FOR a few hours that day in early December, absenteeism was rife. Factories and shipyards were strangely under-populated; the Rootes factory at Linwood, home of the Hillman Imp, shut down because so many key men had disappeared without warning.

The Rootes bosses had issued numerous warnings and requests to its workforce, to no avail. “I am,” said managing director W. Garner, “thoroughly disappointed”. The loss in output that day was 200 cars.

The Scott’s shipyard in Greenock said 590 of its 1,150 workers were AWOL. “Pretty shocking”, murmured a company official. Some 700 workers at the John Brown shipyard were posted missing. “Extremely disappointed”, said an official there. Work on Britain’s largest export order, the passenger liner Kungsholm, had been affected, he added.

But the recently-opened Polaroid film factory in Dumbarton decided to give its workers the afternoon off. Employees at the Lion Foundry and at the M. and C. Switchgear factory were also granted time off. And four TV screens were installed at the Inchinnan factory of the India Tyre factory.

Meanwhile, television screens, wherever they were located - in factories, offices, homes, hotels and pubs, and even in the street (in Leith, main image, a street sweeper forgot his work for a while) - attracted large and enthusiastic audiences. Even councillors in the Glasgow City Chambers put aside their differences for a while and crowded in front of a large-screen TV (above) in the Mahogany Room.

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The occasion was a World Cup qualifying match in Naples, between Italy and the Jock Stein-managed Scotland.

Scotland had done well in their Group 8 matches, which pitched them against not just Italy but Finland and Poland, too. On November 9 a John Greig “wonder goal” had enabled them to beat Italy at Hampden.

“We are not yet through this World Cup wood”, the Evening Times sportswriter Gair Henderson said on November 10, “but it will be a tragedy if we do not fight our way to the finals when we meet the Italians again in Naples on December 7”.

Greig’s late goal prompted a flood of enquiries at the Glasgow office of Alitalia Airlines the following morning from fans eager to get to Naples for the next game. It was estimated that each supporter would have to pay £100 for the experience: £74 1s for the flight and, because of the afternoon kick-off, the remainder for an overnight stay in a hotel.

In the event, a makeshift Scotland team lost 3-0 at the San Paolo stadium. This paper’s special correspondent wrote that the performance disgraced neither Stein nor most of the players.

The match, and the opportunity to play in the 1966 finals in England, had been lost, he pointed out, when Jim Baxter and Denis Law had been forced by injury to withdraw from the squad, followed by Willie Henderson reporting that his leg injury would not stand up to the pace of a World Cup game.