1938: First 37,000 gas masks in Glasgow are issued

RUSSELL LEADBETTER

THE international crisis naturally pre-occupied the Glasgow Herald of Friday, September 30, 1938. A leading article praised the deeds of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Munich. “The chief ministers of four Great Powers,” it began, “have been in Munich less than a day, and it seems that they have already succeeded in making an agreement which will prevent a war that seemed almost inevitable 24 hours before they came together,” The Spectator magazine was already tipping Chamberlain for the next Nobel Peace Prize. But the threat to world peace was weighing heavily on people’s minds. A young woman who had lived in Germany fell to her death from a Bournemouth hotel window after attending a dance. A young man from Portobello who had accompanied her to the dance told an inquest that she had become agitated as she talked about the crisis and was very much against the thought of war.

In Glasgow, the first 37,000 gas masks were issued at Napiershall Street School (above). Residents rushed to the school after police loudspeaker vans toured the local ward to alert them. This method was certainly effective. Some local women took the announcement so much to heart that they began to cry in the streets, and one woman fainted in the entrance of a tenement close when she heard the broadcast. The very first customers at the school were a middle-aged mother with her two young sons.