OUR BLUEBELL WOODS...

In the mornings of our summer Sunday's in the east-end of Glasgow, my pal Andy Black and I would take-off and tour the villages and districts to the north, east and south of our homes in Parkhead.

This was in the early 1930's-the Depression years-but luckily we were too young to let this worry us. We were just two wee boys in shorts, jerseys, caps, and boots which had seen better days, and our pockets were empty.

Our tour took us on a round trip of twenty miles or more and it would be late afternoon before we returned home to a very welcome plate of soup. We were not hikers, we rarely knew the names of the villages and towns we passed through, the destination was not so important as the sights on the way, which grabbed the interest of our young minds.

Localities we named as we perceived them, a disused quarry beside the Monkland Canal near Baillieston, coloured in brown and cream, we nicknamed "The Sugarlollie Mountains", a cobbled laneway between houses which gave out a musical sound from our steel-tipped boots was the "Piano". Today our destination was our "Bluebell Woods" on the banks of the Clyde, which today I realise was on the southern edge of the town of Uddingston.

This was a lightly-wooded area with some old trees which had fallen into the Clyde, which we daringly clambered out on, declaring ourselves as pirates on the roaring seas, and of course the floor of this Wood was dotted with the bluebells of Scotland.

Passing through the Wood we were in open field, with a suspension foot-bridge over the river. We never plucked-up enough courage to venture across this bridge, which was a great pity, because, on the southern bank lay the two villages and town of Blantyre and the memorial home of Dr. David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary and explorer who exercised a formative influence upon Western attitudes towards Africa.

We started our journey through the Tollcross Park, pausing briefly to have a look at the players at the Bowling Club, then over Tollcross Road, passing the Biscuit Factory of Macfarlane Langs where later my sister Catherine would be employed packing the product and bringing home wonderful bags of shan biscuits for me to stuff myself with. Much later, when World War Two began, she would be in the uniform of the Auxiliary Fire Brigade, operating the telephone switchboard in the Miner's Institute in Corbett Street, Tollcross.

Andy and I then passed over London Road and down a farm lane, where we sneaked into a field and eased our hunger by eating the heart out of a "tumshie" which our readers will know as a cabbage. We hurriedly passed the rear of the Dalbeth Graveyard, which at that time, subsidence was exposing some of the coffins -but we were not stopping to look for any!

At this point we would view on a hill, a rail truck dumping red-hot slag from James Dunlop's Clyde Ironworks -not as imposing as the Dixon's Blazes which would light-up the Glasgow sky at night - but impressive enough to our young minds. Tollcross Park was originally the estate of James Dunlop, and his Mansion House and gate-keeper's cottage have been preserved.

Our next destination is the village of Clyde Ironworks near the Clyde in the Old Monkland Parish and even in those times, a lot of banging and activity was observed. Next we visited the beautiful village of Carmyle situated on the Clyde; of course we did not know its name and all I can remember is passing the high wall of some works and on the opposite side of the river [in Cambuslang] stood a large power station.

Seventy-two years later, in June 2006 a New Zealand lady emailed me, advising that she was born in Carmyle and supplying me with some of the history of the village. Her family lived in the Old Mansion House of Carmyle for the best part of 100 years, and James Park, her father was the owner of James Park & Co. who operated the Carmyle Bleachworks- my "works with the high wall".

She advised me that the walls of her home were nearly two feet thick and that so much fruit and vegetables were grown in her garden that they never had to purchase any. In the 1970's the some three-hundred-year-old Mansion House was demolished and the area became the private housing estate called Ardgargie.

The closure of her father's Bleachworks in 1961 heralded the end of a cloth industry in Carmyle which had commenced in 1546 and involving the process to felt cloth by wetting and beating. The operators were called "fullers", which gives us the surname Fullarton and also the name of the nearby district.

This industry did not survive and it was not until 1790 that the cloth processing resumed again, when a bleachfield was opened in Carmyle by a Mr. McKenzie, where some fifty men and women were employed upon a 10-acre site processing light muslins.

In 1861, the new owner of the business and the Mansion House, Alexander Miller, employed 110 women, 30 men and 20 boys.

Another two mansion houses in Carmyle were owned by the families of James Dunlop of Clyde Ironworks fame. His father, Colin Dunlop was a leading tobacco merchant in Glasgow, who in 1747, had invested his fortune in a Fullerton estate with a rich deposit of coal below it. James Dunlop invested ten thousand pounds sterling in the Fullerton Pit which saved him from bankruptcy when his father's tobacco company failed in 1793.

In 1810 Dunlop purchased the Clyde Ironworks started by others on a site a mile south of Fullerton village, where the Dunlops built a new village for their operatives and colliers, and named it Clyde Ironworks, which had a population of 670 in 1882. The Colville's group took over the Clyde Ironworks in 1930 and it operated as part of the British Steel Corporation until-like most of the steel mills in Lanarkshire, under the "dead hand" of Nationalisation- it closed in the 1970's.


Provided for your reading pleasure, by John Duncan, Melbourne, Australia.

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