The Luftwaffe Visits Kintyre

It's often forgotten that many small towns well away from cities and industrial areas suffered air raids. Campbeltown - a town of around 6,000 people near the Mull of Kintyre - is a case in point. Naturally, before the war no-one gave any serious thought to the idea that such a tiny, isolated town on the west coast of Scotland would ever be raided. It wasn't even an obvious "target of opportunity" for a pilot who'd got lost on his way to Clydeside to ditch his bombs. No public shelters were built and the town played host to children evacuated from Central Scotland.

But, of course, the effects of war were felt everywhere. Campbeltown's natural harbour made it a useful base for Royal Navy vessels, and the Navy also commandeered the local secondary school building. Soon those who'd imagined they could sleep safely in their beds, unaffected by the war in the air, discovered that there's always a price to pay for complacency.

Early one evening in November 1940, a sole German raider visited the town. An Edwardian hotel by the town's pier was badly damaged while the local hall next door lost its clock tower. A bullet was fired through the glass door of the local cinema, which incidentally still has a claim to fame as the oldest purpose-built cinema in Scotland. Indeed it took until the 1970s for that relatively minor piece of damage to be repaired - much to the disappointment of some locals who thought a piece of the town's heritage had been swept away!

My grandmother - then in her twenties - and her sister had been preparing to go the cinema when the raid began, but were delayed as they were waiting for their mother. They were always aware that if they had set off on time, they would have been by the hotel as the bombs dropped. There must be countless such stories of people avoiding death, injury or shock by pure chance.

Because of wartime censorship, the raid wasn't reported in the local paper. Only a few death notices and a story about the local council discussing the provision of air raid shelters suggest that something significant may have happened. Whether the town was targeted or simply presented itself to a lost German pilot, we may never know.

Three months later, there was a more serious raid - and this time, the intention was clear. A number of planes dropped mines around the entrance to Campbeltown Loch, later made famous by the Scottish entertainer Andy Stewart. Some hit houses along the shore and the casualties included at least one distinguished local figure, the town's Procurator Fiscal - in effect, the public prosecutor.

After that, the Luftwaffe never returned - although many heard the sound of German planes when Belfast was blitzed. As the crow flies, Northern Ireland is very close to Kintyre. While the damage and casualty numbers were light compared to the suffering inflicted on so many cities and large industrial towns, those two small raids are a reminder that the wings of the Luftwaffe spread to even the furthest corners of Britain.

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