Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 17 March 2021
I want to put on record my thanks to Gil Paterson for securing the debate and for his brilliant valedictory speech, his friendship and our many chats, and for giving me the opportunity to explain why an Aberdonian like me is compelled to speak about the Clydebank blitz. The reason for that is that my grandparents and great-grandparents were Bankies and lived through the blitz.
My papa, Tommy Sanders, was an engineer. Like many young men in Clydebank, Tommy had to stay at home and work in Barr & Stroud’s, Singer’s or Beardmore’s for the war effort, rather than join the forces. My papa never spoke of the blitz, except once, which I will come on to.
As many members have said, the bombing was initially aimed at the munitions factories and the shipyards. The German bombers were largely unsuccessful in devastating those targets, and the bombs fell mostly on family homes. One possible explanation that some have given is that the pilots were not very good, but that is not entirely true. The fact is that the men and women who kept the factories running were targets, too. That was proved to be the case on the second night of bombing, when it was deliberately concentrated on the people of Clydebank.
At the time of the blitz, my father had not been born. He did his apprenticeship at Singer’s in the 1960s and went on to work in John Brown’s shipyard until he took his family to Aberdeenshire. He told me last night on the phone about stories that he had heard about the Polish sailors moored on the Clyde who manned guns to take down the German planes, as many members have mentioned; the decoy lights in the moors made to look like tramlines to fool the German pilots; the village of Inversnaid near Loch Lomond, which was decimated as homebound German planes unloaded their unused bombs; and the burning woodpile made up of materials for sewing machine cabinets at Singer’s that lit up the whole town as the bombs fell.
My mother—also on the phone—was at pains to tell me that our families were lucky. They lived when whole Bankie families were wiped out, such as 15 members of the Rocks family who my gran Jessie knew, as she was friends with the daughters.
On the mornings of 14 and 15 March 1941, my family—the Taylors, the Browns, the Jameses, the Sanders and the Loudens—came out of shelters and made their way back to where their homes once stood. The only family member who went back to an intact house was my great-aunt Margaret, who lived in Agamemnon Street. Her relief at still having a home for her three wee boys was short lived. An unexploded bomb was found and it had to be detonated, completely destroying the house. Indeed, Bankies were finding unexploded bombs for decades afterwards. My brother has an early childhood memory of us standing at our doorway in Wells Street to listen as one was detonated.
Like thousands of people, my papa was made homeless by the blitz. His family home in Bannerman Street was flattened. His parents were moved to Dumbarton, but my great-grandmother Margaret Sanders never recovered from the trauma of those nights and died of a stroke within weeks. My papa was taken in by the people who would become his in-laws in Yoker. During the blitz aftermath, he helped his future father-in-law, Laurie Brown, who was an ambulance driver. The two of them spent days and nights rescuing people and collecting the bodies of the many people who did not make it to shelters.
I said that my papa spoke only once about what he saw. He told my father that many people he recovered looked like they were still alive but sleeping. The flying debris did not kill them—it was the oxygen being sucked out of the atmosphere by the explosion.
As oral histories go, it is scant but devastating. Many Bankies like him who lived through those dreadful nights felt enormous trauma as a result of what they saw and the grief for those they lost. They could barely speak of it. Gil Paterson’s speech has been a fitting tribute to them, and I wish him all the best as he steps down as a true champion for all Bankies, past and present. As a Bankie who became an Aberdonian, I thank him.
19:17