I am going to make a start and if it is interesting to you I'll continue.
I was born in 1944 in a nursing home in Glasgow. My father was a doctor who had qualified from Glasgow in 1942. Having been in the Glasgow University O.T.C. he was whisked away as a volunteer and ended up landing in North Africa with "Operation Torch He was in Command of a Field Ambulance and was blown up during the Attack on Longstop Hill in Tunisia April 23 1943. As a result of this he always used a deaf aid (Which when I was young was a massive thing which was suspended from his under vest and lately was just a wee thing in his ear) and had been a bit shoogly for a while. He was lucky as most of the men with him were killed. My mother and he had got married on 30/04/1942 as if he had been killed and married my mother would have received a pension, otherwise not.
He must have recovered well as I was born the following April. My mum was in a nursing home run by her family doctor as my father was still in the army stationed in Edinburgh doing light duties prior to being returned to front line service. He was later discharged from the army with his rank that of Captain and was sent to Dundee to study bacteria. At this stage he had decided to specialise in Bacteriology. My Mother was the youngest child of an Argyllshire man who came from a crofting background, was a native Gaelic speaker and loved horses. He had been a coachman to the Colquhouns of Luss, a landowning clan on Loch Lomond side. Whilst there he had met my Grandmother who came originally from the “Deep South" of Scotland at Newton Stewart in Kirkcudbrightshire in Galloway. They had settled in Glasgow. Had eight children who survived of whom my mother was the youngest born in 1909. Her three brothers were through the First World War in all its hideousness and survived to come home, unusually so for that part of Glasgow, had joined up en masse.
My mother and father moved back to Glasgow and this is where I start to remember things. .We were living in Gibson Street with my Aunts and uncles. Peter (respondent Peter Mc Naughton) lived later on round the corner from here in Otago Street .I can remember waving father off to work from the flat window. He was still very thin from his war experiences and like all men then he wore a hat. Eventually we found a flat of our own. At the top of the hill in Hillhead Street just up from the university. I can remember going up to view the flat with my mother and my uncle (Second eldest of my mother’s brothers) Duncan's wife. The flat I thought was huge . It was no 44 Hillhead Street and of course was empty except for a very old fashioned "candlestick " telephone. I would be between two and a half and three at this point. At Christmas 1947 I can remember my father being very agitated as my mother had fallen on the snow going down Great George street at Christmas to visit her family. The reason was my mum was about seven months pregnant my father was very agitated was because my mum was seven months pregnant with my wee brother who was born at the end of March 1947.
Our top floor flat was a wonderland for me we had huge rooms which you would have needed a private coalfield/oilfield to keep warm. Times must have been hard and it was a very cold period but I of course was blissfully unaware of this. Creeping into the kitchen one day I wanted to see my wee brother lying in his "Moses Basket" on a chest of drawers I caught hold of the edge of his basket and tumbled him out onto the floor. I have to say that Alan, as he is called seems to have suffered no ill. Looking out over the city at night it was a magical place of lights everywhere and we lived at the top of one of Glasgow’s high spots. Our streets and closes were lit by gas at that time and the "Leerie" came round to light the lamps and to turn them off again when it was light. They gave a funny pale greenish light. The lamplighter always had a word for me. I can remember that we still had ration books and my mother and my aunts had big discussions over what to buy. Probably because of the first war my brother and I were the only children out of the eight. This was probably caused by the fallout of the first war, eg not enough men left to go round, and those that were left had no real job security.
My Father purchased an old Vauxhall car and we drove to Callander sometimes to visit old friends of his. I often sat on my mother’s knee during these trips. Callander was about 30/35 miles away. This car was of an age that it had a temperature gauge on the bonnet. I can remember my father in a rage running out to the gauge and taking it off whereupon he got scalded in a rush of rust red water and boy did I laugh. That laughter was of very short duration as my dad had a pretty short fuse!
I had two girl cousins on my dad’s side both older than me. The one who was closest to me always took care of me at family parties and made me get up to every dance and activity that there was on the go. I hated it! I am not shy, but I always liked to approach situations in my own time and pace.
A favourite trip in the afternoons was for my mum and I with brother in the pram to go to Kelvingrove Park. There we inevitably met with a Mrs Hamilton and her Daughter Sheilagh. Sheilagh and I are still very much in contact, after a career in academia taking her various places she has settled back in north England in Chester. She did not marry and did not have a lot of family around. As she says herself "You are the person I have known longest in life and it is true. We were even in the same class at Hillhead Primary School although she occupied the upper echelons of the clever folk and I whilst not a dope was inclined to be a bit dreamy.
I went to school in 1949 at five years of age. Hillhead High (Primary) School was just round the corner from Hillhead Street and I would be taken there by my mum but would come home myself at about 12.30. Quite a lot for a wee boy, but things were different then I suppose. I did get a row constantly from My Dad as I could not tie my shoe laces.
A memory that stays with me to this day is of the first Christmas tree I remember which had real candles on it and wee prancing horses. We had them in the family for years. I can also remember a Christmas present of a wooden block with nails and my own wee hammer which my father said was the present that I played most with. I have been hammering things ever since.
Going back to our visits to the Kelvingrove Park, having gone down my Mum was faced with a hell of a push back up a pretty steep hill. This was not helped my wanting to climb on the pram also. My Mum lived until she was ninety four. I unfortunately never knew my maternal grandparents, my Grandfather, Duncan MacCallum died of a heart attack in 1932, and my grand Mother Marion (Mirren in Scots) died just three months before I was born.
I used to enjoy going with my Dad to get the car. This was kept in an old fashioned garage lockup which had an old fashioned lift in it. First you had to manoeuver the car onto the lift and then carefully get down the ramp. Round about 1949 my father bought a brand new Ford Prefect, reg GGG719, it is amazing how some things stick in your memory. This car went perfectly and we had a memorable holiday in St Andrews on the east coast which was very sunny, and had lots of sand and had donkeys to ride on. I started school that August.
I loved that west end area of Glasgow and indeed spent a very happy day from 9 in the morning until about 7 in the evening taking my two daughters aged 42 and 45 round all their family background areas in Glasgow
This period took in the death of King George 6th, India’s independence. I can remember listening reverently to the King’s speech on the radio on Christmas day. I can also remember Princess Elizabeth visiting Glasgow and my father giving me a little Lion Rampant flag to shake at her car. At her Coronation we all got a tin of sweets to commemorate the occasion.
Radio was something I had enjoyed as a very young child whilst we lived in Hillhead Street. There was a programme called "Mrs Dales diary" which was really designed for older people chiefly mothers and Edmundo Ros’s Latin American music. There was also a thriller later in the afternoon called Paul Temple with at six o'clock the Dick Barton special agent.
The period at the end of the forties and start of the fifties was a fairly happy time for me. My brother and I had a loving, employed father and mother and plenty of aunts and uncles. We were well fed and clothed and I loved playing in what I considered a huge flat which in fact it was.
At that time unfortunately in Scotland in general and the city of Glasgow in particular we had the most horrendous overcrowding with dreadful sanitation, poverty, unemployment, with all that follows from that. There was an extreme lack of proper housing. Many soldiers were returning from the war and had to join their wives who were staying children with their parents. Many thousands went to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US at this time.
We also had something called "Smog". This was a blend of coal fire smoke, chemical discharge tobacco smoke and raw river mist. I can smell it now as I am typing, it killed hundreds each year.
About this time, my father was sitting his MD which in Scotland was a specialist honours degree taken after you had become a doctor. He was typing his thesis all night it seemed to me. Anyway he became a Consultant Bacteriologist and also decided to move to a new house in a leafy suburb called Jordanhill.This house was a new house built on ground on which a previous house had been bombed, This would be around 1950.We had a front and a back garden, my Mother could just go out of the back door to hang her washing instead of going down four flights of stairs. We were surrounded by what had been until fairly recently farm ground, where we ran wild with a lot of other boys a girls of all ages and different schools. One of the boys Ian MacMillan I knew from Hillhead School. He was not in the same class in the primary but was in the secondary. Indeed his picture is in the same class photo that Peter (McNaughton, friend and fellow respondent) sent you. He and I fell out and then fell in. To this day he is still my oldest and closest friend and that is a long time now.
There was an area close by which had railway lines and many sidings where we played on the coaches and trucks. We even got a ride on the ancient steam engine which organised the trucks in the sidings. If health and safety had been around then we would have been in serious trouble, and the engine driver would have been fired. Here we climbed trees and built underground dens. A speciality was large baked potatoes burnt black in the fire and eaten with the hands and butter. Boys and girls tended to play together I began to be a bit curious when we were holding a brick and turf fort armed with cap pistols and rifles against about ten thousand wild indians. At this point all the older boys seemed to have deserted the walls to be wounded down in the bottom of the fort with the girls who were being "nurses" had they no sense of priorities. We all had bikes and this broadened our horizons as we could go messages, and organise picnics. Our bicycles were our most precious possession as they gave us our independence. We had good family holidays in Argyll at Benderloch and Kilchrenan. Here my brother Alan and I caught many a handful of trout. Probably there are none left now because of acid rain from extensive forestry. My dad still took us to Callander and we fished the River Teith.
My schoolwork did not impress my parents I am afraid. It did not really improve as although I was not really numerate, I was good at other things, had I but made the effort!
I was a member of a swimming club in Glasgow and I was really fond of swimming, we camped a lot with my father who had been in the scouts, it was great and I took my own family away often in a tent. The girls played ropes in the street and, if we were favoured, we were allowed to “Caw" the long rope so everyone got a turn. We were out of doors nearly all the time unlike today where there are computers and video games, we really were pretty healthy .A lot of the boys were in the cub scouts and later the scouts. Some of us others were in the Boys Brigade a more church orientated youth movement. I have never been a church member but our local company had a pipe band and that was for me...I suppose that we were a bit immature for our years, my parents had known the hungry thirties and did not wish to harden us up at all I think.
For all it was nineteen fifty something I think that our society was still living in a sort of Victorian, pre First World War era. At Christmas in my Aunt Agnes's house my father, my uncle Colin (who I was called after) and, my Uncle Duncan plus a few drams would be talking about the war. Even then I was aware that war for my uncles was the only real one and that the second war had been just a bit of a side show despite the fact that my father had been wounded in the second one.
For all our madcap goings on we did not suffer many serious knocks. Scraped knees and elbows for which a dab of Iodine was the cure. It was sore but no one ever had septic wounds.
During this time there had been the invasion of Egypt with the French which the Americans made the UK back out off. At the same time I can remember listening to Imre Nagy the free Hungarian PM pleading for help from the west on the radio. I could not understand when my father said to me "No one will be going son" Imre Nagy was taken by the Russians to Moscow put on some sort of trial and then hung.
The big boy next door to us had a lovely collie dog called Laddie. I used to go out with him after school to walk Laddie. It was on one of these occasions that Brian (that was his name) discovered that I could not tell the time and he taught me. My father then gave me his old watch.
I came home from school by tram car or sometimes bus. I liked the old tram cars, but they were gradually removed over the years. Their rails were set in amongst granite setts which were very slippy after rain. I had two or three bumps coming off my bike and landing on the unyielding granite.
Our summer seemed to be always warmer in those days, when you were by common acclaim in the ranks of the older boys you were entitled to write your initials in melted tar on a special wall. On a trip down memory lane with my daughters I found traces of that tar yet.
There was a company called "Hornby" who made toy clockwork train sets and we all had them. We marked the underside of the rails with different paint to know whose was whose. One summer’s day we built a tunnel between two of the boys gardens, disaster! The tunnel and the wall began to collapse. Our regular window cleaner, who was a friend indeed, got some cement and brick and repaired the damage before parents came home from work. One year we had a circus where we all had to do an act. My wee brother was stationed on the gate and took the entrance money. I do remember that it was a very warm sunny day with all the mothers in frocks. We had so many things to do. There was Victoria Park just down the hill from us. We could go on the paddle boats for tuppence or go on the play park swings for nothing. As we became a bit older we would have a go on the tennis courts. Every activity was always packed full. There was also a very good public swimming baths called Whiteinch.
Industry in Scotland and especially on the Clyde was going down the tubes quite quickly. Scotland had had a background of heavy Industry. Steam Engines were more or less discovered on the Clyde together with ironworks and coal fields. My auntie Maisie's husband Uncle Bob had been a coal miner and he had two tattoos on his hand, one a wee swallow. Like many Miners he kept canaries and budgies and he had a dog. I was allowed to take this dog walks which usually ended up with him taking me Maisie and Bob. He lived in a village called Slammanan which was near Stirling and Falkirk, a bit more east from us. They ran a wee fish, fruit and vegetable store and when I was there on holiday I went in the van with Uncle Bob. This van was a wee pre-war Ford, I loved it. Also many of the farms we stopped at had yards with very old cars and tractors just lying about for me to play on.
All my mother’s family were fairly long lived, except unfortunately my much loved Uncle Colin who died when I was twelve. He used to come on a Saturday morning and take my brother and myself out to a museum, or down to the Clyde quays to watch the ships sailing down. Kids today would be a long time waiting just to see one. A favourite of mine was a visit to one of the big railway stations in Glasgow of which there were four (today two)_When you went in there was always the noise of the engines blowing off steam. We spent ages there. My uncle Colin was a pretty good amateur artist and he was always trying to drag me away from the guns, swords, and armour up to see the Rembrandt pictures, I think there are three and perhaps the most impressive "Christ of St John on the Cross" by Salvador Dali. Myself, I could not draw my breath, but I knew real talent when I saw it. You can see that all us young folk had endless things to do. Shortly as I became older there would be even more,
I left off round about the time I would be twelve or so. There were big changes I feel at that time. It would be 1956. I was finishing primary school. I was beginning to take notice of girls etc. I feel that the climate was changing a bit then also. We stopped having snow before Christmas, my short trousers still rubbed a red frosty line on the back of my legs. There was an increase in the amount of housing schools built on what had been available ground where we had all played/fought with other local boys. Our "frontiers" were expanding, some of the boys we had fought with became our good pals. We started to learn to dance at school for yearly dances. Our qualy dance signified the end of our primary days and our entry into what came to be called our teenage years.
We were all very much more mobile and were constantly on the move from cycling trips, swimming, films, hill walking and congregating with girls.
On moving into the high school I found myself in the first year "A" rugby team where we played against other schools some of whom we really did not get on with. I enjoyed playing rugby. My uncles who had been football daft in their younger days did not want to know what this talentless game was that I played. Especially as I played in the front row of the scrum. I also began to learn to play the bagpipes for the OTC/CCF pipe band I still play in Dunoon Argyll band but of course the covid virus has put paid to all band nights/parades etc. I have to say that some of the boys I started school with in 1949 I still see although lately it has been at funerals. Our club ground was at Hughenden in Great Western Road Glasgow and we still have reunions every now and then. I hasten to add that my school work was not so good. I was more an English. History sort of a guy and I found maths and physics not only hard but like a foreign language in that I just could not get to grips with it. I think I may have been the figure equivalent of dyslexic!
My father took my brother Alan and myself on Camping trips away up north to places like Gruinard Bay and Sutherland. My mother's father Duncan MacCallum was a native Gaelic speaker and the areas we visited contained a large amount of Gaelic speakers. Indeed on one holiday in 1955 in Skye we visited friends of a friend of my father and two of the older folk present could not speak English at all. The people we knew in Gruinard Bay, their old mother had very, very limited English. it was not necessary in a largely Gaelic speaking community. Fast forward to 2020. All the areas in Argyll which were Gaelic speaking in my younger days are no longer so, they don’t in many cases have any Scots people in them anymore. When a language is not spoken in the playground any more it will die, and that I am afraid to say is what is going to happen to Gaelic. It will be used as an academic language for reference purposes only.
Some of the older lads around us had to do their national service, it certainly made a difference to them to see them in uniform. When I finally became able to play on parades for the cadets, I was given a Kilt uniform with special white spats and belts and I was supposed to clean and whiten them. My old uncle Duncan gave me a brass strip with an opening run ning up it from his time in the Royal Marines in the First World War. You slipped this strip over your brass work and could then clean it without dirtying the pristine white bits. Similarly my mother had a wee set of "things" on her dressing table amongst which was a button hook and this enabled me to fasten my spats without getting the white bits dirty. Keep something long enough and it will be useful again.
We had developed more powerful and dangerous bows and arrows, also crossbows which we shot at each other down in the railway sidings, called for some reason the "Dummy Railway"
My pals in the local scouts were adept at making "twist" bread over a fire on a green stick. We BB boys were just as good. We had graduated to sausage, bacon and eggs for our camps. We (BB) boys hiked all over the Trossachs area, One of our favourite areas was going over Ben Lomond and either down the lochside to Drymen and home or over to the Kinlochard road and to Aberfoyle on the bus. I have stood on the Aberfoyle bus soaked to the skin for the hour and a half it took to get home and a warm bath. The loveliest weekend was usually at the end of May and it was often sunny There would be about twelve or fifteen of us older lads sleeping in three to a tent. I usually had a tent and stove to carry and my own cooking gear.
I still went fishing to Aberfoyle and Callander and caught a few brown trout. I once caught a strange wee fish under the old railway bridge at Callander my father said that it was a salmon parr and to put it back and I would catch it when it was bigger. What a fibber. I have never caught a salmon in my life.
We had begun to go to dances in the local scout or BB hall. We knew most of the girls as we were at school with them or played tennis with them. Therefore we were perhaps not so shy at asking them up to dance as we might have been except for me. I loved all types of music but I have never particularly liked dancing. I would rather sit and listen how boring.
I was allowed to use more and more of my father’s tools and would even cut the grass without being asked.
We were aware of the world about us changing. The first British Colony in Africa, the Gold Coast became independent as Ghana and from there it all went quickly on. The regiment my cadets were attached to the Highland Light infantry, a very Glasgow regiment with it's barracks at Maryhill (It is now the Wyndford scheme) was amalgamated with the Ayrshire Fusiliers and this pattern has continued until today where we have only one large Scottish regiment. There is no empire so we do not require any soldiers. No bad thing perhaps but it was a career pattern for many lads without a job.
That is basically about us Rachel the tram rails were being lifted and everything was changing rapidly. We had a lovely childhood in a Glasgow which has had lots of people knocking it but it was a place of wonder for me and my pals .We played the same games in the street as our mothers and fathers had albeit we had bikes which most of them did not have I don’t think I mentioned that the film "Ben Hur" had a great effect on us as we built bogies of various shapes and sizes and raced them round the block pulling them with two or three bikes. What glorious smashes we had on these, there not nearly so many cars then and we did not have anything more than scrapes. Myself and another chap were into building home made cannons/muskets. when I finally suceeded in my cannon, the old man put a stop to all further experiments This let me safely approach 1960, leaving school and getting a job. My youthful days were more or less past,
Yours, Colin Stevenson
