All this has brought back memories of a Glasgow fire I was personally involved in.
It was December 1973 and I was working in an office at 80 Buchanan Street, in the building to the right of the Royal Bank of Scotland as shown in this picture which hazy posted a while back.
Although you cannot see it in the picture this building actually has a 3rd floor and at the time this comprised the offices of a long defunct Glasgow shipping agency called Roxburgh, Henderson & Co. Ltd. They also had part of the 2nd floor, which was where the accounts department and the typing pool were. I had not been with them for very long, only since August of that year in fact. The main entrance to the building was on Buchanan Street beside the Paige dress shop and there was also a side entrance next door to the Rogano, in the passage leading to Royal Exchange Square.
As far as I can remember it was shortly after lunchtime on a Friday afternoon. I had to go down to the 2nd floor to see somebody in the accounts department and as I crossed the landing which led to the back stairs [which were at the Royal Exchange Square end of the building] I thought I heard a faint rumbling noise coming from somewhere. However my mind was occupied with work and I didn’t pay much attention to it. A few minutes later I came back up the stairs and this time the noise was quite noticeable, in fact it was almost like a roar. Puzzled, I looked round about me and almost immediately realised where this was coming from. The source of the noise was behind a wooden hatch just above my head, set vertically in the wall of the stairwell. It gave access to the roofspace. Not only was the noise becoming progressively louder but to my horror I could also see flames beginning to consume the wooden hatch itself and furthermore the stairwell area was starting to fill up with smoke.
I ran into the office and shouted FIRE! For a moment everybody looked at me as if I had gone completely insane, particularly when they saw me take off one of my shoes and use it to smash the glass of the fire alarm point beside the door. However, it was quickly realised that this was for real, the management took over and the building was immediately evacuated via the Buchanan Street exit.
When we got outside we could already see a large cloud of smoke billowing up from the roof. However the Fire Brigade were on the scene within minutes. They managed to get the fire under control fairly quickly and were able to confine most of the serious damage to the roofspace. The Glasgow Salvage Corps was also present and they put sheeting across all the desks in the 3rd floor office so that the loss of documentation etc through water damage was kept to a minimum.
The fire was reported in the late news section of the Evening Times and here is the clipping. Note that they only seem concerned about the Rogano staff, with not a single mention of the people who had been most at risk, namely ourselves on the 3rd floor of the building.
Later in the afternoon a few of us were allowed back in. This is a picture of the more or less habitable end of the office after things had been cleared up a bit. That is me sitting at the bottom right of the picture. I have to say that the Salvage Corps did a really good job – without their protection efforts it would have been much more difficult to get things moving again.
The following week the chairman of the company called me into his inner sanctum. This was Mr. I.A. Lyall, D.S.C., V.R.D., D.L., F.I.C.S., president of the Glasgow & Clyde Shipowners Association. I was praised for my initiative at raising the alarm etc etc and, with a patronising flourish, handed an envelope containing 25 quid. This was certainly a fair lump of cash in those days and I was grateful for having it. However it was but a minute fraction of the business the firm would probably have lost had the damage been serious enough to make the almost immediate continuance of operations impossible.
One thing I do wonder about and that is what might have been the outcome if I or somebody else had not just happened to discover the fire at that particular time. Left to its own devices, would the blaze have come through the ceiling onto the dozens of people working in the office below? Would some people have become trapped? Or would the noise of the fire have increased to the point where everybody would have been alerted and given sufficient time to get out? Whatever, that is is not a scenario I wish to dwell on.