Elizabeth and I attended the Daily Record “Our Heroes” Awards evening on Friday the 7th May.  A great evening’s entertainment and a fine meal was provided by the organisers.  Over 400 guests sat down in the Hilton Hotel in Glasgow for the presentation of 9 awards.

Daily Record readers had voted for nominations in 8 categories and then there was an overall winner.  The co-hosts for the evening were Jackie Bird and Tam Cowan.

I was in the final three for the “Our Sporting Hero” Award.  Congratulations to Kevin Simpson, from Bo’ness, for winning this award.  Kevin is a paralympic tennis player.

The popular winner of the overall award went to 90 year old Alistair Urquhart

Alistair was a soldier in the Gordon Highlanders captured by the Japanese in Singapore. He not only survived working on the notorious Bridge on the River Kwai , but he was subsequently taken on one of the Japanese ‘hellships’ which was torpedoed. Nearly everyone else on board died and Urquhart spent 5 days alone on a raft in the South China Sea before being rescued by a whaling ship.

He was taken to Japan and then forced to work in a mine near Nagasaki. Two months later a nuclear bomb dropped just ten miles away …This is the extraordinary story of a young men, conscripted at nineteen and whose father was a Somme Veteran, survived not just one, but three close encounters with death – encounters which killed nearly all his comrades.

His life story has been told in the recently published book “The Forgotten Highlander“.

A great evening was had by all and thanks to everyone at the Daily Record for organising this popular event.