Memorial smeared

Police began an investigation in December, 1949, after vandals smeared Stirling’s war memorial with brown enamel paint.

Judge Hamilton A Watters, who noticed the vandalism at the cenotaph in Corn Exchange Road, contacted police.

It took three burgh council workman, armed with scrubbing brushes and turpentine, four hours to remove the paint. A paint pot was found nearby and wreaths, laid at the base of the cenotaph, had been thrown on to the neighbouring ground on which stands Burns Statue.

Covered with paint were plaques featuring names of those who died in WW1.

`The question of whether it was the act of children or a much older person has yet to be determined,’ said the Observer.

Meanwhile, at Stirling Police Court, before Bailie Mrs McLachlan, the charge against Samuel Crawford, waggon repairer, 15 Bruce Street, Stirling, of stealing 7lb of wood, worth about sixpence, from railway premises in Stirling, was dropped. At an earlier hearing, a solicitor for Mr Crawford , intimating a plea of not guilty, said the charge was trivial and `beneath the dignity of the court. He indicated it might be necessary to bring a witness up from London – `all for the sake of sixpence’.

A soldier had a miraculous escape when a five-ton boulder plunged down Stirling’s Gowan Hill and smashed into Army offices.

The Observer of December, 1949, said the egg-shaped rock, measuring five feet high and six feet across, was `loosened from its anchorage’ following two storms within the previous seven days.

The boulder rolled 150 feet down the hill and hit Back o’ Hill Road, leaving a crater behind.

It then flattened a six-foot fence and crashed through a wall of the orderly sergeant’s office at the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers Camp .