- Contributed by
- madantler
- People in story:
- William Forbes Rolland
- Location of story:
- Bothwell Golfcourse
- Article ID:
- A2045224
- Contributed on:
- 15 November 2003
My grandfather, a bank manager at Bothwell (south of Glasgow) served with the Observer Corp during WW2.
(In WW1, he served with the Scots Guards at Ypres and was awarded the Military Medal for conveying messages under heavy machine gun fire.)
The Observer Corp post was situated on the golf course on the edge of Bothwell. Also on duty was the local greengrocer who by all accounts would fall asleep as soon as he arrived on duty, the only time he would wake up was when he heard a plane, long before anyone else.
On this particular night, the greengrocer awoke and said he could hear a plane, the others could hear nothing !
A few minutes later, sure enough a single plane appeared, they identified it as german and repoted it to HQ.
It was not until much later that they found out that the plane was that of Rudolph Hess on his way to meet the Duke of Hamilton. The Bothwell post was the first to report the plane.
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