The G.I. Bride

Sculpture by Ranald MacColl, situated inside the station at the Partick Interchange.



Text from the adjacent notice:

Many will recall the G.I. Bride as one of the cast of Bud Neill’s celebrated 1950s cowboy cartoon strip Lobey Dosser. She is immortalised in bronze in her home town of ‘Pertick’.

She originally lived in Neill’s mythical Calton Creek, a small town in the Arizona desert which was populated solely by Glasgow emigrants. However, like many real-life Scottish women she had married a G.I. and followed him to what she thought would be a better life in America only to return home disillusioned.

In the cartoon strip, she is seen to be constantly trying to hitchhike home to Scotland. We will never know if she made it back but we can salute her guts and determination with this significant sculpture.

The location is doubly appropriate since Bud Neill was born in Partick.

The G.I. Bride is a companion piece to the Lobey Dosser/Rank Bajin equestrian statue on Woodlands Road in Glasgow and was commissioned by patron of the arts Colin Beattie in partnership with SPT and C. Spencer Ltd.