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This was Scotland in 1950: coast to coast Jock Tamson's bairns stood or sat, lugs cocked to the wireless for news from home and abroad, from Borlanslogie, from Korea, or tuned in for The McFlannels on a Saturday night, or It's All Yours on a Monday with young Jimmy Logan doing the daft laddie Sammy Dreep, sluttering 'Sausages is the boys!' This was Scotland in 1950: land of 250 pits and 80,000 colliers, 100,000 farmworkers and four universities: land of Singer sewing machines in Clydebank, the Saxone Shoe Company in Kilmarnock, Cox Brothers jute mills in Dundee and the North British Locomotive Company in Springburn, every town and city and every part of every city with it own industries and hard-won skills... This was the land of Leyland Tiger buses from Thurso to Dalbeattie, and double-deckers crowding the city trams towards oblivion, or grandiose department stores and miserable slums, tearooms and single-ends, savage sectarianism and gloomy gentility, no-quarter football and stultifying Sundays.
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