dani bongo

Thats the flights booked, Shetland Saints are on their way.

Naw thought I might wait 'til March, thats the Ashtree booked for me and my son and a room at my sisters for my daughter.

Naw thought I might wait 'til March, thats the Ashtree booked for me and my son and a room at my sisters for my daughter.

Naw thought I might wait 'til March, thats the Ashtree booked for me and my son and a room at my sisters for my daughter.

Naw thought I might wait 'til March, thats the Ashtree booked for me and my son and a room at my sisters for my daughter.

Naw thought I might wait 'til March, thats the Ashtree booked for me and my son and a room at my sisters for my daughter.

Thats the flights booked, Shetland Saints are on their way.

Thats the flights booked, Shetland Saints are on their way.

Thats the flights booked, Shetland Saints are on their way.

Bummer to be on nights this weekend but am off for the final. Will definately be coming down and would expect my sons to tag along for a freebe day out.
A lot of big performances today with NO failures. Best Sunday afternoon TV I've watched ever!!
The guys at works are all happy for me - they usually rip the pissh from me most weekends.

Good luck to you's Welsh bastairds next year now that John Scott and moi have chucked it.

Hi KB, I've been coaching youth football up in Shetland for a few years now and have had the time of my life taking the lads down to tournaments on the mainland. Started at u14 and now currently in charge of Shetland u18/19.
The funding for these trips is huge about £6500 to take the lads to Stirling this year and to be honest most of the money comes from the players. Tesco let us do bag packing which brings in a few quid but our biggest source of revenue comes from holding our own football coaching courses.
Rangers and Ross Co trundle into town every summer with their soccer roadshows and charge the kids £25 a pop to boot a ball at some targets watched by a couple of 21 year old chancers wearing Rangers/Ross co tracksuits. Over a 100 kids would turn up at these events so it inspired us to do our own soccer skills weekend and charge the kids a tenner with the local council funding t-shirts that are given to all the kids.
It took a bit of organising but with a dozen or so coaches each doing a couple of hours coaching over a weekend it has proved a huge success and raised over a couple of grand in the past two seasons.
Hope you get as much satisfaction out of your team as I have over the years. I'm giving up at the end of this season to make way for other coaches who are coming through and it will be difficult to walk away. I wont miss the bag packing though!

Good luck for this season.
Have been coaching youth teams and refereeing for many years in Shetland first and then Orkney. Have taken a back seat now but appreciate how much time and effort that goes into running kids football teams.
I know dani bongo from my time in Shetland - we actually played in the same team for a few years.

Hi KB, I've been coaching youth football up in Shetland for a few years now and have had the time of my life taking the lads down to tournaments on the mainland. Started at u14 and now currently in charge of Shetland u18/19.
The funding for these trips is huge about £6500 to take the lads to Stirling this year and to be honest most of the money comes from the players. Tesco let us do bag packing which brings in a few quid but our biggest source of revenue comes from holding our own football coaching courses.
Rangers and Ross Co trundle into town every summer with their soccer roadshows and charge the kids £25 a pop to boot a ball at some targets watched by a couple of 21 year old chancers wearing Rangers/Ross co tracksuits. Over a 100 kids would turn up at these events so it inspired us to do our own soccer skills weekend and charge the kids a tenner with the local council funding t-shirts that are given to all the kids.
It took a bit of organising but with a dozen or so coaches each doing a couple of hours coaching over a weekend it has proved a huge success and raised over a couple of grand in the past two seasons.
Hope you get as much satisfaction out of your team as I have over the years. I'm giving up at the end of this season to make way for other coaches who are coming through and it will be difficult to walk away. I wont miss the bag packing though!

Good thread Kombi.
Most know I’ve been heavily involved with my sons club at Wishaw Wycombe Wanderers. I was on the Executive Committee but I recently stepped down because of work commitments and time constraints. I still help out with the 98’s though. The team made it to the Scottish Cup Quarter Finals last year and over my time at the club have had 9 players directly leave to go Pro Youth, with another three who were born in 99 dropping down to our younger team before going Pro Youth.
For the most part it’s a well run club with its SFA Quality Mark accreditation at Standard Level – although the club really are ready to submit again for Development Level and possibly even Community Level since we now have an adult and a girls team and their coaches are all now qualified as well.
The Sportsmans Dinner is probably our biggest earner. We're into our third year of them now. The first year was excellent with John McKelvie hosting and Alan Rough and John Gahagan speaking. We made a profit that night of over £6500 which paid for a training kit for everyone of our 250 kids. Last year the profits were down mainly due to the fact that we found it much harder to get donations from football clubs for us to auction but we still made around £5,000 profit. Last year was hosted by John McKelvie again and the speakers were Gavin Strang (who was superb) and Frank McAvennie. Our next one is due in June and this time it's Alan Kennedy and Scot Glynn. At the last count we had sold over 330 tickets for a hall with a capacity of 360 (we moved to a much bigger venue this year).
With the success of the Sportsmans Dinner we also tried a Summer Ball. The idea being that this would allow players Mother's to get involved as well and we had another fantastic night last August. John McKelvie did the jokes but there were a couple of magicians and a brilliant band that was on that night too. Profits were down but only because the committee decided that because the ladies were involved they would glam it up a bit but we still made over £4k.
Other decent earners for us have been the Christmas Raffle draw which usually brings in around £1500 and a football prediction competition that I used to run which brought in around £2k a couple of years ago, and further £600 from the last World Cup.
We usually get one or two bag packing slots over the course of a year at the local Tesco store and we've had the odd occasional one at Morrisons. A day at Tescos will get us anywhere from £1000 - £1500. Morrisons is a smaller store. Last time we were there I think we raised around £350.
We’ve also held race nights which have been decent and a recent event was a thing organized by Motherwell Community Coach Bobby Jenks called Hotshots. Basically the kids took part a competition to find who had the hardest shot in the club. The event was handicapped so that the youngest kids had just as much chance of winning as the oldest kids. There were also other competitions running on the night and we got the parents involved as well with the speed guns. From what I’m hearing the winner at our club was a 9 year old who hit a penalty at 58 mph before the handicap was added….anyway after Motherwell had deducted their 30% fee we made a profit from that of £3000.
Another thing that has worked quite well for us has been the website and the Facebook pages. I stole an idea I found on a Junior Football Clubs pages at the start of the season and put together clear sponsorship packages. From there a number of the guys on the committee approached their mates and their bosses to ask if they’d be interested and the response has been fantastic. I think out of all our teams the only one without sponsorship now is our Under 13’s. The way it usually works is if we get someone who is interested they’ll contact me for the current web and facebook stats and I’ll send them out. We’ve got around 2000 unique users on the website and the facebook stats are brilliant because they’ll break down the demographics as well.
I did a club book thing involving a lot of the former coaches and players. It’s a nice thing to have – and it’s still on sale at Amazon but in terms of profit against the amount of work that went into it, there’s probably better ways to spend your time.
Funding - we’ve got a Sportsmatch application in just now that just seems to be dragging on and on. We were nominated for a Lloyds TSB Foundation Award where we’ve just submitted our forms for approval. And we applied for one of the National Lottery grants at the beginning of the season for our two youngest teams which was successful – but the application was late and a stipulation in the conditions was that we were not to start the project until the funding cheque had arrived. Unfortunately the application didn’t get approved until one week before the football season started and we had already purchased all the equipment so we ‘fessed up and withdrew our application.
We’ve also managed to get McDonalds to sponsor one of our new teams although I don’t know if that was just sponsorship from the local McDonalds franchise owner or if it is a grant that we applied for. Basically McDonalds paid for a complete set of strips. And Topps Tiles always sponsor a number of teams from towns they have stores in that wear yellow and blue – fortunately we meet that criteria so our girls academy were given a complete set of strips and sweatshirts.
When I was at the athletics club I remember applying for grants from Dixons Group (DSGi) and from Sky TV both online but I’ve lost the links for them. And Mars had a Foundation thing as well but they only back clubs from within a 30 mile radius of their factory – or at least so they said.
The athletics club also used to get quite a lot of support from Kwik Fit Insurance and their subsidiaries and Lloyds Banking Group were extremely generous when they ended one of their student banking promotions and they sent us a big box of iPod Shuffles to raffle off – and there was also some brilliant backing from a local driving school that did driving lessons for kids aged 8 and over at Hamilton Racecourse. The company was On Board Training and it really was just a case of our kids fitting exactly the kind of customer they were looking for.
I guess the thing that has worked best for the sports clubs I’ve been involved with is just to keep visible in the community – be aware of branding and if you’ve got more than one team make sure they are all wearing the same kit – and to have the balls to ask and to be able to take rejection.
There’s been loads more but I can’t think of it all off the top of my head. I’ll add to the thread when I remember

I've noticed there are a few of us on BAWA who coach football or are involved with local youth football clubs.
My lad {Innes} joined soccer school at Romford Borough Youth this time last year & I was invited to coach the Under 8's team. I've been coaching for just over the year now & enjoying it immensely.
I've played football down here for 20 odd years [boots got hung up 3 weeks ago} but my biggest buzz was playing at Love Street in Saints Aid 1. That was relegated to 2nd best buzz when the boys recorded their 1st ever win {3-2 against Great Danes of Brentwood} & i've enjoyed every minute of it since.
Noticing there were a few who are involved with youth football, it got me thinking that with us being community spirited these days, there's great potential for ideas, suggestions, contacts, deals etc to be shared.
I started the ball rolling by PM'ing some funding streams to Stuart Dickson {they may be of use to Wishaw Wycombe Wanderers, but they may not but if you don't try} & Stuart fired back a few good ideas that I have found useful for my club.
With a few more youth football coaches treading these boards, I am confident sharing experiences, deals, ideas etc may be of benefit to more.
anyways, to get the ball rolling here's a few of the funding streams that I am currently exploring {some might no longer be available}
http://inspiredfacil...ortengland.org/
http://www.sported.o...-the-south-east
http://www.footballf...n.org.uk/apply/
http://www.sportengl..._deliverin.aspx
http://www.fundingce...idedsearch.aspx
http://www.funding4sport.co.uk/
http://www.barclaysc...portsaward.com/
http://www.sportengl...all_grants.aspx
http://www.cash-4-clubs.com/
http://www.sportengl...portsmatch.aspx
http://www.torchtrop...g/bursaries.htm
http://www.marsrefuel.com/refuel-fund/
http://www.skillsact...y_ovens_bursary

Hi KB, I've been coaching youth football up in Shetland for a few years now and have had the time of my life taking the lads down to tournaments on the mainland. Started at u14 and now currently in charge of Shetland u18/19.
The funding for these trips is huge about £6500 to take the lads to Stirling this year and to be honest most of the money comes from the players. Tesco let us do bag packing which brings in a few quid but our biggest source of revenue comes from holding our own football coaching courses.
Rangers and Ross Co trundle into town every summer with their soccer roadshows and charge the kids £25 a pop to boot a ball at some targets watched by a couple of 21 year old chancers wearing Rangers/Ross co tracksuits. Over a 100 kids would turn up at these events so it inspired us to do our own soccer skills weekend and charge the kids a tenner with the local council funding t-shirts that are given to all the kids.
It took a bit of organising but with a dozen or so coaches each doing a couple of hours coaching over a weekend it has proved a huge success and raised over a couple of grand in the past two seasons.
Hope you get as much satisfaction out of your team as I have over the years. I'm giving up at the end of this season to make way for other coaches who are coming through and it will be difficult to walk away. I wont miss the bag packing though!

Hi KB, I've been coaching youth football up in Shetland for a few years now and have had the time of my life taking the lads down to tournaments on the mainland. Started at u14 and now currently in charge of Shetland u18/19.
The funding for these trips is huge about £6500 to take the lads to Stirling this year and to be honest most of the money comes from the players. Tesco let us do bag packing which brings in a few quid but our biggest source of revenue comes from holding our own football coaching courses.
Rangers and Ross Co trundle into town every summer with their soccer roadshows and charge the kids £25 a pop to boot a ball at some targets watched by a couple of 21 year old chancers wearing Rangers/Ross co tracksuits. Over a 100 kids would turn up at these events so it inspired us to do our own soccer skills weekend and charge the kids a tenner with the local council funding t-shirts that are given to all the kids.
It took a bit of organising but with a dozen or so coaches each doing a couple of hours coaching over a weekend it has proved a huge success and raised over a couple of grand in the past two seasons.
Hope you get as much satisfaction out of your team as I have over the years. I'm giving up at the end of this season to make way for other coaches who are coming through and it will be difficult to walk away. I wont miss the bag packing though!

My father was a fireman and attended the incident. These are his words;
A wee story about an event which I was involved with back in 1964, it is an eyewitness account of the Brown and Polson dust explosion on the 5th. of june 1964. when five souls lost there lives..but to start with I have to go back to the night previous, the 4th. june 1964....I was on nightshift with blue watch..when I was told by my station officer to get myself out to the thornhill hospital as my wife was about to give birth to my first born..when I arrived at the hospital my wife Jean had given birth to a son..I was over the moon with delight at having a son.
Back at the fire station to complete my shift. the bells went off at 0630am..it was a call to an explosion at the brown and polson factory, persons reported missing....the factory was an old building with very thick walls and was five stories tall...when we arrived at the scene all that was left of it was one very large pile of bricks and morter, being young and inexperianced [ I was only 24 at this time ] My first impression was that the mill had been pulled down by contractors..but I was so wrong, as I made my way to the debris I noticed a movement in the rubble when a man appeared out of it his brown overalls shredded off of him along with half his skin hanging like tatters from him..he muttered to me where his two mates were seen last..so I helped the poor soul over to the care of an ambulance crew, turned round and headed back to the scene of chaos
...I called over to another fireman [ Alec Lawler ] to come and help me to search the area that the injured workman had told me about..so together we tore at the rubble with our hands, when we heard someone groaning we cleared the mess from him and made a stretcher out of a short extension ladder,roped him in it with a personal line [which we all carried in these days ] then lowered him down to some other firemen....we then resumed searching the rubble and came to a bit of brown cloth, as we cleared the bricks and mortar from it we had found another soul..but he was dead, he was lying face down wth a massive lump of concrete on top of him..we cleared it off of him and called for another stretcher to be passed up to us, we wrapped his head in rags and secured his body with a line and lowered him to our mates down below.......another two workers were found in the remains of a works van it was completely flattened by the whole of the gable wall which crashed down on it,,it was just like a butchers shop,terrible..the last person was found two days later lying beside a three ton truck. which no one knew was there untill a bulldozer found it..the fifth worker was never found......the explosion was caused by corn dust which had gathered in the old mill over the years .. under certain atmospheric conditions this dust can glow and then ignite devouring the air inside the building, which then causes an implosion.......although this happened back in 1964 I sometimes dream of the apparition of the first workman lumbering towards me...scary...now I tried to google up this tragic event, but could find no trace of it, so I thought if there is no public record of it..then why not tell it to you all on this forum ... and hopefully lay to rest the ghosts in me.....
My father is now 72 and still has nightmares about that night, the explosion not my entrance into the world. Great thread by the way.

My father was a fireman and attended the incident. These are his words;
A wee story about an event which I was involved with back in 1964, it is an eyewitness account of the Brown and Polson dust explosion on the 5th. of june 1964. when five souls lost there lives..but to start with I have to go back to the night previous, the 4th. june 1964....I was on nightshift with blue watch..when I was told by my station officer to get myself out to the thornhill hospital as my wife was about to give birth to my first born..when I arrived at the hospital my wife Jean had given birth to a son..I was over the moon with delight at having a son.
Back at the fire station to complete my shift. the bells went off at 0630am..it was a call to an explosion at the brown and polson factory, persons reported missing....the factory was an old building with very thick walls and was five stories tall...when we arrived at the scene all that was left of it was one very large pile of bricks and morter, being young and inexperianced [ I was only 24 at this time ] My first impression was that the mill had been pulled down by contractors..but I was so wrong, as I made my way to the debris I noticed a movement in the rubble when a man appeared out of it his brown overalls shredded off of him along with half his skin hanging like tatters from him..he muttered to me where his two mates were seen last..so I helped the poor soul over to the care of an ambulance crew, turned round and headed back to the scene of chaos
...I called over to another fireman [ Alec Lawler ] to come and help me to search the area that the injured workman had told me about..so together we tore at the rubble with our hands, when we heard someone groaning we cleared the mess from him and made a stretcher out of a short extension ladder,roped him in it with a personal line [which we all carried in these days ] then lowered him down to some other firemen....we then resumed searching the rubble and came to a bit of brown cloth, as we cleared the bricks and mortar from it we had found another soul..but he was dead, he was lying face down wth a massive lump of concrete on top of him..we cleared it off of him and called for another stretcher to be passed up to us, we wrapped his head in rags and secured his body with a line and lowered him to our mates down below.......another two workers were found in the remains of a works van it was completely flattened by the whole of the gable wall which crashed down on it,,it was just like a butchers shop,terrible..the last person was found two days later lying beside a three ton truck. which no one knew was there untill a bulldozer found it..the fifth worker was never found......the explosion was caused by corn dust which had gathered in the old mill over the years .. under certain atmospheric conditions this dust can glow and then ignite devouring the air inside the building, which then causes an implosion.......although this happened back in 1964 I sometimes dream of the apparition of the first workman lumbering towards me...scary...now I tried to google up this tragic event, but could find no trace of it, so I thought if there is no public record of it..then why not tell it to you all on this forum ... and hopefully lay to rest the ghosts in me.....
My father is now 72 and still has nightmares about that night, the explosion not my entrance into the world. Great thread by the way.

My father was a fireman and attended the incident. These are his words;
A wee story about an event which I was involved with back in 1964, it is an eyewitness account of the Brown and Polson dust explosion on the 5th. of june 1964. when five souls lost there lives..but to start with I have to go back to the night previous, the 4th. june 1964....I was on nightshift with blue watch..when I was told by my station officer to get myself out to the thornhill hospital as my wife was about to give birth to my first born..when I arrived at the hospital my wife Jean had given birth to a son..I was over the moon with delight at having a son.
Back at the fire station to complete my shift. the bells went off at 0630am..it was a call to an explosion at the brown and polson factory, persons reported missing....the factory was an old building with very thick walls and was five stories tall...when we arrived at the scene all that was left of it was one very large pile of bricks and morter, being young and inexperianced [ I was only 24 at this time ] My first impression was that the mill had been pulled down by contractors..but I was so wrong, as I made my way to the debris I noticed a movement in the rubble when a man appeared out of it his brown overalls shredded off of him along with half his skin hanging like tatters from him..he muttered to me where his two mates were seen last..so I helped the poor soul over to the care of an ambulance crew, turned round and headed back to the scene of chaos
...I called over to another fireman [ Alec Lawler ] to come and help me to search the area that the injured workman had told me about..so together we tore at the rubble with our hands, when we heard someone groaning we cleared the mess from him and made a stretcher out of a short extension ladder,roped him in it with a personal line [which we all carried in these days ] then lowered him down to some other firemen....we then resumed searching the rubble and came to a bit of brown cloth, as we cleared the bricks and mortar from it we had found another soul..but he was dead, he was lying face down wth a massive lump of concrete on top of him..we cleared it off of him and called for another stretcher to be passed up to us, we wrapped his head in rags and secured his body with a line and lowered him to our mates down below.......another two workers were found in the remains of a works van it was completely flattened by the whole of the gable wall which crashed down on it,,it was just like a butchers shop,terrible..the last person was found two days later lying beside a three ton truck. which no one knew was there untill a bulldozer found it..the fifth worker was never found......the explosion was caused by corn dust which had gathered in the old mill over the years .. under certain atmospheric conditions this dust can glow and then ignite devouring the air inside the building, which then causes an implosion.......although this happened back in 1964 I sometimes dream of the apparition of the first workman lumbering towards me...scary...now I tried to google up this tragic event, but could find no trace of it, so I thought if there is no public record of it..then why not tell it to you all on this forum ... and hopefully lay to rest the ghosts in me.....
My father is now 72 and still has nightmares about that night, the explosion not my entrance into the world. Great thread by the way.

My father was a fireman and attended the incident. These are his words;
A wee story about an event which I was involved with back in 1964, it is an eyewitness account of the Brown and Polson dust explosion on the 5th. of june 1964. when five souls lost there lives..but to start with I have to go back to the night previous, the 4th. june 1964....I was on nightshift with blue watch..when I was told by my station officer to get myself out to the thornhill hospital as my wife was about to give birth to my first born..when I arrived at the hospital my wife Jean had given birth to a son..I was over the moon with delight at having a son.
Back at the fire station to complete my shift. the bells went off at 0630am..it was a call to an explosion at the brown and polson factory, persons reported missing....the factory was an old building with very thick walls and was five stories tall...when we arrived at the scene all that was left of it was one very large pile of bricks and morter, being young and inexperianced [ I was only 24 at this time ] My first impression was that the mill had been pulled down by contractors..but I was so wrong, as I made my way to the debris I noticed a movement in the rubble when a man appeared out of it his brown overalls shredded off of him along with half his skin hanging like tatters from him..he muttered to me where his two mates were seen last..so I helped the poor soul over to the care of an ambulance crew, turned round and headed back to the scene of chaos
...I called over to another fireman [ Alec Lawler ] to come and help me to search the area that the injured workman had told me about..so together we tore at the rubble with our hands, when we heard someone groaning we cleared the mess from him and made a stretcher out of a short extension ladder,roped him in it with a personal line [which we all carried in these days ] then lowered him down to some other firemen....we then resumed searching the rubble and came to a bit of brown cloth, as we cleared the bricks and mortar from it we had found another soul..but he was dead, he was lying face down wth a massive lump of concrete on top of him..we cleared it off of him and called for another stretcher to be passed up to us, we wrapped his head in rags and secured his body with a line and lowered him to our mates down below.......another two workers were found in the remains of a works van it was completely flattened by the whole of the gable wall which crashed down on it,,it was just like a butchers shop,terrible..the last person was found two days later lying beside a three ton truck. which no one knew was there untill a bulldozer found it..the fifth worker was never found......the explosion was caused by corn dust which had gathered in the old mill over the years .. under certain atmospheric conditions this dust can glow and then ignite devouring the air inside the building, which then causes an implosion.......although this happened back in 1964 I sometimes dream of the apparition of the first workman lumbering towards me...scary...now I tried to google up this tragic event, but could find no trace of it, so I thought if there is no public record of it..then why not tell it to you all on this forum ... and hopefully lay to rest the ghosts in me.....
My father is now 72 and still has nightmares about that night, the explosion not my entrance into the world. Great thread by the way.

My father was a fireman and attended the incident. These are his words;
A wee story about an event which I was involved with back in 1964, it is an eyewitness account of the Brown and Polson dust explosion on the 5th. of june 1964. when five souls lost there lives..but to start with I have to go back to the night previous, the 4th. june 1964....I was on nightshift with blue watch..when I was told by my station officer to get myself out to the thornhill hospital as my wife was about to give birth to my first born..when I arrived at the hospital my wife Jean had given birth to a son..I was over the moon with delight at having a son.
Back at the fire station to complete my shift. the bells went off at 0630am..it was a call to an explosion at the brown and polson factory, persons reported missing....the factory was an old building with very thick walls and was five stories tall...when we arrived at the scene all that was left of it was one very large pile of bricks and morter, being young and inexperianced [ I was only 24 at this time ] My first impression was that the mill had been pulled down by contractors..but I was so wrong, as I made my way to the debris I noticed a movement in the rubble when a man appeared out of it his brown overalls shredded off of him along with half his skin hanging like tatters from him..he muttered to me where his two mates were seen last..so I helped the poor soul over to the care of an ambulance crew, turned round and headed back to the scene of chaos
...I called over to another fireman [ Alec Lawler ] to come and help me to search the area that the injured workman had told me about..so together we tore at the rubble with our hands, when we heard someone groaning we cleared the mess from him and made a stretcher out of a short extension ladder,roped him in it with a personal line [which we all carried in these days ] then lowered him down to some other firemen....we then resumed searching the rubble and came to a bit of brown cloth, as we cleared the bricks and mortar from it we had found another soul..but he was dead, he was lying face down wth a massive lump of concrete on top of him..we cleared it off of him and called for another stretcher to be passed up to us, we wrapped his head in rags and secured his body with a line and lowered him to our mates down below.......another two workers were found in the remains of a works van it was completely flattened by the whole of the gable wall which crashed down on it,,it was just like a butchers shop,terrible..the last person was found two days later lying beside a three ton truck. which no one knew was there untill a bulldozer found it..the fifth worker was never found......the explosion was caused by corn dust which had gathered in the old mill over the years .. under certain atmospheric conditions this dust can glow and then ignite devouring the air inside the building, which then causes an implosion.......although this happened back in 1964 I sometimes dream of the apparition of the first workman lumbering towards me...scary...now I tried to google up this tragic event, but could find no trace of it, so I thought if there is no public record of it..then why not tell it to you all on this forum ... and hopefully lay to rest the ghosts in me.....
My father is now 72 and still has nightmares about that night, the explosion not my entrance into the world. Great thread by the way.

My father was a fireman and attended the incident. These are his words;
A wee story about an event which I was involved with back in 1964, it is an eyewitness account of the Brown and Polson dust explosion on the 5th. of june 1964. when five souls lost there lives..but to start with I have to go back to the night previous, the 4th. june 1964....I was on nightshift with blue watch..when I was told by my station officer to get myself out to the thornhill hospital as my wife was about to give birth to my first born..when I arrived at the hospital my wife Jean had given birth to a son..I was over the moon with delight at having a son.
Back at the fire station to complete my shift. the bells went off at 0630am..it was a call to an explosion at the brown and polson factory, persons reported missing....the factory was an old building with very thick walls and was five stories tall...when we arrived at the scene all that was left of it was one very large pile of bricks and morter, being young and inexperianced [ I was only 24 at this time ] My first impression was that the mill had been pulled down by contractors..but I was so wrong, as I made my way to the debris I noticed a movement in the rubble when a man appeared out of it his brown overalls shredded off of him along with half his skin hanging like tatters from him..he muttered to me where his two mates were seen last..so I helped the poor soul over to the care of an ambulance crew, turned round and headed back to the scene of chaos
...I called over to another fireman [ Alec Lawler ] to come and help me to search the area that the injured workman had told me about..so together we tore at the rubble with our hands, when we heard someone groaning we cleared the mess from him and made a stretcher out of a short extension ladder,roped him in it with a personal line [which we all carried in these days ] then lowered him down to some other firemen....we then resumed searching the rubble and came to a bit of brown cloth, as we cleared the bricks and mortar from it we had found another soul..but he was dead, he was lying face down wth a massive lump of concrete on top of him..we cleared it off of him and called for another stretcher to be passed up to us, we wrapped his head in rags and secured his body with a line and lowered him to our mates down below.......another two workers were found in the remains of a works van it was completely flattened by the whole of the gable wall which crashed down on it,,it was just like a butchers shop,terrible..the last person was found two days later lying beside a three ton truck. which no one knew was there untill a bulldozer found it..the fifth worker was never found......the explosion was caused by corn dust which had gathered in the old mill over the years .. under certain atmospheric conditions this dust can glow and then ignite devouring the air inside the building, which then causes an implosion.......although this happened back in 1964 I sometimes dream of the apparition of the first workman lumbering towards me...scary...now I tried to google up this tragic event, but could find no trace of it, so I thought if there is no public record of it..then why not tell it to you all on this forum ... and hopefully lay to rest the ghosts in me.....
My father is now 72 and still has nightmares about that night, the explosion not my entrance into the world. Great thread by the way.

My father was a fireman and attended the incident. These are his words;
A wee story about an event which I was involved with back in 1964, it is an eyewitness account of the Brown and Polson dust explosion on the 5th. of june 1964. when five souls lost there lives..but to start with I have to go back to the night previous, the 4th. june 1964....I was on nightshift with blue watch..when I was told by my station officer to get myself out to the thornhill hospital as my wife was about to give birth to my first born..when I arrived at the hospital my wife Jean had given birth to a son..I was over the moon with delight at having a son.
Back at the fire station to complete my shift. the bells went off at 0630am..it was a call to an explosion at the brown and polson factory, persons reported missing....the factory was an old building with very thick walls and was five stories tall...when we arrived at the scene all that was left of it was one very large pile of bricks and morter, being young and inexperianced [ I was only 24 at this time ] My first impression was that the mill had been pulled down by contractors..but I was so wrong, as I made my way to the debris I noticed a movement in the rubble when a man appeared out of it his brown overalls shredded off of him along with half his skin hanging like tatters from him..he muttered to me where his two mates were seen last..so I helped the poor soul over to the care of an ambulance crew, turned round and headed back to the scene of chaos
...I called over to another fireman [ Alec Lawler ] to come and help me to search the area that the injured workman had told me about..so together we tore at the rubble with our hands, when we heard someone groaning we cleared the mess from him and made a stretcher out of a short extension ladder,roped him in it with a personal line [which we all carried in these days ] then lowered him down to some other firemen....we then resumed searching the rubble and came to a bit of brown cloth, as we cleared the bricks and mortar from it we had found another soul..but he was dead, he was lying face down wth a massive lump of concrete on top of him..we cleared it off of him and called for another stretcher to be passed up to us, we wrapped his head in rags and secured his body with a line and lowered him to our mates down below.......another two workers were found in the remains of a works van it was completely flattened by the whole of the gable wall which crashed down on it,,it was just like a butchers shop,terrible..the last person was found two days later lying beside a three ton truck. which no one knew was there untill a bulldozer found it..the fifth worker was never found......the explosion was caused by corn dust which had gathered in the old mill over the years .. under certain atmospheric conditions this dust can glow and then ignite devouring the air inside the building, which then causes an implosion.......although this happened back in 1964 I sometimes dream of the apparition of the first workman lumbering towards me...scary...now I tried to google up this tragic event, but could find no trace of it, so I thought if there is no public record of it..then why not tell it to you all on this forum ... and hopefully lay to rest the ghosts in me.....
My father is now 72 and still has nightmares about that night, the explosion not my entrance into the world. Great thread by the way.