“NEVER can Glasgow have seen so many cameras in use. Nearly everybody seemed to be trying to get a pictorial record of the occasion, while hundreds of others, more daring in a traditional way, risked their arms putting coins on the line, for a commemorative flattening.”
Thus the Glasgow Herald of September 5, 1962, on the rain-soaked farewell, the previous evening, of the trams. Some 200,000 people, a quarter of the city’s population, crowded the streets of central Glasgow “to give a hearty, affectionate, and even a sentimental farewell to the Glasgow tramcar.”
Today’s photograph, on sale in the Herald Picture Store, is one of the defining images of that day.
At the new Arnott Simpson building, this paper added, cameramen by the score were like roosting starlings. “The comment of a professional photographer was that those putting pennies on the line would get a better souvenir - the light was very bad.”
Every threepence copy of the Evening Times’ Last Tram Souvenir Edition sold out, and it had to be reprinted.
Many adults shed a quiet tear as they watched the trams one last time. But some younger people couldn’t resist mischief: at Hope Street some boys set off a massive fire-cracker in a closemouth as the Lord Provost’s tram was passing, causing a woman to cry: “My Goad, it’s blew up!”
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