“WHEN Mr Churchill appeared, waving and V-signing, a tremendous cheer exploded from the crowd packing the street”.

This is how one Glasgow newspaper reported the war-time leader’s election visit to Glasgow on October 17, 1951. The photograph (far right) of Churchill’s famous V-sign is one of the most enduring images of his time in the city.

By then, Churchill had been out of office for six years, having been replaced by Labour’s Clement Attlee. Even so, he was rarely out of the news: the Glasgow Herald of 1951 ran more news stories about Churchill than about his successor as Prime Minister.

On Friday, May 18, the first of two visits that year, Churchill arrived by train at Central Station, where members of the public behind the safety barriers were easily outnumbered by pressmen, police officers and station employees. During his brief visit he called in at the City Chambers (right, top) to meet the Lord Provost, Victor Warren.

At Green’s Playhouse, Churchill told the annual conference of the Scottish Unionist Association that Britain’s difficulties abroad and her immediate domestic problems had been aggravated by the lack of foresight and comprehension shown by a tottering Labour government absorbed in party affairs.

Six years of Socialist rule had brought Britain low, both at home and abroad, he continued, but the country’s spirit was unconquerable and she only had to cast off the fetters of Socialist rule in order to reclaim her place among the Great Powers of the world.

Read more: Herald Diary

If the waiting crowd had only been a modest one then, it was a different story entirely when Churchill returned on October 17, towards the end of his general election whistle-stop tour of Britain. As he left Central Station (right, bottom) police officers had to hold back the cheering bystanders.

The city newspaper mentioned earlier reported: “Churchill faced Clydeside yesterday and Clydesiders accepted him on his own terms. They massed in the streets and cheered his out-thrust chin and militant cigar. They milled outside his Glasgow hotel and jostled on the roadway by St Andrew’s Hall and listened, thousands in streets and neighbouring halls, to a ‘bonnie fechter’.”

Churchill rounded on the Labour government’s record on house-building and lamented the housing situation in Scottish towns and cities. Glasgow alone had a waiting-list of nearly 100,000 families, but Labour had built only 15,000 permanent homes in the city during its six years in power. The Herald carried his lengthy speech in full, and a leading article praised him for a “sober and incisive indictment of the Socialist record”.

His speech over, Churchill was driven back to Central Station, to catch the London train. The concourse was full of people eager for a last glimpse of him. But one man in the crowd, from Govan, was suddenly slashed on the neck by an assailant. He staggered almost into the arms of a taxi-driver, who drove him to hospital, where he had the three-inch-long wound stitched.