Hansard

I thank my colleague Marie McNair for bringing this important debate to the chamber and for giving us the opportunity to remember and reflect. We remember the losses, the lives cut short, the families broken and the homes reduced to rubble on those terrible nights, yet we also remember the ordinary men and women who, in extraordinary circumstances, displayed such resilience and courage.

As we have heard, Clydebank bore the brunt of the raids, but the attacks were not confined to there. Bombs fell across our city of Glasgow, especially in areas such as Partick, Temple and Knightswood. Tenements shook, windows shattered, families huddled in closes and, ultimately, many lost their lives or their loved ones.

In the aftermath of the Clydebank bombing, thousands of survivors fled from Clydebank, and many went to Glasgow. Communities that were already strained by war were almost overwhelmed, but they were proud to open the doors to those displaced people who had bravely stood up to what had happened to them.

In 2010, John MacLeod captured the trauma in his celebrated book, “River of Fire: The Clydebank Blitz”. As the author so eloquently recounts, it had been

“a beautiful day in Clydebank—dry, sunny, the first bashful daffodils—and, after school, after their tea and till well after dusk, nine-year old Brendan Kelly played football on Jellicoe Street with his big pal, 13-year-old Tommy Rocks.

But, bedtime beckoning, they abandoned their game and sat at the tenement door, marvelling as the great full moon rose over the town, illuminating every highway and the shimmering Clyde itself.

‘God,’ breathed Tommy. ‘Look at that moon. If Jerry comes tonight, he cannae miss…’”

Jerry did come that very night and took little Tommy Rocks. John MacLeod continues:

“The attack was of such intensity that the explosions could be heard in distant Bridge of Allan; the glow in the night sky, as Clydebank burned, visible from Aberdeenshire, from the Inner Hebrides, and even from Ireland.”

Yet, for all that suffering, for all that sacrifice, history did not always give those events the prominence that they deserved. Much of the devastation and death from the German bombing raid was, for a time, wiped from our national story. The lack of adequate air defences and the lack of preparation were matters too uncomfortable for those in authority to confront. Shamefully, many victims were not even given a proper burial, with a vast mass grave being dug in Dalnottar cemetery, where, without the dignity of even cardboard coffins, corpses were interred wrapped in sheets knotted with string. Similarly, in the cellar beneath a Dalmuir pub, where dozens were killed, authorities did not even bother to recover the bodies—they just poured in quicklime. In the national press, a photograph of that mass grave was cropped on censors’ orders, so that its sheer size would not be apparent.

As we know, the second world war ended with the unprecedented horror of the nuclear devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—cities annihilated in moments, humanity brought to the brink by weapons of unimaginable power. Today, those dangers have not receded. We live in an age of renewed geopolitical tension, of modernised arsenals, of doctrines that still contemplate the unthinkable. Here, in Scotland, we have HMNB Clyde a short distance from Clydebank and our largest city of Glasgow. Just as in 1941, we must ask ourselves whether that proximity places a target on our back—whether we have learned the lessons that history has written in fire. Today, as we remember those past horrors, we must speak out against the potential of today’s, and we must work together to ensure that they are not repeated.

I will offer a minor tangent. My granda, Davie Gray, who worked on the building of the Kelvingrove art gallery in Glasgow—a famous and beautiful place—was a very good stonemason and he built a massive Anderson shelter at the back of our family’s house, in Temple. One night—it would be the night of the Clydebank blitz—the bombing was very intense and the family all went into the Anderson shelter. The old man from upstairs ran in and said, “Oh, Davie, I think we’re gonnae get it this time—just listen to how close they’re getting there.” My granda said, “I think you might be right, Willie—I think you might be right. Just think, though: there’s weans in here—away and put your bloody troosers on.”

That is one of the true stories that took place at the time. Sorry for the industrial language, Presiding Officer, but there you go.