Here’s something you don’t normally see in local parades nowadays. Floats! Pictured in 1981 are several floats for the gala that year. Current health and safety rules mean a whole new level of safety needs to be considered before floats are permitted (an end to dangling legs over large wheels!) The decline of floats […]
Taken from the windows of Mayberry Place, this pre WW1 crowd gathered at the David Livingstone Church for the unveiling of David Livingstone’s Statue. This is 1913 and a narrow Glasgow Road can be seen in the background, before being widened. Trams were running for about 10 years by the time this was photographed. The […]
Another wonderful previously unseen photo! This time, it’s the shady and leafy alcove at Auchentibber Quoiting Green, within the former Italian Gardens. Incredibly, this super clear photo is around 110 years old, an image lifted from a glass plate as photographed by David Ritchie, of High Blantyre. The alcove was next to the former […]
Concluding this week’s look at the Livingstone Statue on the Livingstone Memorial Church, ending here with some photos of the statue as it is today and of course the plaque commemorating it. Photos: Courtesy of Gordon Cook.
My history colleague and friend Gordon Cook, kindly provides today’s article which is on the humble beginnings of the Livingstone Memorial Church. Accompanying the words is a lovely colourised postcard from around 1904, showing the church in all its glory and of course the much narrower Glasgow Road. Gordon writes, “With the rapid increase […]
By August 1934, it had taken seven years to bring to completion a movement to erect a memorial to David Livingstone at the Victoria Falls, Africa, which he was, (so far as is known), the first white man to see. Livingstone was bom at Blantyre, in Scotland, and as a boy and young man worked in […]
On Friday 20th November 1840, a meeting took place in Glasgow of several businessmen to discuss procuring a statue of the Duke of Wellington and erecting it in Royal Exchange Square. On the committee, and one of the major subscribers to the cost of the new statue, was Mr. Alexander Downie of Crossbasket. Today, in 2015, […]