It Started in a Cupboard by Kenneth Calman sampler

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it started in a cupboard first appearance in the family album. It’s 23 May 1942 and there I am, being proudly shown off to my adoring gran in our back garden. Again, at first glance, it seems as though it belongs in peacetime. But, look again at the garden and you can see that it has been given over to growing potatoes. By 1941, thanks to the Dig For Victory campaign, and the songs and recipe books of Captain Carrot and Potato Pete, Britain’s food imports had halved to 14.65 million tonnes. Some 10,000 square miles of gardens and neglected spaces had been taken over by vegetable growers. At No. 62 Thornley Avenue, we were doing our bit too. In some of the photographs, in the middle of the potatoes is the grim hump of an Anderson shelter. Again, there’s nothing unusual about that. 2.1 million of these corrugated galvanised steel shelters were half-buried in Britain’s gardens, with most resurrected in peacetime, as ours was, to serve as a garden shed where we also kept our bikes. But nine months before I was born, in the middle of the Clydebank Blitz the shelter had its use. I might even have been conceived in it! On the night of 13 March 1941 the first of three waves of German bombers flew west over our house. They’d already done their aerial reconnaissance, and you can see the targets marked out on their largescale (1cm:150m) briefing photographs. On them, Knightswood is unmarked, the neat geometry of its streets undisturbed by parked cars or indeed vehicles of any kind. The real targets were in Clydebank, just over a mile to the west. The giant Singer Sewing Machine works, then largely given over to munitions work (they made Sten guns), was the biggest one, but John Brown’s shipyard wasn’t far behind: this was, after all, where the British battle cruisers hms Hood and hms Repulse – both sunk, with appalling loss of life, later that year – had both been built. Beardmore’s engineering works was badly hit, as were the Admiralty oil storage tanks at Kilpatrick, and a huge timber yard at Singer’s was lost – the last two adding immeasurably to the fires that earlier incendiary bombs had started. Before the Clydebank Blitz there had been 12,000 houses in the town. Only seven were unscathed; 4,300 were destroyed or beyond repair. In the two-night bombing raids of 13 and 14 March 1941, 528 people died in the concentrated carnage of Clydebank, and a further 650 in Glasgow. 1 18
a cupboard in knightswood It’s odd, isn’t it, the things you never ask your parents? While they were alive, I never remember asking either of them what it felt like as those German planes roared overhead under a full ‘bomber’s moon’ and the Drumchapel ack-ack guns opened up – whether they were frightened and stayed in the Anderson shelter until the all-clear sirens sounded, or whether they couldn’t stop themselves going outside to look at the flames devouring Clydebank. It wasn’t as if they were far from the danger themselves. Some of the earliest bombs in the raid fell on Knightswood – on houses in Alderman Road, Baldric Road and Kestrel Road. But it was the eight foot-long cylindrical 1,000lb landmine that landed on Bankhead School that did the most damage. Witnesses reported hearing a ‘flapping’ sound, looking up and seeing it swing down by parachute, hitting the school roof, sliding down the slates and dropping down to the playground, where it exploded. The blast destroyed almost the whole of the west wing of Bankhead School, which at the time was being used as a first aid post, fire station and arp (Air Raid Precaution) centre. Thirty-nine people were killed, including 21 auxiliary firefighters and two teenage messenger boys. The fire burnt until dusk the next evening. St David’s, where we all went to church, was damaged in the raids too, but so slightly by comparison to the horrors at Bankhead School – which my brother Norman and I subsequently attended – that I can’t remember anyone ever mentioning it. People forget just how long the war overshadowed the peace that came in 1945. Norman was born that year, but even by the time he left Bankhead school in the mid-’50s, ten years after the end of the war and 15 years after the bombing, they still hadn’t replaced the gym hall or the canteen. Rationing lasted almost as long: it only ended in 1954. Years later, when I was Chief Medical Officer for first Scotland and then England, I used to tell my political masters that if they really wanted a healthy population, they should bring it back. Britain’s wartime diet may have been deeply unpopular, but the country has never had a healthier one. That, then, is a snapshot of the place and the time I was born into. But before I got any further, I should introduce you to my parents and the rest of my family. I loved my Dad. I loved my Mum too, but she wasn’t the one who played football with me in the back garden, put 19
Page 3 and 4: sir kenneth calman was Scotland’s
Page 5 and 6: It Started in a Cupboard Adventures
Page 7: Contents Foreword 9 Introduction 9
Page 11 and 12: Foreword Compiled by Susan Calman a
Page 13 and 14: foreword The 1995 Calman-Hine repor
Page 15 and 16: Introduction the original purpose o
Page 17 and 18: chapter 1 A Cupboard in Knightswood
Page 19: a cupboard in knightswood the river
Page 23 and 24: a cupboard in knightswood Mum was d
Page 25 and 26: a cupboard in knightswood football
Page 27 and 28: a cupboard in knightswood across a
Page 29 and 30: a cupboard in knightswood sermon,
Page 31 and 32: a cupboard in knightswood also when
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It Started in a Cupboard by Kenneth Calman sampler

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