Meeting of the Parliament 24 February 2026 [Draft]
I am grateful to Marie McNair for lodging the motion and for her speech. She has brought to us all remembrance of the events of 13 and 14 March 1941, when Clydebank was subject to devastation on a scale that is beyond belief: 439 Luftwaffe bombers and thousands of bombs; 528 killed and 617 seriously injured; and 12,000 homes damaged, with 4,300 destroyed completely. She mentioned the seven houses that were, famously, not damaged, which is an incredible statistic. Second Avenue suffered the heaviest loss of life. As Marie McNair said, whole families were wiped out and streets disappeared.
The targets were strategic. As has been mentioned, they included John Brown’s shipyard, the Beardsmore engine works and the Singer factory. Incendiaries were dropped first, to set the town ablaze, followed by high explosives and parachute mines to finish the job. That was calculated and deliberate—it was the work of a regime that believed that terrorising civilians would break a nation’s will. It did not.
For me, this commemoration is personal. My mother was six years old when her own street in Birmingham was bombed from 19 to 20 November 1940. She lived in a small back-to-back house beside St Andrews football ground. That night, there was no siren and no warning. She remembered her mother suddenly shouting, with absolute authority, “Get out—into the shelter.” There was no visible threat, but she and the other children in the family obeyed. They hurried into the Anderson shelter at the back of the house and, moments later, the bomb struck. Their home was obliterated—brick, timber and dust filled the air, and a fractured pipe began to flood the shelter. My mother told me and my sister many times how she sat in the darkness, hearing the crash of masonry above her, and kept saying to her mother, who was praying for the family, “Pray louder, mummy. Pray louder.”
For six hours they were buried in the rubble, and, when they were finally dug out, cold and soaked, my grandfather, who had been on duty as an air raid warden, was there in what had become a smoking ruin. She remembered being lifted from the rubble and passed into his arms. She carried that night with her for the rest of her life—interestingly, not with bitterness but with gratitude.
Clydebank endured that horror on an even greater scale. Some 35,000 people were left homeless, yet, the next morning, people dug, rescued, cleared and began to rebuild.
The crew of the Polish destroyer that was docked at John Brown’s yard for refitting manned their guns that night and fired back. They stood their ground.
That generation understood evil, because it fell from the sky on to their homes. They knew what Adolf Hitler and his gangsters represented—tyranny, racial hatred, the crushing of liberty—and they defeated it. They endured the bombs, they buried their dead, they rebuilt their town, they refused to be broken. We stand here today because they did that.
We honour the 528 people who were killed that night in Clydebank. We honour those who were injured. We honour the homeless. We honour a generation that faced down violence and terror and prevailed. We will remember them, and we will not forget what they secured for us—our freedom.