The Chapel of St Mary Undercroft

Palace of Westminster

Service to mark the 75th Anniversary of the Blitz

Tuesday 15th March 2016

Noon

Readings: James 3:13-18; Matthew 5:1-12

In the context of worship offered to Almighty God, who came among us in His Son Jesus, the Prince of Peace, we come together today to remember the dreadful events that took place in the town of Clydebank 75 years ago.

It is a privilege to be a part of the first ever service at the Palace of Westminster to commemorate the Clydebank Blitz.

The suffering, resilience and courage of the people of Clydebank have not always been adequately acknowledged and it is appropriate and right that we do so here today and in this capital city of our nation which itself endured the experience of destruction from the skies.

On the night of the 13th of March 1941, 236 bombers unleashed a ferocious and sustained attack on targets in the Clydebank area.

These included the shipyards, Dalnottar tank farm and large factories which were involved in making munitions, such as Singer’s Sewing Machine factory.

On the night of the 14th of March, 203 bombers returned.

This time they also attacked targets in the area where there were shipyards and the Rolls Royce aero engine factory at Hillington.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Clydebank was an obvious target for the attentions of the Luftwaffe.

However, as my colleague (former Moderator the Very Rev) John Christie, has written, ‘when on the evening of the 13th of March … the authorities first detected that Clydebank was ‘on beam’ – targeted by the primitive radio-guidance system of the German bombers – no effort was made to raise the alarm or to direct the residents to shelter or flight.

Within the hour, a vast timber-yard, three oil-stores, and two distilleries were ablaze, one pouring flaming whisky into a burn that ran blazing into the Clyde itself in vivid ribbons of fire.

And still the Germans came; and Clydebank, now an inferno, lay illuminated and defenceless as heavy bombs of high explosives, land-mines and parachute blasters began to fall.’

When the skies at last fell silent, only seven of the town’s 12,000 houses remained undamaged after two nights of saturation bombing. What that brief sketch of the events of the 13th and 14th of March, 1941, does not tell is the depth of the appalling human tragedy which it represents.

It is a tragedy still being relived to this day in the lives of hundreds of survivors both in and scattered around the world who remain haunted by what they had to pass through in 1941.

To read through the 27-page list of names – representing every age and stage of life – of those who lost their lives, in John Macleod’s fine account of the Clydebank Blitz, River of Fire, is a moving experience.

Over the years various survivors have courageously shared their own experiences, many of them deeply harrowing.

These awful nights also witnessed selfless acts of heroism.

One example of many, recounted in River of Fire, tells how the house at 81 Boreland Street, in Knightswood, collapsed on itself, trapping all eight of the Hastie family inside, when a bomb exploded on the pavement. Here, in the narrative, is what ensued:

‘A 16-year old schoolboy, Gerard McMahon, joined determinedly with two grim-faced ARP wardens, Alex Glennie and Alex Hamilton.

They managed to haul most of the roof clear by the simple if risky expedient of a rope and a car. Glennie then clawed and tunnelled his way into the rubble with his own raw hands.

Only yards away, curtains of flame roared some 20 feet into the air from a smashed gas main.

Overhead, as the little group toiled on, shards and splinters tinkled down from detonating anti- aircraft shells in the glowing and roaring sky.

McMahon had put in 4 hours at this labour before nipping briefly back home to check on his own family.

They were safe in their Anderson shelter, and he quickly extricated himself and was soon back on Boreland Drive. So they picked on, brick by brick, beam by beam, and – one by one – every last Hastie was brought safely out. Only a few hours later, in Stobhill Hospital at eight o’clock on Friday morning, Mrs Hastie was safely delivered of a baby boy’.

The suffering and the destruction unleashed on Clydebank were unspeakable.

But as in this city of London, as elsewhere, during , the Luftwaffe utterly failed in its aim of destroying the spirit of the people.

As a historian of the Clydebank Blitz, Tom McKendrick points out:

‘The psychological effect was the exact opposite of what was intended. Rather than divide the community and throw it into frenzied panic, it strengthened and immeasurably hardened people’s resolve to survive and resist. Many still bear the mental and physical scars. All have vivid recollections.’ But what has humanity – what have we – learned from looking back on such instances as this one of man’s inhumanity to man, in the most advanced and most bloody of all centuries to date?

Not very much at all, it would appear in times when – to say no more - the very words ‘bomb’ and ‘bomber’ appear with such sad regularity in our daily conversations.

It is high time, I suggest, for a suffering humanity to embrace another narrative altogether – that to which James refers and which is embedded in the person, work and teaching of Jesus himself.

It is a narrative of love and of hope in a world of violence and despair.

The true story of the world is a love story – God’s love story in the outworking of which every wall of hostility is broken down as he makes peace through the blood of the cross.

Nazism had all the hallmarks of a religion. It is wise, as Archbishop Justin (Welby) has recently pointed out, to remember that ‘the idea that you can separate secular life from religious life like separating … potatoes from peas on you plate, is just cloud cuckoo land.

It’s not how human beings work.’

It was their faith in the revealed narrative of divine love and their trust in the One who is at its centre that helped sustain many of the brave survivors of the Clydebank Blitz.

Our society is none the better of having lost to such a degree its grip on that faith which is our precious heritage.

For in a despairing world, here is found solid hope – hope to give us joy and energy and life in our living, as we anticipate the day when we shall witness not a river of fire, but as in John’s vision, the ‘river of the water of life, clear as crystal,’ flowing in healing and enlivening virtue from ‘the throne of God and of the Lamb’ (Rev. 22:1-2).

It’s a picture of the coming full shalom – the comprehensive peace – of God’s new creation.

Our truest calling is to embrace by faith the Prince of Peace and so to devote ourselves by his grace and where he has placed us to the urgent task of peace-making in a divided world, serving God and neighbour, labouring by all means to make friends of enemies, as we walk the wise way of Jesus, ‘the pioneer and perfecter of our faith’ (Hebrews 12:2).

I can think of no better way of honouring the memory of those who, in the Clydebank Blitz, suffered so greatly from the evil which Jesus came to this world to destroy.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen