IT was, for decades, a Glasgow landmark. The Grand Hotel at Charing Cross was closed in October 1968 and subsequently demolished to make way for the new inner-city ring road. The Evening Times’s Jack House wrote a fond tribute, detailing its history - it was opened in 1878 by one John Duncanson - and its colourful role over the decades.
The Grand, pictured here in 1966, had 105 rooms, a ballroom, a cocktail bar and nine function rooms. House observed that sentimental guests had been trying to book a specific room for one night as they had spent their honeymoon there; some had tears in their eyes when told, with regret, that it was fully booked. “Perhaps the Grand’s greatest days,” he wrote, “was when it was run by the Glasgow caterers, R. and S.W. Kerr. These were the days when the sprigs of West of Scotland society held big, snobbish assemblies. The bachelors would hold their assembly in the Grand and take over the whole of two floors. They would be followed by the spinsters, and the spinsters’ ball in the Grand was the Glasgow equivalent of being a debutante.”
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Herald DiaryA Times reader, James McGowan, wrote to say he had worked as a pageboy at the Grand, beginning in early 1914. “I remember seeing the young German waiters leaving the hotel with their cases en route for the Fatherland, and the manager, who was also German, wishing them all the best on their journey home,” he recalled. “I often wondered later how many of them survived the war.”
In March 1969, demolition workers in the partly-demolished Grand had to run to safety when staircases and some inside walls crashed to the ground. “I was standing on top of the west corner,” one said, “when I heard somebody shouting ‘run, run!’”
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