Cheapside Street ran through the heart of dockside Anderston, and No. 83 was one of the district’s bonded giants: the whisky warehouse of Arbuckle, Smith & Company, six storeys of Victorian masonry holding over a million gallons of whisky and rum in some 21,000 casks — the export wealth of this site’s Trade pages, sleeping in wood a few streets from the Clyde. On the evening of Monday 28 March 1960, smoke was seen issuing from the building, and the Glasgow Fire Service and the Glasgow Salvage Corps turned out to what began as a routine call to a smouldering bond.
The Crews Arrive
The crews were deploying around the building — men in the narrow street, appliances close against the walls, a turntable ladder rising — when, at about ten past eight, the warehouse detonated. Super-heated casks had burst in the sealed interior until the pressure of ignited alcohol vapour blew the building apart: the massive stone walls did not fall but were hurled outward, without one second’s warning, onto the men and machines beneath. Whole crews were buried where they worked; a fire that had shown only smoke had killed most of its victims before the flames were even seen.
The Nineteen
Fourteen men of the Glasgow Fire Service and five of the Glasgow Salvage Corps died at Cheapside Street — nineteen in all, the greatest loss of life the British fire services have ever suffered in peacetime. They were men of the city’s ordinary heroic sort — drivers, firemen and officers from stations across Glasgow, the youngest in their twenties — and their names are read aloud in the city to this day; this page, like every disaster page on this site, holds those nineteen names as the centre of the story, not its backdrop.
The Greatest Fire Since the Blitz
What followed the explosion was the greatest fire Glasgow had fought since the Blitz. Burning whisky ran in blazing rivers down Cheapside Street and its neighbours; the fire spread to an adjacent tobacco warehouse and an ice-cream factory; and some 450 firefighters — comrades of the dead, working past the ruins that held them — fought through the night and into the following days before the bond was finally beaten. Tens of thousands watched the glow across the river; the whole city understood by morning what it had cost.
A City Bereaved
Glasgow buried its firemen as a city bereaved. The funeral cortege through streets lined many deep remains among the largest the city has seen; the fire service’s losses touched stations and tenement closes in every district; and the Salvage Corps — the insurance-funded service that worked beside the brigade for a century, and whose five dead are sometimes unjustly forgotten in the retelling — mourned the worst day in its history. Relief funds swelled by public subscription supported the widows and children left behind.
The Reckoning
The reckoning changed the law and the trade. The inquiry into Cheapside Street drove new regulation of bonded warehousing — the storage of spirits in vast urban bonds among tenements and docks was progressively ended, stocks dispersed to purpose-built sites away from the city — and fire service doctrine for whisky bonds was rewritten around the explosion risk the nineteen had discovered at the cost of everything. Glasgow’s brigade would be schooled by fire again — James Watt Street in 1968 and Kilbirnie Street in 1972 have their own grim pages — but never again by a bond.
Anderston After
The district itself did not long survive the decade: Anderston’s comprehensive redevelopment and the Kingston Bridge approaches, told on the district’s own page, swept away Cheapside Street’s warehouses, and traffic now passes over ground where the bond stood. The disappearance of the place has made the remembering matter more, and Glasgow has kept it faithfully.
The Memorials
The memorials hold the line: the firefighters’ memorial in the Necropolis, where the service gathers; the annual commemoration each March, maintained for decades and renewed with particular solemnity at the fiftieth anniversary in 2010; plaques and honours at fire stations; and the roll of the nineteen, read name by name. The Cheapside Street dead stand at the head of the tradition by which Scotland’s fire service remembers all its fallen.
Cheapside Street’s place in this collection is the hardest kind of exchange this site records: the city’s wealth — a million gallons of the export trade — stored carelessly close to the city’s people, and the bill met, when it came due in one second of 28 March 1960, by the men whose job was to stand nearest. Nineteen of them. Glasgow has not forgotten, and neither does this page.