Norry Wilson from Lost Glasgow on Christmas memories of the old John Lewis on Argyle Street

National World - LocalTV

We speak to Norry Wilson, a historian who runs the Lost Glasgow website and Facebook page on his Christmas pastimes in the city.

Transcript

00:00 So we're here to talk about Glasgow at Christmas.

00:02 If you'd like to start by maybe sharing some personal memories.

00:06 I think my earliest memory, which I probably share,

00:08 in fact I know I share with tens of thousands of other Glaswegians,

00:13 is climbing the stairs in Lewis's department store

00:17 in Argyle Street,

00:21 waiting in an interminable long queue,

00:23 holding my mum or dad's hand,

00:26 waiting to meet Santa Claus.

00:29 And it wasn't just you get up and you went into this wonderful grotto.

00:34 By that point you'd already had the magic of Lewis's Christmas windows,

00:39 which every year were an absolute draw for everyone.

00:44 So even growing up in the late 60s, early 70s,

00:49 we'd have black and white TV set.

00:52 The world seemed pretty black and white.

00:55 And then Glasgow particularly before the stone cleaning

00:58 seemed very black.

01:02 And then all of a sudden, once a year,

01:03 the whole city centre just seemed to spring into magical technicolour.

01:09 And as I say, the Lewis's Christmas windows were always

01:13 just something out of this world,

01:15 because they were all sort of animated figures and all the rest of it.

01:19 It was these huge plate glass windows with things going on

01:23 and toys and animated figures and just magic.

01:29 And that's something that had gone on in Lewis's right since the,

01:32 pretty well since the 1930s when Lewis's was built in Glasgow.

01:36 And it was a great tradition that virtually half of Glasgow

01:41 would turn out to welcome Santa Claus to Lewis's.

01:46 There's fabulous, unfortunately silent footage on YouTube

01:52 of an old PATH newsreel,

01:53 and it's Santa Claus arriving in Glasgow on the Clyde,

01:59 on board the ship with his elves, supposedly from the North Pole,

02:04 and getting off just at the southern end of the George V Bridge

02:08 and getting onto a horse and carriage

02:11 and getting ridden through Glasgow up to the back

02:15 of the old Lewis's department store,

02:17 at which the fire brigade provide probably the tallest ladder

02:21 you've ever seen in your life.

02:22 And some poor guy dressed as Santa,

02:24 complete with a sack over his shoulder,

02:26 has to climb up this ladder and vanish in a window.

02:30 Oh no.

02:32 So whereabouts was the Lewis's on Argyle Street?

02:35 It's what became the Debenhams store,

02:36 that beautiful big sort of,

02:38 well it's really sort of late art deco.

02:42 And it replaced an even more spectacular store,

02:46 which used to be called, now, what was it called?

02:50 So-and-so's Royal Polytechnic Stores.

02:54 Because I could never understand growing up,

02:56 my mum and various old aunties and all the rest of it

02:58 would always call Lewis's the poly.

03:02 Didn't understand that at all.

03:04 But as I say, it replaced what had originally been

03:06 one of Glasgow's first huge department stores in the 1880s,

03:10 the Royal Polytechnic Stores,

03:13 which is one of these places where you could buy

03:15 everything from a needle to an anchor.

03:19 It really did everything for the city.

03:22 I think it might have been Walter Wilson that started it,

03:25 who previously had a big store on Jamaica Street,

03:28 and was one of these spectacular,

03:30 self-made Glasgow businessmen,

03:32 who ended up with stores all over the world.

03:35 But very much in the sort of,

03:37 stack it high, sell it cheap principle.

03:40 He bought wholesale and sold retail,

03:43 but it was one of these go-to places,

03:45 and he made an absolute multi-million pound fortune.

03:50 And at the same time, was one of these great guys,

03:53 because he supported the city,

03:55 because he'd had it tough as a child in the Gorbals.

03:58 I think it was Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

04:01 He chartered every steamship on the Clyde,

04:06 and took 40,000 poor Glasgow children

04:09 on a trip down the water.

04:10 I don't think my mum and dad were ever quite flush enough

04:14 to take us to the Santa's grotto in Fraser's.

04:19 But I definitely remember Fraser's windows again,

04:21 they were up to equal Louis's,

04:24 with beautiful Christmas tableau and all the rest of it.

04:28 And oddly enough, just a few weeks ago,

04:31 I was speaking to a senior BBC Radio Scotland producer,

04:36 who spent the whole of the 1980s as the Santa,

04:40 in the house of Fraser.

04:44 And according to him, if you go sort of,

04:46 even now, if you go sort of backstage,

04:50 for want of a better,

04:50 in some of the unused bits of the house of Fraser,

04:53 they've still got great big bits

04:54 of the original Santa's grotto

04:56 that they've never thrown away.

04:58 It's all just sort of lying in storage in the back shop.

05:01 [LAUGH] >> Amazing.

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