John Street Gable Collapse

The gable of a Blantyre tenement house collapsed during a fiercesome gale on the morning of Monday 2nd December 1946.  Two families ended up being homeless. Mr and Mrs David Nesbit. 4 John Street, Blantyre, were awakened by the howling of the wind round their house, and the battering of the rain against the windows. She told reporters the next day, ” I had a feeling something was going to happen,  so I got up. I had just got to the middle of the floor when the stone gable crashed down.”

With the wind and rain swirling into the room, Mrs Nesbit found herself gazing into inky darkness where a minute before her bedroom wall had been. And when her husband went into the kitchen he found that here, too, the wall had disappeared. Mrs O’Neil, who occupied the house below Mrs Nesbit in the two-storey building,  also lost part of her wall. Her husband was on night-shift, and the first he knew of it was when he returned from work.  At the time of the gable fall the gale reached velocity of 62 miles an hour. Windows were blown in, and slates hurled from roofs.

This old map is from the same year. Number 4 John Street was the first house up from the foundry at the lower end of John Street, closer to the railway. It was on the opposite of the park. Whilst looking at this old map, i was surprised to see a curling pond where the public park football pitches are now. This was some new information for me and something previously unknown by me.

In earlier decades, before John Street, Low Blantyre got its name from John Forrest Clark’s memory, the street was called “New Station Road”, although i cannot find any evidence of a station at the end!