Glasgow memories: Strange goings-on were work of eccentric city showman AE Pickard

Our recent feature on the showman and cinema boss prompted some readers to get in touch.

Walter Smith recalls: “Mr Pickard used to come up to our house when I was very young, maybe about five years old, because he was a cousin of my mum’s.

“It was about 1947, and he would pop in for a cup of tea. When he parked his car in the street it caused a lot of commotion.

“It was unusual to see a car in our street back then, and he was usually dressed in his plus fours.”

Later on, Walter asked his mum about this unusual character who used to visit.

He adds: “She said they had fallen out over money. My mum was living in Partick at the time, and was moving to Greenfield Street after she and my dad got married.

“Pickard offered her transport to move her furniture – and then charged her 10 shillings, a princely sum in those days - hence the fall out.”

He smiles: “Now I wish I could have asked my mum many questions that remain unanswered....”

Dan Harris recalls seeing a poster in the window of AE Pickard’s election campaign office on Maryhill Road, in 1951.

“It read ‘AE Pickard, Maryhill’s Independent Millionaire, if you vote for me, you are daft,’” says Dan.

“Two hundred or so ‘daft’ people voted for him. My younger brother was a first year apprentice electrician, about that time.

“He told me that he went to work in AE Pickard’s big house on Dumbreck Road.

“The walls of one of the large rooms in the house were covered with life size pictures of Pickard, posing as characters from history in full replica uniform, such as Napoleon.”

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In her book Glasgow’s Lost Theatre, about the Britannia Music Hall - Pickard was the man who took over the Britannia in 1906 and transformed into a successful, off-beat venue - Judith Bowers also shares a great story about Pickard and his White Elephant cinema, in Shawlands, which he opened in 1927.

He advertised dinner and a fur coat, free with admission, to the first 2000 patrons.

Attracted by such a bargain, women stood in a lengthy queue only to discover at the front of that queue, Pickard and his cinema manager handing out rabbits.

The White Elephant was said to be the first cinema in the world to have, in its balcony seating, layers of fine rubber atop shock absorbers rather than springs underneath the velvet.

It had long since passed into other hands, and been known simply as the Elephant, by the time it was closed, and sold to builders, in 1960.

“When I announced I was calling it the White Elephant,” Pickard, then 85, told the Evening Times as it closed, “I was told it would be a white elephant.

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“But I built it for £25,000 and sold it some years ago for £40,000. Some people just won’t give me credit for being able to see through a brick wall.”

He even said he might build another White Elephant cinema in the city centre’s Renfrew Street, where he had two sites.

This delightful, if a little weird picture of Pickard, captures him in tartan coat, chauffeur’s cap and driving gloves on Buchanan Street in December 1950.

He is showing to the street corner lads a box with “Hame Again” written on the side – a reference to the fact the Stone of Destiny had been stolen/repatriated from Westminster Abbey a few days earlier.

Pickard, who died in 1964, had made his own Stone of Destiny out of chicken wire and papier mache which he then drove around Glasgow claiming he was bringing it back to Scotland.