The Clydebank Blitz

I’ll never forget it as long as I live and I’m 90 now. I was only 19, just a girl really, and on the nightshift at Singer's. It was a big factory then with two stations. One of them was right inside the factory and because it had been requisitioned for the duration of the war, trains went right in and came out again at all hours. It was all very hush-hush. But I don’t think any of us thought it was sewing machines the trains were carrying. There was a saying: ‘loose lips sink ships.’ We just did our job.

John Brown’s Shipyard and the River Clyde were at the bottom end of a T- shape. Kilbowie Road ran downhill into them and was bisected by the horizontal of the train tracks at Singer's factory, less than a mile away. I came from the Vale and could get on the train and be at work within half an hour.

There were six of us in my section. Emily and me and four men. I can remember them to this day. Bobby, Robert, Jack and George. They were all older than us girls, perfect gentleman, although I could always tell if Bobby had a wee drink in him from the sparkle in his eyes. You couldn’t have met a finer chap and he was devoted, devoted to his wife. They all were.

Emily’s job and mine was to inspect their work. They had to turn out a certain number of shell casings per hour. It was the old overhead feed lines that powered the machinery in the factory and even then it was outdated and you had to watch you didn’t catch your hair. The lathes clattered and whined day and night. Milky metal fillings fell into steel buckets that tended to overflow. The oldest of the antique machines also leaked oil onto the floor so you had to watch your step. The acrid smell made your throat burn at first when you started nightshift, and it did cling to your clothes, but you quickly got used to it. The men wore overalls of course. They were meant to wear goggles as well, in case hot metal fillings flew up into their eyes. But as Jack said to me when I started:

‘Ellen, hen, don’t you worry. I’ve been daeing the job that long I can dae it with my eyes shut.’

And he shut his eyes and the machine whined on without him. And then all the men laughed, because he was kicking the bottom of the lathe with his feet so that all I heard was a banging noise and I panicked a bit. They’d been watching me and were trying to get a rise out of me, but not in a bad way; they were all good to me, couldn’t have treated me better.

That night Bobby said to me, ‘Ellen I’m ahead. I’m going to have a wee lie down. Give me a dunt if Nichol turns up.'

I knew where he went for a wee sleep. So when Nichol turned up I went to get him. He had his piece wrapped up in greaseproof paper lying beside him in case he rolled over it when he was sleeping. But there was a rustling and something moving about inside it and a rat’s head popped out. I was petrified, so I shouted to Bobby that Nichol was here. He took one look at the rat and the rat took one look at him before running beneath one of the punches. Bobby stuffed his sandwiches in his overall pockets and said, ‘Nichol’s got fair small. I hope he’s left me a bite.’

Later, it was a lovely clear night and we were having our tea break. Jack said to me ‘Ellen do you fancy a walk to stretch our legs.’ He didn’t smoke much. All the other men chain-smoked at their break to save time later. And I didn’t smoke at all. So I said ‘that would be lovely’. We’d just got out the double doors at the bottom of the stairs when we were blown back inside again. There was no klaxon sounding that we should have taken shelter. No warning. Even if there had been we’d probably have treated it as some kind of joke. They’d been going on and off intermittently and nothing really happened apart from Nichol moaning about needing to catch up with production. We hadn’t heard the bomb going off. We just felt it. By some miracle neither of us were hurt. We scrambled into the building and out the back way into one of the store rooms that we used as a bomb shelter. I don’t think there was one among us that thought we were going to see the morning. We were just waiting.

I didn’t notice that Bobby was missing. The buildings were vibrating and I was shaking even more. I was in a bad way and Bobby sidled up next to me and said, ‘Ellen would you like a cup of tea?’ With all the false warnings we had time to make the bomb shelter habitable and we had a wee stove. But I said to Bobby, ‘where are we going to get the tea?’ And Bobby, he was a character, said ‘Ellen, the canteen's on fire.’ And he pulled a packet of tea out of his pocket. When we got settled with our tea, he said to me again, ‘Ellen, would you like a biscuit?’ We didn’t have to ask where he got them.

There was a bit of daylight, but we still didn’t think we’d make the morning. I was perhaps the most surprised of us all when the all clear sounded. When we got out of the shelter all the houses, the tenement blocks that crouched over Singer's, were on fire, or had been swept away. The men were keen to find their families, and I was no different. I started walking home. It was about ten miles to the Vale. There seemed to be no house that hadn't been damaged in some way and people were walking down the middle of the main roads, leaving town, in case the Germans came back to finish the job. I wondered why I was still alive.

I got to about Old Kilpatrick, which is about three miles from Singer's, when I saw a Corporation double-decker bus. The trams and trains were off, of course. It was crawling along the road, but I was glad to see it not only because I hoped for a lift home, but also because it was a sign of normality. I waited for it, just beside the canal, outside Massie’s the newsagents. A man hurried past me and out of the side of his mouth he whispered, ‘You don’t want to go on that bus hen.’

When the bus got closer I could see it was filled with bodies. Some of them had been covered up with sheets, but some of them were just lying there, bits and parts of people, a butcher’s shop. Even to this day I’ll never forget it. I knew what war was then. That’s why when I saw the programme about ‘The Clydebank Blitz’ I cried. I maybe shouldn’t have watched it.