#52Ancestors - Week 44 - Frightening

Week 44 (October 29 - November 4) – Frightening: Do you have an ancestor who did something frightening or lived through a scary event? Do you have your own ghost story in the family? Now is the perfect time to share!

I have 3 relatives who went through the same frightening event - unfortunately one of them, my Uncle Eddie Martin did not survive.

Eddie Martin was my father's youngest brother and the 2nd youngest child of James Martin and Annie Dempsey. He was born on January 11th, 1937.

Also involved in the incident were Eddie's brother Alex and his brother-in-law Angus. What you're going to read in the newspaper articles is something that most of us would think would only happen in the movies.

What makes the incident perhaps worse than it is (once you read the newspaper articles), is that it happened on the night that Alex's wife, Betty, gave birth to their first child.

The news of the event starts of simply enough - no real detail:
Glasgow Herald June 6, 1960

But then we get more and more detail - and it was a pretty horrific incident. I won't go into what happened in detail here, but you can read the newspaper articles below:

Here's the 2 parts from the Glasgow Herald on September 21, 1960 about the trial and sentencing:
Part 1
Part 2

The following is the recollection of what happened that night from Alex's wife Betty, passed on to me by her daughter:

8 yrs ehh! Nothing for what they done,,,,they lied through there teeth, as they already had attacked Eddie when my da and uncle gus went after them,,,,,as my da n gus was in the house when it happened, and that's when they took the weapons because they had been told that they had hit Eddie with a hatchet, poor Eddie, poor poor guy

My da had a name, he was a very very tough guy in Glasgow, but that was when he had been younger, these guys where very well known from a gang, I think from Castlemilk, a notorious area in Glasgow, they came to the Calton area to kill my da, and poor Eddie who was a quiet guy was mistaken fir my da,,,,,,as far as my mum tells me, my da had had the argument previously with one of them,

My da fought and got the knife off one of them, but the other hit my da with the hatchet also, on his head and back, by all rights my da should have died also, but he survived,,,
My ma also said my da had ran out the house with no shoes on,,,,as Annie (Alex and Eddie's mother) told her,,,
My ma said Eddie was a very very quiet guy, not a fighter,