Last week we left entrepreneur Frank Gourlay and wife Susan at the start of their joint venture to create a log chalet holiday village and horse riding centre at Barend in Sandyhills.
Previous to that, Frank, now 80, had owned fashion boutiques in Dumfries and Ayr in the Swinging Sixties – and set up a Scotland-wide toy distribution company.
Brought up at the Glaisters farm between Corsock and Moniaive, Frank and Northumberland girl Susan married in her home village of Longframlington in 1971.
After moving to Galloway from Edinburgh in the late 1970s, over time the couple built up their holiday complex on the Solway coast to include 78 log houses, a bar, the award-winning Granary restaurant, a swimming pool, laundrette and letting agency.
Listening to Frank, he recalls how the seasonality of the holiday trade meant staff were generally only needed between Easter and October – a situation he was determined to change.
”We had girls answering phones and selling holidays in Scotland all through the main season,” he explains.
“But most places closed down for the winter which meant everybody would leave then come back in spring.
“I thought why don’t we make something so they could carry on working through the winter?
“So I started Andorra Holidays offering ski holidays in Andorra.
“I also took over the Ski Jeannie franchise and sold winter holidays in France and Switzerland.
“I would say to the girls ‘remember it’s snow, not sun we are selling!’,” Frank adds with a chuckle.
“We did all this to enhance the main thing, which was building the log cabins at Barend.
“The equestrian side was proving popular and soon we moved from having just pony trekking to being a proper riding centre.”
Any notion that Frank would have had enough on his plate with his business ventures are dispelled as he takes me through his decades of public service, which began with a six-year stint on the old Kirkcudbright County Council to 1972.
He was Dumfries and Galloway Regional Council’s vice-chairman of water and sewerage from 1994-6, served on Dumfries and Galloway Council from 1995-99 – latterly as assistant convenor – and chaired Dumfries and Galloway Tourist Board for three years over the period.
Other notable roles, I learn, included 24 years of service with the Children’s Hearings system, director, chairman and part time chief executive of the Crichton Development Company up to 2012, chairman of the Prison Visiting Committee from 2011 to 2015, Independent Prison Monitor – a role he still holds, and, until recently, vice-chairman of Visit South West Scotland.
Frank takes particular pride in his time on the Children’s Panel Advisory Committee, which oversees a system distinctive to Scotland in that it seeks to avoid criminalising young people by guiding them away from reoffending.
“We were the people who monitored the panel,” Frank explains.
“We would go in, listen to hearings, and write reports on how they were doing.
“It’s very different from England where young people appear in a juvenile court before judges and barristers.
“Here it’s a much more friendly atmosphere where they meet three people across the table who are civilian volunteers.
“I’m not certain if the results are all that different but they do a good job – quite a lot of children who appeared before the Children’s Panel have gone on to have good careers. And most of the time it’s the parents’ fault.”
A dozen years before his work with the panel began, Frank recalls, he began another business venture – selling golf balls.
“At one time Uniroyal made golf balls at their factory in Dumfries,” he tells me.
“They stopped making them but then the Abernethy Golf Ball Company started up in Locharbriggs and all the machinery from Uniroyal was installed there.
“But it was basically running into problems so I went to see a government body, the Scottish Development Agency, that helped rescue companies.
“I told them I would be prepared to put some money in and get involved if they put money in and produced monthly accounts for me.
“We did that and I ran it for two years.
“Things were improving, we had 20 or 30 employees and I thought it was at the stage where I could sell.
“I phoned an American company that made styluses based in Peebles.
“They were interested and we did a deal subject to due diligence.
“But they found that the accounts done for the SDA were a lot of codswallop and the figures were more favourable than was actually the reality.
“I did continue with the sale but did not make any money out of it. The company did carry on for a while but then it folded.”
Clearly, I’m speaking to a man with many talents and commitments, as Frank jumps back in time to his years on the old Kirkcudbrightshire County Council, which at that time included Cargenbridge.
“To begin with the ICI plant at Cargenbridge was in Kirkcudbrightshire”, he smiles.
“Dumfries town used to get very uppity because they had to provide all these workers with houses yet Kirkcudbrightshire got all the rates money from the company – which was about 10 per cent of the entire rateable value in the county.
“Yet Dumfries had to provide the homes and educate all the children.
“That’s what the journalists would put in the papers.
“It was always a gripe that Kirkcudbrightshire did rather well out of this and that the boundary should therefore be moved so the ICI was included in Dumfries.
“That’s why at the beginning of the 1970s all the council houses were built at Cargenbrige, and the school.
“The original boundary of Kirkcudbrightshire was the Nith but that’s quite a long time ago.
“My mother taught at St Andrew’s Boys’ School in Dumfries in the 1950s.
“It’s gone now but it stood just opposite where the Palmerston Cafe chip shop is today. It was a fine three-storey sandstone building.”
As his time as a councillor drew to an end, latterly with the present Dumfries and Galloway Council, Frank tells me, civil war was raging in Yugoslavia with bitter ethnic strife resulting in the deaths and displacement of countless Bosnians, Croats and Serbs.
A huge international aid effort got under way, Frank recalls, with Scotland one of the countries from where mercy mission were organised to the stricken country.
“General Norman Arthur started up the Action for Croatia charity at that time,” he says.
“I got involved and Maisie Welsh, who had a coal merchants business based at Barlae on the A75 near Kirkcowan in Wigtownshire, said we could use one of her coal lorries – and she drove it out to Croatia with supplies.
“John Miller Transport always gave us vehicles as well.
“We would have four or five lorries and vans going out from Dumfries for each trip, loaded mostly with clothing, tents and toiletries.
“The first time we went the people really did need everything but by the end, maybe 1994, they would look and say it’s not a designer label!
“We would go to Caritas, a Catholic charity based in Croatia, who helped us get through customs.
“That was very easy the first time we went out and we would simply be waved through.
“We would leave Dumfries for Dover and the ferry, drive through France, Germany and Austria, then into Slovenia and finally Croatia.
“We had a very nice guide who spoke very good English.
“I asked him what he wanted to be when the war finished and he said president of Croatia!
“Then he met an English girl who would not let him get into politics.
“His father was chairman of the Croatian Oil Company.
“Croatia did not have any oil but did have a refinery.
“Serbia did have oil but didn’t have a refinery – so they were at daggers drawn. It was fascinating talking to these young people sitting outside a warehouse who told us about all these people who had just vanished.
“By the end it was very difficult – we had to spend hours getting through because there had been various aid convoys found with rifles.
“I have to say that latterly it was rather sad – they were not particularly interested in what we were taking out because they had enough from everybody else.
Frank has travelled thousands of miles in every conceivable mode of transport – he used to be involved with fundraising for Tibetan Relief, Malcolm Sargent Cancer Fund and various others – but, he tells me with some pride, one car is the jewel in the crown.
“A long time ago I paid £30 for a Hillman Aero Minx,” he chuckles with obvious pride.
“It was built at Coventry just after Mr Morris had started building his MG sports car. Roots Brothers bought Hillman and were great marketers.
“They got a Hillman Minx and put a sporty body on it and the car had graceful sweeping lines.
“It was manufactured in the early 1930s and one was delivered to Cassie Laurie in Maxwelton House near Moniaive.
“I believe she purchased it in October 1934 and I bought it from the owner of the Baron’s Craig Hotel at Rockcliffe in 1960.
“It is in very good condition and I still drive it around. Once when I was rebuilding the engine there were these swastikas on the connecting rods and I could not think why. An expert in military history whom I know told me the chances are it was nothing to do with Nazi Germany.
“The engine dates to the late 1920s which predate Hitler.
“The swastika was originally a sign of good fortune and my friend’s theory is that whoever made the connecting rods impressed them with the symbol as some kind of guarantee of safety from the Almighty!”
Frank and wife of 53 years Susan, who live near the Haugh of Urr, together built up a successful horse-riding and holiday complex at Sandyhills before selling Barend Holiday Village in 1999.
“Susan was very much involved with horses, was chairman of the British Horse Society in Dumfries and Galloway and ran that until about 2013,” Frank explains, leafing through photos of the couple’s equestrian exploits, one of which shows Frank – no mean rider himself, Susan tells me – in the saddle jumping a fence during an eventing competition at Floors Castle in the Borders.
“Susan also started Riding for the Disabled which sadly has rather collapsed now,” he says.
“Before the disabled children could get to the centre by buses but then the education department cancelled them.”
Frank has great pride in the couple’s two sons, Rupert, who runs a veterinary practice in Minnigaff, and Hugh, one of the top film location managers in Scotland whose credits include Mission Impossible starring Tom Cruise, the Bond movie Skyfall, Saving Private Ryan and the Outlander series.
These days the irrepressible Frank is still involved in entrepreneurial pursuits, his 80 years obviously no barrier to a full and active life.
“I did another small development at Kippford building and selling nine large log houses,” he tells me.
“And I am now building seven five-star log houses at Kippford with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, with very high-quality insulation, triple-glazing, ground source heat pumps, solar panels, rainwater harvesting and heat recovery ventilation systems.”
