Thirty years on, remembering the Big Storm that slammed right into Scotland

Yes, it is almost 30 years to the day since the Great Storm, and undoubtedly that coincidence has resonated. The 1987 storm has also stayed in the public mind as it will forever be associated with weatherman Michael Fish who famously said there wasn’t a hurricane on its way – and technically, he was correct as the weather system, like Ophelia, had been classed as a storm rather than a hurricane. In fact, its technical description was an extra-tropical cyclone.

The Big Storm of 1987 was horrendous. It smashed into north-west France, blitzed vessels in the Bay of Biscay and English Channel and then struck the south coast of England with devastating force. Gusts of wind of more than 100mph were recorded, tens of thousands of homes were damaged and 15 million trees were felled, although thankfully the peak winds blew during the early hours of October 16, or the final death toll of 22 in England and France would have been much worse.

Yet many more died in the Burns Day storm of 1990 – at least 47 people in the UK and at least 40 more on the Continent – and the damage was even worse as it hit during the day, making you wonder why it is not the reference point for the media.

And again, it could have been much worse, had not the Met Office warned for days before the January 25 storm that it was going to cause serious damage. I suspect many people will remember it for the fact that ’Allo ’Allo! actor Gorden Kaye was critically injured and barely survived after the wind blew an advertising hoarding through his windscreen.

In the last 50 years, however, the second-worst storm death toll in the UK came from Scotland’s own hurricane, which I have heard referred to as the Big Blaw, of January 14-16, 1968. It is almost never referred to by the London-centric media yet Hurricane Low Q, as it was called, killed 21 people in central Scotland alone and a further eight in Denmark. The death toll is sometimes given as 20 in Scotland but that was the immediate figure and does not include a victim who died of his injuries later – some also add the numbers killed during the repairs of housing which was estimated at 30, including 12 who fell from roofs, to give a death toll in excess of 50.

I was eight at the time and have never forgotten it, not least because a man who lived near our home in West Dunbartonshire was killed when his car hit a tree that fell right in front of it. His name was Hugh Timoney and he was just 24. He had been taking his wife Evelyn to the maternity hospital when the accident happened.

After she was treated for her injuries Mrs Timoney gave birth to a son, Andrew in the Vale of Leven Hospital. I recently read an account of the events in the local paper to refresh my memory.

Whatever Ophelia does to Scotland today, it surely will not wreak as much havoc as that 1968 storm. Yet back then, the BBC in London only really cottoned on to the seriousness of the event when the north of England was affected by freezing conditions.

The London tabloids were much more interested in the antics of Lady Norah Docker, the notorious socialite. Eventually, the newspapers did take matters seriously after the sheer scale of the devastation was realised. Some people reckon the 1968 storm was Scotland’s greatest natural disaster of the 20th century. The death toll was lower than the 66 killed in the Ibrox disaster in 1971, and very much below the figure for the Quintinshill rail crash of 1917 which saw 217 soldiers, nine passengers and three rail staff killed. But these were man-made disasters while the 1968 storm was entirely weather-driven.

What made Hurricane Low Q so disastrous was in many ways just sheer bad luck. Out in the Atlantic, two weather systems collided, with Hurricane Low Q heading east and north and predicted to peter out and miss the British Isles and hit the Faroes. But it ran into very cold air heading south from Iceland and the area of low pressure deepened markedly.

The storm was now back to hurricane force, and was knocked off its course. On Sunday, January 14, it veered directly across the Atlantic above Ireland to hit the central belt of Scotland head on. By dusk, we guessed something big was heading our way – I recall my father trying to calm us down as the weather forecasters had not told us there was a storm coming.

Almost entirely unpredicted, in the early hours of Monday, January 15, Scotland suffered the worst period of hurricane force winds ever recorded on the mainland.

Their power was simply extraordinary when they peaked at between 3am and 5am. For as long as records had been kept, nothing came close to the sustained high winds that smashed across Scotland from Perth down to the Border.

In fact, Cumbria was also badly hit and the highest ever wind speed in British weather history to that point was recorded at Great Dun Fell. At seven Met Office stations in Scotland, gusts of more than 100mph were recorded, ranging from 118mph on Tiree to 104mph at Prestwick.

More exposed places saw gusts up to 125mph, as recorded by local weather watchers at Lowther Hill in Lanarkshire, and there were solid accounts of “tornadoes” coursing across the land and into Glasgow. Soon, reports of death and damage were pouring in, and the news just got worse and worse all day. The winds kept blowing – although they died down considerably, it was still gusting into the early hours of Tuesday, January 16.

It has to be said that the Scottish press did a brilliant job of covering the disaster and showing its true effects – you can argue with a written account of tragedy but nothing displays it better than a photograph of a child’s shattered bedroom or an extraordinary picture of a tenement with a hole clean through it where a chimney stack had fallen.

The Scottish newspapers all ran special editions with updates though the day, and it soon became clear this was a national disaster – it is often thought that only Glasgow was badly affected but in fact more people, 11 all told, died outside the city than the nine who were killed there.

Greenock, Paisley, Rutherglen, Clydebank, and Edinburgh all suffered damage and in the capital two people were killed. William and Elsie Anderson died when a chimney stack collapsed through their ceiling in Dalry.

In all, 100 people sustained serious injuries, and there were many more walking wounded who either treated themselves at home or went to their local GP rather than the hospitals where emergency departments were full.

In the River Clyde and its Firth, seven vessels were sunk, including a dredger that went down off Greenock with the loss of three lives.

Falling masonry and trees were the main causes of death, and the toll could have been much worse had it not been for the exceptional work of the emergency services. Four families in Edinburgh were trapped on the top floor of a toppling building but were led to safety by firefighters. Also in Edinburgh, the Scott Monument lost one of its 80ft-tall pinnacles, which speared into Princes Street Gardens.

The countryside was ravaged by falling trees and power lines. It was estimated that 95 per cent of the farms in central Scotland were damaged to a greater or lesser degree, and more than 1000 applications were made for cash assistance to keep farms going. Almost five per cent of the Forestry Commission’s entire stock of trees was blown down, about 18 months’ worth of timber production for the entire nation.

Telephone lines were simply blown away – some 66,000 people lost the use of their phones for varying periods.

It was Glasgow that became the focus of attention, however, as politicians and the press alike realised the scale of the damage. All across the city, years of neglect of the fabric of tenements and council houses saw masonry simply crumble down in the face of the hurricane.

To get some idea of what happened to, you need to know that some 250,000 houses – the majority of them in and around Glasgow – were damaged. Those beyond repair numbered 1300, all of which were demolished.

The Army was called out on the morning after the hurricane hit, and brought an incredible 13,000 tarpaulins to cover holes in buildings. It was said at the time they were also there to shoot looters – not true, for there was no looting on any major sort, probably because everyone was so overwhelmed by what they saw … pieces of masonry everywhere, gardens and parks destroyed, glass smashed and cars flipped on to their sides or deposited in fields. It really was almost apocalyptic, but at least we got a day off school. In some ways, it was Glasgow’s Grenfell. The gable ends of some tenements were ripped clean off, and the poor state of housing for many, many thousands of people was exposed. There was a feeling that “enough is enough” and Glasgow should be fixed, for the disaster had struck so many people so deeply.

That feeling was never better enunciated than by the Tory leader of the opposition, Ted Heath.

He gave a superb speech in Parliament, saying: “What we are really dealing with in the debate are the sad consequences of the loss of families and friends whom nobody and nothing can replace, of homes which have been destroyed, of precious belongings and possessions which have been damaged, very often beyond repair, of capital and savings, especially in the countryside, which have been wiped out, and of jobs and livelihoods which have been imperilled. These hardships and sufferings, which are continuing in some cases, must affect each one of us here deeply.”

The secretary of state for Scotland, the old Labour warhorse Willie Ross, told the House of Commons the estimated sums it would take to fix things: “The cost of putting right the damage may be as much as £25-£30 million. The main elements of this are about £10m in respect of local authority housing, schools and other buildings; £8m for private housing; and £6m for agriculture, horticulture and woodlands.”

Ross railed against those who had no insurance cover for their homes, and the Labour government was at first prepared to give just £500,000 to help homeowners. However, political pressure saw proper loan schemes brought in to assist Glasgow and the other areas hit.

Above all, the people of Glasgow and Scotland rallied round. There was precious little moaning and just a determination to fix things. It was summed up thus by Dr J Dickson Mabon, the MP for Greenock, in Parliament: “Let us be grateful to the warm-hearted, good-natured people who have risen so splendidly to this national calamity and have worked, every one of them, so hard to try to get us over the difficulties and on to the road to recovery.”

For Hugh Timoney and dozens of others, there was no recovery, but I’ve not forgotten him or them, nor should any Scot be ignorant about that 1968 event. Which, when you think of it, is what history is all about.