I WAS greatly surprised to see my photograph in your "Those were the days" feature (“Glasgow’s war and the children who helped clear the damage”, The Herald, September 5). I am the small boy sitting with his hands on the barrow, talking to my young brother immediately to my right. The bomb site we were working on was the junction of Wilton Street and Queen Margaret Road, immediately across the River Kelvin from the former BBC building.
A parachute mine had landed there in 1941 and demolished a row of tenements, killing a number of people including the ARP wardens. The mine apparently caused a conflagration in a large mansion house just on the other side of Wilton Street. Our house in Fergus Drive looked directly on to this burnt-out house. We dared not go anywhere near this house as it was established fact amongst us kids that the house was inhabited by lions and even ghosts. Any alleged siting of a large feline at any of the burnt-out windows would send us fleeing up the nearest close, hearts pounding. Whichever parent started that rumour to keep us out of that undoubtedly dangerous building was a genius.
The house was demolished about 1947 and the resulting waste ground became our play site for many years. An organisation called The Tree Lovers’ Society went around such sites and attempted to brighten them up by planting gardens within them. The lady looking after our bit of waste ground, a Mrs Wishart, conscripted us kids into making rock gardens from the rubble, planting flowers and even making compost heaps from fallen leaves from nearby pavements.
Our contribution to brightening up a drab post-war Glasgow was minimal, but in those pre-television and tablet days it gave us something interesting to do.
Russell Martin,
17 Rutherford Avenue, Bearsden.
THE “Those were the days” article about the German bombing of the west end of Glasgow in December 1941 brought back some distant memories. At that time I was an eight-year-old living in one of the recently-built flats on the corner of Great Western Road and Bearsden Road, which looked out over the Anniesland Cross junction and down Crow Road.
On the night in question, after the air-raid sirens sounded, all the residents in the upstairs flats were assembled in our front hall, because it was apparently considered the safest place to be if there was a direct hit on the building. We could hear the frequent explosions but could not tell how far away the bombs were falling.
A teenage neighbour was standing in the mouth of the close, and rushed in to say that the Germans were invading us, as she could see a parachute coming down. My father shouted “That’s not a parachutist, it’s a land mine” and pulled her back inside. Seconds later there was a massive explosion, and the building and windows trembled. That was the land mine that fell on the cottages a hundred yards down Crow Road, with the blast strangely sucking out the north-facing windows of the shops and flats at Anniesland Cross.
The next morning cycling down Crow Road on the way to school I saw the devastation – buildings completely flattened, and broken furniture and clothes lying in the front gardens and on the pavement. In the following days we heard news of the devastation in Hyndland, Partick and Scotstoun, almost all domestic properties.
It has never been explained why the Germans were using land mines on parachutes, which were obviously less accurate than targeted bombs when attempting to attack the Clyde shipyards and factories along the river. Perhaps they just didn’t care about the deaths of innocent civilians, just as our own air force behaved when flattening German cities later in the war.
But sometimes when I drive through the Anniesland junction and look across at my old home, I think about that night and realise I was just lucky to survive.
Iain AD Mann,
7 Kelvin Court, Glasgow.
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