by Methane » Wed Sep 08, 2010 5:34 pm
Hi. Re the Central Heating Plant in Nitshill. This was managed by My Uncle Pat McLaughlin who stayed at 35 Newfield Square. Although we stayed in Anderston I would come over on a Number 48 bus. I spent many happy hours playing in and around the square as well as in the burn. Here is a wee story about 'The Plant'.
Great photos by the way.
Michael Meighan
At Newfield Square we looked over a bowling green and tennis court. On the long hot summer days we sat in deckchairs as on a steamer and listened to the plip plop of tennis balls, claps from the older people on the bowling green and general noises from the children in the roads round the square which was very free from traffic at that time. And incongruously I remember regular visits from a rag and bone man, complete with horse and cart. He would make his way round the square giving away inflated balloons in exchange for old clothes and jam jars.
While we are still in Nitshill, a word about my Uncle Pat who stayed in the roomy top floor flat at 35 Newfield Square along with Aunty Polly and my two cousins, Raymond and Gerald. Probably for my mother’s health, I would be pushed off to Nitshill for the weekend, or prolonged periods, in the summer.
Now as I have said, Nitshill was centrally heated from a boiler plant and my uncle was the plant engineer. This was a very important position and he, once or twice would take me with him at a weekend to check that all was well with the three huge marine boilers. Now these boilers were coke-fired just like the ones that heated the swimming pool at Hydepark but I do remember the difference. The boiler-room was spotless and dust-free as far as I can remember. The big boiler-room was light and airy and there was a little glassed-in office for Uncle Pat.
Of course, He didn’t have to go up to ‘The Plant’. He only had to feel the heat in the radiators to know that the plant was working efficiently. Now I was used to him doing this with regularity and you would get used to his commitment to ensuring that the thousands of people in the scheme were kept cosy. However, one night, he did feel the radiator and it was cold. He then went to other radiators in the flat to check if it was maybe just the one in the living room. But no, there was no heat. So, in his position, he had one of those big black Bakelite telephones but with the little drawer underneath where you could keep telephone numbers. As far as I remember, my aunt and uncle were the only people that I knew that actually had a telephone albeit that it was on a party line, which is shared with other people. If you picked up the phone and heard talking you had to get off till they had finished.
Anyway he phoned the plant and nothing. There was no response.
‘I’ll better away up and see what the problem is he said’. ‘Can I come’, I said.
‘He looked at me and said ‘come on then, not anticipating that it would be anything other than a breakdown about which he should have been informed.
So we got on our coats and hurried up to the plant that was about two streets away, up the hill.
We walked into the building and past two of the big marine boilers that were stone cold. I could hear voices coming from the little cabin and there, sitting round Uncle Pat’s desk were the two stokers, rolling drunk with at least one bottle on the table in front of them.
He looked at them till they turned and finally took notice. It was like Burns: 'The moments whiled away wi’ pleasure…. '
While his coat was coming off and his sleeves were getting rolled up, he turned to me and said: get away back to the house and tell your auntie about this and that I will be some time. If the boys are there send them up. I must say, Uncle Pat I remember being amongst the most placid of men but I am glad I wasn’t there to see what he thought of them that night.
There is a confusion about working class heroes and what working class actually is, or was. Uncle Pat was a plant manager, but also a lifelong trades union member and official who would take me to the May Day Rally and I would be on the Boilermakers float as it made its way through the town ‘Up Sauchie, doon Buchie and along Argyle’ and over the bridge to Queens Park where there would be the Labour Party May Day rally. At that time there didn’t seem to be a distinction between manager and worker. You were all working class and in many cases, those who had bettered themselves through education to become managers and teachers were highly respected.
Working class meant working and usually working hard. It had nothing to do with needing handouts or sympathy. It had everything to do with the dignity of work and the need for equality and parity with others, rights to work and rights to education. Uncle Pat was the only one I knew that was in a Trades Union as far as I can remember and while everyone around me I suppose made me a socialist, he made me a trade’s unionist.