Sadly, it has to be admitted that these changes began to put an end to the whole-hearted support the village had formerly given to its own local entertainments. Gradually enthusiasm for the cantatas and operettas that the schoolmaster Mr. Low had worked hard to produce in previous years started to fade. He had died in 1926 and at that time there was no one to continue his work. In the 1930s Mrs Ross Brown, founder of the Amateur Dramatics Society who had produced plays and recitations, took ill and resigned, and for some years newcomer Mr. William Ritchie, a retired actor, took over.
In 1939, with better transport enabling farmers to compete in bigger Agriculture Shows further afield, it was regretfully decided that Carmunnock’s annual Cattle Show on the north Glebe be discontinued.
Few people had cars in the early 1930s, but now as well as train journeys, Charabancs Companies throughout the country gave folk the chance of new adventure, transporting them numbers of miles away from the environment they had always known to places some of them had never even heard of. They say that people’s excitement was tremendous. By the later 1930s these charabancs - buses with canvas roll-back roofs, mainly for holiday occasions - took Carmunnock’s Sunday School children and the Woman’s Guild on their annual summer outings. We are told by folk here that these were a great experience, the Guild outings of those early years still remembered for their fun and friendship.
Our quiet country village was no longer isolated at the back of the hill. People from the city and other districts were now even more attracted to live in the quaint little place with its 18th century cottages near its old church. It had a good primary school, an excellent golf course little more than a mile away, the village’s own regular bus service to town, and if you hired or walked or cycled down to Busby, the train too.
From the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s was the time of the bungalows! North along Windlaw Road they went up: in Gallowhill Road two together behind Viewfield and more along the road north-east of and opposite the front of Gallowhill Farm; Kittochside Road was built with them; Waterside Road had several extending along both sides south of the stone villa Five Acre Gate at 150 and next to no. 154; and there were more bungalows on Busby Road west of Bankhead Farm and (opposite The Hut) over the slope that became Bankhead Road. Without a doubt, the buyers were influenced by the County Council’s reassuring promise that Carmunnock would for all time be surrounded by its green belt to be held in perpetuity.
Roads with their modern houses that had been bought by strangers were extending outwards and away from the community in the centre of the old village. Yet even now, Carmunnock on its brae-side, open to the wind and rain, to snow and sunshine again, was still a quiet, sometimes seeming a cut off, forgotten little place. Daily the workers and business people went off to the city or nearby districts and left it, self-contained, getting on with its everyday life as it has always done.
Through most of the 1930s Connells’ old empty Smiddy on Waterside Road still stood. Next to it, now that Mrs Harper had retired, the Avonbank Co-operative Society put their sign above the store door, still selling groceries, hardware, paraffin and oil. Even then, shop hours were long by our standards today: from about 7.30 or 8 in the morning to 7.30 on weekdays and 9 o’clock or even later on Saturdays - being the day customers paid the week’s bill for which the reward was frequently a little bag of sweets or a bar of chocolate.
At the village shop the first Mr. Archie Tagg, whose second wife was Nellie Campbell of Thorncliffe at the top of the Green, had dodged grumpily between being Postmaster-cum-shopkeeper at Campbell Place and his other job as Weighman at the Weys-box nearby at the foot of Greenside. Traffic was steady, drivers impatient to be attended to and shop customers must wait. “He’d keep you waiting for 6d,” remarked one frustrated housewife left standing at the shop counter. But now the kindlier sons, Sandy and another Archie, were taking over and tiny Mrs Tagg, plump and cheerful, chatted with her customers.
Far away in England, King George V’s life had come slowly to its close, King Edward VIII had abdicated after only a few months, and now in 1937 it was the Coronation of King George VI and his consort Queen Elizabeth. In Carmunnock celebrations were held in Crofthill Field or Park behind Linnbrae and Bankhead Farm just as two years before, and flags flew everywhere in the village in patriotic loyalty.
Lanarkshire County Council had already built 15 blocks of houses: eight stone ones on Netherton or Glasgow Road and Windlaw Road in 1922, five brick and harled ones in Hillcrest in 1927 where Gallowhill Farm’s field and the garden plots had been, and then in 1936 at the south-east end of Gallowhill Road near Trummle Brae, on a rocky piece of ground useless to the farmer, two fine-looking blocks went up, quite different in style from the others.
Some say that after these, the County Council wanted to build on the south Glebe field, but Sir Andrew McCance who moved into The Craigs after the Misses Cassie and Maggie Brown left objected strongly. Others say that it was Crofthill, the village’s playing field at the north-west end of Carmunnock, that the Council was interested in. Crofthill was one of High Netherton’s fields whose land was owned by Glasgow Corporation, and it would seem that Glasgow agreed Lanarkshire have it for building if it was suitable.
About 1937, it was decided that the Glebe land on the south side of Pathhead Road be taken over from the Lawsons of Parklea who worked it, to become the King George’s Playing Field - not in the new King’s name, but in George V’s.
No one in the village was very happy about this decision. They had always liked the Croftie best. So, mainly because in a few years’ time the new field at the south Glebe was dug up to grow vegetables as part of the War-time Dig for Victory food-growing campaign, the children’s football area and their swings remained at the familiar old playground at Crofthill throughout the 1939-45 War and into the 1950s.
Next to Crofthill Park, the Warnocks who had owned Bankhead Farm auctioned the farmhouse, steadings, cottage and fields about 1927 and they fell to Mr. John Twaddle.
But a different family of that name, Mr. and Mrs Alexander Warnock whose son James had been killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, lived at Pedmyre. Many years before old Mr. Warnock’s death in 1927, the farm was bought out from the Estate and by the time Mrs Warnock died in 1937, they had left money and their field land (west of High Netherton’s) in Trust for the good of Carmunnock. The Warnock Trust was at first put in the care of the Parish Council and is nowadays in that of Glasgow City Council.