River of Fire: The Clydebank Blitz

423 Pages·2011·3.16 MB·English

by  John MacLeod

R I V E R O F F I R E
Born in Lochaber in 1966, John MacLeod spent the 1970s in Glasgow, attending
Scotstoun Primary School and Jordanhill College School, and living in a manse
still visibly scarred from what may have been the very first bomb – on Queen
Victoria Drive – dropped in the Clydebank Blitz, with neighbours still haunted
by those nights and, he says, ‘a sense in the very stones of the neighbourhood of
recent, unspeakable horror. Bombs had fallen all round us – yet folk would not
talk about it.’
After graduation from Edinburgh University, he began his career at BBC
Highland in Inverness and quickly established himself as a freelance writer. He
has won many awards and is presently a columnist with the Scottish Daily Mail.
He has written a number of books, including When I Heard the Bell, which was
shortlisted for the Saltire Book of the Year Award (2009).
RIVER OF FIRE
THE CLYDEBANK BLITZ
John MacLeod
This revised edition first published in 2011 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk
Copyright © John MacLeod 2010
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored or transmitted in any form without the express
written permission of the publisher.
The author’s royalties from this edition
will be donated to the Clydebank Asbestos Group
ISBN: 978 1 84158 968 8
eBook ISBN: 978 0 85790 086 9
The moral right of John MacLeod to be identified
as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Typeset by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore
Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
For
Mrs Agnes I. Kinnis
Clydeside evacuee of the Second World War
Teacher of Primary 1B at Scotstoun Primary School
1971–72
where she taught me my letters
and
Teacher of Primary 7B at Jordanhill College School
1977–78
where she taught me to fly
C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
Preface
I. THE JOYS OF THE TOWN
1. A Grief Interred
2. The Risingest Burgh in Scotland
3. Shoulder to Shoulder
4. The Winds of War
II. THE TERRORS OF THE NIGHT
5. ‘All on fire …’
6. ‘Not as much as a rip of hair …’
7. ‘Well, they’re coming back …’
8. ‘A picture of heart-rending tragedy …’
III. AND SORROWS ALL DEPART
9. The Naming of the Dead
10. Orphans of the Storm
11. The Bombing of Ethics
12. The Flowers of the Forest
Casualty List
Two Poems for Jim MacKinven
Sources
Index
Plate Section
L I S T O F I L L U S T R A T I O N S
Striking apprentices, Clydebank, late 1930s
The majestic Queen Mary, leaving Clydebank under her own power, 1936
Jim MacKinven and his father, around 1939
Glasgow tenement back-court, with communal bomb-shelters
Women and children queuing for coke during the Second World War
Clydebank from the air – as photographed by the Luftwaffe
An exhausted fireman by Brown’s Buildings, March 1941
Families fleeing Clydebank after the bombing, March 1941
ARP Warden John Stewart takes a little boy to safety, March 1941
The ruins of a comfortable middle-class home, Park Road, March 1941
Kilbowie Road, some days after the assault, March 1941
Queuing for transport out of devastated Clydebank, March 1941
The mass-funeral at Dalnottar, Monday 17 March 1941
As a spirit undaunted: Singer’s Tower and Clock, March 1941
P R E F A C E
The Clydebank Blitz, and what Glasgow and the towns of the Clyde coast
endured during the Second World War, has fascinated me since I was a
dislocated Highland child – a son of the Free Church manse – growing through
the 1970s in the western reaches of Glasgow from infant to adolescent.
When I began school, at Scotstoun, in April 1971, the war itself had ended
only a quarter-century before and was still very close to us, in a way hard for my
generation’s children to appreciate. We now see most keen interest in these
things, from the battle for national survival through the darkness of the Third
Reich to the hardships and simple, doughty values and good humour of the
Home Front, as those who personally endured those years and witnessed those
realities, especially as adult experience, quietly slip from us with each passing
year.
And we must never forget what we, as a nation and indeed as a civilisation,
owe to those men and women – and indeed to many who were then but boys and
girls – in a war of unparalleled savagery. This war the criminal state of Nazi
Germany had criminally launched; this war she very nearly and criminally won;
and this war she lost only after untold atrocities and a cold-blooded endeavour in
genocide that will flame to the end of this world in the annals of infamy.
I am grateful to Hugh Andrew, Andrew Simmons and all the resourceful and
unfailingly cheerful staff at Birlinn for giving me the opportunity to write this
book. And I especially wish to thank Provost Denis Agnew, Mrs Joan Baird, Mrs
Susan Holmes, Mr Hector Cairns, Mr Iain A.D. Mann, Tom McKendrick, the
Reverend Peggy Roberts, Theresa Stewart and all friends in Clydebank, all those
who have gladly taken time to speak to me or to write with details of their own
recollections or their family experience, and the staff and resources of West
Dunbartonshire Council for their invaluable help in illustrating this book.
I am particularly grateful to West Dunbartonshire Libraries and Museums
Section for granting access to the Clydebank Blitz Archive, for providing every
assistance and for permission to quote material to which the Libraries and
Museums Section holds copyright. I also deeply appreciate the kindness of Mr
Billy Kay, a distinguished broadcaster, sage and scholar of Scottish life and
culture, for supplying a recording of his important 1981 Radio Scotland oral
history of the Clydebank Blitz, the best documentary on that experience which
will ever be broadcast. Even thirty years later, however, and with so few people
remaining who experienced the Clydebank Blitz as adults, Finestripe
Production’s television documentary for BBC Scotland – premiered in March
2011 – was an outstanding programme and I am grateful for their kind
permission to quote from it in this edition. And – I write this with deepest
sadness – my gratitude, too, to the late Reverend Donald MacLean, for many
years Free Presbyterian minister of Glasgow, who spoke to me a few weeks
before his lamented death on 13 August 2010: though ninety-five years old, he
was as sharp, buoyant and splendid as ever.
I am also indebted to the good people of Carradale, Argyll and Bute, and
particularly to Mrs April Simpson – first cousin of James MacKinven, the last of
his near kin and who knew him well – for entrusting me with a complete copy of
his surviving papers and photograph, as well as poems previously unpublished
and in his memory by Naomi Mitchison and Joan Adeney Easdale. A fine
photograph of Jim and his father was kindly supplied by Miss Christine Ritchie.
I am most grateful for all their help generally in Carradale to Mr Martin and Mrs
Chris Mears. I have not made much of James MacKinven – he was not from
Clydebank, nor did he die there – but he is worth memorialising, both from the
waste of real talent and from the solemnity of being in the wrong place at the
wrong time.
I must also with great gratitude again acknowledge the time and sacrifice
again of Dr Robert Dickie FRCGP DRCOG; and on this occasion of Mr Bill
Heaney, a great son of Dunbartonshire and one of the most respected journalists
in Scotland – as well as a senior pillar of the Labour movement and sometime
high counsel to Scotland’s second First Minister, the Rt Hon. Henry McLeish
MP, MSP – for taking the time and trouble to read, in early drafts, these
chapters. Dr Dickie and Mr Heaney sacrificed much of their scant leisure time to
this chore and made very many helpful suggestions, as well as pointing out
egregious errors, occasional blunders in the congruity of my English, the odd
lapse of taste or judgement and still odder moments of entire opacity. I also
appreciated the encouragement of Mr Andrew Murray, Tolsta, at a difficult point
in the project in March 2010.
Since the hardback edition was published, dozens and dozens of readers –
including many Blitz survivors from Clydebank and Greater Glasgow, or their
families, from all over the world – have been in touch by post and email, not just
with kindly remarks but with stories and memories hitherto unpublished. In
addition, important archived papers have since come to my belated attention and
the seventieth anniversary of the bombing, in the spring of 1941, brought
renewed media coverage and interviews with survivors, as well as West
Dunbartonshire Council’s outstanding new work on the ‘Remembering Scotland
At War’ website. I have therefore been able to incorporate a great deal of new
material in this paperback edition and revised some chapters quite extensively.
Opportunity has also been taken to correct errors from the excusable to the
egregious. Responsibility for any mistakes in this work, nevertheless, is mine
and mine alone. Anyone who wishes to correct me on a given point, or to supply
further material or anecdote for a future edition, is most welcome to contact me
at the address below.
While I have taken time to detail in some measure what was endured by the
people of Glasgow and other communities – especially Cardross, Dumbarton,
Paisley and Port Glasgow and in particular Greenock – under the assault of the
Luftwaffe in the spring of 1941, this book is unashamedly centred on Clydebank,
the people of Clydebank, and what befell them as a social and human experience
in the Blitz. It is neither a military history nor a detailed and technical account of
what the German air force – whose inept leadership did more than any other
talon of the Nazi state to lose Hitler the war, admittedly with much fatuous
meddling from the Führer himself – actually did in the skies over central
Scotland. Much new, interesting documentation from the contemporary
Luftwaffe perspective has emerged in recent years, but it is for other writers to
explore and emphatically for such as can fluently read German.
I have devoted much time in the early pages of the book to describing the rise
of Clydebank and both the human character and the physical environment of the
town, which was effectively destroyed for ever in March 1941. I have besides
also devoted some space to the rise of the Scottish Labour movement with which
the town, and wider Clydeside, is so associated, and which had some bearing on
her preparations for an aerial assault and, perhaps still more, why there has been
so little recognition of her ordeal in a wider Britain. It is important to me that
this remarkable community – which I have long loved – is not cast as a mere
victim; and that people should know much of that town, that order and its values
largely obliterated in March 1941. The values endure: the townscape and its
1941 community were lost to Scotland for always.
But I have also, in the penultimate chapter, demonstrated quietly how two
great German cities – as Air Marshall Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris pitilessly put it –
having helped to sow the wind, would reap (and that tenfold) the whirlwind of
terror bombing; and touched at various points in the text on what was endured,
in particular, by the people of London.