FACES OF THE PAST

STUDYING photographs of the impact of the Blitz in Scotland means that you are seeing the same kind of images, again and again: facades of villas and tenements torn away, exposing interior walls, settees, bookcases and light-fittings; rescue scenes illuminated by arc-lights; families and young children with suitcases in devastated, once-familiar streets; colossal piles of rubble.

They bring home, just as powerfully as the firsthand testimonies and descriptions mentioned here, the stark horror of what befell Scotland eight decades ago. Some 2,500 people lost their lives in Scotland during the Blitz.

Across the whole of the UK, the figure was in excess of 43,500. In March 1960, the nineteenth anniversary of the attacks on

Glasgow and Clydebank, John Cormack, the man who had lain trapped for eight days and nights in Peel Street, spoke to The Bulletin, our sister paper.

He had spent time in a convalescent hospital, where he met the nurse who would later become his wife. Once he had recovered, he joined the Navy.

“I don’t know how you’d put it”, he said, “but you could say I had faith in coming out alive.

“I couldn’t panic, because I couldn’t move. If I’d been able to crawl about I might have lost control of my mind. But there I was in my bed, with only my mind free, and after the first shock I settled down to wait for my rescue”.

Sources: Glasgow Herald archives; Blitz article by Tom McKendrick at https://www.westdunbarton.gov.uk; https://www. tommckendrick.com/; River of Fire, by John MacLeod; Britain’s War: Into Battle 1937-1941, by Daniel Todman; National Records of Scotland; Untold Stories: Remembering Clydebank in Wartime, Clydebank Life Story Group 1999; Imperial War Museum website, iwm.org.uk; Voices from the Twentieth Century: The Battle of Britain and the Blitz, ed. Nigel Fountain.

John Cormack, a survivor of the Clydebank Blitz, recovering in the Western Infirmary after being trapped in the ruins for more than eight days in March 1941