CREW and passengers aboard Flight 1549 which ditched in the Hudson River in New York on January 15 2009 may have the Second World War work of the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment at Helensburgh partly to thank for their survival.
So too the crew of the helicopter and 18 oil rig workers rescued in the North Sea 125 miles off Aberdeen in February may have benefitted.
A SHY Frenchman who won some of his country’s highest honours during and after World War Two spent the final 22 years of his life in retirement in Helensburgh.
Rene Taverne, who met his wife Leda in Dunoon during the war, lived at 7 Scott Court, James Street. He died in the Vale of Leven Hospital, Alexandria, on November 27 1993 at the age of 77, and Leda died there too, six years later, at the age of 89.
ONE of the most bemedalled soldiers in the British Army was married to a Helensburgh woman and lived in the burgh for nearly 20 years after retiring from the
Regimental Sergeant Major Richard Thomas Boyde, MBE, DCM, of The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, retired from the regiment on December 13 1966 at the age of 54 and after 33 years service.
A HELENSBURGH man who served as a County Councillor for 23 years was a First World War hero who won the Victoria Cross, the top award for gallantry in the face of the enemy.
Colonel George de Cardonnel Elmsall Findlay was born on August 20 1889 in Cardross and died suddenly at his burgh home, Drumfork House, on June 26 1967.
MAEE Helensburgh was dreading the prospect of a white Christmas in 1941.
The Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment secretly moved to the Helensburgh area from Felixstowe when war broke out in 1939, with work being carried out at Rhu Hangers.
LIVES were lost during the Second World War when the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment was based at Rhu Hangars.
The story of an MAEE Lerwick seaplane which crashed into the hillside above Faslane on October 21 1941 with the loss of seven lives is told elsewhere in the Military section of this website, and there was another fatal crash a year later — this time involving a Supermarine Walrus aircraft.
A HELENSBURGH man was awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal in July 2001 after leading an heroic escape by a group of United Nations workers from war-torn Sierra Leone.
But it was at great personal cost, as Major Phil Ashby brought home a memento of the West African jungle in the form of a virus lodged in his spinal cord.
SEVEN lives were in lost in a World War Two tragedy shrouded in secrecy when a flying boat which had taken off from Rhu crashed into the hillside above Faslane.
The Saunders Roe S.36 Lerwick test aircraft L7248 from the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment based at Helensburgh and Rhu crashed close to the Gareloch on October 21 1941.
TWO Helensburgh women received inscribed badges of honour — 60 years after their hard work in the Second World War.
Anne Coll (left) and Mary Copeland were in the Women’s Land Army and worked on farms, planting crops and tending animals to keep the nation provided with food while the men were away fighting.
A HELENSBURGH man was awarded the United States Medal of Honor in 1894 for bravery in the American Civil War.
James Jardine, who had emigrated from the burgh, received the award for “gallantry in the charge of the volunteer storming party."
A LUSS man who with 13 other Scots died in 1917 in the world’s worst man-made pre-nuclear explosion in the harbour at Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, is remembered every year on December 6.
Second Engineer John MacGibbon, son of villager John MacGibbon and his wife, Jane Bennett, was serving on board the merchant ship SS Curaca, which was loaded with grain and was awaiting a shipment of horses.
HELENSBURGH man Vice-Admiral Sir Ian McGeoch, who died on August 12 2007 at the age of 93, is reputed to have played a major part in the choice of Faslane as the home of Britain’s Polaris submarine fleet.
But the World War Two hero was best known as a submarine ace and a serial escaper after being captured by the Germans in the Mediterranean in 1943.
