FILM STAR Deborah Kerr spent the first four years of her life with her parents in Helensburgh, but was born in Glasgow — and her birthplace has been marked with a blue plaque.

She was born Deborah Jane Trimmer in a maternity home in the west end on September 30 1921. At that time it was St James Terrace, but today it is 7 Ruskin Terrace, home of Mark and Laura Dunn.

A 97 YEAR-OLD woman thought to have been the last surviving link with RAF Helensburgh and the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment at Rhu died recently at the age of 97.

In 2020 Helensburgh Heritage Trust presented Frances McLaren, who had no surviving close relatives, with a framed certificate of appreciation of her wartime service.

THE FIRST TV star, Stooky Bill, was a ventriloquist's dummy used — then discarded — by TV inventor John Logie Baird. But what happened next?

That was the question for John Burnside FRSL FRSE (65) who was born in Dunfermline, and is one of only three poets to have won both the T.S.Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book.

He has written 'The Ballad of Stooky Bill', which will be broadcast on Sunday at 4.30pm on Radio 4, and imagines what its future might have been.

 

THE ROYAL MINT is marking the 75th anniversary of John Logie Baird’s death with the release on January 1 of a special 50 pence piece.

The Helensburgh inventor demonstrated the world’s first working television system on January 26 1926.

A FOURTH carriage clock presented to Helensburgh soldiers who served in the Boer War has been found — but is in very poor condition.

Joanne Byrne, who lives in Ireland, contacted Helensburgh Heritage Trust to say that it had been left to her by a friend who liked restoring old items.

A NEW edition of John Logie Baird's memoirs “Television and Me” which has been released as an 'ebook' by Edinburgh publishers Birlinn Ltd.

The TV inventor's son, Helensburgh Heritage Trust hon president Professor Malcolm Baird, assisted on the project, and said that the preface and the end notes had been updated and a new cover prepared.

A NOVEL just published features a young Spanish girl who comes to Helensburgh in the 19th century, stays to live here, and how her life develops.

However ‘Cuando Regresse al Norte’ is written in Spanish — in English the title is ‘When I Returned to the North’.

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