Dundee’s greatest ever sportsman Dick McTaggart has described VE Day as “like winning a gold medal”.
The octogenarian former Olympic boxing champion was just 10 years old when the Second World War in Europe ended on May 8, 1945.
However, he remembers the delight at seeing soldiers return home after the “heartbreak” of the preceding years.
“It was like winning a gold medal when the war came to an end,” said Dick, who lived in Dens Road at the time and was a pupil at St Mary’s Forebank and later St John’s.
“I remember the air raids and black outs very well.
“My father was in the Pioneers doing all the dirty work, all the digging. My mum and dad worked in the mills. In those days it was very difficult. My mum had a big family. We got our free dinners at school. We were lucky.
“I remember folk down the town. Fantastic. Hundreds of people there.
“It was great to see the soldiers. The war was over. That was the main thing. All the heartbreak before…”
Dick won Olympic gold at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, and he is regarded as the finest amateur boxer Britain has ever produced.
His performance earned him the Val Barker Trophy as the most stylish boxer of the 1956 Games.
The light weight fighter twice returned to the Olympic arena, winning bronze in Rome in 1960 and going out early in 1964 in Tokyo, Japan.
Other achievements included gold at the 1958 Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, and silver at the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth, Australia.
He won gold at the European Amateur Championships in Belgrade in 1961 and was a five-time winner of the ABA Championship.
Priceless memories include the time he had dinner with Mohammed Ali at the Rome Olympics, went skinny dipping in Honolulu and turned down a party invitation from Tom Jones in Los Angeles because he was busy.
It was all a far cry from his early life as one of a family of 18 children raised in a Dens Road tenement.
But more than 50 years after he gave up boxing and as many decades after he left Dundee, he remains grateful for the way the city shaped his early life.
