Remember when ... Supermac goes shopping in East Kilbride

IT’S not every day that the Prime Minister takes time out of his busy schedule to look inside a dry cleaner’s and a wallpaper shop, and to admire, in a furniture store’s window display, a dinner service and a 75-guinea sideboard.

But this was part of Harold Macmillan’s unprompted walkabout when he opened East Kilbride’s shopping centre on May 1, 1959.

From a sweet shop his wife, Lady Dorothy, emerged with a tartan box of shortbread. The couple then admired a huge display of TV sets and washing machines.

The walkabout, this newspaper noted, “was like a fast game of hide-and-seek with the good-humoured crowds of women whose shopping was interrupted”.

In all, Supermac visited 10 of the 27 new shops.

A crowd some 1,000 strong had greeted the Prime Minister and Lady Dorothy as they arrived for the opening. An enthusiastic cluster of Union Jacks and Saltires caught the eye.

In a speech Macmillan said that in less than 12 years the new town had grown from fewer than 3,000 inhabitants to 25,000. The East Kilbride Corporation had built more than 6,500 houses, more than half of which had been let to families from Glasgow. A great start had been made in clearing the Glasgow slums, he added.

Macmillan told his audience – dignitaries and members of the public alike – that they were in the social and economic vanguard, showing how industry could sensibly establish itself outside a large city.

They represented, he said, a step away from the nineteenthcentury conception of “the large and ever-growing conurbation, as they call it, which, like a reluctant dragon, swallows up every tree and green field lying in its path”.

He wished good fortune to the new venture, and added, “God bless you all”.

There was a pause, and amid laughter he quickly attached his postscript: “I now formally declare the shopping centre open”.