FOREWORD by Jimmy Black, writer and broadcaster
Tom
Waugh and I sat in the same class at Eastbank School about sixty years ago. But,
not once did he give me the slightest hint that in sixty years’ time he would
ask me to write the Foreword for his second book of Shettleston photographs. Now
that he has asked me, the pleasure of writing it is sweeter than the squares of
Delicious Toffee we used to buy in Mrs Chalmers’ cafe way back then.
Tom’s first book of Shettleston pictures has been a bounding success! It’s been in demand, not just by local folk, but by Shettlestonians in other parts of the world. My goodness! How we love to see the way we were!
Who remembers being sent racing to Mary Mack’s Handy Store at the latest hour of the evening to get the loaf Mum had forgotten earlier in the day? Mary Mack that slim, dependable lady, grey hair drawn to a bun at the back of her head, never let us down. We were sure she would be there for ever.
Away at the other end of Shettleston was Granny McGraw’s “Jenny a’ thing” shop — at the end of the building which boasted three pubs: Deans’, McMillan’s and Chassells’ . . . . affectionately named locally as “the three lochs”.
I remember joining Granny McGraw’s Christmas Club one year. A penny a week I paid — for three weeks - then I lapsed and never had the nerve to ask that grim old lady to give me my thruppence back!
I particularly like Tom Waugh’s format of having the photographs grouped in a range of interesting categories. Those pictures in the “Then and Now” section are fascinating. Old photographs show parts of Shettleston as they used to be. New pictures show the same places as they are now. What a memory-stirrer this section will be. What arguments it will settle once and for all!
One of Tom’s pictures has a special interest for me. It shows the Royal Coat of Arms carved in stone above the telephone exchange in Wellshot Road. This carving is one of the few in the entire country bearing the name of the abdicated monarch, Edward VIII. In the spring of 1937, 1 was an apprentice bricklayer on the building of that exchange, and I saw the old carver chiselling out the name of the king who had left his throne some five months earlier. I recall, too, that old carver spent as much time in Chassell’s pub as he did at the carving!
It was imperative that Tom Waugh produce a second volume of Shettleston pictures. The two books are now a comprehensive and compact pictorial record of our area. In completing it, after endless slogging hours of research and detective work, Tom Waugh has done Shettleston a service of immeasurable value. Through these pages, future generations will find out something about the kinds of people we were, and the kinds of places we lived, worked and played in.
JIMMY BLACK
