The Clydebank Blitz 80 years on: Heroism and horror

“We have walked along those devastated streets,” she subsequently wrote, “crunching all the time over littered glass speedily being swept into the gutters. We have seen those shattered modest homes. If one looked for it, no doubt there was the lighter side – two children dancing unconcernedly on a novel stage, the cleared and windowless frontage of a shop; and the incongruous, those odd personal items standing still intact before gaping walls”.

Carson's article appeared 80 years ago, on Monday, March 17, 1941, in the aftermath of the Clydeside Blitz. Clydebank and parts of Glasgow had been bombed on the nights of the 13th, a Thursday, and 14th, Friday. It has been said of the first night, when the planes, some 236 of them, arrived in three waves between 9pm on the Thursday and 5.30 the following morning, that you could hear the explosions in Bridge of Allan, in Stirlingshire; you could see the fiery glow in the night sky as far away as rural Aberdeenshire.

“We have seen", Carson continued, "weary-eyed firemen, strained-looking wardens, tired soldiers about their business among the debris. We have seen a delicate, white-haired lady have to be firmly restrained from going to help them, and when warned of the havoc in her lovely home, refuse to be concerned”.

One sight in particular remained with her: huddles of people standing beside bedding laid out on the pavement. “Those women and men everywhere with their pathetic little cases and bundles; those patient evacuees at the rest centres, waiting to be shepherded to this place, or the next place, it did not matter where.”

Since the previous September, Scottish people had been reading of the catastrophic damage visited upon towns and cities in England by the Luftwaffe. London was first bombed on September 7, when 430 people were killed; the capital was then bombed for 57 consecutive nights.

What followed was "a winter of horror, death, demoralisation – and heroism". Coventry was devastated on November 14-15; 568 people died. Then came Birmingham, Bristol, Southampton, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, Cardiff, Portsmouth and Hull, as the Luftwaffe focused its attention on key provincial cities and industrial centres and, eventually, ports.

Aberdeen had already been targeted, and was on its way to being “Scotland’s front-line town”. Thirty-four people were killed there on July 12. The enemy planes' arrival over Aberdeen was for a time so regular that a remark would do the rounds: "It's just about time for Jerry".

Glasgow had been attacked, too, in July and September. A young female shop assistant in the city said she had seen a German plane “like a speck in the sky”, dropping a bomb. “It seemed to be coming straight for us, and I got a terrible shock. It landed about 200 yards away, and before I heard the crash I saw a column of smoke and debris thrown high into the air from the house it struck”.

People who lived in Clydebank had been bracing themselves for an onslaught, aware that the presence of the John Brown & Co shipyard, as well as an armaments factory in the Singer Sewing Machine Works, and the Beardmore engine works, made it vulnerable.

The Clydebank-born artist, Tom McKendrick, who has researched the Clydebank Blitz deeply, has noted that though many felt that the town's industrial profile marked it as prime target, some believed that the iron in the mountains surrounding Clydeside would interfere with the compasses of aircraft, thus making reliable target navigation impossible.

By March 13, Clydebank, a town with a population of 55,000, had long grown accustomed to the piercing wail of alarms. There had been some 40 false alarms in the preceding month alone. “The siren would go, perhaps because a single aircraft was flying overhead”, one man recalled in a 2011 BBC documentary on the Blitz, “so in the event, when the sirens went on the thirteenth of March, a lot of people thought initially, it’s another false alarm”.

But it wasn't.

“All the lights went out, and then we heard one or two crumps here and there, the first bombs starting to fall”, remarked a second man. A third: “The next thing was an explosion … there was just a helter-skelter of debris. We knew this was no longer fun, we were a target”.

Helen Robertson, an air raid warden at the time, would recollect in 1999: “I remember incendiaries were falling just like flowers on a carpet, hundreds of them”.

Helen’s story is among many included in Untold Stories: Remembering Clydebank in Wartime, which was put together by the Clydebank Life Story Group. There are so many vivid, painful memories of loss and destruction in its pages. One more will suffice here, from Jean Golder, who was on ARP duty: “I was on night shift and it was the most terrible experience of my life, the planes screaming, bombs exploding and the smell of burning (we learned when the all-clear had been given the whole of the vast wood yard had been burnt to the ground).

"When we were allowed to make our way home, tears were streaming down our faces as we looked towards what had been terraced houses on the hill. There was nothing left but huge piles of rubble of what we called the ‘Holy City’.”

The staggering impact of the bombs and incendiaries on Clydebank has been well documented. Second Avenue had the highest number of deaths – 80 – when a parachute mine ripped the face off 150 yards of terraced housing, McKendrick writes. Entire families were wiped out as tenement buildings collapsed, crushing the occupants who had sought shelter in lower floors and closes.

On the Friday morning, says John MacLeod in his vivid book, River of Fire, thousands of “dazed, filthy, bloodied survivors” made their way along Dumbarton Road into Glasgow.

That night, the Germans returned: 203 aircraft this time. Few people were left in Clydebank by this time, but many townsfolk would assert that this second raid was a more vindictive raid than the first, says MacLeod.

A news report in Saturday's Glasgow Herald said that the “long and fierce” attack had been carried out “with a grim and revolting sadism by relays of raiders … What angered Clydeside was not the fact that they were being raided. It was an attention they had expected. But they felt the insensate fury of the attack had not the manner or methods of an attempt to dislocate industry; rather did they take it as a deliberate adventure in terrorism”.

By the Saturday night, “the near-fabulous total of over 40,000 people had left the town” (the words are MacLeod's). Homeless Bankies were sent to accommodation in towns across the central belt. “The town was all but destroyed. From one geographically small community, 528 people were dead; 617 seriously injured. Hundreds – perhaps thousands – more were superficially hurt and cut. Of some 12,000 dwellings – including tenement blocks as well as villas and semi-detached homes – only seven were left entirely undamaged. Four thousand homes were completely destroyed; 4,500 would be uninhabitable for months”.

Blitz victims were laid to rest without much ceremony in mass burials. The 1941 Register of Deaths for Old or West Kirkpatrick registration district bears the names of over 450 of those who died in Clydebank. The cause of death is stated as ‘Due to war operations.’

“We were now seeing for the first time among our own people what had happened elsewhere”, Mary Carson wrote. “These were the same as we had seen in pictures from Spain, from Finland, from Poland. “For all their national differences their circumstances were now the same and they had that same look in the eyes – that stunned, numb look. And by the same cause – war”.

Many areas of Glasgow – Tradeston, Scotstoun, Partick, Hyndland, Kelvindale – also took direct hits over the two nights, and 647 people were killed. On the Sunday, in Hyndland, a boy of 15, whose name was Stanley Ewing, was found in the rubble that had once been his home. He was dressed in his pyjamas in a recessed bed; his rescuers heard his voice long after they had assumed that no-one in the pile of debris could be alive.

By a stroke of luck, a bag of sugar had been thrown into his bed from a cupboard when the house collapsed around him. The sugar was all he had to eat in the two days since. He was pulled from the wreckage, black with soot and dust but, in the words of one rescuer, “surprisingly cheerful”. “I’m okay,” he told them. “When you get me out I’ll tell you where my mother and sister are”. An 11-year-old girl was extricated from the wreckage.

In Clydebank, in Glasgow, many other people were pulled from their devastated homes. One woman, trapped for six days, was brought out alive by a doctor and demolition workers, but died a few hours later in hospital.

On March 21 two men, one of them a War Reserve policemen, were found, alive, in wreckage in Peel Street, Partick. John Cormack, 22, was found lying in a bed: a large wooden beam supported the weight of the debris above him. Only his face and arms were visible to his rescuers, who were understandably astonished when he gave them a feeble wave.

Moving as quickly and as gently as possible, they shifted the debris that had been trapping him. “Could you go a cup of tea?”, asked Dr Ian A Mackay, who had been summoned to the scene. “Aye, ah could fine”, Cormack replied. The fact that he had been beneath his blankets probably meant that he did not die from exposure.

Later, he told reporters: “I was in bed when I heard the bomb coming. I pulled the bedclothes over me. A crash followed, and the next thing I remember was finding myself buried with the bedclothes still wrapped around me. I had no idea how long I lay. The time passed fairly quickly, and occasionally I heard tappings and voices which seemed to be coming from a distance”.

It took three hours’ painstaking work to free the other man, Fred Clarke, 32. A chest of drawers had apparently fallen over his body, too, protecting him from the mass of stone and timber above. Norman Manson, a joiner in charge of the rescue squad, said: “We had to smash in a floor and crawl underneath to locate the trapped constable. I estimate that we had to remove seven tons of wreckage before we were able to break a way through to him”.

Glasgow’s Lord Provost, Sir Patrick Dollan, launched a fund for the relief of Clydeside air-raid distress. Within three days it had raised £12,000; by March 24 the figure had climbed to £37,400, including a donation of £5,000 by John Brown’s to a Central Fund.

Still the bombing continued. An estimated 64 people were killed on the night of April 7/8, when bombs fell everywhere: Largs, Greenock, Gretna, and such parts of Glasgow as Shawlands and Hyndland. A German bomber, returning home, dropped a stick of seven high-explosive bombs over part of Falkirk: a six-strong Home Guard patrol was blown of their feet by the blast and showered with mud.

Eight people lost their lives in Greenock on April 16. “But the last and, in their own way, most terrible German raids on Clydeside began early on Tuesday 6 May”, writes John MacLeod: Maryhill, Yoker, Kilmarnock, and many other places. Not even douce Cardross escaped, taking “an assault of astonishing ferocity”.

The merciless bombing continued on the night of May 6/7: Greenock suffered horribly, with around 250 people losing their lives. The two nights’ bombing also claimed the lives of 95 people in Paisley and 72 in Port Glasgow.

“When the sirens went off around 9pm we went up to the shelter on Whinhill and the bombers came over. We had to come out of the shelter at one point. The distillery was bombed and whisky was running down Bakers Brae on fire! It was a sea of flames”, recollected one Greenock woman, just 14 at the time, on the BBC’s WW2 People’s War page. A man who was working at Scott’s dry dock in the town that night remembered: “There were a destroyer and a submarine in the dry dock and the sub was knocked off its blocks”.

The Luftwaffe returned to London on May 10-11, dropping 711 tons of high explosive and more than 2,300 incendiaries. Nearly 1,500 civilians died,

On April 21, 1943, it was, yet again, Aberdeen’s turn to suffer. “In the space of just 44 minutes, 127 bombs fell, damaging or destroying more than 12,000 homes and killing 98 civilians and 27 soldiers. Even though Aberdeen was the most frequently bombed city in Britain between 1940 and 1943 – a statistic that prompted the nickname Siren City – the scale and severity of that night’s Luftwaffe raid shocked everyone”. These words come from an article in the city newspaper, the Press and Journal, in September 2020.

Aberdeen, writes John MacLeod, was bombed 24 times during the war, though the figure of 34 is frequently quoted. Peterhead was bombed 28 times, Fraserburgh almost as many. Nowhere seemed safe.

EIGHT decades later, when you study photographs of the impact of the Blitz in Scotland, you find yourself looking at the same kind of images, again and again and again: facades of villas and tenements torn away, exposing interior walls, settees, bookcases and light-fittings; rescue scenes illuminated by arc-lights; families and young children with suitcases in devastated, once-familiar streets; colossal piles of rubble. They bring home, just as powerfully as the first-hand testimonies and descriptions mentioned here, the stark horror of what befell Scotland eight decades ago.

Some 2,500 people lost their lives in Scotland during the Blitz. Across the whole of the UK, the figure was in excess of 43,500.

In March 1960, the nineteenth anniversary of the attacks on Glasgow and Clydebank, John Cormack, the man who had lain trapped for eight days and nights in Peel Street, spoke to The Bulletin, our sister paper. He had spent time in a convalescent hospital, where he met the nurse who would later become his wife. Once he had recovered, he joined the Navy.

"I don't know how you'd put it", he said, "but you could say I had faith in coming out alive.

"I couldn't panic, because I couldn't move. If I'd been able to crawl about I might have lost control of my mind. But there I was in my bed, with only my mind free, and after the first shock I settled down to wait for my rescue".

Sources: Glasgow Herald archives; Blitz article by Tom McKendrick at https://www.west-dunbarton.gov.uk; https://www.tommckendrick.com/; River of Fire, by John MacLeod; Britain’s War: Into Battle 1937-1941, by Daniel Todman; National Records of Scotland; Untold Stories: Remembering Clydebank in Wartime, Clydebank Life Story Group 1999; Imperial War Museum website, iwm.org.uk; Voices from the Twentieth Century: The Battle of Britain and the Blitz, ed. Nigel Fountain.