“I USED to get the subway from Partick under the Clyde to Govan and then get the electric tram, or caurs as we called them, the last half a mile to school. I loved those trams and they are totally and ineffably bound up with my memories of my Glasgow boyhood. The trams were the main and the best way to get around Glasgow and I was on them every day”.

It can be hard, now, to convey any sense of the ubiquity of the Glasgow trams in their heyday, but Billy Connolly, recalling them in his book, Made in Scotland: My Grand Adventures in a Wee Country (2018), manages to do just that.

“Any time you went down to any main road you would always be able to see one trundling towards you, in the distance. They didn’t go very fast so even if it was ahead of you, you’d still be able to chase and catch it. The caurs had a peculiar, electric smell that I will never forget. They smelled like hot metal”,

When the trams disappeared for good in Glasgow in 1962, the Herald made the passing observation that ‘caur’ was a word “which seems likely to become as completely a forgotten part of Glasgow’s vocabulary as the ‘hing-oot’ and the ‘jaw-box’.”

Shown here is a tram making its way through Anderston Cross in August 1962.

The trams also stir strong memories in Bill Paterson, who devotes a chapter of his entertaining book, Tales from the Back Green (2008) to them.

“Some say that you can measure the end of Glasgow as a great commercial city from the day they scrapped the last tram”, he writes. “Certainly few cities in the world, and none in Britain, were as devoted to a tramway system. Trams were to Glasgow what gondolas are to Venice.

“The whole city seemed made for them. The long straight blocks four storeys high. The grid of the streets. The canyons of the city centre where the tramcars queued like a conveyor belt and you could have walked the whole length of Renfield Street on their roofs.

“The scale of the trams seemed totally in keeping with the tenements that surrounded them and filled them with passengers. They were almost like red, green and gold miniatures of the buildings themselves. Maybe if the trams hadn’t been so bright and the tenements hadn’t been so black they wouldn’t have stayed in the memory so long”.

That the trams were loved, Paterson says, is evidenced by the emotional response to their farewell procession in 1962: “... Grown men wept and held their children up to touch them as they passed. That’s how much we loved them. No surprise that when the trams went, an awful lot of streets in Glasgow just gave up the ghost and went with them”.

The other picture shows a hold-up of trams in Renfield Street in October 1951. The lead tram has come off the rails -- and, as ever, a sizeable crowd of onlookers has gathered.

Read more: Herald Diary