Spotlight onmary Seacole
few weeks was “devastating”.
He added: “It was absolutely beautiful in summer, you felt you were out in the country. I feel Bothwell has lost something special.”
But a Langside Road resident said: “To be honest that area has been quite overgrown and unkempt for some time. I can see advantages in developing the site. I don’t have any problem with it.”
South Lanarkshire’s head of planning and economic development, Pauline Elliott, pointed out that the tree removal work was not related to the demolition of the house at 1 Crofbank Crescent and a flats development there which has already received planning permission.
She commented: “We are aware that a number of trees have been removed from land between Croftbank Crescent and Langside Road in Bothwell and have visited the site.
“While the site is partly within the Conservation Area, the trees have been removed from an area outwith the Conservation Area and therefore no planning consent was required for their removal.
“No planning application has been submitted to date for the development of the site in question.” Historian Chris Short gave an account of the life and work of Mary Seacole (1805-81) at Bothwell and Uddingston Probus Club’s meeting last Thursday.
Born Mary Jane Grant to a Jamaican mother and a Scottish father, an officer serving in the occupying military forces, she achieved the accolade of greatest black Briton in a 2004 poll.
Driven by a lifelong instinct for relieving suffering, she combined the nursing skills learnt initially from her African mother, but honed by working in the most extreme situations of human hardship and deprivation with her instinct for providing the basic needs necessary for civilised life.
Mr Short said she went to where people lived in the greatest of hardship – whether the squalid cholera-infested communities spawned by the Californian gold rush or the extreme deprivations of the British Army in the Crimean War.
The vote of thanks was given by President Len Shaw.
The next meeting is today (March 23) when Ann Parsonage will speak about Glasgow Humane Society.