Hansard

I am honoured to have secured this debate to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the Clydebank blitz, and I thank members for supporting my motion.

I take the opportunity to thank Clydebank artist and historian Tom McKendrick and many of my constituents for sharing their knowledge of the blitz and shaping the contribution that I will make today. I dedicate this speech to the memory of all those who lost their lives in the Clydebank blitz.

On 13 and 14 March 1941, Clydebank was changed forever. During those two terrifying nights, Clydebank was pounded by the Luftwaffe, which dropped more than 1,000 bombs in its raid over the town, killing 528 people and seriously injuring 617. Those are the official figures, but many more died later as a result of their injuries. Clydebank experienced a massive loss of housing, with 12,000 houses damaged and 4,300 destroyed, leaving only seven houses in the area untouched. It resulted in 35,000 people being made homeless.

The main targets were the armaments factory at the Singer sewing machine factory works, the John Brown & Company shipyards and the William Beardmore and Company engine works. While most of those in the constituency will now be too young to remember the blitz, the stories and the feeling of sheer horror have been passed down through generations . It is not something that the town will ever forget—nor should it—and it has been, and always will be, part of the primary school curriculum.

Clydebank has always been a tight-knit town. Prior to war, it had a dynamic community that truly considered itself to be socialist. The notion that we are all Jock Thompson’s bairns was felt across the town. That is not to say that it was a perfectly equal society—we know that it was not—but, across the board, the Clydebank sense of community was strong and the people were never complacent, with strikes for better pay and working conditions being part of many people’s lives.

Oil was a high-priority target during the war, and Clydebank lay beside what has been described as a category A target, which contained potentially 178 million gallons of fuel oil. At 11:30 pm on 13 March, two and a half hours into the raid, a 250kg mine bomb landed at the junction of Kilbowie Road and Second Avenue in Clydebank, obliterating the town’s water mains, with supplies to firefighting services being instantly cut. Clydebank burned. People could see Clydebank burning from all over Glasgow—I know from speaking to people that that is one of their memories.

It would simply not be possible, in this short speech, to fully depict the devastation and tragedy that occurred. As Tom McKendrick so perfectly put it:

“The Clydebank Blitz could not be least described in a single story. It is thousands of tragic experiences bonded together by a single catastrophic event and like all things which entail human activity it is complex.”

The blitz had a huge impact on my home town of Clydebank. It was the only town in Britain that was rendered uninhabitable as a result of bombing, and the biggest loss to a single family in the blitzing of Britain was that experienced by the Rocks family in Clydebank. Fifteen of the Rocks family were killed on the first night at 78 Jellicoe Street in Dalmuir, alongside so many others.

Ann Holmes, the daughter of Annie Rocks and Walter Greig, records a heartbreaking account of the impact on her family in the book, “Untold Stories: Remembering Clydebank in War Time”, and I commend it to Parliament. Ann promised her mother that she would honour the memorial to the event every year, and the Rocks family attend the service at the communal grave every year in big numbers.

The blitz caused incomprehensible hardship, anger and sadness. For the people of Clydebank, those nights were terrifying, as is made clear in these quotations from Tom McKendrick’s book:

“What I’ll never forget as long as I live was the noise and the screams and cries when I was taken to the First-Aid post. This was something you couldn’t believe, the screams were terrible, people had lost arms and legs, people were doing what they could to help but it was just too much for them”.

“These people were your neighbours, people you had known all your life”.

“The dead were laid out in rows in the school … it’s a sight etched in my mind for ever. All those bodies lined up in neat rows, after all that noise it was the silence that got to you”.

Among this fear, though, was bravery and solidarity. We will never forget the many brave souls who saved others and who often sacrificed themselves. They are our heroes, who will never be forgotten.

The blitz caused irreparable damage and hardship to Clydebank. Many close-knit communities were severed, with many relocated. However, Tom McKendrick is correct to say:

“Clydebank people were no stranger to hardship”,

as those who know the town’s history will know,

“the psychological effect was the exact opposite of what was intended. Rather than divide the community and throw it into frenzied panic, it strengthened and immeasurably hardened peoples’ resolve to survive and resist.”

The sense of community and of a shared longing, as I mentioned earlier, has never left our town and I hope that it never will.

Clydebank paid a heavy price on those nights, but the burden of rebuilding the town fell on the council and the citizens of Clydebank. The replacement of houses resulted in the Burgh of Clydebank being left with an annual deficit of £61,000 for the next 60 years—£61,000 in 1941 would be equivalent to around £3 million now. Not only did the people of Clydebank suffer the bombing; they were also burdened with such a heavy charge because of the high replacement costs for capital lost in the form of houses. That was not right.

I pay tribute to all those who lost their lives on the tragic nights of 13 and 14 March 1941. Eighty-five years on, their memories live on with the people of Clydebank. Clydebank has always been resilient, and no more so than in the aftermath of the blitz. I am forever grateful to the heroes who saved victims on those fateful nights and who helped with the rebuilding of our town. They will never be forgotten.

It is hard for many of us now, in 2026, 85 years on, to comprehend what the Clydebank blitz must have been like. To understand that level of terror and anguish is hard, and in remembering events like the Clydebank blitz, we must be resolute and clear about one thing: this cannot happen again. We, in Clydebank, resolutely take time to remember the blitz and those who were killed.

We also remember the brave Polish sailors of the ORP Piorun, which was docked on the Clyde. They fired their anti-aircraft guns at the bombers in defence of our town, and I pay tribute to those in our town who have done so much to galvanise efforts in their memory, such as Kilbowie St Andrews church, West Dunbartonshire Council, the late Jack Tasker and so many more.

Every year, we gather at the communal grave at Old Dalnottar cemetery above Clydebank, and we will always remember those we lost to such evil.