Chris McColl who runs Forget Me Not Memorials was approached by West Dunbartonshire Council earlier this month in a bid to restore the feature which was in “a bad state.”
Ahead of the 85th anniversary of the Blitz, McColl and his team felt they couldn’t accept the money for such an important job and have instead decided to top up the sum with funds of their own and donate it to charities in Clydebank.
In a bid to find groups in need of the funds, Chris made an appeal on social media asking for suggestions of those who could use the £1500 pot.
Chris said: “The council contacted me and asked if I could have a look at it. I gave them a price, which was a good deal, and said we’d do it.
“We went up, did the work and I was just sitting thinking, it doesn’t sit well with me. I thought the best thing to do is put it back into the Clydebank community.
“I put [a post] on Facebook and it was just inundated with all these charities.”
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Adding an additional £200 to the donation pot, Chris settled on five charities to give the funds too.
These are Golden Friendships, St Margaret’s Hospice, Men Matter Scotland, Clydebank FC White 2013, Whitecrook Community Action Group.
In addition, he is giving over extra funds to a local knitting group.
Chris has been hard at work restoring the memorial to it’s former glory describing the transformation as “night and day.”
He says she doesn’t want to see the names forgotten.
He added: “We have redone all the lettering in 24 karat gold and gave it a steam clean. We’ve done that maybe about three or four times.
“We’ve cleaned up the brass lettering, cleaned all the pillars, the chains and then West Dunbartonshire Council put like two or three tonne of stones down.
“It does look amazing, it’s like night and day.
“There’s all these people’s names, they’ve got like their grannies and grandpas and you know what I mean, their family relatives’ names are all on this.
“Then is our wee way of saying, we do remember you. These were people in the local area. We can remember them and maintain their resting place and maintain like the markers there to sit and say, these were people in our community.”
