OUR Thanks for the Memories readers like a mystery - so here is one for the music-minded.

Jim Peddie in Motherwell got in touch to ask - who was Syncopatin’ Sandy?

“In the early 50s, I remember my gran taking me to see this man playing the piano non-stop in the window of a furniture store under the Hielanman’s Umbrella,” he smiles.

“Big crowds would gather to cheer him on - I think he might have been trying to break a world record.

“I’d love to know more about him and why he was in Glasgow.”

Glasgow Times:

A little bit of digging reveals Jim is likely to be talking about Syncopatin’ Sandy Strickland, a Bolton musician who travelled around the country completing ‘piano marathons’ – almost 500 in total, it seems.

He survived on milk, fruit juices, glucose, meat extract and gallons of tea – and 140 cigarettes a day – with members of local ambulance crews on hand to mop his brow and even help him shave.

He was one of the last acts to perform at Falkirk’s Roxy theatre, when he did break the world record by playing for around 130 hours non-stop. People queued up to watch and the sound was relayed to the crowds by loudspeaker.

Sandy started playing the piano when he was six; he later played the cornet with the Coldstream Guards and then became an Associate of the London College of Music.

“The worst thing is the terrible monotony of it all. I play chess or draughts and write letters with one hand, just to keep my mind occupied,” he once said in a newspaper interview.

A report in the Bolton News says Sandy achieved 193 hours 50 minutes in 1951. Many reports across the country suggest he topped 130 hours on numerous occasions. It is thought his final public appearance was in Hampshire, in 1964, when he played non-stop for 132 hours.

However, we cannot find many more details about Sandy’s visit to Glasgow – can our Thanks for the Memories readers help? Did you spot him in the city furniture store? Get in touch to share your stories and photos.

Our Thanks for the Memories features prompted more Glasgow stories from regular reader Eddy McLeod, who was born and raised in Cardonald.

He has fond memories of playing football in the street with his pals.

“We played morning until night, we even kept going under the streetlights on dark nights in the crescent,” he says. “Sometimes we had the ‘Olympics’ where we would divide into three teams, GB, the USA and Russia – everyone always wanted to be GB or USA.

“The older boys sometimes organised us in to ‘greyhound’ teams, where the younger boys would be the greyhounds racing each other round the crescent and the older ones would bet pennies on who would win!”

Iain Henderson wrote to tell us his memories of Glasgow’s fantastic shopping scene.

Glasgow Times:

“It is sad to see so many of our popular and once-thriving shops closing down,” he says, lamenting the loss of the likes of Watt Brothers, Wood and Selby's, British Home Stores and more.

“I think of all the great old department stores, too – Pettigrew and Stephen, Woolworth’s, C&A and Crockett’s the Ironmonger,” he says. “There has been such a change in shopping trends in the last 20 years, with centres opening on the outskirts and more customers going online.”