THE visit in March 1941 was meant to be a well-kept secret, involving only those who needed to know, but word leaked out, nevertheless. When the King and Queen arrived in Glasgow to acquaint themselves with Clydeside’s war effort, a large crowd was waiting for them at the railway station. “We are with you to the end,” one woman called out. The royal couple then spotted a Union Jack fluttering from a tenement window. His Majesty, resplendent in the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, gave the salute.

The royals visited industrial establishments, talking to many workers and congratulating them on their long service records. “They saw,” the Glasgow Herald reported, “women learning the art of engineering, spent three-quarters of an hour amidst the clang and noise of a busy shipyard, and met officers and men of the merchant navy and the dockers who discharge the ships which run the gauntlet of lurking submarine and hovering bomber.” At Ibrox stadium, they inspected civil defence units.

Years earlier, as the Duke and Duchess of York, they had visited the Templeton carpet factory. It was a measure of Scotland’s war effort that the workers, some of whom are pictured here, were not making carpets but were instead devoted to the rapid production of army blankets. Some 1.5 million had already been delivered - and the workers were turning out a further 33,000 each week.