NOBODY could claim John Reid didn't carry Clydebank on his shoulders.

His hearing was badly damaged when he was five in the Blitz, he helped work on the QE2, on the Erskine Bridge, run a guest house for the homeless in his 60s and help raise six daughters.

And as he battled a rare form of leukaemia, he wanted his girls to carry him.

At his funeral at Clydebank Crematorium on Friday, daughters Charlotte, Josephine, Anna, Frances, Jacqueline and Catherine carried their father as part of a celebration of the man known as "Johnny Boy".

Born on June 29, 1936, John stayed in Crown Avenue and Second Avenue in his early years. When one of the Blitz bombs went off nearby in 1941, it damaged his hearing, something which affected him all his life but in no way limited his adventures.

At 19, he met Charlotte, then 15, at the Dalmuir Masonic Halls and they were married two years later.

Initially working at Singers, John then went to John Browns as a riveter, a job where you couldn't hear even if your ears did work properly. He was a cocker burner, then working on storage tanks, then bridges including the Erskine and jobs on the QE2, explained Charlotte.

For a time the family lived in Barrow-in-Furness as John followed the work, a habit that eventually led him to working on storage tanks in Libya and Sudan.

"He followed those jobs wherever they were," his wife Charlotte, 76, told the Post this week. "He didn't like early retirement at all. He was always working - he used to say he would work the two-minute silence."

Even when he would go on holiday, he would be working, helping daughter Josephine in Australia one trip or Francis setting up a guest house in Perth.

When John was 60, Charlotte gave him a bicycle, not realising he had never been on one before. But he took to it with gusto, cycling around the whole of Ireland, Holland and John O'Groats to Land's End when he was 65.

"He was out every day, all weathers," said Charlotte. "He liked his whisky and beer, so he had a well-earned drink at the end of the day."

John was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of leukaemia five years ago, making him only the sixth person in Scotland to have the disease. As his health deteriorated, the couple made a trip last year to Australia, their eighth.

He told Charlotte he want his daughters to carry him when he left.

"He never got a boy," she explained. "There were plenty of boys who could carry him, but he wanted his lasses to carry him."

With the daughters and 21 grand children and 25 great grandchildren to the family, Friday's celebration was a full one.

Music by Leo Sayer and Eva Cassidy performing Danny Boy were part of the service along with a power reflecting "Johnny Boy", the family caravan in Prestwick, the homes in Hamilton Terrace and Edward Street.

"Everybody played a part and did something," said Charlotte. "I was mourning him before he died so I just wanted to up lift it and give him a good send off.

"He was a good family man. We have a big, big family and we are very close. He was a hard worker and thought the world of his lasses.

"He didn't think he was anything special, but the family think that he was."