Page 210 - Microsoft Word - Guiding lights final version 0841 1007 big print.doc

Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde as a student apprentice, moving up the managerial ladder to become general manager responsible for the construction of frigates for the Royal Navy. Just before retirement, he took the STGA training course in Glasgow. ‘I decided to do this as a result of my father’s experience,’ he said. ‘He was a tour guide with the then Scottish Tourist Board, just before the founding of the STGA, and enjoyed it so much and it kept him active so I decided to follow in his footsteps.’
Stewart Noble was born in Glasgow in 1943 and shortly before his eighth birthday moved to Helensburgh, a town on the Firth of Clyde about 25 miles north-west of Glasgow. ‘Apart from four years spent living in the "Far East" (in other words Edinburgh, as far as someone born in Glasgow is concerned), I have been in Helensburgh ever since,’ he said. He has degrees in economics from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, and lectured in economics and also worked as a self- employed financial adviser. He qualified as a Scottish Tourist Guide in 1996, and works principally with German-speaking groups. From 2002 to 2008 he was a director of the Scottish Tourist Guides Association, serving as chairman for three of these years. He also has a variety of interests in Helensburgh. He has been involved in Helensburgh Community Council for many years and also Helensburgh Heritage Trust. He has also served on the Council of the Friends of Loch Lomond and been involved in the production of three books. ‘By The Banks of Loch Lomond’ appeared in 2003, and in the previous year he was the editor of ‘200 Years of Helensburgh’.
In 2010 he brought out ‘The Vanished Railways of Old Western Dunbartonshire’, a book of historic photographs. Two years later he produced a DVD for schoolchildren on Henry Bell (the first recorded Provost of Helensburgh) and the "Comet" (Europe's first commercial steamship). He also produced another video on "The Helensburgh Area in the Second World War". In 2014 he received the accolade of Citizen of the Year in the Helensburgh and District Community Spirit Awards. Sue Gruellich trained as a guide in Glasgow in 1995/6 while still working in PR & Marketing at Edinburgh Napier University. Prior to that she had worked in export sales, with various Scottish manufacturing companies including Flexible Ducting, Howden Compressors and Inveresk Papermills. ‘I was lucky to be able to put my language skills in French and German to good use with all these companies,’ she said.
‘I took early retirement from Napier in 2003 and spent a year travelling round the world. On returning home it was easy for me to return to the world of guiding and in fact I approached it with renewed vigour. As a Geordie by birth, or “blown-away Scot,” as I was told on settling in
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