Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 17 March 2021
I also thank Gil Paterson for bringing the debate. I have not known him for 40 years, but I have known him for almost half my life, including the time that I spent as member of the Scottish Youth Parliament for Clydebank and Milngavie. We have not always agreed, but I have enjoyed our work together. In fact, I have enjoyed it more when we have disagreed and could have a good rammy, not least during the independence referendum, when we disagreed not about the eventual outcome but about the dreary details of which streets to leaflet first.
I am grateful to Gil for bringing the debate, which is a deeply personal one for me. My gran passed away almost two years ago. Her name was Nancy Greer, but on 13 March 1941 she was five-year-old Nancy McGuigan and she lived in Clydebank. She had already been evacuated to Ayr—both my grans were evacuees, one to Ayr and the other to Drymen—but, in what was probably the most spectacularly unfortunate timing in her whole life, my gran and her mum returned to Clydebank on 13 March. She witnessed the near-total destruction of her town over the following two nights.
Despite her age, my gran remembered that for the rest of her life. It was something that she shared with us and with the occasional interviewer. My gran told me of her vivid memories of being one of the children hiding under the stairs at the bottom of the tenement close, of all the adults leaving to fight the fires that engulfed most buildings not obliterated by direct impact and of the orange glow that she saw through the windows as those fires came to every street.
In about 36 hours, Clydebank was destroyed around my gran. It was the only town in the United Kingdom to suffer such a fate during the war. My gran and her family were able to go back to Ayr, but more than 35,000 people were made homeless during those two nights. Residents of Bearsden further east and in Knightswood to the south woke in the morning—if they had managed to sleep at all—to see snaking lines of refugees making their way along the main roads with whatever possessions they had left.
Around 1,200 people died and more than a thousand were seriously injured but, as Kenneth Gibson said, that number was not known until the Sunday Post managed to evade the censors to publish it a year later, after which it was officially acknowledged. At the time, the Government insisted that about 500 people had died during the raids across all of Clydeside, despite 647 having died in Glasgow alone, a figure entirely separate from the Clydebank death toll.
The Government’s lack of support went as far as a failure even to supply a sufficient number of cardboard coffins. Many people were buried in mass graves, which the Sunday Post had photographs of, although it could not get those past the censors without cropping out the bodies.
The intensity of the bombing is impossible to imagine for anyone who did not live through it. A member of my church congregation told me last week that she remembers seeing the glow and the smoke from Perthshire. People heard the bombs in Bridge of Allan.
Of course, Clydebank did not go undefended. The British anti-aircraft defences in the Kilpatrick hills and elsewhere had little ammunition and they ran it dry very quickly but, as has been mentioned, they were not the only ones to answer the Luftwaffe that night. The ORP Piorun, a destroyer of the Free Polish Navy, was in dry dock for repairs. Ships in dry dock are not supposed to have ammunition on board, for obvious reasons, but it is clear that the Piorun’s crew had decided otherwise. Despite being under no external orders to do so, they returned to their ship and, for two nights, returned fire on those who set out to destroy Clydebank. The Piorun and her crew, who went on to play a role in sinking the Bismarck—they spotted the Bismarck and began the final pursuit—are rightly remembered at a memorial opposite the town hall.
It was not just Clydebank that suffered on those nights. As I said, the death toll elsewhere was terrible, although nowhere was it as completely destructive as it was in Clydebank. Another reason why the debate is so personal to me is that my church, the then Bearsden South church, was directly hit by incendiaries and completely destroyed. The building in which my parents were married and my brother and I were baptised, and where I now worship, was built on the very same spot in the early 1950s. You can tell that it is a post-war building, because it was clearly built with whatever was available—a fact that causes our property committee no end of grief to this day.
Some members might know that I lead our church youth group. A few years ago, I was privileged to arrange for the members of that group to interview a member of our congregation who had also lived through and remembered the events of 1941 in Clydebank. His memories and those of my gran mean a huge amount to me.
Eighty years and two generations on, it is almost inconceivable that we faced the threat of total destruction on this island and that, within living memory, a force of true evil was intent on our defeat and conquer. I have a copy of the Bearsden Invasion Committee instructions from 1942, which were shared with me by the kind gentleman from my church who had experienced it all at first hand. I want to highlight just three of the 12 do’s and don’ts in the event of a German invasion:
“If you hear church bells ringing, it is a warning to the local garrison that troops have been seen landing from the air”.
In the case of Bearsden, that would have been the garrison at the Maryhill barracks.
Number 5 was:
“Hide away your maps, money, valuables and food.”
An important tip was given:
“Several small places are better than one large hiding place.”
Number 10 was to completely immobilise your car or your motorcycle. Even now, in an era in which the Government is issuing what we would consider to be unprecedented instructions on how people are to live their everyday lives, instructions such as those that I have just read out are completely inconceivable.
Eighty years on, I think that it is only right that we reflect on the terrible events of the blitz. Many of the people who fled those bombs never returned, and Clydebank was never the same, but some did come back and rebuild, including members of my family, and I am grateful for the opportunity to share their stories tonight.