Glasgow’s trams...
of Rita herself with one of her brothers, Bobby, in the back court at Townhead.
“I am about nine or 10 years old in that photo,” she explains. “Incidentally, it was around that time I met my husband Billy, and we are still together more than 50 years on...”
The Glasgow Times archives include a fantastic photograph, taken by former picture editor
Jim Hamilton in August 1964, of the last working tram in Glasgow at Pinkston Power Station, with ‘Mr Charles Swinton, electrical maintenance engineer at the door,” states the caption on the back.
Coal for the power station, whose cooling tower was given a coat of camouflage paint during the war to prevent it from becoming a target in bombing raids, was brought by barges on the Forth and Clyde canal.
Eventually it was transferred to the South of Scotland Electricity Board to provide power for the national grid and it was decommissioned in the Sixties.
The cooling tower leaked warm water into the canal, with claims at the time that fish in the canal grew to an enormous size as a result. (Almost certainly false, but it did not stop crowds of local children from searching hard...) The first of the chimneys, estimated to contain 4200 tons of bricks, was taken down in a controlled explosion in April 1978 which temporarily stopped the traffic.
Rita adds: “We lived at several addresses in Springburn and Townhead during my childhood, and the power station was ever-present,” she explains. “Its colossus of a tower was visible from many locations...”
Do you remember the old Pinkston Power Station? Send your stories and photos to ann.fotheringham@ glasgowtimes.co.uk or write to Ann Fotheringham, Glasgow Times, Print Centre, 125 Fullarton Drive, Cambuslang G32 8FG.