Editor's Preface

I've lived in Ratho since 1979 and although I was aware of the Seagull Trust I knew little about it. Photography is my hobby so when I retired and joined Seagull Trust Ratho branch in 2002 as a volunteer I started taking photos of branch activities.

In 2009 Ratho piloted an "Our Village" website project. Material was quickly put together and that became the origin of the "Virtual Cruises" accessible from the Ratho page of the official Seagull Trust Cruises Website https://www.seagulltrust.org.uk/ratho . The "Our Village" project failed to get funding and collapsed.

In 2014 I became the Thursday lead skipper. There was a big shortage of qualified skippers in the team. Training manuals existed but prints were scarce so files were reformatted for electronic distribution to support the urgent training programme.

When David Hoskins (who had been branch Vice Chairman, Maintenance Manager and Training Officer) sadly died suddenly in 2015 he left a mass of information on his home PC relating to maintenance and general Trust activity. Information was rescued but there was great risk of losing valuable work kept on private computers. That was the start of a project to gather and digitise material as a resource for the Ratho Branch. Digital versions of manuals were updated incorporating a lot of David's notes and the branch decided on electronic rather than paper distribution. A general Trust resource was created using the free "Google Drive" and "Google Sites" resources.

I was keen to preserve historic Trust information and found that even for an organisation less than 40 years old, history was lost and distorted. Material largely from David Hoskins plus my own photos were archived. In 2019 I contacted Ronnie Rusack and photographs, newspaper cuttings and videos started arriving in crates! Amongst this was Ronnie's unfinished "booklet" for selling as a souvenir for Trust funds. It was a collection of former key member "quotes" scoured from annual reports and newsletters to around 2005. More recent material is more photographic record and less text. The advent of "digital" has meant more photographs are around. Ronnie's old prints have been digitised.

I suggested using the "booklet" as a basis of web pages and offered to try to do something as long as Ronnie was willing to answer a lot of questions. I had a curiosity about how the Trust was very quickly established with capital assets worth several million pounds. I'm conscious that the Trust originally had much more of a mission to preserve the canals and serve the disabled. Having succeeded, the focus has now become operational. However, talking to Ronnie, I find he still focuses on that mission by supporting voluntary activity for Scottish Canals.

We can publish on the web in an incomplete and imperfect state in the hope others will modify and add. Ronnie's video collection has been included. The product has changed with my attempt to get everything recorded rather than produce a saleable souvenir booklet. Hopefully it will be a source for anyone who wishes to produce that booklet.

Initially I hoped for a general history of the Trust. However, Ronnie is almost the sole contributor so things are seen through his eyes and biased towards Ratho where his Bridge Inn business was located, so I made it "Ronnie Rusack's History of the Seagull Trust". Hopefully there will be other contributions and it can eventually become the general history.

Using photographs of passengers has been restricted compared with Ronnie's original script due to difficulties in getting formal permission.

Brian Shearey, July 2020