The infirmary’s senior medical officer had made it very clear that students could not be allowed to administer this.
Stopped by a policeman as they neared Clydebank because of the danger of unexploded bombs, they explained what they were about. ‘Make for where the fires are greatest!’ he told them. They made it to Radnor Park Church Hall, where a cry of relief ran round: ‘The doctors have come! The doctors have come!’
They saved lives that night, tended to many of the wounded, although without the ability to use morphine to relieve terrible pain caused by terrible injuries. As a direct result of their experiences during the Clydebank Blitz, it was subsequently agreed that final-year medics would be allowed to give the drug to those injured in air raids.
Only seven houses in Clydebank were left undamaged by the Clydebank Blitz. How many people were killed or injured became a controversial issue. Although German bombing raids on British cities were reported during the war, those cities were often not named and the number of casualties tended to be played down for the sake of morale.
This could work both ways. Bombing raids on Liverpool, Clydebank and Greenock alike were sometimes reported only as having been ‘on a northern port’, giving people the sense that their own town’s suffering had not been honoured. It was the same with the number of casualties. When told that 500 people had been killed in Clydebank, one member of the local Home Guard bitterly asked, ‘Which street?’
More realistic estimates put the numbers who died in Glasgow and Clydebank during the Blitz of March 1941 at 1,200, with 1,100 seriously injured. In 1954 the Commonwealth War Graves Commission compiled a list of as many names as they could establish. The list was placed in the Roll of Honour at Westminster Abbey.
On the eerily quiet morning after the first night of the Clydebank Blitz, a man through from Arbroath selling fish from a van eventually found a working public phone in Glasgow and reassured his family that he was safe. He kept repeating the same words: ‘It was terrible. It was terrible. It was terrible.’ Over and over again, that was all he could say.
Animals had suffered too. Only a small proportion of them had been put to sleep because of their owners’ fears of gas attacks. One of the most distressing sights in the aftermath of the Clydebank Blitz was that of dogs and cats which had lost their homes and their humans running around wild and beginning to form themselves into packs. They were rounded up within the next few days and, sadly, humanely put to sleep.
Many caged birds were luckier. As I.M.M. MacPhail put it in The Clydebank Blitz:
On the Friday and Saturday mornings of the raids a not uncommon sight was that of a homeless family with one of them in charge of a canary or a budgerigar in a cage, which remained with them wherever they went – to the Rest Centre in Clydebank, to the Rest Centre in the Vale of Leven or elsewhere.
The workers were heroes now. As the Glasgow Herald put it, ‘Clydebuilt has hitherto applied to its ships. All that it implies in rugged strength and reliability in times of stress has been won by its people this past week.’
For weeks afterwards, the young woman who’d thought the flares were like fairy lights couldn’t hold a cup and saucer without the two of them rattling together. Years later, speaking of the compensation paid out after the raids, she said in her best deadpan tones, ‘You would never have guessed there had been that many pianos in Clydebank.’
Always the humour. Running through all these stories even in the darkest of times, this quicksilver vein of wit is the birthright of the people of Red Clydeside.
Legacy
Much ink has been spilled in the debate over whether Red Clydeside ever brought Scotland close to revolution. Personally, I don’t think so, certainly not in the sense of the convulsion which seized Russia in 1917. Different country, different history, different kind of people. Or maybe it’s because Scottish mothers bring us all up to be too well-mannered. You can’t have a polite revolution. Or a cheery one.
I find it sad that many historians who have written about Red Clydeside view it only in these terms. Since the revolution never happened, they disdainfully declare the whole thing to have been a failure. In addition to so often rendering a thrilling and passionate period of history boring, I also believe they’re missing the point. Nor do I think it’s fair to judge the early Red Clydesiders by the subsequent history and development of the Labour Party.
Red Clydeside did bring about a revolution, a sea change in thought, attitudes and expectations. The legacy is all around us, so much part of our daily lives we often hardly notice it, take it completely for granted. In 1922 James Maxton said that he and his fellow Clydeside Labour MPs wanted to abolish poverty. Although they may not have entirely succeeded in that, they did improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. Life for the majority in the Glasgow of 2011 is immeasurably better than it was in 1911: at home, in the workplace, in the health of men, women and children, in educational opportunity.
The Red Clydesiders inspired their fellow man and woman to expect more and demand more, for themselves, their children, their community and their country. They encouraged them always to ask why and to speak out whenever they saw something which wasn’t fair. It’s a simple principle but one which in Scotland runs bone-deep. You might call it rebel spirit.
In 1971, under the leadership of shop stewards of whom the most well known became Jimmy Reid and Jimmy Airlie, the workers at the Clydebank shipyard which had been John Brown’s fought to keep their jobs and to keep shipbuilding on the Clyde. The late Jimmy Reid made a famous speech at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in: ‘There will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevying’ – cue dramatic pause – ‘because the world is watching us.’
Responding as people did to the UCS war cry of ‘the right to work’, support came from throughout the UK and from some unexpected quarters. During the dispute, a florist delivered a bouquet of red roses addressed to Jimmy Reid at the yard. Checking the gift card, one of the shop stewards told the others it had only one word on it: ‘Lenin’.
‘Lenin’s deid!’ someone protested.
‘No’ the one who spells his name Lennon,’ came the laconic reply. John and Yoko Lennon sent a generous cheque towards the UCS fighting fund along with t
heir blood-red roses.
When Glasgow University’s students chose him to be their rector a few years later, Jimmy Reid made another famous speech:
The rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. That is how it starts, and before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, ‘What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?’
Pure Red Clydeside. An instinctive and passionate sense of democracy, justice and fairness. The unshakeable belief that we all owe each other care and respect. Stirring words well chosen to put the message across. The conviction that the pen is mightier than the sword. The familiarity with the beauty and power of the language of the King James Bible. Jimmy Reid also quoted Robert Burns in his Glasgow University speech. Like a band at a demonstration, Burns always has to be there too.
Time and again while I was researching this book, I came across these same bright threads which link each generation of Scotland’s people to those who came before them. Whether it was Davie Kirkwood or James Maxton, one man born into poverty, the other into comparative financial comfort, there’s always that love of language, love of poetry, love of Scotland and the unshakeable conviction that this is a country more than able to run its own affairs.
James Maxton had something to say about revolution:
The biggest mental revolution necessary is, I believe, the mental revolution which enables a man or woman to desire a social order in which no one will be better or worse off than himself or herself, a social order in which men and women do not get added prestige by the number of pounds they can show in their bank books, the numbers of superfluous rooms they have in their houses, or the number of spare suits of clothes they have.
