High up on the fields above Udston (now where the Westcraigs housing estate is) Private Weir of the Mechanical Transport section of the 4th Lanarkshire Battalion training on a motorcycle in 1942.
Mr Weir is on the bike and his trainer looks on. Taken during the middle of WW2, the home guard played an important part in the overall plan of protecting the country against invasion, but as you may probably know from a certain 70s and 80s TV series, home guard tended to consist of residents of , shall we say, more senior years.
A friend this week was metal detecting in the area and found parts of 2 tail fins from ww2 no.68 anti tank grenades and the bottom plug from a ww2 mills hand grenade. The home guard often trained with No 68 grenades (or at least mock ups)
Strangely, there I still have a lack of photographs of wartime Blantyre. If anybody has any in their family collection they would like to share, please feel free to get in contact.
My grand father, John Pearson, unable to “join up” because of some physical ailment, may have been deafness, was part of the home guard in Blantyre and I recall some of the conversations that bordered on hysteria when he told the story of going out to meet the enemy with a ‘stick’ … they didn’t individually have weapons of war apparently? I further recall the concrete bunkers in the fields where we played and digging up relics of years gone by, old tins of milk powder, rusted and buried, perhaps it was where a rubbish dump used to be near to Hillview Drive? We were fascinated as kids by the detritus we found, and fully expected to uncover bombs.