AT the end of March, 1941, with Clydeside still counting the cost of the pulverising German air raids - the Glasgow Herald said they had been carried out with “a grim and revolting sadism” - Clement Attlee, the Lord Privy Seal, and a man who had been an army officer during the Great War, came to Glasgow to pay his respects.
At the St David’s (Ramshorn) Church he joined a memorial tribute to 13 A.R.P. workers, members of a first-aid post, most of them women, who had lost their lives in the Blitz. He is pictured here with Glasgow’s Lord Provost, Sir Patrick Dollan, and Arthur Jenkins MP, his Parliamentary private secretary.
That weekend, he visited Paisley and Greenock, toured some of the bombed areas on Clydeside, and attended a union official’s long-service presentation at Glasgow’s Ca’doro Restaurant.
In a stirring speech at the City Chambers, he said: “Hitler’s air forces strike now here, now there. They hope somewhere to find a soft spot, but they fail. Everywhere their attacks are met by men and women whose souls are steel-tempered in the flame of liberty.” Every town, every village was a fortress of democracy, with its own natural leaders, but able to co-operate in the larger whole, he added. This gave a supple steel strength to this country which was infinitely stronger than the brittle cast-iron of the dictator States. “We in this country are an example to the world of free people - Scots, English, and Welsh - working together.”
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