SEEING them in colour is a surprise as they seem, in my mind at least, to be from a black and white era. However a woman on the film puts them in context. “It was the highlight of the year. The Beatles were the next year.”

She was referring to the last day of the trams in Glasgow, an event in 1962 which brought out the biggest crowd in Britain, according to one estimate, since the celebrations on VE night. The number of people on the streets, on a route from Dalmarnock to Pollokshields via the city centre could have been as high as 250,000.

Well I say Pollokshields, but the terminus was the now almost forgotten name of Coplawhill, the former tram depot and workshops on Albert Drive which is now the Tramway arts centre.

So where better to show a film of the trams’ last day, shot by the Scottish Association of Amateur Cinematographers in colour, and resurrected for the Southside Film Festival, than the Tramway where the now painted brick walls absorbed for decades the clanging and screeching of hundreds of tramcars.

Even today, over 50 years since the film was shot, the screening was a sell-out with 100 people filling the cinema room. And very few of them were old enough to have actually travelled on a tram. Interest in Glasgow’s past it seems is still a powerful magnet.

But before we get too nostalgic about the trams, let’s put them in context. The then Glasgow Herald reported not only the last day with its ceremonial parade of trams old and new across the city, but the actual last working day a couple of nights earlier when only a few die-hard tram enthusiasts mingled with everyday users. The Herald quoted a perspicacious young woman on the tram who said: “A’ that stuff about the last tram’s a lot of nonsense. It’s time all they auld things wis aff the road. My mother minds when the horse trams went aff an’ she was near greetin’ but she wouldnae be seen deid on wan noo.”

The Evening Times held a debate on its pages amongst its writers on whether it was a good thing or not that the trams were going, and as one writer succinctly put it: “They have clanged and clanked their way to the scrapheap. Don’t ever bring them back.”

As Hugh Brown wrote: “The city will be safer without treacherous cobbles on the road and happier as you will no longer risk life and limb venturing into the middle of a busy road to scramble onto an antiquated vehicle.” “Only a jabbering jobbernowl,” declared another, who perhaps was in a more colourful frame of mind after a liquid lunch, “would defend them.”

The person who did defend them was the Evening Times’s Mr Glasgow, Jack House, who astutely said that a modernised tram system would have been of enormous benefit to the city but “there has been a deliberate policy of letting the whole system run into desuetude.” Goodness Jack, I had to reach for my giant Shorter Oxford dictionary, which is propped up by my computer screen, to confirm that it means disuse.

The film shown at the Tramway reminds you of how colourful the trams were in daylight, away from the night-time fog and drizzle that they were often pictured in. There was the traditional orange and cream livery of Glasgow Corporation, plus a broad band of colour along the top to tell you the route - red, green and blue were the main colours. As someone reminisced in the Evening Times: “I got a blue tram back to the west end. If someone said they caught a red tram, it made you wonder where they lived as you had never been on one.”

Alastair Stirling, a volunteer guide at the Transport Museum, spoke after the screening and explained the colour coding was introduced at the turn of the previous century when many people could not read and would not know where the tram was going without the colour band.

Many of the trams, he said, were actually built in Glasgow at the now Tramway, and were so solidly made that a number ran for over 60 years. “You could only smoke upstairs, and if you compared the white paintwork on the ceiling upstairs, which actually turned brown with the smoke, with the white paintwork downstairs, it was enough to put you off smoking for good.,” he said.

Tram crews were immaculately turned out. Said Alastair: “One tram depot had a full length mirror and a full length picture of someone in uniform beside it so that staff could make sure they were properly attired.

“The ticket machine was a huge aluminium object strapped on the front of a conductor who could use it to dunt someone on the head if their drunken behaviour called for it.”

The early sixties were more cavalier it seems. The film shows lads climbing on high walls and window-sills to watch the parade of trams. Folk dart out from the crowds to place pennies on the line just before a tram passes over in order to have a lasting souvenir of a flattened penny.

No one seems to mind these folk leaning down in front of the wheels just inches away.

There is no commentary on the main part of the film, but Southside Film Festival organisers had asked local band Machines In Heaven to compose a musical score to go with it, and it is superb, drawing out all the emotions of the day.

Karen O’Hare from the film festival, which is aimed at bringing film-going back to vast areas of the city’s south side which have no cinemas, confirmed people are really interested in the history of Glasgow, and getting to know the area a bit better. The film festival, she says, “is the idea of bringing people together to watch things communally. We are still social animals.”

And I don’t think there was a single jobbernowl amongst them.