TO widespread applause, the stage and screen star Gracie Fields left the special car reserved for VIPs and jumped up onto the rostrum of the South Bandstand, where the Munn and Felton’s works band had been playing her songs.
Such was the density of the crowds that it had taken Fields longer than expected to reach the bandstand at Glasgow’s Empire Exhibition, that day in early August, 1938. For the last few yards, mounted police officers had to clear a path for her.
Arrayed before Gracie were some 10,000 people. They filled the bandstand area and packed the adjacent avenues. There were spectators perched on nearby statues. Others had taken up positions on the pylons at the end of the ornamental lake nearby.
“With complete unconcern and evident enjoyment” she stepped onto a chair, removed her short jacket, and reached for one of the microphones. “Is there anybody left in Glasgow?” she shouted.
“With a continuous flow of amusing remarks”, noted the Glasgow Herald’s reporter on the spot, “she almost ‘wrecked’ her introduction by Mr A.B. King, the cinema proprietor, who had to abandon the microphone in her favour”.
Replying to a vote of thanks, however, Fields did describe it as “the biggest welcome I have ever received”.
It had indeed.
When she arrived in the forenoon, crowds gathered round each pavilion she visited. From one building to another, she had as escort two mounted policemen and roughly one hundred small boys, who had trotted alongside her car.
She called in at the U.K. Pavilion, the Palaces of Industry and the Amusements Park. In the latter she sampled several of the attractions and described the scenic railway as thrilling as the “big ride” at Blackpool. She was an hour ahead of schedule by the time she went for lunch at the Garden Club.
Lunch over, she visited the BBC Pavilion and the Peace Pavilion, and she made an unexpected detour into the Women of the Empire Pavilion, where she watched a hastily-arranged mannequin parader and took a special interest in the gowns of fabrics from her native Lancashire.
On the bandstand, she spent little time of preliminary remarks, preferring instead to sing such songs as ‘Little Old Lady’, and via a handful of other numbers, ended with another popular number, ‘Sally’.
As she left the bandstand police had to hold back the crowds, who pushed in a solid mass towards her car. She was driven to the Atlantic restaurant, where she appeared briefly on the balcony before sitting down to dinner. Later in the evening, she was taken to Central Station, where a crowd gave her an enthusiastic send-off to London.
* Tomorrow: Further snapshots from the Exhibition
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