Helensburgh Heritage
Helensburgh Heritage Trust
A SAD SIGHT on Helensburgh seafront at the moment is the boarded up mansion Cairndhu — once the proud home of the Ure family.
The fate of the former home, wartime degaussing base, hotel and lastly care home has still to be decided, but it is a treasure which is well worth preserving and is on the Buildings at Risk Register.
THE MOST generous benefactor in Helensburgh’s history believed that divine intervention had saved his life, and giving was his way of expressing his gratitude.
Not only did Provost Andrew Buchanan pay for the King George V Silver Jubilee beakers and sweets given to town schoolchildren in 1935, but he is best remembered for donating the outdoor swimming pool.
A HELENSBURGH man who had a colourful and highly successful career as a lawyer and in business also served with distinction during the Normandy Landings and the Clydebank Blitz.
HELENSBURGH’S Abbeyfield supported housing for the elderly at 54 West King Street, Barclay Smith House, consists of eleven flats, and is named after its most generous local benefactor.
In the late 1960s Colonel Edward Alan Barclay-Smith, MA (Cantab), AMIMechE, AMIEE, a prominent figure in the then Helensburgh Town Council, sat down in his Suffolk Street villa, Khillanmorg, and wrote a cheque for £6,000 — the equivalent of some £80,000 today — to the Abbeyfield Society.
MAY 1935 was a very special month in Helensburgh and throughout the land, as it was when the silver jubilee of King George V was marked. This fascinating newspaper account, typical of the period, tells how the occasion was celebrated.
THE death of Baroness Thatcher on April 8 2013 led to the great and the good producing all their views and memories — some favourable, some not so — of the ‘Iron Lady’.
In Helensburgh thoughts turned to her visit to the town on April 18 1975, when the first woman to lead a British political party was given a rapturous welcome.
THE historic village of Rhu has been home to many famous people over the years . . . but only one man changed its name.
‘Mr Rhu’ for decades was Colonel Kenneth Barge, DSO, MC, DL, and he had another historic title — late of the Bengal Lancers.