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