Education

PENINSULA residents are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the present Rosneath Primary School . . . but its history goes much further back than that.

Staff, parents and pupils — assisted by Cove Park’s Dawn Youll and artist Linda Florence — are busy organising appropriate events under the supervision of head teacher Mrs Emma McDermid.One of Linda’s aims is to produce an artwork which will reflect input from the children, including feedback from a recent question and answer session which included parents.

A RHU village schoolteacher had a sideline of money-lending — and it led to his murder.

Dominie John Arroll became the focus of a mystery.

BAREFOOT children on the street, as happened in Helensburgh and district in years gone by, is a sight which exemplifies the squalor and poverty of the bad old days.

There must have been instances where the straightened circumstances of some children left them with little alternative.

TRAINING SHIPS were a way of life — and a hard one — in the Gareloch from 1869 for 54 years.

But Helensburgh and Rhu benefitted in various ways from the two former sailing ships moored off Kidston Point and the boys who lived on them.

AN 1899 copy of John Bunyan’s ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ found in a Glasgow bookshop was donated to Helensburgh Heritage Trust . . . and led to a flurry of research by two of the directors.

The book was presented by the finder, Glasgow man Michael Bar-Lev, who was interested in the Helensburgh background.

TO MANY people of a certain age, the school song was, if not always much loved, certainly much sung . . . and that was the case at Helensburgh’s former Hermitage School.

Former Helensburgh man Bill McEwen, who has lived in New Zealand since 1966, liked it, but could not remember it.