The Ponderosa, that is what we called South Nitshill when we moved there from Harley St in Ibrox in October 1960. I was six months old, so it didn’t mean much to me. Bonanza had first aired in 1959 and my 11-year-old brother was a TV addict, though his preference was for Davy Crockett, racoon hat and all. We moved into the third floor flat, looking north from the top of the hill across the city to the hills beyond…

This would be a view I would get to know well, cranes on the Clyde, factories in the foreground, mounds of spoil from the old Lime works, low lying tenements and a few high-rise towers. Off to the right a glow would appear from Hampden Park on International nights, and if you listened carefully the roar would sometimes be heard. On Hogmanay we would throw open the window and hear the ships on the river sound their horns at midnight.

Shops, vans and horse-drawn carts

In the early days you could hear the clip clop of a horse drawn cart and a voice calling “any auld claese”; us weans would gather around the old horse, staying a bit back from the size of it and the man’s fierce attitude. Every week the “van” would tinkle around, selling ice cream and ginger, the ubiquitous term for fizzy drinks. Irn Bru might be the standard bearer today but back then it was cream soda we craved.

We had a few shops in the scheme, two tiny grocers, Galbraith’s and the Co-op, a newsagent (ah, the rolls) a butcher and a “fancy goods store” Kerr’s, selling light bulbs and knitting wool.

Summer trips to Ayrshire towns

In the summer buses would be put on to take us to the coast, Troon, Girvan and Ayr. Largs had a stony beach and was not a favourite of mine, Nardini’s ice cream parlour there was unknown to me, we could not afford it and took sandwiches with Kia-Ora juice in an overheated plastic cup.

I moved away in 1983, to a job in Aberdeenshire. A new and completely different life awaited me, though I was ignorant of that at the time. Up there lived a community that was oblivious to the curious Glaswegian preoccupations, and I came to see the city as Scotland’s New York. In the country but not really part of it. Cosmopolitan yet inward looking.

Weekends visiting Mosspark and Bellahouston

My landscape through the sixties and seventies comprised Soothie (as we called it) and Mosspark, where my father’s mother and her eldest daughter lived. Maw and Nana. I would be taken there each Saturday by Mum and on Sundays Dad would take me to Bellahouston Park, to the bowling green, site of my long-gone grandfather’s sporting success.

Maw’s house seemed so different from my home, especially when my dad’s many brothers and sisters appeared – Mamie, Nellie, Lottie, James, George and Davie – usually not all at the same time. Sibling rivalry lasted well into their dotage. There was an air raid shelter and a wee garden at the back where my grandfather’s flowers had often won prizes, on the other side of the hedge was the cemetery that held his grave.

Each Saturday Nana would have bought a box of French Fancies (the Fern Cake was always for Maw) for our visit and their terraced housed smelled of coal gas and stewed tea, kept on the hob and topped up through the day. Maw, now in her eighties, never seemed to move from the chair and Nana, deaf from a childhood accident, had to be woken from her slumbers when we arrived by putting a light on.

Sometimes we would go to the pictures at the Mosspark Picture House at the end of the road, sadly long gone. The hairdressers on the way there sat in a single-story infill between two red tenements, the window decorated with images of beehive haircuts.

South Nitshill was not a great move for my parents. It was two bus trips to Shieldhall and the SCWS for Dad and isolating for Mum, though she soon found a community of likeminded women.

Schooldays, new neighbours and social engineering

After a while I noticed the curious, and probably predetermined, attempt at social engineering by the council. On each floor, of the close we lived in, were two families. One catholic and the other mostly non-denominational. They swapped locations on each floor.

Ours was a happy close, we got on. The older man next door was quiet and content. I would wait for him to come home from work, and he would pat me on the head with a rolled-up newspaper. The top floor housed a childless couple, and the man was a huge cheerful butcher, though when rescued from Changi in 1945 he weighed less than 6 stone.

This was my community, a mostly content small village.

My first school was Nitshill Primary and as I look back, I see the other attempts to integrate the people from the religious divide, this time through the placement of buildings. Across the road from our “Proddy” school was St Bernard’s Catholic Church and outside the Soothie boundary sat St Bernard’s School. This social engineering didn’t really work and a sense of otherness was maintained by each group. They rubbed along well enough and I don’t remember any real animosity. Only a social distance, laced with a fear that was seldom enunciated.

For example, when Celtic won the European Cup, Mum kept me indoors. No doubt the same happened to others when the Orange Walk season was upon us, I too found that alienating. This distaste arose, no doubt, from my socialist father; whose morals were defined in the ‘20’s and 30’s by the Red Clydesiders and a belief in the common cause of all working people. He hated religion and the toxic effect it had on his community, he aspired to a utopia of common interest and endeavour.

As the sixties progressed, I joined the Cubs and then the Scouts, and was taken camping and hillwalking and the experience put me off the great outdoors, a reaction a that has lasted to this day. I was a softie. School was fine and I have friends from those early years to this day.

Remnants of old Nitshill village

Nitshill in the sixties retained some of its village structure. The Railway Inn sat up on the embankment next to the railway bridge over Nitshill Road, facing the war memorial and the small monument to the Victoria Pit disaster. We incomers didn’t pay much attention to these features. The pub was removed, I suspect when the road under the bridge was lowered to get the buses through safely.

Along the road was the Jackie Connor garage and a small shopping court was formed with Templeton’s supermarket, home to my first job, stacking shelves and stealing biscuits. A bit further stood a remnant of the old village, a detached house that was the doctor’s surgery, Dr Gerber, a quietly spoken, smiling, gentle, man who must have endured many challenging experiences with his patients. He shared the building with an optician who prescribed my first glasses at age eight, plastic framed NHS that would sit squint on my face.

Nitshill station was a haunt for me and my pal Chubb (a stout lad called Neal). We would visit the station man, Auld Tam, who would chat away to us in his dark waistcoat and wee skipped cap. Along the platform stood, for a while, the monument to a WWI VC winning soldier, John Meikle, who had worked at the station. This would be regularly pushed over by the youth, much to Auld Tam’s distress. His life was plagued by this social disorder.

My softie nature found this too much and I stayed away. I would often find refuge at home to avoid the threat of something unknown from the folk outside. This unknown would on occasion become frighteningly real, I can remember swords and knives being wielded as I traipsed home from the Cubs.

My Secondary School was Craigbank. Terrifying to think of in Primary, I found it hugely affirming when I was there. It was situated in a less hostile landscape, if you kept your eyes away from the Bundy housing scheme across the road. There were mature trees and reasonably well-maintained gardens intertwined with tidy semi-detached council houses around the school. Nearby was Pollok Park and while I seldom went there, my father did; especially as the Burrell building was being erected. He had a sense of civic pride about this and longed for it to open, but he died before it did…

The lasting influence of new scheme community life

Those buildings and the landscape of those days were to influence me, though I was unaware at the time. The douce, well maintained and managed working class Mosspark, with its tidy tenements, gardens and parkland, together with the remnant village and nearby industrial heritage embedded themselves in my psyche. I enjoyed history as a school subject and the social history of Scotland’s city surrounded me.

My move in ’83 to the North East was to work for the National Trust Scotland, an organisation I knew nothing of. It would give me an opportunity to work with many of Scotland’s finest historic buildings, and when I moved on after 34 years as a surveyor, and senior manager, they would publish my stories. A Heritage in Stone recounts the characters I knew and the places I cared for. Aberdeenshire remains relatively unknown to most folk, it is a land of farms, castles, beautiful villages, distilleries and, on occasion still, an impenetrable language that confirms a living link to northern Europe and a pre-Union trade network that is largely unknown. Pictish monuments dot the fields and ancient forts sit on top of low hills.

In the years since leaving the Trust I have offered consultancy to folk looking after old buildings, often local communities. I have been very fortunate to meet and help wonderful people who strive to protect places that their communities really value, whether they be old schools, swimming pools, public parks or whatever.

My early experiences in the south of Glasgow have been foundational and my memories of the people there has given me a connection to folk committed to the care of their environment, for the betterment of their neighbours. Those folk of my youth, family, teachers, friends and neighbours have embedded a core value and I am grateful for it.

By Ian M. Davidson

Published: 9th February 2022

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Image references

Priesthill and Nitshill, Glasgow, general view, 1991. Photo: copyright of Canmore / HES. Canmore ID 78669
https://canmore.org.uk/collection/1685344

Ian’s grandparents, Maw aka Charlotte and John outside their house in Mosspark, circa 1956. Photo: copyright of Ian M Davidson.

Mosspark Picture House, Paisley Road West, April 1934. Opened in 1925. Photo: copyright of Glasgow City Archives from their Virtual Mitchell website.

Nitshill, Glasgow, general view, 1991. Photo: copyright of Canmore / HES. Canmore ID 78666
https://canmore.org.uk/collection/1685338

General view, Nitshill, Eastwood, Lanarkshire, Scotland, 1937. Oblique aerial photograph, taken facing south. Photo: copyright of Canmore / Aerofilms collection.
https://canmore.org.uk/collection/1452134

Priesthill and Nitshill, Glasgow, General View, 1991. Photo: copyright of Canmore / HES. Canmore ID 78666
https://canmore.org.uk/collection/1685342

About the Author:

Ian M Davidson was born in Glasgow in 1960 and after a few months living in Ibrox moved out to the new housing scheme at South Nitshill. He attended Nitshill Primary School (1965-1972) and Craigbank Secondary (1972-1978). He then attended Glasgow College of Building and Printing to study Building Surveying, graduating in 1982. Ian moved to North East Scotland to join the National Trust for Scotland, where he stayed for almost 35 years, occupying several roles from Assistant Surveyor to Head of Projects, Director NE, and Lead Surveyor. Upon leaving NTS in December 2016 the Trust published his stories in a book that spoke of the fascinating characters and conservation he enjoyed (A Heritage in Stone, Sandstone Press, 2017). A regular public speaker, Ian has also assisted community groups in conservation projects. He was made Visiting Professor at Robert Gordon University in 2016 and Chairs the RICS Conservation Accreditation Panels, helping others to become involved with the care of our heritage.

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