MacLeod River of Fire

The Clydebank Blitz
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-85790-086-9
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 456 Seiten

Vibrating with endeavours for Britain's effort against the might of Nazi Germany, Clydebank was - in hindsight - an obvious target for the attentions of the Luftwaffe. When, on the evening of 13 March 1941, the authorities first detected that Clydebank was 'on beam' - targeted by the primitive radio-guidance system of the German bombers - no effort was made to raise the alarm or to direct the residents to shelter or flight. Within the hour, a vast timber-yard, three oil-stores, and two distilleries were ablaze, one pouring flaming whisky into a burn that ran blazing into the Clyde itself in vivid ribbons of fire. And still the Germans came; and Clydebank, now an inferno, lay illuminated and defenceless as heavy bombs of high-explosive, as land-mines and parachute blasters began to fall ... With reference to written sources and the memories of those who survived the experience, John MacLeod tells the story of the Clydebank Blitz and the terrible scale of death and devastation, speculating on why its incineration has been so widely forgotten and its ordeal denied any place in national honour.

John MacLeod was born in Lochaber in 1966. After his 1988 graduation from Edinburgh University, he began his career at BBC Highland in Inverness and quickly established himself as a freelance writer. He has won several awards, including Scottish Journalist of the Year in 1991, and has contributed to many publications including the Scotsman and the Herald. He currently writes a Thursday column for the Scottish Daily Mail and is the author of a number of highly acclaimed books.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Macleod, John

Leseproben

2

THE RISINGEST BURGH IN SCOTLAND

In 1870, there was no such place as Clydebank. By 1941, it had been a bustling burgh for over half a century, and a community of notionally 42,000 people. (In fact, a decade after the last census and abuzz with war industry, it harboured many more.)

What is now densely housed and largely post-industrial sprawl was in 1870 so much farmland in Dunbartonshire: a few hamlets and larger villages, like Dalmuir and Duntocher, Faifley and Hardgate and Old Kilpatrick, and some dusty, even desultory industry. There were minor mines for coal, whinstone and limestone; the odd cotton-mill and some little yards for building little ships. Clydebank is, effectively, a new town, with a hastily adopted new name, and born in rather a hurry, when the rapidly growing Glasgow economy led to irresistible demand for additional docking space along the city’s quaysides. Pressed to create more ship quays, the Clyde Navigation Trustees resorted to ruthless use of their statutory powers for compulsory purchase and demanded (and duly recovered) the land occupied by the ‘Clyde Bank Iron Shipyard’ at Govan, where the Trust would subsequently build Princes Dock. Its owners, the eponymous brothers of J. & G. Thomson Ltd, had hastily to acquire new territory, and the pair soon agreed terms with Miss Hamilton of Cochno for a suitable chunk of her Dunbartonshire estates.

This was appropriately flat land on the ‘West Barns o’ Clyde’, on the north side of the river a little west of Yoker, and ideal for their purposes. For one, the main road west from Glasgow ran through it. For another, so did the Forth and Clyde Canal. And – right opposite the site of the new yard – the River Cart flowed into the Clyde from Paisley. This may not have been of great significance in 1870. By the Second World War – when the men of Clydebank had built the behemoth that was the most famous ship in the world, and had almost completed one still bigger – the handy junction of waters meant a great deal, allowing the launch of much larger vessels than would otherwise have been possible so far upriver.

On 1 May 1871, a local gentlewoman and minor laird, Miss Grace Hamilton, ceremoniously cut the first sod at West Barns for the new shipyard. The lack of an immediate workforce – or people in any number, period – was not at first thought a problem; the company could convoy labour daily from the city by paddle steamer. But it was far from ideal, and soon J. & G. Thomson built a few tenements. Completed in 1872, and hard by the shipyard gates, the sweep of housing comprised 126 little flats, each with two rooms and a kitchen, and was officially named Clydebank Terrace. Everyone, though, informally dubbed the street ‘Thomson’s Buildings’: remarkably, the flats would largely survive the Blitz, only to succumb to witless town planning (and the wrecker’s ball) in 1978. And the rapidly expanding community around the yard was to many ‘Tamson’s Town’.

By 1875, a private housing scheme for a shipyard in Nowheresville was already a community, with yet more houses, and a school, and a large shed quickly dubbed the ‘Tarry Kirk’, for it served not only as a workers’ canteen and community hall but hosted church services. Proper churches (Established, Free, Roman Catholic and so on) were soon rising for the care of souls, and sanctioned as charges, and settled with clergy. There were soon more schools. The place grew remorselessly. Other companies set up shop. By 1880, at least 2,000 men were living there; by the end of 1882, the town even had a train link – the Glasgow, Yoker and Clydebank Railway, on a spur from Hyndland station by Jordanhill, Scotstounhill, Garscadden and Yoker. By the end of 1896, three railways would serve Clydebank, with five tracks. From 1903, there was also a busy tramcar network

Between 1882 and 1884, the Singer Manufacturing Company built an enormous new factory at Kilbowie, just half a mile inland from the Clyde Bank yard. Yet more workers (and their families) flocked to the area, for the Singer plant alone employed a vast workforce; by 1911, no fewer than 11,000 people would be turning out sewing machines for the Empire. The concern’s stolid 190-foot tower – augmented during further expansion of the plant between 1905 and 1906 – became a prized landmark, for the great four-faced clock that adorned it was bigger than its Westminster kinsman and almost certainly the largest in the world. At its apogee from 1906, each clock face was 26 feet in diameter; each minute hand was over 15 feet long and, at its broadest, 18 inches wide. The hour hand was 8 feet 6 inches long. Every one of the numerals was 3 feet 6 inches high; the letters of SINGER, above each face on each side, were 13 feet high and 1 foot wide. It was raised for the glory of Singer’s, this tower and timepiece; but it became the glory of Clydebank.

Singer’s even won their own station on the extended railway line. And in 1886, the people of this pioneering and extraordinarily young community formally petitioned for local autonomy, as they now qualified as a ‘populous place’. It was granted, and the new town became an official ‘police burgh’ on 18 November. There was a determined (and arguably wiser) bid to call this new entity Kilbowie; but the new burgh’s very first Provost was James Rodger Thomson of the eponymous shipyard, and he had his way. The company town, begotten by the Clyde Bank Ship Yard, became for ever Clydebank.

Thomson, a pompous, genial paternalist, was one of three Big Men in the ‘risingest burgh’, if the weakest as a money-man: in 1899, he lost control of his business. Robert McAlpine, his builder, founded a huge company and duly bought himself a knighthood – nay, a baronetcy; and his empire endures to this day. ‘Concrete Bob’ had lived the Scottish industrial dream. Born in Newarthill in Lanarkshire, in 1847, he had left school when but ten – to work down a coal-mine. McAlpine turned from that choking, dangerous trade to become an apprentice bricklayer and, by graft and brains and ruthlessness, became great. He built much of Clydebank, from shipyard-workers’ housing to the curious flat-roofed tenements at Radnor Park (which have a notable part in our story) to the great new Singer’s complex. He built besides much of Glasgow’s subway tunnelling, undertook contracts in Europe and was a noted pioneer of labour-saving machinery and concrete construction. His hapless son and namesake, always in his shadow, finally inherited the old ogre’s fortune and baronetcy in 1934 – and died within the fortnight.

And there was William Beardmore, a London lad and son of a London engineer, born in 1856 and who came to Glasgow as a child of five in 1861; his engineer father co-founded the enormous Parkhead Forge. Well schooled and – shrewdly – apprenticed into the family trade at 15 rather than sent off for the life of an Oxbridge drone, William rose through the clan ranks and became head of the business at 30. It was soon a limited company – William Beardmore & Co. – and he moved into shipbuilding and armaments, buying several Clyde yards and assorted torpedo and munitions plants. In 1900, Beardmore moved on Clydebank – expressly, Dalmuir, its undeveloped western end – and there William Beardmore & Co. rose as one of the biggest and most advanced shipyards in the world, building liners, warships, and – among many notable vessels – the ‘dreadnought’ HMS Ramillies and, in 1916, the huge HMS Argus, the first through-deck aircraft-carrier in the world.

William won the usual fruits. He turned his handsome inheritance into a prodigious one; he bought his Highland estate (at Strathnairn, where he died in 1936); he collected his baronetcy in 1914 and his peerage six years later. He sponsored the 1907 Shackleton expedition to Antarctica, and a glacier was wisely named after him. Beardmore had (or affected to have) a social conscience, for – among many great bodies whose boards he adorned – he served as chairman of the Industrial Welfare Society.

A young, radically minded employee, David Kirkwood – of whom we shall hear much more – never quite got over his awe of this formidable Victorian patriarch. Beardmore was summoned once, in front of Kirk-wood, when a wretched craftsman, cutting a great crank, made some elementary mistake, miscalculating the job by 1,000th of an inch and wasting £1,000-worth of materials – a huge sum in Edwardian times, when if you had £150 a year you could afford a maid. The great man ambled down, puffing a goodly cigar. He wordlessly beheld the useless crank. Then he turned to the manager. ‘Can we make another?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Then get the thing done.’ And away Beardmore swept in his mercy – ‘a very god’, Kirkwood would memorialise, ‘To err is human, to forgive divine.’ Repeating this story, T.C. Smout adds, ‘Autocracy, when clothed in visible, if occasional, benevolence and mercy, could get away with a great deal.’

Such emperors ruled the young Clydebank. Dozens and dozens more owned it; for such housing as was not built expressly by companies for their workers was leased privately – poor and rickety as it might be – from a host of little bourgeois landlords, most in Glasgow, most of the stock managed by cold-eyed factors. Both business barons and these Rachmans had a vested interest in a biddable, insecure, economically powerless working class. And their power and fortune depended on maintaining this pleasant order in housing provision for their social inferiors. For decades, then, they would wage war against any provision of public housing.

A ‘Citizens’ Union’ in Glasgow was ruthlessly formed to win municipal elections and bring down...