No-one can forget night of death and destruction
Locals battened down the hatches
It was a night those who lived through it will never forget.
On January 14, 1968, a massive storm hit the northern part of the British Isles leaving millions of pounds worth of damage in its wake. More than 20 people were killed in Scotland that night – one of them in Cambuslang. Angus Barr was sleeping in his Hamilton Road tenement home when the storm came in. At around 3am on January 15 a chimney pot, shaken lose in winds of over 100mph, fell from the roof killing the 37 year old who was lying beside his wife. She suffered head injuries but survived to witness the damage the storm, known as Hurricane Low Q, wreaked. “There was not anywhere in Rutherglen that had tenements where there wasn’t damage,” remembers keen historian Davy Jackson. “I am 72 and it is the worst I have ever known.” Davy, who has lived in the same Blackfaulds Road house all his life, took a walk through the Burgh on the morning of the 15th to survey the damage. “I was going down Greenbank Street,” he remembers. “There was a whole chimney in the middle of the street. “It had landed on a car. I had never seen a car like this, it was a as flat as a pancake.” Margaret McCall was 16 and working in the Town Clerk’s office. When she arrived for work on the Monday morning she got quite a surprise. She said: “There was a building in Kirkwood Street and it had a big crack right through it, we could see it from the office.
“The residents had to be evacuated and they were taken to the church hall at St Columbkille’s. Everyone really rallied round to help each other but the building had to be demolished.
“I stayed in Spittal and it was certainly the worst storm I had known. We were OK though because the houses in Spittal were strong, they had only been built 18 years before.”
Not everyone was in their homes when the storm struck.
Christine McLean was a 19 year old staying in Fernhill at the time. She was out on a date on the 14th, with the wind putting paid to any chance of romance.
She said: “We were walking from Castlemilk to Rutherglen.
“We were nearly blown away. We got to Johnstone Drive and I said I’d had enough. There was a close there and we were both blown right down it.
“He landed first and I landed right beside him and we were laughing trying to get back up. We were crawling about for ages.”
Despite the storm, there was no respite for Rutherglen and Cambuslang school children.
Marjorie Vennelle got the train from Kirkhill to Burnside every morning before walking to Rutherglen Academy.
She was not even aware there had been a storm when she woke up and found the trains were off. Instead she got a bus from Cambuslang Main Street to Rutherglen, where she had a lucky escape.
“We were on the north side of the Main Street just before Farmeloan Road, there were two or three of us, and this big bit of masonry fell just a few feet in front of us.
“I remember thinking it was just as well we were walking and not rushing. It wasn’t really until years later I realised what a big deal it had been.
“Schools would be off now of course, but we actually got a row because we didn’t get there until 9.30am.”
The storm actually gathered near Bermuda before making its way north. Wind gusts of 173mph were recorded in the Cairngorms before it passed. Although Northern Ireland and the northern part of England were affected, the Central Belt of Scotland was worst hit, with 21 fatalities.
A week after the storm, the Reformer reported that MP Gregor Mackenzie had performed a tour of damaged homes, and slammed landlords who had sold unsafe homes to young couples who could not get insurance to cover storm damage. The estimated damage in Rutherglen alone was £65,000 – nearly £8 million in today’s money. However, the storm has been widely credited with marking a change in the housing strategy of Glasgow – and Rutherglen. Out of the rubble emerged a community based housing association model to provide better housing for residents. Govan was the first, but Rutherglen soon followed in 1979. Geraldine Baird MBE, one of the founder members of the association, said: “The great storm hastened the first community based housing association in Glasgow which in turn allowed the then Rutherglen Housing Association to use that model to draw in funds to save firstly the tenements in Victoria Street, then Farmeloan Road. “We moved on and in our nearly 40 years we have refurbished tenements, built new homes, expanded into Cambuslang and maintained stock through our factoring arm.”