John Logie Baird

By Professor Malcolm Baird, President of Helensburgh Heritage Trust

WE are sometimes told that television has taken the place of print. I would like to explore this idea.

This article is the text of a talk given by Andy Andrews to Bliss Probus Club in February 2011, at the Chequers Public House, Goddard Lane, in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. Andy was 99 in August 2011 and is still going strong. His original handwritten manuscript was transcribed by Kenneth Crawford in March 2012.

John Logie Baird was born in Helensburgh, Scotland, in 1888 and died in June 1946. He was Superintendent of Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company until the end of the First World War. In 1920, because of very poor health, he went to Trinidad and opened a jam factory.

Professor Malcolm Baird, son of TV inventor John Logie Baird and president of Helensburgh Heritage Trust, remembers the first broadcast.

BBC TV Scotland opened in a wave of optimism on Friday March 14 1952, just a few weeks after the Queen’s accession.

AN interview in June 2011 about a radical overhaul of the National Trust for Scotland raised a few eyebrows in Helensburgh.

The Scotsman interviewed Trust chairman Sir Kenneth Calman, who said that the Trust must become more commercially minded, intervene to save threatened historic sites, and generate more cash from its existing assets.

A NEW audio slideshow about Helensburgh-born TV inventor John Logie Baird can be viewed on the BBC Scotland website.

Entitled ‘Thinking outside the box’ it is the work of a freelance producer, Gill Davies, who is now Glasgow-based but is originally from Helensburgh.

TWO descendants of Helensburgh-born TV inventor John Logie Baird returned to the burgh on Wednesday April 27 2011 to publicise the digital TV switchover.

The inventor’s daughter, Uddingston-based Mrs Diana Richardson, and grandson Iain Logie Baird from Bradford were joined at the John Logie Baird pub in James Street by another relative, Diana’s cousin Laura Baird Conley — whose home is in the town’s Baird Avenue.

In this article, based on a talk she gave to the University of Strathclyde alumni group known as 'The Tech Club' on April 19 2006 and specially adapted in 2011 for the Helensburgh Heritage Trust website, Mrs Diana Richardson, daughter of TV pioneer John Logie Baird, recalled her father's life and work.

MENTION the name of Helensburgh-born John Logie Baird, and the words inventor of television immediately come to mind. But this was not his first successful invention.

That was not at all technical, yet in the year it was on sale, he made a profit of £1,600 — which equates to £34,000 today.

In this article specially written for the Helensburgh Heritage Trust website, Trust president Professor Malcolm Baird, son of TV pioneer John Logie Baird, recalls his childhood and student days. 

I WAS born on July 2 1935 at the family home at 3 Crescent Wood Road in Sydenham, a south eastern suburb of London.

THE earliest book on television — signed by Helensburgh TV inventor John Logie Baird — sold for £1,400 at the Books, Maps, Manuscripts and Historical Photographs Sale at Bonhams in New Bond Street, London, on November 23 2010.

The book, entitled Television, was donated anonymously to the Oxfam charity shop in Morningside, Edinburgh, and dates back to 1926. Staff did not realise its significance until one flicked through it some time after it was received.

HELENSBURGH TV inventor John Logie Baird failed to win enough online votes in 2010 to be featured on a new £5 coin being issued by the Royal Mint — and was beaten by a Beatle!

He faced stiff competition from Jane Austen, Douglas Bader, Sir Walter Raleigh, Emmeline Pankhurst and John Lennon to become the latest Great Briton on a new coin being struck by the Royal Mint.

ON June 14 1946, Helensburgh-born TV inventor John Logie Baird died in his sleep at home in Bexhill at the age of 57. Thirty years after his death, a Helensburgh commemorative exhibition had a remarkable visitor.

On May 31 that year a 26-day town celebration began with the opening of the main exhibition in the then Templeton Library in James Street, with the ceremony conducted by a local man and Baird expert, Professor E.S.Fairley, the depute principal of the University of Strathclyde.