JAMIE Stuart still clearly remembers his family of six being forced to move from their plush detached home after his father's wages were cut in half in 1926.

The Glasgow author’s father, John, a £5-a-week general manager at the city’s Fruit-market, was in despair. “He sat in George Square and wept, and wondered how he was going to cope,” recalls Mr Stuart.

“He hired a horse and cart, bought fruit and vegetables from the market and for five months tried to make a living selling his produce round the streets. Sadly, he was not cut out to be an outside trader and he often ended up giving his stock away for nothing rather than dumping it.”

Last week’s warning by Sir Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, that Britain is experiencing its worst financial crisis since the 1930s caught the eye of many people who can still remember the Great Depression.

Like many people in their 90s, Mr Stuart remembers the privations and uncertainty they and their parents endured when Britain’s economy shrank by 7.7% and unemployment reached record levels. Scotland suffered particularly badly.

However, they insist that as bad as things have been in the past couple of years, they are far better than they were in the 1930s, a decade that was also wracked by the onset of war.

Mr Stuart, author of the best-selling A Glasgow Bible, says his own family of six had to move from their mortgaged, detached home in Stepps in 1929 and relocate to a four-in-a-block in Carntyne. He added: “I have no memory of ever going hungry but I can only imagine we ate a lot of potatoes and bread. My mother was good at making jam and we also had our own chickens in the garden so we were OK for eggs.”

“We were obviously poor but I have no memory of being poor because my parents were ingenious, caring people.”

As the Depression deepened, the Stuart family had to grow their own vegetables. His father built beds for the family and repaired all their shoes.

“We cut up newspapers for toilet paper. I got a Saturday penny from my mother and would spend a halfpenny in the sweet shops and save the rest for Monday and Tuesday.”

Isobel Logan, 94, of Glasgow, also has vivid memories of growing up in the 1930s.

The youngest of a family of five, her father had a small grocer’s shop in Dennistoun. He did not like to refuse his customers credit but ended up going bankrupt in the late 1920s. “It meant he was in and out of employment but one job saw him overseeing the supply of foodstuffs to lodging houses, which was quite ironic.”

Mrs Logan remembered that in order to make ends meet her mother took in dressmaking and festive baking for neighbours, recycled her father’s suits to make trousers for her sons, and made dresses for her daughters using cheap fabrics.

Flour sacks would be cleaned and turned into pillow-cases, decorated with insertion lace.

“No matter how poor we were, we had to wear a hat on a Sunday.” Panama hats were fashionable at the time, and the Logan family would cover theirs in winter so they could be worn all year round.

A staple meal was “pan haggis” – made from oatmeal and onions, and fried in the pan, to eke out the meagre food supply. Home-made jam, enough to last the whole year, would be stored in a sideboard, while stale bread would be toasted to make a coating for fish.

Freelance journalist Gordon Irving, who will be 93 on his next birthday, said: “I agree this is the worst crisis for a long time but it was not nearly as bad in the 1920s and 1930s because we didn’t have much of anything. Today we are in a bad way because people are losing so much more – jobs, salaries.

“Back then, we weren’t as affluent as we are now, so it is going to hit us more. We were quite happy with the little we had. We didn’t have all the home comforts we have now.”

Glasgow historian and author Ian R Mitchell, who is currently in the US, believes the current downturn could last as long as the Great Depresssion. He said: “We are nowhere near the end of it yet.

“Here in the US there is near-hysteria at the economic situation. In some towns I drive through, half the businesses are closed and half the houses are for sale, and neither of the parties can understand what the problem is, still less the solution.”