A POPULAR Glasgow tour guide has shared his grandmother's diary entries of living through the Clydebank Blitz.

Glasgow Central station guide Paul Lyons, one of the stars of BBC Scotland's Inside Central Station TV documentary series, took to social media to share four pages of his granny Lyons' diary detailing her experience of working at the town's Singer factory during the Luftwaffe's raids in March 1941.

Paul, the station's historian, shared the entries on Twitter, where other users replied to share their families' experiences of the bombings.

Paul's grandmother wrote:  "I remember what fun we had going into work that night on nightshift. There was always a few of us girls went in and out of all the shops in Kilbowie Road tormenting most of them, having a good laugh.

"The we got into the factory that night the nighshift manager told us there would be a red or green light coming through later. We laughed and said we are tired of listening to the sirens."

However sadly for Granny Lyons this would not just be a siren on this occasions.

The diary continued: "My whole body shook in a split second. All the glasses windows were blown in and incendiary bombs were coming pelting down. We were struck dumb. We did not know what to do. There was no place to go for safety, so we sat in a little office."

 

 

 

The town was largely destroyed in two nights of raids, with hundreds of lives lost and most of the buildings in the town reduced to rubble.

The Singer factory - which was repurposed for the war effort to manufacture munitions instead of sewing machines - was among the targets which suffered either direct hits or severe incendiary damage, along with the Beardmore and John Brown shipyards, the ROyal Ordnance Factory in Dalmuir, Rothesay Dock and the Admiralty oil storage facility to the west of the town.

Around  4,000 houses were completely destroyed, another 4,500 were severely damaged and 3,500 suffered serious to mild damage.

Only seven houses out of a total stock of 12,000 remained intact. Many large schools and churches were also destroyed.