I might have set the bar too high when I called this website Untold History; for this post all I have done is re-present the work of others, so I hope I have suitably acknowledged them.
It started when I read a post on the highly-recommended Facebook page, This is My Glasgow (link):
I’ve cut off the maps so here they are again:
I think I am using the same map as the author of the post but below I have shown a slightly wider area:
I’ve also shown that Queen Margaret Road led to a bridge across the Kelvin at its south-east end; the street numbering began at that bridge and ran from 1 to 14, the closest property to Queen Margaret Drive.
In response to the Facebook post, Neil Torrance shared the following photo, taken by his grandfather, Ian Mackay who was a doctor living at 4 Kelvin Drive (ringed in green on the map above):
In his book, “This Time of Crisis” Andrew Jeffrey describes what happened:
“A pair of mines drifted down on to Kelvinside at 0043 hours. The first exploded on Tulloch’s Garage at 14 Queen Margaret Road at the junction with Queen Margaret Drive. Numbers 9, 10, 11 and 12 Queen Margaret Road were all demolished and the gable end of number 8 collapsed. Two pedestrians at the corner of Queen Margaret Drive and Kelvin Way were killed instantly. Warden’s post F22 opposite 14 Queen Margaret Road was flattened. Warden Alex Munro of Rolland Street crawled out of the wreckage with serious injuries. His fellow warden Marian Macdougall, a former pupil of Hillhead High School and a one-time hockey internationalist, died on the way to hospital. Another three people died at 8 Queen Margaret Road, six were injured and fifty trapped. Around 500 houses and shops were damaged including the BBC studios in the former Queen Margaret College and a considerable quantity of glass in the Kibble Palace was broken.”
Combining this with Neil Torrance’s photo, we can see the collapsed gable end of Number 8, but also if you look in the bottom-right, just to the right of the two policemen, there is a small structure with a doorway facing towards us. I believe this to have been the wardens’ post. The side facing the camera is intact but it’s possible the side further away has been severely damaged.
Jeffrey gives a total of six dead, with which I agree. I’m a little more sceptical about the figure of 50 trapped because if we look at the 1940 Valuation Roll (via the Scotland’s People website) we can see that number 8 seems to have been a 6-apartment tenement (unlikely to have had eight people per apartment). Numbers 9 through 14, demolished by the blast, were shops and would probably not have been occupied at night:
But this is a minor quibble with what is otherwise an excellent source as it tells us what sort of bomb was involved and the time.
We can name the people who died, as follows:
At 8 Queen Margaret Road: Ulla Rigmor Watt, 32, who was the wife of DS Watt who is listed on the 1940 Valuation Roll above. Ulla was Danish and her parents had an address in Copenhagen. We have a glimpse of her aged 8 in the 1916 Census:
Her father is a ‘grosserer’, which translates as ‘merchant’. The family are doing well enough to have a servant, 18-year old Gerda. Ulla was a translator – my Danish according to this reference (source):
This also reveal that her mother, Mary Emily Dagmar was born in Scotland.
Ulla also undertook some journalism, publishing five articles in The Scotsman between 1935 and 1937 informing readers about aspects of life in Denmark. These included farming, Ingrid of Denmark (‘A Modern Princess’), recipes using buttermilk, and proposals to change regulations about the relationship between ‘the housewife’ and her paid ‘house assistant’ (servant) involving the assistant being given better training and more leisure hours. In between the last of these articles in January 1937 and the next (and last) in July 1937 she signed off Ulla Watt instead of Ulla Bache. I have reproduced the last of the five articles, relating to the lot of nurses in Denmark, below:
Her husband David Stevenson Watt was also a journalist. The clipping in Danish (above) also refers to Ulla’s child having been killed but the records I am looking at do not mention this
Ellen Donaldson, aged 23, died at 9 Queen Margaret Road which, as we have seen, was a shop – I wonder if she was sheltering in the doorway? Her home was in Townhead, at 396 Parliamentary Road, but her parents lived in Motherwell:
(Motherwell Times 21st March 1941)
Cecil Guberman, aged 18, lived at 31 Menock Road, Kings Park with his parents, Joseph and Catherine. He is recorded as having died as a result of falling masonry.
(Jewish Echo, 20th March 1942)
(Jewish Echo 7 August 1942) This second article adds the new information that Cecil was in the civil defence, presumably an ARP warden. This is not recorded in the records. While it would explain why he was on the street during an air-raid, he would probably have been assigned to the King’s Park area.
Marian MacDougall was 48 when she was fatally injured, dying the same day (the 14th) at the Western Infirmary at the other end of Byres Road. She was an air raid warden and that is all we would have known about her, but on the Facebook post, Sandie Knudsen recalled that her Great Aunt was a WREN (Women’s Royal Navy Service) and had not long walked passed a phone box with a woman inside when the bomb fell. She was sure the woman must have been killed outright, but it seems Marian survived until she got to hospital. The telephone box can be seen, circled in blue, on the map at the top of this post.
Photo from Glasgow University website but attributed to Hillhead High School.
Her parents were Alexander (an accountant for the Clyde Navigation Trust) and Marion. She had several brothers and sisters, one of whom died in the First World War (Captain Archibald Macdougall, 31, died on 31st October 1918 just 11 days from the Armistice – he left a widow, Bella, but his army records indicate no children.)
She attended Hillhead High School then Glasgow University (link):
“Marian started at the University of Glasgow in 1911, enrolling for classes in mathematics, natural philosophy and political economy. Over the course of working towards her B.Sc Marion also took classes in physical chemistry. Marian graduated with a B.Sc on 21st June 1915. She then continued at the University of Glasgow taking exams in French, political economy and chemistry amongst others, graduating with an M.A 20th November 1915. Upon her final graduation Marian became a teacher.”
She may also have played field hockey for Scotland (I cannot verify this but not an M. Macdougall scored in the 7-1 win over the USA at Edinburgh in November 1920!)
At the time of her death, Marian lived at 19 Kelvinside Terrace South with her sister, Christina.
In the Facebook post that I referred to earlier, another name came up, John Henry Tait. The records suggest he died at Kelvin Drive, but as the map above shows, the eastern end of this street is just across Queen Margaret Drive from where the incident happened.
John was aged 52, married to Isabella, and his occupation on the record of his death was “dairykeeper”. From the Facebook page, his grand-daughter, Allison Longbone, identified the shop as Tait’s Dairy on Roland Street, started 1926 and continued by her grandmother until 1970. Allison said that her grandfather set out with the family dog, Dingo, from their home at 3 Botanic Crescent to check if the shop was okay. Somewhere on route he was killed; while the dog survived he was so traumatised he had to be put down.
To complete the story, if you recall the quote from Jeffrey’s book, he said that two parachute mines were floating down and we have seen the effects of one of them. He continues:
“The second mine crashed through the roof of the Aberholme Hotel at 84 Kelvin Drive and came to rest on the landing, fortunately without exploding. More than eight feet long and two and a half feet in diameter, black, and with its green parachute still entangled on the roof, it was made safe by a naval mine disposal party the following morning.”
Sadly, the brave bomb disposal team are anonymous. They were navy personnel because the parachute mine was essentially a mine intended for shipping but dropped by parachute instead.