A SMALL party of rescuers balanced precariously on a pile of rubble where just half an hour before a busy shopping arcade had stood.

Surrounded by the mangled remains of the buildings, the group and the scene were silent, in marked contrast to the previous 30 minutes of frantic action when every available ambulance in Glasgow had made for Clarkston Toll.

The victims of a powerful gas blast at 2.50pm on October 21, 1971, had been rushed to hospital and quiet had descended on the disaster scene as the grim task of checking for victims began.

"We were listening for sur-vivors," says Dr George Napier, remembering the aftermath of that fateful day, 40 years ago, when 22 were killed.

Dr Napier added: "We were listening, but there was nothing."

Dr Napier, then aged 35 and a doctor with 10 years' experience, had been holding an anti-natal clinic in Eagles-ham when the call came through that afternoon.

He said: "The doctor at the clinic opposite the shops had phoned round all the local GPs asking us to come down and lend a hand.

"By the time I got down there, people form the Victoria Infirmary had been and removed all the casualties. It was just a big heap of rubble.

"But along with a number of others I was asked to stand on the rubble, under the overhanging car park and we had a couple of minutes silence.

"We waited for noises - but there was nothing."

He recalls the scene of devastation after the blast which was caused by a build-up of gas under the shops.

Dr Napier, now 75, added: "Where the shops were, there was just a heap of rubble. The shops at the top end of the Toll were still standing, undamaged, but as you came down, the car park had part of its supports removed by the blast, and it was hanging down over the rubble with cars still on top of it. The platform of the car park was left dangling.

"It looked pretty horrendous - it was a heap of rubble and glass."

Stewart Miller was just 16 at the time and was working as a milk boy. The shops were on his regular run.

Now a local councillor, he remembered: "The whole place went up. There was a chap who stayed just round the corner and he phoned my father to say Clarkston has just exploded. My father Matthew said 'don't be silly,' as he'd just gone through it.

"But I remember going to Boys Brigade that evening, there was a girl who helped at BBs and she came in saying she'd come up from the station and seen limbs all over the place."

Fellow councillor Douglas Yates was a young police constable based in Johnstone at the time.

HE was sent to the scene soon after the blast and remembers the arduous task faced by emergency services: "It was unpreceden-ted. To be confronted with that was new for everyone.

"It was a question of trying to find out who was missing. Who knew how many custo-mers were in the shops, how many were passing by? It was a challenge to bring in plant in to get lights on the scene.

"It was one of those scenes ingrained into your memory, you get flashes of it. It was a tragic and traumatic exper-ience. Many people had narrow escapes. From a police pers-pective it was a difficult scene to manage.

"We had to discern what was the cause of the blast and we had the gas people in early on as the immediate issue was whether there was going to be a secondary explosion.

"It was chaotic. There was a massive amount of rubble which blocked the roadway. It was surreal, with cars at strange angles.

"We had a police office in Clarkston, we used that to store all the clothing and other personal items that had been left strewn all over the place. They were piled up.

"It was a gory job, to attend the mortuary. There was an officer assigned to do it. It was arduous, as some bodies were very badly damaged."

The aftermath of the explosion, the 40th anniver- sary of which falls tomorrow, prompted a fatal accident enquiry which lasted for 19 days. In the end, the probe found that no one person or persons were to blame.

At the time of the hearings, the Evening Times' sister paper the Glasgow Herald reported: "Advocate depute Mr W Stewart QC told the jury that it was fortunate that the disaster occurred on a wet Thursday afternoon.

"He said that if the explosion had taken place at a time when the weather was good, or on a Saturday afternoon when the shops were busier the result might have been the worst peacetime disaster Scotland had known."

A flower-laying ceremony will take place next to Clarkston Hall tomorrow at 3pm. Then, on Sunday at 2pm a service will be held in Greenbank Church, where residents and visitors can pay their respects to those who lost their lives or loved ones.