Jean’s grandfather, Thomas Mair, was a founder member of the Wee Pictures, and although he died before she was born, she looks back fondly on her summer holidays spent with her grandmother. Jean recalls excitedly arriving by steamer with the prospect of many adventures ahead of her in the company of her cousins, the Armours.

On her trips to the Wee Pictures she vividly remembers the horror of ‘King Kong’ and to the other extreme being so moved to tears by ‘The Bells of St. Mary’s’ that she could not stop crying all the way up Main Street to the Argyll Hotel where the group used to end their evening out with a supper of tea and sandwiches!

Mary was born in 1913, the year the cinema opened. As a child she lived in Glebe Street, her father was a blacksmith. She was the youngest in the family and had one brother and three sisters.

She remembers that the seats cost tuppence, four pence and upstairs was sixpence. She was allowed to go on a Friday and was given four pence to spend on her seat. She used to go in the tuppenny seats so that she could spend the remaining tuppence on sweets. But this meant she would be sitting amongst the rowdy young men. However Mary remembers that the usherette, Mrs Betty Speed, would make sure she and her friends were seated away from these people. Mrs Speed was also very adept at keeping order amongst the noisy fishermen!

Mr Greig was the pianist and Mr McGougan would open up the iron gate across the entrance to let the audience in. Mary remembers the great excitement at this moment and the slow deliberation with which he went about this important duty.

My mother worked at the Rex and that allowed my brother and I to get in free and we got into the Wee Pictures as well!

In the winter we would go to Rex on monday and the Wee Pictures on Tuesday, back to the Rex on Wednesday and so on. In those days they changed the pictures every two days so we saw lots of them.

Long time ago .....

My interest in the performing arts was sparked off over fifty years ago by spending Saturday afternoons in The Picture House immersed in the antics of Pinocchio and Hop-A-Long Cassidy.

I was a trainee projectionist in 1964/65, Ronnie Hamilton was chief projectionist and Catherine Stanners was 2nd projectionist. Catherine and I married in 1969 and have been in Corby since.

When Catherine first started it was Tommy Galbraith and Ronnie who worked there, and it was Ian McAuley who had left that created the vacancy that she filled.

Another person I remember is Neily McGeachy. Neily was the long time handyman and previously in the Rex heyday he was the doorman, complete with uniform. This was when the tearoom on the 1st floor was still in operation and Mr Duff, the manager, would come to work in dinner jacket and dickie bow. A far cry from the final days when the Rex was a "flea pit".

The Rex was the place to be on a Saturday afternoon when I was young! Then on a Friday or Saturday night when we were older.

Lots of memories, like trying to convince the cashier that I was old enough to watch 'Enter The Dragon' ( it was an 'X ' in my youth ) but she or he knew my Mum so there was no chance of getting in!

The back row up in the balcony was a wonderful place to be. I'm sure there were lots of memories that came crashing down with the demolition.

The Rex had a stage and I remember being taken to see 'The Alexander Brothers'.

The best film I ever saw there must have been 'Tommy ' by The Who.

One of my memories of the Rex kiosk was the big Coca Cola cooler they had. It was a thing like a dustbin and you put a bottle of Coke in at the top, pulled a big handle and an ice-cold bottle would come out the bottom. Tommy Duff used to go through quite a pantomime juggling with the bottle that was going in much to the amusement of the customers.

When I was about 17 I got a job in the kiosk at the Picture House and discovered they had a similar Coke machine that wasn't being used for some reason. I plugged it in and filled it up with bottles, only to discover when I first served a customer from it that it was running too cold and the bottled were coming out the business end actually frozen solid (which was why it had been taken out of use in the first place).

Ah the enthusiasm of youth!

During the Second World War, both cinemas, the Picture House and the Rex were doing sell-out business, being open from 2pm till 11pm each day (except Sunday). The idea of course, was to get as many showings as possible.

Unfortunately the running of the films didn’t always go right. A good example of this was Dragon Seed, a film about Chinese peasants trying to escape the Japanese invasion and starring Katherine Hepburn. In one scene Hepburn is carrying her newborn baby but in a scene further on the baby hasn’t been born yet!

What had happened was that the Rex cinema manager had decided to shorten the movie by cutting a large chunk out of it. Unfortunately he had also mixed up the reels. This caused great consternation for the afternoon audience who summed up the film as, “Very good but a little difficult to follow!”

By the last showing in the 2-day run, the projectionist, with the aid of an audience member who had read the book, had the film back in its correct order and MGM who distributed it sent an apology.

Another wartime habit was the sharing of the newsreel between the two cinemas in order to conserve film stock, and great care had to be taken that the showings did not clash. One projectionist almost broke the four-minute mile with a late exchange.

In the course of research into activities in and around Campbeltown during the war, I have been in touch with many men and women who were stationed in Kintyre at that time.

Many thousands of men and women of the Royal and Allied Navies served at HMS NIMROD the anti-submarine training establishment and at HMS MINONA the training base for the Rescue Tug Service. Both of these organisations were established in Campbeltown for the duration of the war together with associated training ships and tugs which operated from the harbour and loch.

The original airfield at The Strath was taken over by the Royal Navy early in the war, and the air station at Machrihanish was constructed for the Navy shortly thereafter; both these air stations operated throughout the war as HMS LANDRAIL, and thousands of personnel served there and with the many front line Naval Air Squadrons which trained there prior to embarking on aircraft carriers for their operational roles.

Personnel from HMS LANDRAIL also manned the bombing ranges at Skipness, Crossaig, Balure and Bellochantuy, all of which were used in the training of the visiting squadrons.

With so many visiting personnel in and around the town, it is not surprising that the two cinemas found no difficulty in filling their auditoria. Cinema, walks, dances, whist drives, private hospitality and pubs provided the mainstay of entertainment for the visiting servicemen.

Many long-lasting friendships were formed during this period including many marriages with locals - no doubt some of the courting having been carried out in the back rows of the stalls in both The Picture House and The Rex!

Many have written of their fondness for the 'Wee Toon' and the area, and many have returned to visit during the years since the war.

Someone wrote of being in the cinema when the bombing raid occurred in November 1940 - apparently a cartoon was showing at the time!

Someone else wrote of how the film show would be interrupted from time to time if there was a requirement to contact Naval personnel - up on the screen would be shown the message 'ALL NAVAL PERSONNEL RETURN TO THEIR SHIPS IMMEDIATELY', and within minutes the cinema would be virtually empty with all the sailors running down to the jetty!

There was a cafe on the first floor of the Rex Cinema from where a very good view could be had of the ships and activities in the harbour and loch. On one occasion an alert member of staff spotted someone sketching the scene, thought this was very suspicious and called the Naval police. Within minutes a suspected spy was arrested and dragged off for questioning!

Should any readers have further wartime memories of either The Picture House or The Rex, I would be very interested in receiving them.....

As a boy and a regular visitor to Campbeltown with my parents - my fathers' uncle was born in Campbeltown in 1896 - and as a keen cinema-goer, I very much relished my visits to the cinemas in Campbeltown.

I was allowed to go on my own for a start - and by judicious saving of my pocket-money found that I could see six different programmes a week - 3 at Green's 'Rex' cinema and 3 at 'The Wee Pictures'. And remembering that many features came with a 'B picture' as part of the programme, this meant one could see as many as 12 films in a week.

A lot were the 'quota-quickies' I dare say, but I did expand my cinematic horizons over the years.

My favourite cinema was the Picture House - I loved the building, and I used to imagine all sorts of theatrical productions taking place utilising the window balconies on either side of the stage area. And when the lights went down, you would be magically transported to another world.

It was certainly not the 'hi-tech' cinema experience of today - much more like that depicted in the film 'The Smallest Show On Earth' with Peter Sellers.

Where 'The Bijou' in that film had to contend with being shaken to bits by passing trains, and the disastrous consequences of Sellers' drunken projectionist, all we had at the Picture House was watching a film that became progressively dimmer as the story unfolded.

Eventually, shouts from the audience would alert the projectionist to the near invisible film, and a jolt to the projector would restore illumination - which after a few minutes would begin to dim once more. This could occur maybe half a dozen times during the course of a screening.