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[endlessrarities]

Today was another of those strange, uneasy days when the Past and the Present seemed to be inexorably linked.

Last night, the 70th Anniversary of the Clydebank Blitz was marked by BBC Scotland with a gripping programme relating the events of the 13th and 14th March, 1941.  It wasn't an event I had much knowledge of until last year, when I was drafted in to carry out a standing building survey of one of the anti-aircraft batteries built to safeguard the Clyde shipyards from just such an assault.

And this year, I'm spending my working life at a World War II munitions factory which was just a stones' throw from the Clyde and must surely have been high on the list of preferred targets for the incoming Luftwaffe pilots.

As I recorded my chosen building this afternoon, it struck me that 70 years ago, to the minute, it would have been full of workers beavering away at arms production, while just a few miles away, Clydebank burned.  The fact that the munitions factory escaped unscathed that night shows that the Luftwaffe must have considered the shipyards to be the easy option.  What better navigational beacon was there than the broad waters of the River Clyde, gleaming beneath the full moon, leading them onwards to their destination? 

I wondered what the workers were thinking that day.  Were they worried about the people of Clydebank, or worried that the next night, they'd be next.  Or were they gritting their teeth and making themselves work all the harder, so they could give 'those damned Huns a bloody nose'.  The West of Scotland mentality being what it is, I rather suspect it was the latter...

I've been asked by a number of people why it is that we're putting so much effort into recording a set of buildings which are, to put it bluntly, modern, less than a hundred years.  Days like today hammer it home: to paraphrase Belloq (that marvellous fictional exponent of archaeology and arch-nemesis of Indiana Jone), 'You and I are passing through history.  But this... This is history.'

It's a humbling thought, and it makes me feel quite priviliged that I'm involved in recording this site for posterity.

 

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

At around that time, my mother and her brother were working in a munitions factory in Newcastle, and her father in a shipyard on the Tyne. Same thoughts going through their heads, I suppose.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

It makes me very relieved that I haven't had to live through a major war, and even more relieved that the Europeans tend to get along a lot better now than they used to!!