FOR this week's journey into the Advertiser's archives we go back 10 years to the 100th birthday of a Helensburgh painting and decorating firm.

What are your memories of using the firm? Do you know someone who worked there? Share your memories with us by commenting below!

Here's how we reported the firm's centenary in our edition of February 22, 2007...

* * * * * * * * * * * *

A PAINTING and decorating firm which has been handed down from father to son over three generations celebrated its 100th year in the family this month.

Gordon Burgess, aged 72, has worked for the family business, J.G. Burgess and Son, for more than 50 years.

His grandfather, James Gordon Burgess, bought the firm from Alexander Bisland for £45 in February 1907, and gradually built up a successful and well respected business.

James had an eventful life. He was born in Glasgow in January 1865. When he was just nine months old, his father drowned in the River Clyde, leaving his young wife to bring up three children on her own.

Gordon said: “They had no money so his mother had to put his two older sisters in the poor house. My grandfather was ‘farmed out’ to a farm in Glen Fruin when he was still a baby but she worked hard and eventually made enough to get the family back together.”

James picked up his trade while apprenticed to a painter and decorator in 1884. He also studied at the Helensburgh branch of Dumbarton School of Art in the early 1890s, gaining a teaching certificate in 1893. He was a talented artist, exhibiting in the Glasgow Institute Exhibition and the Royal Scottish Academy.

He bought his own business at the age of 42. Gordon’s father took over the family business in the late 1920s but had it not been for the First World War, things might have been very different.

Gordon said: “My father wanted to be a solicitor. He started out with what is now McArthur Stanton but my grandfather’s men were all taken away at the start of the war and he offered to help him out. That was him for life.”