I was mentioning some things about the war, and remembered we had a post on the old board, so anyone with memories please post them,its nice to see what others remember of that time,

Mags I have lots of memories,but the one that comes back to me often these days,is that there was an awful lot of sadness.I was too young then to really appreciate ,what was going on.I found on another site ,a pic of the street I was born in.Looking at the buldings ,and the different closes,remembering who lived where.It was amazing how many times, I could ,recall a family by the, member they had lost in the war.What a waste of young lives .!!!

I must have been three or four years old when the Germans bombed along the river Kelvin, but I remember standing on one wheel spar of my mother's big old fashioned pram, my sister on the other side, and two babies in carriage and all the women going down to the Kelvin to see the destruction. They used to have prisoners in the Maryhill Barracks, the prison was right next to the front gate guardhouse, and we used to stand in front of the wee Saint Mary's Annex school, and call taunts to them. We'd sing silly wee songs about Churchill and Hitler. We had a german girl in our class at school (Gairbraid) her father was a defector or something but she was allowed to go to school. I call that real civilized. Wha's like us?

The bridge over the river kelvin which led to the art gallery was hit by a bomb. But the bridge was scottish-built and the bomb left a crater which only had to be filled in.

I remember the prisoners of war only they were down Kelvindale rd across from the railroad also across from Gairbraid place where the buses used to stop over,my mammy said not to say bad things to the prisoners as they were some ones father,brother,son,or husband and we had a brother and would we like if he was taunted? one used to call me liepshien I dont know how to spell it,

I am too young to remember any of WW2, just remember the stories my Mother used to tell. She lived down past the barracks when the land mine fell on Kilmun Street. When she was told what happened and she rushed up to see about her family,(they were killed) she said the closer she got, the amount of debris and broken glass on Maryhill Rd, just got heavier and heavier. She said they had to pick their way over the top of it when they reached Kilmun Street. They took all the bodies of those killed to the Ice Rink at Shawlands, and that is where everyone had to go to identify the bodies. I have the newspaper with all of the obituaries in it from that time. It is very sad. You read about whole families being wiped out.

My Mammy lived in a flat overlooking the Kelvin Bridge during the blitz. When the sirens sounded, instead of making for the shelter she decided to stay in her flat and watch the searchlights picking out the bombers. She recollects seeing a parachute swinging down towards the Kelvin Bridge and thought that it was a German who had bailed out. Unfortunately for her it was a parachute mine which hit the bridge and exploded. Next thing Mammy knew, she was in hospital having chunks of glass removed from her face and eyes. She carried those scars till she died 4 years ago.

I remember my 'job' when the siren went - get dressed and take the dogs (we had Scotties) to the shelter at the bottom of the garden - no questions asked! Warm clothing was laid out each night and I think there were thermos bottles and food left handy on the kitchen table. I did my thing and, in a top bunk, with the dogs, snuggled down. A good sleeper, I guess I slept through most of the raids and then went safely back to bed. Far enough East of Clydebank we were lucky although there were several big hunks of shrapnel found in ours and other gardens.

Years later I met a gal who had difficulty walking, as a tiny babe she had lost 4 toes from one foot as her mother dangled her on her lap during a Clydebank raid.

For sure makes you realize just how lucky so many of us were!

I was born in 38 and come from Clydebank, I remember only once being in a shelter sitting on my aunts knee, and i still remember the bombs whistling down, and i think that was the only time i remember.
Yes a direct hit somewhere in Clydebank on a shelter, all were killed and below a pub around the holy city it was flattened I believe everybody was burried down there.
Fearn about the shrapnell, my parents had a nice mahogany wardrobe well there were a couple of holes my dad patched on the front door, i remember when i was a wee bit older being told the shrapnell went through my mothers fur coat, and my dads only suit, he my dad was a joiner and made a great job of matching the configuration of those holes and the contour but i dont think he ever did get the the French finish done on that wardrobe.
Whats that called again French something, its a finish on furniture.
French pollish is that it.
LoL I am having a middle age moment! LMAO
Nae smart comments please? HaHa

It's amazing the difference 10 years and a few miles can make to the memories we have.

Keep those Blitz stories coming, I love hearing them:)

hubert - I think many people think of shrapnel as always being in huge chunks - not so - thinking of 4 baby toes 'neatly' removed and holes in a fur coat and a suit make you realize how small shrapnel can be - but no less deadly depending on where it hits.

Does anyone remember the size-dipped curtains stuck to all the windows - to prevent slivers of shattered glass flying all over the place?

Please God, such days do not happen ever again.

they are happening, Fearn, maybe not for us but people are suffering the nightmare of war.

Hi all, as I was born in 1941 not a lot do i remember of that time, we did not live in Glasgow, but out in the country Stonehouse was the village, and I do remember having evacuees from Clydebank, we had 3 daughters, of a family called Kerr, the parents stayed with house if I remember right, they were May, Helen, and I don't remember the other one,and I remember my parents tell us about the planes that flew over.
they followed the river Clyde, and the one that flew the plane to scotland ,landed not far from where we lived, and they talk about the Good old times, not for some............Mamie in Sydney

Very true Mary, but what can WE do about it?

Dunno, Fearn, I suppose it's all in one's belief system...for myself I meditate and send out healing .

Mamie, I was brought up just down the road from you in Larkie..G'day:)

What is for you will not go past you!
I am a great believer in that old saying.
Living 500 yards from Blochairn steelworks throughout the war one would expect to be bombed out but happily that was not to happen to me or my pals.
My parents never took our family to the air raid shelters on the spare ground at Sannox Gardens next to our home at Crinan Street.
They either had a death wish or thought that the tenement building was as safe as any air raid shelter.
We children had a wonderful time during the war. If we were'nt picking up pieces of shrapnel we were collecting pieces of barrage balloon silk which we took home to be used as a table cover.
What a wonderful occasion it was when Victory in Europe night came along.
A massive bonfire was started in the spare ground (stolen paddle boats from Alexandra Park- not a nice thing to happen but nobody cared) and dancing in the streets.
A wonderful time for an 11 year old and his pals.

I recall in March 1943 my dad was away and my mum was asleep and the sirens went. I recall running out into my street in Glasgow, we lived in a place called Drumchapel at the time, to watch the planes. How crazy to think of it now. The German planes were very low and the local ack ack guns started firing. The shrapnel and stuff started falling and broke slates and some glass. I remember picking up this shrapnel and nearly getting my figures burnt off it was so hot. We used to take bits into school to swop or show off!! Next day looking for shrapnel was what we did.
These German planes made a distinctive noise compare to the British ones. I can still recall their noise. Does anyone elso recall their distiinctive noise?

I do indeed remember the German planes noise, it was most distinctive>>>>a repetitive drone.

My old man was a First Aider with the ARP ( air raid precaution) and travelled from Blantyre into Glasgow before the night time raids. The stories he had to tell were horific but there was always something humorous to relate too. He also told us of the big oil drums set alight along the Clyde way way out of town to mislead the germany bombers, who followed the river to their targets by night, and get them to waste their bombs out in the country. We had a big anti aircraft battery outside the door over the fence in an adjacent feild. My 10 year older brother remembers it but I was born in '44 so just remember the stories.

"Leibchen"-is German for loved one-basically the sojer was calling you darling!-poor bugger was probably comparing you to a wee sister or mebbe a daughter-they wern't all child bayoneting nazi monsters-just guys fighting for their country like our boys-we all had ma's and da's-no matter what nationality we were.

A lot of them were conscripts like our boys too. Cannon fodder.

Many years after the war I met a couple who had lived in Clydebank.The man told me an incredible story of the evening they were strolling through the town during the war when the sirens warned of an air-raid. Before they could get to a shelter, the bombers were dropping their load along the street and they tried to get shelter in the deep entrance of a ladies outfitters. A bomb landed nearby and the man described being picked up by the blast and blown yards away from his wife and he lost consciousness. When he came to, he found bodies of dead and injured all over the street, but it wasn't as bad as it looked, as many 'bodies' were dummies from the shop display. He was horrified to see the complete shop front was demolished and he began to search for his wife. She had been wearing a bright green coat and shoes and he suddenly saw the coat and shoes lying under a blanket placed by the wardens. The warden stopped him looking at his wife and he said she had been 'cut to pieces' by shop window plate- glass. The poor man was so distraught that he went into a kind of daze and he told me he just wandered around the town for a whole day and night not knowing where he was going. Eventually, he found himself slowly walking over the canal bridge when he saw a woman in a dirty, torn green coat, covered in dust with dirty green shoes walking towards him in a kind of daze. Yes, it was his wife, who had also been told that her husband had been blown to bits and she had suffered the traumatic experience just as he had. What a happy ending to an amazing story.

Truly amazing story Rab. Just had to be retold.

I have memories of the war. My mother had been serously ill about three years earlier and we had moved to my grandparents home in Springboig. She must have been bad for my father to move in with his father-in-law, the two of them too much of a kind! I remember sitting beside my parents as they listened to the radio when war was declared, not understanding why my Mum was crying. Two months later she gave birth to my brother and soon after that we moved to Springboig while my grandparents and aunt moved to Dunoon, to escape the bombing. I remember the first air raid and my Dad lifting me out of bed and carrying me downstairs, putting me and my wee brother beneath their heavy oak table.

Then we had an Anderson air raid shelter in our back garden, and my mother made it into a wee home with carpets, chairs, two cots for my brother and I. One night I awoke, the door was open, I could see fire and I stood in the large cot screaming my head off as my parents were not in the shelter. Don't know what caused the fire in the garden of a house nearby, an incendiary bomb? Everyone had rushed out of their shelters to put the fire out. My father suddenly appeared and with an odd sense of humour said something about Hitler coming, and thereafter I lived in fear of Hitler invading Glasgow. He had a large map on the kitchen wall with little flags of different colours for the Germans and the Allies which fascinated me, and I helped him move the flags. The German flags seemed to be coming closer and closer to the coast and I still feel the fear I felt that Hitler would invade us. Dad was great at answering all my many questions but perhaps some of his information was too much for a very young highly imaginative wee lassie!

To his bitter disappointment my Dad was exempt from the forces as he was a baker, worked with the UCBS in McNeil Street (?) and throughout the war worked nightshifts except Saturday nights. My poor mother was on her own with two young children and some nights we were in the Anderson shelter from early evening until morning daylight. One night when Dad was at home the siren had just gone and I opened the back door, stood transfixed watching German planes fly overhead in the moonlight,so low I felt I could reach out and touch them. Next thing I was yanked in by the scruff of my neck and the door slammed shut. I remember the windows and black stuff covering them to prevent them shattering, and being frightened when one night a warden knocked on our door and said a chink of light was showing.

One night our shelter seemed to lift up out of the ground and settled back down, there was terrible noise, and we feared out house had been hit. Thankfully it was still there although lots of things had been thrown about and broken. A house in direct line to ours but a few streets away had gone, although fortunately no one was killed. I remember walking to primary school with my gas mask box across my chest and a torch, dark mornings - no parents walking with us let alone the school car run in those days!

I remember the morning Dad didn't come home and my mother was terrified for him,. After the All Clear we were at the upstairs bedroom window watching the crimson sky as Clydebank was blitzed. Dad eventually turned up safe and sound but exhausted, having walked home, and I think he had been fire fighting on the roof of the UCBS, although maybe got that wrong, childhood memories....

My mother used to take us down to Dunoon for summer holidays with my grandparents, by train and then steamer, and I remember the bleak sight from the train of row upon row of tenements bombed to pieces and wondering where all the people had gone. Also often the carriage was full of soldiers or airmen, and I think Americans as they gave us children sweets or chocolate and I remember sometimes also coupons for sweets. The Navy was in the waters off Dunoon, in the Holly Loch I think, the town full of them, and I remember the boom stretching from Dunoon across the water to the other side. The pebbled beach, out of bounds, covered in oil.

I remember VE celebrations, hanging a flag out of the upstairs bedroom window, going to George Square which was packed. So packed that there was some sort of panic and crush, people sceaming and sort of falling back on each other. My Dad lifted my brother up onto his shoulders and grabbed me one side, my mother the other side. Can't remember how we got away, but do remember we walked home and how wonderful it was as there were street parties in every street we passed, people singing and dancing and laughing.

Compared with what others suffered we were lucky, and not in the thick of it, although not far from Beardmore's and other munition factories. For years afterwards I hated to hear sirens sound - can't remember what they were about though. Works sirens?

I also remember seeing Churchill drive along through Shettleston in an open car, waving.

hi my story about the war is about my older sister,my father was a very strict bloke and hated you telling him a lie, my sister one night told him she was going with a friend to the local mission in Plantation, but she was really going to the pictures , when she arrived home after an air raid , my dad asked her where she went during the raid , to which she said the mission of course, the reply from her father shocked her as the mission had been bombed and a lot of the people died,needless to say my parents were relieved that she had turned up safe and so she escaped the usual wrath of her dad .

Lizziehen, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your story; you have a great memory for detail. Yes, you're right about the UCBS, it was on McNeil St. It certainly was a tough time for your mother alone with two small children every night and the possibility of air raids, but you all got through the war safely ...thanks in part I'm sure to your Anderson shelter. You seem to have had a wide variety of experiences, and reading through them with you brought back many of my own war time memories. Great story Lizziehen!

That's quite a story you have here as well Enrique. I recall the the bombing on Plantation St. On the night of the bombing I lived in Govan and not long after the blitz I visitied the site where the explosion took place; sure made a mess of the whole area. Rumour had it at the time that it was a "land mine" that hit the building.

Dugald you're right, it was a landmine, I believe these things came down on a kind of parachute which deceived many people into thinking it was a person. My family lived on Paisley Road West, about 3 streets along from Plantation St. and the blast dislodged our tenement block a few inches, so that we had to move right out of the area and ended up in Govanhill. Our nearest "shelter" was in Admiral Street. What struck me (8 years old at the time) as being a bit odd was that all folks in the shelter spoke in whispers!!!!

rudolf hess spend a few nights at the guardhouse in maryhill barracks after crashing in eaglesham

George, I had to chuckle to myself after your mention of the people in the air-raid shelters talking in whispers. Yes, it's a fact and I remember it; it had never really dawned on me until your post. Strange isn't it, as if the Gerries flying overhead were going to hear us. Maybe it was so's we wouldn't disturb those who were able to sleep.

I'd heard about people in Plantation St. thinking the device at the end of the descending parachute was a person. I mentioned this in an earlier post somewhere; I also mentioned how when the parachute was spotted, some young fellows sheltering in the closes ran out towards it thinking it was a German parachutist only to be blown up along with the tenement when the mine detonated. I actually heard this said on the night of March 13th, 1941, but I have since read about similar mistakes having been made all over the country, and wonder now in just how many instances did it actually happen.

The land mines on parachutes were used to cause more surface damage than the bombs which tended to go deeper, but the accuracy of the mines was non-existent. I personally saw the result of one which landed on Wilton St. around Yarrow gardens.

I also saw many of the hundreds of german POW's who were held at Maryhill barracks during the war. My dad worked in a railway signal box which overlooked the barracks. I would not be surprised if Rudolph Hess spent more than a few nights there after his one-way flight.!

Thanks dugard. I did get a bit carried away recalling those war time memories, wrote too much. It's amazing how clear those memories still are, yet other things I try to remember and are "on the tip of my tongue", so to speak, totally escape me! It's also sobering to think that we are the last generation who have those Glasgow wartime memories. We are indeed fortunate to have survived when so many others were killed.

You must have a few war memories of your own living in Govan. You also, George Muir. I'm trying to remember where Plantation Street is - was? It rings bells, must look for my map of older Glasgow, Part of Paisley Road is on it, It covers Govanhill where my Dad lived.

(By the way, I wrongly wrote we moved to Springboig after war was declared. We moved from there, my grandparents home, to Sandyhills.)
Lizzie

Plantation Street was ( is?) off the Paisley Rd. West. I believe it runs from Paisley Rd. West to the Govan Rd. My Mum, who was visiting her brother's wife, was standing in a close where one of the young men (a soldier home on leave) ran out to "help" whoever was in the parachute. Even at that time people thought the best of each other. If I remember correctly she said the chap's last comment was "the poor sod" and off he ran. End of story. She never forgot that, ever. Mind you on a different note she also remembered the man next door running down the stairs and crashing right into the baffle wall at the end of the close but that was not on Plantation St. Her Dad refused outright to leave his home and, of course, my Grandma stayed with him.


GB

Hi GB the streets running parallel to Plantation St. were Rutland Cres., (My first primary school), Mair St. (great wee bakery there), Blackburn St. and Lorne St. (the Capital picture house was there). I was born in Sussex St. just across PRW from Mair St. You may remember where there is/was a gap in the tenements right across the road from Buchanans the newsagent shop. Well that was where we lived at the time of the bombing. All of us tenants up that close were decanted due to the damage caused by the bombing and a few weeks later our tenement block was pulled down. I heard much later that these "parachute" landmines could rarely bomb a precise target as they were dependent on the vagaries of the prevailing winds at the time.

Hello Gallusbisom. A very interesting post, and one which I have long hoped to come across. I'm talking about what your mother told you about the land-mine on Plantation St. I had the occasion to mention the same event on an earlier post. I first heard about people running towards the descending parachute carrying the mine on the actual night of the air-raid, and I wrote about it in an earlier contribution to The Blitz Or World War Two thread. I wrote:

"Did ye hear aboot Blackburn St., a terrible thing happened therr. A crowd o' people staunen in a close mooth saw a parachute comin' doon an' they thought it was a German airman. Some young fellas had run oot tae get him when the German chute hit the building and blew it, along wi' aw' the young fellas, to blazes.". And, pausing momentarily to let his eager audience grasp the horror of the story, " Aye, it wis a bliddy great land mine!".

These words were spoken by a docker who had just arrived back at his close on Crossloan Rd. Govan, after running all the way from the docks during the raid. I heard of people running towards the parachute many times, but what your mother saw is the first verification I have come across.

Interesting reminder about the baffle wall too GB. Many people ran into these baffle walls; who knows, maybe they caused more casulties than the bombing...just joking, they actually served a good purpose.

Thank you for a very welcome post Gallusbisom!

My aunt broke her nose running into a baffle wall during a blackout in Paisley.

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Williamina,Margaret, Chritina and Margaret Thomson (they lived at 27 Graham Ave) were the niece and great neices of my fatherinlaws grandmother. The father William Thomson we have no record of and would love more information on him. The grandfather Joseph Goodlad died in 1957 in his 80's and was the sole survivor of this line of the family.

Hello there,

I hope my story in the Scots Magazine this September (My Refuge in the Storm) will rekindle memories of WWll as experienced in Glasgow. It should be in magazine stores now. September 2010

I'd love to hear from anyone who lived through this stormy time in our beloved Glasgow.
Alastair