In celebration of Dumbarton Football Club being promoted to the Second Division, I thought I would photograph some of my collection of prints and postcards of Dumbarton.
Pictures and postcards of Dumbarton Rock etc.
Note the mediaeval instrument of torture on the left. (Only joking; but it is a Lochgelly tawse [strap or belt] used for generations in Scotland to punish pupils who misbehaved in school. The practice was only abolished 25 years or so ago.)
The Rock was a big part of my life, although I didn’t realise that until I moved away from Dumbarton and suddenly I didn’t have the wonderful west coast scenery as a backdrop any more.
More pictures of Dumbarton Rock
When I was a wee girl I played at the bottom of the castle and the model of James Watt’s first steam engine was our climbing frame. I believe that it has been in various different positions in the town but I think it now lives at the Denny Ship Museum.
Old colour print of Dumbarton, plus Dumbartonshire Rifle Volunteers' badge.
More postcards, prints or photos of Dumbarton.
I have also lived at various locations around Britain. The last 20 years or so I have lived very close to the North Sea and believe me you have to be hardy to put up with that. It’s beyond me why anyone would want a sea view, especially when it is mainly grey sea and grey sky accompanied by a wind which usually feels like it has shards of glass in it, which cut right through your bones.
But – each to their own – and there are people in the Kirkcaldy area who can’t stand not being close to the sea. I suppose for them it’s like the hills of home.
Anyway, my Dumbarton collection cheers me up and I bet that there are plenty of people living there who can hardly believe that.
Division 2 here we come. It has really cheered up my husband Jack, my personal Son of the Rock, who has been a supporter of The Sons, as they are nicknamed, since before I knew him. In the daft days of my teenage years, I was even mad enough to go to Boghead with him.
Thirty-five years on from then, I spend my time visiting the Castle when he manages to see a home game.
I came as a young boy, from India, to Dumbarton in 1956, to serve as an “indentured apprentice” in Denny’s Shipyard, and stayed there until my graduation from The Royal Tech in Glasgow in 1962.
A few years ago Icam to visit Dumbarton with others in suggesting that the offices of the former Denny shipyard (already demolished) should escape the same fate. Denny’s was a big name in Clyde shipbuilding and marine engineering, and they also gained a progressive reputation for the provision of good quality housing for their workforce. But I was shocked by the number of people, many of whom had been employees, who shunned the whole idea; I remember one especially sour individual who snarled, ‘I’ll be glad to see the back of that name in the town’. The building was demolished.
The image that sticks with me mostly is that of the yard gates opening up and people spewing out in their thousands – it’s an abiding image, the first person squeezing out that narrow gap in the gate as it opens and on the other side the security men trying to hold you back. That ritual was played out every night reinforcing the difference between them and us
The yard had a huge reputation . . . but when you went in the place you had to ask how these sophisticated ships had been built when, in many ways, the technology was turn of the 19th century.
Today, they might as well never have existed. Nothing of any substance remains; all the individual sites have been redeveloped (with no thought given to using the opportunity to build an ‘industry research fund’ for example); no history has been written, and no museum celebrating this extraordinary industry – and the people who were its backbone – is even a remote pipe dream.
So I think that Cronin, and so much more that is or ought to be important, has been sunk by that great west of Scotland disease – apathy.
It’s humbling to see how little space is needed to describe a whole life: a cigarette paper would do, said Conrad. In the past 109 days, I have read the obituaries every morning in The Times and The Dumbarton Record. Fewer than five people warranted a full page obituary in the Times. Rudolph Serkin was the only one I knew. His recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto was the first 78 rpm I bought, when I was twelve. I have it on compact disc, now, rerecorded.
Cronin, a famous “son of Dumbarton” died sometime in the past. His obituary did not turned up in the Times, although his humanity and expertise merited more than a cigarette paper. Even a full-page summary would not have captured the essence of his good life. His obituary would not appear in the Dumbarton Record because he lived on the other side of the Leven River, but I read them because I am obsessed with Dumbarton and its “Sons of the Rock”
Mo Ahmed,
Thanks for the interesting comment. My parents moved to Dumbarton from Glasgow in 1964, I was only 5 then. Denny’s Shipyard had already closed, but people still spoke about the crowds of men coming through the gates. We now live in the east of Scotland but my husband is a big ‘Sons’ fan and we were very sad to see that the remaining bit of Denny’s had been demolished. I think that the attitude that you met with about the name Denny was purely a class thing. Dumbarton is a mainly working class area and there are a lot of people who would have hated ‘the bosses’ even if they were giving them employment. I used to work in Dumbarton Library and in the 1970s a woman came into the library and announced to me in a very plummy voice that she was MRS. EDWARD DENNY – I honestly think she expected me to curtsey. I think if they were all like that it must have been very annoying for people.
Yes it is very sad that there is now nothing there, except the Denny Tank Museum, I’ve always thought that the town council is useless at promoting the area, especially when there is so much which could be done to improve it. I think the whole of Scotland is quite apathetic, I don’t think it’s laziness, they just don’t appreciate the importance of things.
Dr I.M.M. McPhail was the Dumbarton historian when I was a girl but nobody seems to have taken over from him. I’m always thrilled when I see that a ship was built in Dumbarton, they even built a Mississippi River Boat – The Delta Queen and it is still in use. Cronin was huge in his day but unknown to the local youngsters now I’m sure, I’m still reading him though. The best thing about Dumbarton for me was always the scenery, rivers and of course the castle but the town itself has always been sad and neglected. Thanks for getting in touch about it.
Regards,
Katrina
I too played around and on the engine in the park beneath the Castle Rock. It was built by Robert Napier, a Dumbartonian, and was his first steam engine. Named The Leven, it is in the Denny Ship Model Museum. It spent some time in the square in the middle of the dire “new” town centre.
Levenax,
Thanks for the comment. I had been wondering what had happened to that engine. I remember it being in the “new” town centre, sometimes surrounded by foam when people decided to tip a packet of soap powder into it. I haven’t been to the Denny Museum yet, I’ll need to get around to it.
Katrina