Helensburgh Heritage
Helensburgh Heritage Trust
A POPPY Cross was not placed at the war memorial on Rhu village green on Remembrance Sunday 2017 — but it was not far away.
The cross, in memory of those who were killed serving with RAF Helensburgh during World War Two, was placed at the nmemorial in Kidston Park, erected in the summer, overlooking its former Rhu Hangers base.
JUST over 80 years ago, what is probably Britain’s best known flying boat, the Shorts Sunderland, made its maiden flight — and the seaplane was to play an important part in the Helensburgh and Dumbarton areas.
The prototype aircraft K 4774 gave the name Sunderland to the new specification R22/36 aircraft.
IT HAS always been something of a puzzle why Cardross, a small harmless village, should so incur the wrath of the mighty Luftwaffe over the night of May 5 1941.
Could the World War Two bombing of the village have happened because of mistaken identity?
ONE of the best known Helensburgh men to die in action on the front in the first two years of World War One was a 39 year-old with twenty years service.
Lieutenant James Francis Marsland MC, known to his friends as Jim, was serving with ‘C’ Company of the 2nd Battalion (109th Foot) the Leinster Regiment (Prince of Wales’s Royal Canadians).
MEMORIES of the night Cardross was bombed when she was ten years-old are still fresh for a villager who now lives in America.
Patricia Lockhart, now Mrs McInnis, left Scotland for Canada in 1956, and has lived in San Diego, California, since 1960.
A CARDROSS army officer with a shipbuilding background died instantly when he was hit by a shell on the Belgian Western Front in during World War One.
Captain William Beardmore Stewart, of Auchenfroe in the village, was killed in action on May 24 1917 at the age of 33, and is buried at Reninghelst New Military Cemetery near Ypres.
A YOUNG Cardross man who volunteered twice in World War One lost his life shortly after entering a trench with his platoon.
Second Lieutenant Frank Ritchie was killed in action near the village of Givenchy in Pas-de-Calais on May 25 1915 at the age of 22.