Bank Row, 1940: 'Those bombs just came out of the blue'

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Ten years on from the official opening of Wick's World War II memorial garden, we republish an interview from 2010 with the late Alister Wares. Sadly, Alister passed away in March 2016.

EIGHT-year-old Alister Wares had a clear view of the plane that emerged from the west and flew over Lower Pulteneytown. From his vantage point, a window ledge at an old kipper kiln in Martha Terrace, he watched the aircraft approach the harbour and was puzzled by the sight of two objects that appeared to have worked themselves loose from the undercarriage. For a fleeting moment he wondered if the tyres had come off.

Seconds later, the whole of Lower Pulteney was rocked by a massive blast. Alister was hurled from the window, falling some 20 feet and landing painfully in a pile of barrel hoops. Terrified, he picked himself up and ran round the corner into Williamson Street and on towards his home in Saltoun Street through a thick cloud of dust.

It was Monday, July 1, 1940. The plane had been a German bomber, a Junkers 88, and Bank Row had taken the full force of its payload. An everyday Wick scene – shops doing business, bairns playing in the street at the beginning of their school holidays – had been transformed into a vision of chaos and destruction. The two bombs had exploded in a single devastating impact that would claim the lives of 15 people.

On any other day Alister might have been down in Bank Row too, along with his sister Jenny and brother John and other neighbourhood youngsters, but the old kiln was his playground that afternoon. It was a favourite haunt for Alister and his pals, and a place where pigeons gathered in large numbers. The boys had their eye on one specimen in particular: a blue-barred pigeon reckoned to be of some value. They hoped to earn half a crown by capturing it and selling it to a local fancier.

Seventy years on, the events of that day remain etched on Alister’s memory.

“We’d had mist, terrible fog, and maybe this pigeon went astray,” he recalls. “Anyway, he had got mixed in with the pigeons that were in our doocot. It was a lovely big bird and we thought we’d catch him when he came in.

“So we were after this pigeon, but we hadn’t got a hope in hell of catching him. I was sitting in this window, it must have been about 18 or 20 feet up.

“What took my attention then was this plane, just coming up over the library and along Union Street. I thought it was just about Sutherland’s wood yard and I said to myself, ‘Did two birds pass that just now? Or maybe it’s the tyres that have fallen off…’

“It all happened in a flash. There was an almighty explosion, just a loud bang. Instead of blowing me in at the window, it threw me out the window, and I landed down amongst some rusty hoops.

“I remember the fear that was in me and I set off running. Looking up Williamson Street, I thought the place was on fire. I thought it was smoke I was seeing, but it was a big cloud of dust. All you could hear was the tinkle of glass falling out of windows, and not another sound.

“There was a blacksmith’s shop and I was just level with it when this figure came running out of the smoke. It was Kenny MacGregor – he lived in the street next to me.

“We were both running – well, he wasn’t running, he was really staggering. I mind saying, ‘Are you okay, Kenny?’ and he gargled something… It was afterwards that I realised he had been struck in the throat with shrapnel.”

Eight-year-old Kenny would die of his injuries two days later.

Alister continued his frantic progress up Williamson Street. “A big pane of glass fell out of the labour exchange, at the Lorne Buildings, and hit the deck with one almighty crash. What a fright I got.”

All you could hear was the tinkle of glass falling out of windows, and not another sound.

At the corner of Saltoun Street, where Barbara Farquhar kept a small shop, the entire contents of the window display had been deposited on the pavement.

Reaching the family home, Alister found that it too had been badly damaged. There was no sign of Jenny, who had just turned seven, or John, who was two weeks away from his fifth birthday.

“The windows were all blown in and doors were hanging and jammed,” he says. “I remember standing in the doorway, we were waiting to see if Jenny and John would come home. It was a good long while before Jenny came round the corner at Williamson Street, coming from Bank Row, and she was pretty badly injured. She must have been unconscious for a wee while and then she came running back home.

“Everything was full of stoor and muck and then Barbara Farquhar appeared with this lovely white towel which she must have taken out of a drawer. I always remember the whiteness, with all the stoor and muck, as she put it round Jenny’s face.

“Jenny had some awful shrapnel wounds, and I remember holding her at the door. We were pretty shaken up at that time with shock, terror, whatever you want to call it.

“John, he never appeared.

“My father [Donnie Wares] was working as a labourer at Skitten airfield at the time. They did hear the blast while they were working. A lad had arrived at Skitten and told them that these bombs had dropped in Bank Row. So he got a shot of a bike and cycled home. I remember him coming and speaking to us at the door. Then he set off over to Bank Row.”

By this time a temporary barrier had been set up to restrict access to the scene. “I remember my father going up past it but they wouldn’t let me past. Father came back home a long while after that. By that time the remains had been taken up to the mortuary.”

John’s body had been found in the middle of the Black Stairs, round the corner from Bank Row. “My father identified him just by his clothing. It was a long time later that my father told me about having to go and see him. It was years and years after.”

John and Kenny were among eight children killed in what is thought to have been the first daylight air raid of World War Two on mainland Britain. “We’d split up that day,” Alister explains. “Some went one way and some went the other way. I could have been amongst them. If it hadn’t been for that pigeon I probably would have been.”

Jenny was spared the worst of the blast as she ended up behind a wall near Beel’s Hillie, in front of Bill Smith’s grocer shop at the end of Bank Row. “Just opposite Beel’s Hillie there was a grassy incline and the bairns would play on it,” Alister says. “Jenny was sitting on a wall there. The blast took her and the shrapnel struck her but she dropped down behind the wall and she missed the rest of the stuff that came, so that’s what saved her. If she had been on the other side she would have been dead as well.”

The following day a family friend took Alister, his mother Minnie and his two-year-old sister Isobel on a trip to Strathy. Even on the north Sutherland coast there were reminders of the war that had broken out 10 months earlier. He says: “I remember we went up to Strathy Point and we could hear all this activity at Scapa Flow, the ships with their guns banging away.”

Jenny spent a fortnight in hospital being treated for her injuries. Now living in Lancashire, she still visits Wick from time to time.

Alister has fond memories of his little brother, who not long before his death had been rescued after falling into the harbour: “Oh, he was a great lad, a topper. He was a fine wee fellow.”

After leaving school Alister went into the grocery trade and then the building industry, working all over the country. He had a spell as a gasworks stoker before moving to Pulteney Distillery, working there for more than 26 years before retiring. He will be 79 in November.

Alister, who lives with his wife Margaret in Louisburgh Street, Wick, is a committee member of the voluntary group creating a memorial garden in Bank Row. It will commemorate the 15 who were killed there and also three people who died later in 1940 in a raid on Hill Avenue.

He is pleased that after a series of delays and setbacks the garden is on course for completion later this year. Concerns over a high wall at the site have now been resolved and work is being stepped up.

Other committee members include Elsie Cormack (née Miller), who lost two sisters – Amy (9) and five-year-old Betha – in the Bank Row raid. Eric Blackstock (5), seven-year-olds Isobel Bruce and Bruce Flett and 16-year-old Donald Thomson also died, along with adults Isobel Mackenzie, Robert Mackenzie Snr, Robert Mackenzie Jnr, Mary McTavish, Bill Smith, Mary Steven and Donald Waters.

It had been a close-knit community where, says Alister, “everybody knew everybody” and the children had “lots of fun and capers”. But it never recovered from the horror of the bombing. “Lower Pulteney was never the same again,” he says. “There was always laughter and shouting and cheery voices. You don’t hear anything like that now down there.”

Watching the TV coverage of panic-stricken New Yorkers running through clouds of choking debris on 9/11, their faces turned a ghostly white by falling ash, Alister found himself thinking back to his encounter with Kenny MacGregor in Lower Pulteney.

“When the Twin Towers came down… that day I came running round the corner out of Martha Terrace into Williamson Street, it was actually the same as that,” he says. “There was just this huge plume of dust. And when Kenny MacGregor came running towards me he was just white. But I could see that his jersey had a big stain on it.

“You could say it was the worst day of my life. It was horrible – horrible. Those bombs just came out of the blue.”

• This interview was first published in the John O’Groat Journal in July 2010, ahead of the official opening of the memorial garden in Bank Row. Alister took a great pride in the garden, spent a lot of time there, and often told visitors the story behind it. He passed away in March 2016.

• Work goes on at World War II memorial garden 10 years after opening

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