A PERMANENT memorial to those who served at a top-secret military base in Helensburgh will be unveiled this weekend.

The Helensburgh Heritage Trust has joined forces with the Airfields of Britain Conservation Trust (ABCT) on the project to place a lasting memorial to the personnel of RAF Helensburgh.

The memorial will be unveiled in a ceremony at Kidston Park this Saturday, July 1, at 11am.

Local politicians and service personnel representatives have been invited to attend the unveiling ceremony – which will see the realisation of a long-held ambition for members of the Heritage Trust.

Stewart Noble from the Heritage Trust said: “It's one of the things we've been wanting to do for years, but we've been helped enormously in two ways.

“We owe a great deal to the legwork of Geoff and Trudi Tompson, who are both ex-RAF – they moved to Helensburgh fairly recently and were also keen to see a memorial to RAF Helensburgh, and they have done a lot of the leg work for Saturday's ceremony.

“Geoff and Trudi were also starting to look for funds for a memorial, and then, out of the blue, we got an email from the Airfields of Britain Conservation Trust, who said they were willing to put up a permanent memorial at no cost to us.”

Geoff Tompson said: “I flew Nimrods and Buccaneers in the RAF and Trudi was an air traffic controller. We're both members of the Heritage Trust, and when Stewart found out about our RAF background and invited us to get involved, we were more than happy to accept.

“The task we took on was made significantly simpler once we were aware of the desire of the ABCT to erect a permanent memorial.

“They have done a fabulous job and we're very lucky that they knew of the background of RAF Helensburgh – which we knew nothing about until we moved here in 2014.”

The memorial itself will be unveiled by Robin Bird, a retired newspaper journalist from Helensburgh whose late father, Bob, spent two years working as the official photographer at the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment (MAEE), which was based at RAF Helensburgh.

The story of the base has been extensively chronicled in the Advertiser's 'Eye on Millig' column and by Donald Fullarton on the Heritage Trust's website (www.helensburgh-heritage.co.uk).

The memorial site at Kidston Park overlooks the Gareloch, where a series of experimental flying boats took off and landed during the war as the government sought, in conditions of great secrecy, to develop ways of finding and sinking the U-Boats of the German navy.

The park site is also just a stone's throw from a hangar at what is now the Clyde Off Site Centre for HM Naval Base Clyde and which is the only evidence still standing of the base and its vital work.