Glasgow Hurricane January 1968

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Postby gordon » Wed Jan 03, 2007 9:08 pm

Aye, not a direct link, i was more meaning that due to a lack of cash to demolish and rebuild, rehab was the only way forward in some areas - enter Raymond Young, ASSIST etc in Govan a few years later?
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Postby Pgcc93 » Wed Jan 03, 2007 9:17 pm

I read that there were more people killed after the Hurricaine than during it.
Roofers and scaffolders were regular casualties carrying out the precarious repair work as back then health and safety wasn't what it is today.
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Postby John » Wed Jan 03, 2007 9:43 pm

I would have been three at the time and we lived in a tenement in Avenue Street, Rutherglen.

My dad always told me that the tenement was damaged during this storm and had to be demolished as a result leaving us to find a new place to live.

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Postby Socceroo » Wed Jan 03, 2007 10:04 pm

gordon wrote:Aye, not a direct link, i was more meaning that due to a lack of cash to demolish and rebuild, rehab was the only way forward in some areas - enter Raymond Young, ASSIST etc in Govan a few years later?


That's right, i think that Govan, Burleigh Street or thereabouts was where some of the first Tenement rehab was undertaken.

I recall as a kid standing with my parents and watching the demolition ball flatten Tenements in Langlands Road in Govan.

Aye, thankfully ASSIST Architects and others managed to come up with a relatively cost effective way of rehabilitating Tenements.
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Re: Hurricane Low Q

Postby tobester » Wed Jan 03, 2007 10:37 pm

pwm437 wrote:
Four people were killed at 555 Dumbarton Road due to a collapse caused by the winds.

Quite a night


Thats right, its the spare ground next to the new partick police station, where that tenement used to be.

I was told by my dad that the people in question were only here for a funeral, thats sad :cry:


My mum and dad were up in the blocks in broomhill drive, they said you could feel the block swaying and the window bulging.

I remember it from the high winds in 1987 (i think).
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Re: Hurricane Low Q

Postby AlanM » Wed Jan 03, 2007 10:45 pm

tobester wrote:
pwm437 wrote:
Four people were killed at 555 Dumbarton Road due to a collapse caused by the winds.

Quite a night


Thats right, its the spare ground next to the new partick police station, where that tenement used to be.

I was told by my dad that the people in question were only here for a funeral, thats sad :cry:


My mum and dad were up in the blocks in broomhill drive, they said you could feel the block swaying and the window bulging.

I remember it from the high winds in 1987 (i think).


Was 555 not between Sandy rd and Meadow rd (where the Sandy rd clinic is)

There weren't any tenements where the the police station is, it was a railway line.
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Postby tobester » Wed Jan 03, 2007 10:52 pm

As you look at the police station from where thornwood park is now, youll see a row of tenements with Lenas (chippy) on it, its at the lef end of this block, i think the last shop was/is a fieplace shop.
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Postby elgee » Wed Jan 03, 2007 10:56 pm

The community centre for health ( sandy rd clinic replacement) is at 547 Dumbarton Road
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Postby AlanM » Wed Jan 03, 2007 11:04 pm

I had looked at google maps earlier and it pointed to between Sandy Rd and Meadow Rd and since I didn't think it would have been that far out that was the only spot that fitted.
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Postby viceroy » Thu Jan 04, 2007 11:01 am

The 1968 Hurricane is firmly embedded in my memory. I had only just come back to Glasgow after living in the Netherlands for 10 years and at the time I was staying with my eldest sister. She had a top floor tenement flat in Dunearn St. just off Great Western Road, not far from St. George's Cross.

What I remember in particular is the noise of the wind - it was terrifying and you felt like screaming for it to stop, but of course it went on all night, only dying down towards morning. The roofing material in those days was slates rather than tiles and you could hear them being ripped off roofs and shattering all over the place.

My sister's flat still had open coal fires. The chimney above the kitchen collapsed - thankfully it seems to have disintegrated rather than toppling over and coming straight through the ceiling. But a huge amount of rubble and stour came down the flue and spread itself over the kitchen floor.

Once things had calmed down in the morning and it started getting light I had a look out of the living room window to see it was like outside. There were tree branches and broken slates all over the street together with sundry other debris. Although there were not as many cars parked on the street as you would see today, those that I could see mostly had damaged roofs and bonnets as a result of slates crashing down onto them.

It was only during the course of the day that the full extent of the damage citywide became apparent, as well as of course the shocking loss of life.

Very much a night to remember.
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Postby Toby Dammit » Thu Jan 04, 2007 11:30 am

I was only 4 at the time, but still remember it. We lived on the top floor of a high flat, right on the corner in Mountblow (appropriate name that night). I think I remember it as my both my parents actually looked scared by what was going on. Being little, me and my sister picked this up quite vividly, as it was something we'd never seen before then. I seem to recall we ended up spending part of the wee small hours in the bathroom, the only the part of the house that didn't have any windows, listening to howling sound tearing up the night outside.

Both my parents had lived through the Clydebank Blitz as children, and in retrospect I think they were partly re-living some of that.

I also remember the sight of the tenements in Dalmuir for the next few weeks, with many of them roofless, and everything looking odd.
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Postby tarzan-bridge » Thu Jan 04, 2007 11:46 am

I remember it starting about 10 o'clock on the Sunday night and carrying on until about 4am. It came in up the Clyde and went out by the Forth making a mess of the central belt.
I had to travel to Embra on the Monday and the M8 was strewn with sheet metal from the signs and all the stanchions that held them were bent towards the east.
I think Glasgow and Paisley copped it the worse.
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Postby MacotheIsles » Thu Jan 04, 2007 1:03 pm

These are all quite amazing recollections of a very significant event. Thanks to all.

As fate would have it I was in London on the night of the big 'Michael Fish' hurricane and saw the same kind of sights next day that I remembered from the Glasgow Hurricane: lamposts bent to the ground like knitting needles, debris and branches everywhere... The diference (I feel) is that the London event is remembered much more than the Glasgow one.

As an aside, was there ever any kind of memorial set up or a rememberance service for those who died in the Glasgow Hurricane?
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Postby Josef » Fri Jan 05, 2007 12:23 am

MacotheIsles wrote:These are all quite amazing recollections of a very significant event. Thanks to all.

As fate would have it I was in London on the night of the big 'Michael Fish' hurricane and saw the same kind of sights next day that I remembered from the Glasgow Hurricane: lamposts bent to the ground like knitting needles, debris and branches everywhere... The diference (I feel) is that the London event is remembered much more than the Glasgow one.

As an aside, was there ever any kind of memorial set up or a rememberance service for those who died in the Glasgow Hurricane?


I was there for both of those hurricanes too, Mac (one as an infant, obviously :wink: ).

The 68 one: my memory of this is the broken chimneypots and slates all around our house in the morning. There was a row of wooden lock-up garages out the back before the storm: not afterwards. Apparently they were found up to a couple of miles away, sometimes still intact.

The London one: the job I had at the time, in the city centre, normally finished at 4 a.m. It must have been the eye of the storm, because although it was a bit draughty it was nothing special. I got on the late night bus back home, but around Battersea the driver said that he thought the bus was going to go over and put us all off, so (still not realising there was anything much going on), I got on the Underground.

The station where I got off was on a corner, with a curved entrance. I saw the guy in front of me, a rather large gentleman (minimum twenty stone) walk out the front. Then he was raised up a foot or two and deposited back in the station. I tried getting out myself, but it was like one of those Star Trek Forcefields: there was nothing there, but you just couldn't get past the entrance :) .

Took me two hours to do the ten minute walk home. You had to wait for the wind to die down for a minute or two, then run like feck (which would get you twenty yards or so) and then hang on to the railings and hope nothing nasty hit you as it flew past and wait for the next lull to get another twenty yards. Awesome! ::):
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Postby MacotheIsles » Fri Jan 05, 2007 1:17 pm

You had a more exciting time than me Josef - I slept through that one too. It wasn't till I got up next morning and saw everybody huddled in the hotel lounge watching the tv that I realised anything had happened.

I'd been sent down to London by The Queen's College to look at DTP systems at an exhibition in Olympia. The exhibition went ahead, but I had to pick my way through rubble, crushed cars, fallen scaffolding and bent lamposts to get there. I remember seeing a brilliantly Pythonesque scene - just visible through the branches - of a London Bobby nonchalantly standing on the trunk of a massive tree which had fallen right across the road, directing traffic into a side street. Alas I had no camera.

Apart from that the abiding image is the speed of the clouds whipping across a bright blue sky the morning after the storm.
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