The Arts

HELENSBURGH people have long embraced Deborah Kerr as their very own film star, but the time she spent in the town was very short.

Countless newspaper, magazine and website articles say that the Scottish girl who became the archetypal movie ‘perfect English rose’ was born in the burgh.

JEWELLERY owned by Helensburgh film star Deborah Kerr was sold at auction by Bonhams in London on Thursday December 4 2008 — and the prices exceeded all expectations.

Deborah Kerr, who was born in 1921 and died in Suffolk in October 2007, starred in more than 50 films over four decades, most memorably appearing in From Here to Eternity, with Burt Lancaster (1953), The King and I, with Yul Brynner (1956) and An Affair to Remember, with Cary Grant (1957).

ONE of the most commercially successful of the 21st century Helensburgh and district artists was Mary Batchelor, who passed away after a long battle against ill health in October 2027.

Mary’s very colourful works adorn art galleries throughout Britain and fetch high prices at art sales and auctions. She was inspired by Scottish landscapes and she matched its magical presence with vital colour and broad brush work.

A PAINTING by Helensburgh artist Erskine Beveridge, “After Sunset, The Gareloch”, was acquired by the Anderson Trust from the fine art dealer Neil McRea in 2008 — and provides this artist’s interpretation of a familiar view.

It is also a welcome addition to this growing collection of paintings inspired by this area, many by artists who at some time lived and worked here.

AN ATTRACTIVE painting by a Helensburgh artist turned up in the summer of 2008 . . . in a disused mill in Oldham, Lancashire, now used as a secondhand furniture store.

The 28 x 20 inch oil on hardboard painting by Jan Stirling is entitled ‘The Town of Mostar’, and it immediately caught the eye of John Crabbe, from nearby Todmorden.

THE Anderson Trust launched a set of three cards of prints from the Trust collection in October 2008.

Says Trustee Mary-Jane Selwood: “Over the years, visitors to the Anderson Trust exhibitions have asked whether reproductions of any of the paintings were available in card form.

A REMARKABLE relic of Helensburgh of days gone by has been unearthed by James Brown FSA Scot, a historical researcher based in Ayrshire.

It is a manuscript volume dated 1822, containing six poems and several small vignettes which depict sailing and loch scenes. If that was the date the manuscript was prepared, the picture of Helensburgh would be one of the earliest known.

AN AUTHOR of international best sellers wrote his first book during the ten years he lived in Cardross.

Bernard Attenborough, who used the pen name James S.Rand, became world-renowned as the author of exciting novels, mostly based in Africa.

TWO creative Helensburgh teachers played a major part in the formation of the Scottish Peoples Theatre, which flourished in Dumbarton from 1938 and through the Second World War.

The SPT, which welcomed guests actors such as Andrew Cruickshank and Molly Urquhart, even staged a concert at Shandon Hydro for recuperating servicemen in 1944. It became the more modestly-titled Dumbarton Peoples Theatre after the war.

AN American songstress whose voice was used in place of Helensburgh screen star Deborah Kerr’s vocals in ‘The King and I’ is keen to trace her roots – which she believes may also lie in the burgh.

Marni Nixon — who was born Margaret Nixon McEathron in Altadena, California, on February 22 1930 and is known as ‘The Voice of Hollywood' — was working with Deborah on the big-screen hit when she learned from an historian that her family too came from the Helensburgh area.

PROBABLY the most honoured academic ever educated in Helensburgh treasured his memories of his boyhood in the burgh until his death aged 87.

Sir James George Frazer, a leading social anthropologist, folklorist and classical scholar of his time, was a key figure in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion, and greatly influenced writers and thinkers such as D.H.Lawrence, T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound.

HELENSBURGH man Jimmy Logan OBE — a world famous and colourful Scottish actor and entertainer — served until his death in 2001 as the first honorary president of Helensburgh Heritage Trust and took a keen interest in the work of the Trust.

Jimmy Logan's connections with Helensburgh go back even to the time before he was born, as it was in Helensburgh that his parents, Jack Short and May Dalziel, met each other.