by Toryglen Boy » Mon Sep 14, 2015 5:42 pm
My grandfather, Phil Roberts, lived in Cambuslang all his life and worked at Colvilles steel works. He had a framed certificate on his wall that stated he'd worked there for 50 years. I think he retired around 1950. As children, we used to live in Knightswood and would visit him once a month in C'mslang, as it was (is?) called locally.
My abiding memory of the steelworks as a child, was of going back home to Glasgow on the country bus after a visit, in the dark, past the steelworks just as a shift had finished. The near-empty bus would then fill up to to the gunnels with excited noisey steelworkers, all dressed in absolutely filthy black work clothes or boilersuits and cloth bunnets as they came off their shift. The steelworkers all had a very peculiar sickly sweet smell about them too which filled the bus and which I'd never experienced before. Years later, I realised this unusual smell was that of fumes from the furnaces, and was probably from the coke in the furnace or that of the sulphur added to the iron ore that was being smelted.
My grandfather worked in Colvilles steelworks all through the First World War, as steelmaking was classified as a 'designated occupation' for the war effort, meaning that a steelworker was considered to be too important to be called up at that time and sent to the Western Front to fight. This probably saved his life during the carnage of that war. As my own father, Lewis Roberts, was born in December 1918, a month after the war ended, both he, and I may never have 'happened' had my grandfather not worked for the duration of that war in the steelworks.
My grandfather's own parents were from south Wales, and were natural, fluent Welsh speakers, as were many from that generation in and around Cambuslang at that time. These people had moved up from Wales to the Glasgow area to find work in the mines and steelworks in Scotland, when presumably work was scarce in the south. I estimated that they moved to Scotland around 1890 or thereabouts. They were from Gorseinon in the Swansea/Llanelly area of S Wales.
The nearby town/village of Newton, just along the railway line from Cambuslang to the east, was known locally as 'The English Village' at this time, such was the number of English miners and steelworkers who had come up to this area from England to find work in the 'New Town'.
Oh ye cannae shove yer Granny aff a bus.....'cos she's yer Mammy's Mammy!