Glasgow (26 page)

Mr D. Barr, who had been bombed from his home in the same street, and was on his way to salvage some of his belongings, was passing when he heard someone shout, ‘A man alive! Get a doctor and an ambulance quickly!'

Mr Barr ran at once to the surgery of Dr Mackay near-by. The doctor went at once to the bombed tenement and stood by in shirt sleeves as the workers extricated Cormack. As soon as he could reach him he went to his aid.

When Clark was rescued he was still able to speak. As he was removed on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance, he told his rescuers – ‘I'm all right.' Before he was taken to the Western Infirmary Clark was able to drink a cup of tea and eat a biscuit.

Demolition and rescue workers who have been working side by side since last week's blitz, and with decreasing hope of removing trapped victims alive, were astonished yesterday afternoon to hear a moan come from the debris. They had just removed a body when they were startled by the sound.

With the utmost speed they excavated a tunnel through the mess of the twisted wreckage as a woman hastened to the scene from a near-by clinic.

Dr Annie Thomson, of an Outdoor Medical Services Clinic, was the first person to reach the imprisoned man. She crawled through the improvised tunnel, no more than 18 inches wide, and administered an injection. “That wasn't so bad, was it?” she asked the man, still pinned beneath the debris. She was surprised when she found that he was able to reply. ‘No,' he said.

As the rescuers worked feverishly and grimly to release him, jacking up wreckage to free his feet, they discovered that a chest of drawers had apparently fallen over Clark's body, thus protecting him from the mass of stone and timber that had crashed above him. He was lying at full length on top of a fallen door in a passage-way many feet below street level.

The successful and unexpected rescue effort was described by Mr Norman Manson, a joiner, who was in charge of the rescue squad. ‘We had,' he said, ‘to smash in a floor and crawl underneath to locate the trapped constable. I estimate that we had to remove seven tons of wreckage before we were able to break a way through to him.'

The rescue operations were in two distinct stages. When the tunnel was driven through to reach Clark it was discovered that he could not be freed until a weight of stone pinning a leg beneath a chest of drawers had been removed.

It was seen that to remove this stone would cause a downfall of more wreckage, and it was decided to dig another passage in the foundation ground of the building below where Clark was lying. While this was being done, warm blankets and hot-water bottles were placed around Clark, who was also given stimulants.

As the under-tunnelling proceeded, Clark's leg dropped clear, while the chest of drawers holding up the wreckage above remained in position, and eventually, after three hours' work, the rescuers were able to free the imprisoned man.

Colleagues at the police headquarters where Clark was stationed said that he was actually on night shift last week, but had left the station
for his night off when the raid occurred. He was lodging with a Mr and Mrs Docherty, who, with their two daughters, are believed to be still trapped in the partially wrecked building.

AN OLD-STYLE AMPUTATION,
c
. 1944
R.D. Laing

Born in Glasgow in 1927, R.D. Laing's background was working-class. His father was apprenticed at fourteen in a shipyard and after World War One found employment with the Corporation of Glasgow as an electrical engineer. Laing himself graduated in medicine from Glasgow University in 1951 and went on to practise psychiatry. His principal and controversial thesis, expounded in
The Divided Self
(1960) and other books, was that psychiatrists should not attempt to cure or ameliorate the symptoms of mental illness – a term he repudiated – but rather should encourage patients to view themselves as going through an enriching process. In
Wisdom, Madness & Folly
(1985), his autobiography, he wrote: ‘As a young psychiatrist in general hospitals and psychiatric hospitals, I administered locked wards and ordered drugs, injections, padded cells and straitjackets, electric shocks, deep insulin comas and the rest. I was uneasy about lobotomies but not sure why. Usually all this treatment was against the will of its recipients.' Laing died in 1989
.

The first surgical operation I attended, at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, was very atypical of the surgery in this day and age. It was a mid-thigh amputation on an old, seasoned and pickled sea-salt who was beginning to develop gangrene due to advanced arteriosclerosis. His heart and lungs were not in good shape. It was thought he would not stand a chance with a general anaesthetic, so it was decided to try out a procedure that had been reported from Australia: ice-pack anaesthesia. The surgeon ordered his left leg, which was the one due to be amputated, to be packed in ice the night before and for him to be given a bottle of whisky before the night staff went off. The operation was to be performed first thing in the morning.

At the first cut of the knife he went wild, screaming, yelling and cursing. It was evident that the ice-pack had not had its desired effect and, it turned out, the nurse on night-duty who had given him a bottle of whisky had no idea what a bottle of whisky meant in the real world and had given him the contents of a four-ounce hospital bottle, which he had downed in one gulp. It did not touch him at all.

Anyway, it was too late to turn back. He had to be held down and I saw an old-style amputation. The whole thing.

However shocking such things are, I could ‘take' them. Life has to go on. Every gamble does not come off. It is no one's fault really. The next patient is already on the table. There is no time to cry over spilt blood . . .

At the end of our first year as medical students, we paid a traditional visit to the Royal Gartnavel Mental Hospital, Glasgow.

This was the first time I had been in a mental hospital. Over a hundred students assembled in the main hall and the Superintendent, Dr Angus MacNiven, from a stage platform, gave a short talk about the hospital and psychiatry and introduced and talked with four or five patients. These were the first psychiatric patients I had ever set eyes upon.

I came in late. There were two men on the stage sitting on chairs having a chat. One of them, in impeccable dress, with a cheerful flower in his buttonhole, sat with composure and assurance, talked fluently with the other man, who had his legs twisted around each other, grimaced, stammered, fidgeted, all but picked his nose, and wriggled around in his chair.

It was not until the interview ended, when the patient got up, gave a bow and left the stage that I realised that Dr MacNiven was the man I had taken to be the patient. Years later, after medical school, six months in a neurosurgical unit and two years as a psychiatrist in the British Army, he was very amused when, now a registrar on his staff, I told him the story.

This was a very decent interview. It sounded like two old friends chatting about the hospital, the changes they had seen. The patient had been in the hospital longer than MacNiven, had been there in the time of D.K. Henderson, later Professor of Psychiatry at Edinburgh University and co-author of a book that became the standard text in British psychiatry. The patient claimed to have been mentioned in despatches, as it were, in that book for calling D.K. Henderson ‘the Kaiser', which was cited as an example of paranoid delusion. After a lifetime of social catastrophes in states of manic excitement he had settled in a room in Gentlemen's West Wing, the paying part of the hospital, where most of the time he lived quietly in a state of indefatigable good humour.

RIVETING STUFF, 1946
V.S. Pritchett

Riveting was one of the most skilled jobs in the shipyards and the best riveters were highly prized and generally well-paid. V.S. Pritchett (1900–97) was a novelist, critic, short story writer and memoirist, who was always interested in what people did to earn a living. The following is extracted from
Build the Ships,
published by HMSO
.

The riveter is a member of the ‘black squad' – a gang of four who turn up to the job with the misleading nonchalance of a family of jugglers. They are the riveter, the holder-up, the heater, and a boy. A speechless quartet, or almost speechless: ‘Where's that boy?' is about their only sentence. The ‘black squad' can set up shop anywhere and begin performing their hot-chestnut act. You see one swung over the ship's side. He stands on his plank waiting with the pneumatic instrument in his gloved hands. On the other side of the plate, inside the ship, is the heater with his smoking brazier – a blue coke haze is always rising over the ship: he plucks a rivet out of the fire with his tongs, a ‘boy' (nowadays it is often a girl in dungarees) catches the rivet in another pair of tongs and steps quickly with it to the holder-up, who puts it through the proper holes at the junction of the plates. As the pink nub of the rivet comes through, the pneumatic striker comes down on it, roaring out blows at the rate of about 700 hits a minute, and squeezes it flat.

One of the curiosities of the ship's side – it is also one of those accidental beauties of line which are sought by modern artists – is the white chalk mark which the rivet counter ticks across each rivet, showing how many the riveter has done in the shift. One sees half a dozen plates cross-hatched in this way by the errant human touch, and a list of figures like a darts score is totted up beside them. Paid by the hundred, the riveter is keeping his accounts. He will average up to thirty-seven in an hour.

THE LOWEST OF THE LOW ON THE
GLASGOW HERALD
, 1946
Peregrine Worsthorne

The
Glasgow Herald
– now called the
Herald
– is the longest-running extant daily national newspaper in the world
. The Times,
for example, is two years younger. As such, it has a fabled history and has employed
many distinguished journalists and writers. One such was George MacDonald Fraser, author of the bestselling Flashman novels, who in the 1960s was its deputy editor. Peregrine Worsthorne's sojourn with the paper was, as he relates, less stellar. In the 1940s, when Worsthorne joined it, it was edited by Sir William B. Robieson, who regularly denounced the policy of appeasing Hitler. His shift ended at 2.00 a.m. when, in order to return to his bedsit in Kew Terrace, he had to run the gauntlet of drunks and prostitutes in Sauchiehall Street. On more than one occasion the tram in which he was travelling had to be stopped and the police called. As he recalled in his autobiography
, Tricks of Memory
(1993), such encounters with the city's low life amused his colleagues and endeared him to them. ‘Instead of being resented as a privileged English high-flyer I was soon taken pity on as a persecuted species in need of protection.' On leaving Glasgow Worsthorne had spells at
The Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
and from 1986 to 1989 was editor of the
Sunday Telegraph.

Every detail of that interview is embedded in the memory. At no other time in my life have I ever so completely got hold of the wrong end of the stick. As I understood it Sir William [Robieson, editor of the
Glasgow Herald
] was offering me the deputy editorship of his paper. This quite took my breath away. There I was without any journalistic experience or even ambition being offered this lofty position on a plate. True, the salary mentioned was pretty measly, only £6 a week. But one couldn't have everything – a top job and a high salary. Needless to say, I accepted with alacrity and promised to come north without delay.