He’s a man of books and maps with a love of the great outdoors.
And at 69, Benny Gillies of Kirkpatrick Durham is still full of joie de vivre.
It must be said that Benny’s hikes in the Alps and Pyrenees are behind him.
But more sedate treks around Galloway and further afield are still on the menu.
That’s through his membership of the Bus Pass Walking Group, an over-60s hiking club formed by Dumfries Academy former pupils.
Sports-mad Benny attended the academy after four years at Dumfries High, where he was school sports champion.
His mother Cathy Gillies ran a boarding house in Queen Street.
She also worked in Blacklock and Farries bookshop – a trade her son would enter decades later.
As a boy, Benny was in the 57th Dumfriesshire Scouts and gained a Queen’s Scout award – the highest the movement can bestow.
Cross-country stamina and map skills meant Benny was ideally suited to orienteering.
And it was through that sport that Benny found his future career.
“There were not many in the country who won that award,” he says.
“Myself and two others formed Solway Orienteering Club.
“We organised competitions in Mabie Forest.
“But, setting them up, I could not understand why burns on the maps just stopped and appeared again.
“It turned out they were culverted – and it was things like that which took me to the office of the Ordnance Survey.”
Scout membership also pointed Benny towards the mapping agency.
“The son of the chief surveyor at the Ordnance Survey office in Dumfries was in the same Scout group as me,” Benny explains.
“One day his dad asked me if I would be interested in applying for a course.
“He got the application forms for me and I went for interview at Newcastle.
“I was accepted and was off to Ordnance Survey HQ in Southampton within two months.
“I thought a job was far better than staying on at school.”
The move began a successful 34-year career with OS, starting with nine months field surveyor training in Southampton.
“Basic training was in graphic survey but we learned aerial photography mapping and to use theodolites and tachometers,” Benny explains.
“We used steel chains for measuring – that was all part of our training.
“We were updating the The County Series Maps using clear acetate sheets of the old mapping which we would superimpose over aerial photography to update any changes such as new buildings and field boundaries then complete the survey on the ground.”
Updating the entire Great Britain series was a monumental undertaking – one which began in the 1930s and would take half a century to complete.
After his course, Benny was one in a team of OS surveyors dispatched to the four corners of the British Isles to record changes to the built and natural environment.
After four weeks at Brechin, the 18-year-old was posted to Scotland’s northernmost outpost – the Shetland Isles – for a six-month deployment timed to coincide with maximum daylight.
Lying only a few hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle, Shetland in winter is dark apart from two hours either side of noon.
But in high summer the sun barely dips below the horizon between dusk and dawn.
“They call it the land of the simmer dim,” explains Benny.
“You could write a letter home at 11pm.
“It was a very strong crofting community then and the folk spoke in a broad Shetland dialect.
“That was the time before the oil came – Shetland was very primitive and rural.
“There were no roll-on-roll-off ferries in those days either.
“You drove the car onto a net on the quayside at Aberdeen and the car was lifted up by a crane on to the deck.”
Benny worked on the smaller Shetland Isles such as Fetlar and Unst and also took in island groups nearby.
“I was very interested in bird watching,” recalls Benny.
“One time six or seven of us went a jaunt to Fair Isle, 30 miles to the south.
“We took off in a wee plane from Sumburgh and landed on a turf and gravel track.
“We were only given a certain amount of time there but this thick mist came down.
“The pilot said I can’t take off and fly you back.
“There’s no air traffic control at Sumburgh and I can’t guarantee getting down visually.
“We turned up again two hours later but a storm had blown up and we had to tie the plane down with ropes.”
The enforced stay led Benny to a chance encounter with a fellow Doonhamer – in the most unexpected of places.
“Fair Isle had two lighthouses, north and south,” Benny explains.
“Each was staffed with two keepers – and one was a Dumfries postie!
“We had a night on his home brew but I was fine the next morning.
“The weather had cleared so we just untied the plane and flew back.
“It was a big adventure from being a schoolboy in Dumfries just the year before,
“That was 50 years ago last year.
“There was talk of a reunion but it never came about.”
Outside work, 1970 was propitious in another way – just seconds into it wife to be Lynette Armstrong came into his life.
“I was back home in Dumfries for New Year,” laughs Benny.
“I met Lyn at the Mid Steeple at The Bells and must have been impressed – I ended up marrying her.
“I suppose it was love at first sight.”
The young couple’s courtship continued while Benny was in Shetland – and when a job arose in the OS Castle Douglas Office, he grabbed the chance.
“Lyn’s parents were staying at Upper Auchenreoch Farm at Springholm and we ended up buying a house in Kirkpatrick Durham,” smiles Benny.
“I was responsible for the hill areas of Galloway and we would use helicopters quite often.
“Given the time taken to walk in to a place you were far better flown in.
“The whole map series was being changed so you could technically measure from John o’ Groats to Land’s End.
“There was a national grid of 1km squares and that’s the basis we worked on at Castle Douglas.”
Sometimes Benny would go away to other parts of Scotland to help with summer survey work.
One such posting was to Argyll, where he bumped into another acquaintance from the past..
“We flew in Lunga, an island near Easdale, by helicopter and this man was striding about in a kilt.
“It was Major Brian Johnson Fergusson, the county commissioner for Dumfriesshire Scouts.
“He was a typical eccentric ex army officer and landowner from Solwaybank near Springkell who organised the Dumfriesshire County Flag competitions.
“‘Good God, Gilly, how nice to see you boy.’ he said to me. ‘What a splendid way to come!’
“I think his son was trying to make an outward bound centre there.”
Working at Castle Douglas gave Benny a chance to develop his keen interest in local place names.
One in particular, Black Moray’s Well in Kirkcudbright, captured his attention.
He was directed to local artist Tim Jeffs, a former curator of Dumfries Museum – and the rest, as they say, is history.
“Tim advised me to look up various books,” explains Benny.
“There was a antique place in Castle Douglas that sold books and I started buying from him.
“Up at Ayr I saw a copy of the Wigtown Ploughman for sale for £8.
“I thought that was awful dear so I didn’t buy it.
“But back in the shop in CD the guy said he would have given me £15 for it!
“So I phoned the seller up, bought the book, read it then sold it to the CD shop.
“I thought ‘ching ching!’, started advertising to buy books and applied for membership of the Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association.
“They organised book fairs up and down the country and I ended up chairman of the Scottish region.”
When Benny started the bookshop in Kirkpatrick Durham he got to know a customer called Dr MacLean who stayed at Loch Ken.
“Over time we built up a big friendship through attending Mash Brown’s sales at Kirkcowan and Carsluith,” says Benny.
“He was terminally ill and asked me if I could sell all his books on behalf of his widow for a commission.
“I wasn’t sure it was great business – but it gave me experience of handling and cataloguing that quality of material.
“I went to book fairs down south to sell all my non-Scottish books and bring only Scottish books back.
“Eventually I ditched all my non-Scottish books to become a specialist in Scottish books only.
“I gathered the names of people at book fairs and anybody who came into the shop.
“I sent out catalogues to them every year which was really good for sales.”
Benny’s field mapping work left him with a lasting love of antiquarian books on travels across Scotland.
Favourites include Thomas Pennant’s A Tour of Scotland, written in 1769, Martin Martin’s 1716 epic, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland and John McTaggart’s 1824 A Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia.
“I like having books like that because they are describing places as they were at the time,” he says.
“Sometimes I would buy books back from people I had sold them to in the first place.
“One customer from Dumfriesshire purchased a lot of Galloway Books from me. He relocated to Colonsay and I eventually went out there to buy most of the collection back .”
Benny took early voluntary severance from OS in 2002, aged 51, and kept the bookshop going for another nine years.
“I sold up in July, 2011, when I got to 60,” explains Benny.
“I thought ‘I’m not doing this forever’.
“One day this guy came in and bought John McTaggart’s original 1824 A Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia for £300.
“I quickly said to him you can buy all my books at a good price – I’m going to be retiring.
“Six weeks later I was at a book fair in Edinburgh and he was there.
“He came across and said ‘can I talk to you? Since you made the offer I have hardly slept.’
“He asked if I was still serious about selling the books.
“I said yes and he bought the whole thing, shelves, books, fittings, lock stock and barrel – the works.
“He worked for the General Medical Council and he wanted to set up a rare books business in Wigtownshire.
“He bought the books at half the retail price but took the rough with the smooth as well.”
These days Benny bemoans the loss of discovery and excitement which once was part and parcel of the book trade.
“Everything is comparable online now so the price of books is more or less set,” he says sadly.
“In the 1980s London dealers would come up to Scottish book fairs and just hoover the shelves. But nowadays everybody is wise about prices.”
As he approaches 70, Benny’s fascination with local history and images has continued.
“I’m very interested in local picture postcards and photos,” he says.
“When I retired I bought a very good scanner and scanned my whole collection.
“I have over 20,000 images relating to Dumfries and Galloway.
“There’s old advertisments from newspapers and other ephemera – anything of local interest.
“One image I have is of sheep on the Whitesands by George Washington Wilson.
“He was a 19th century landscape photographer who did a series of glass plates which are now at the University of Aberdeen.”
It’s said that books can find their way home – and so it proved with Benny.
“Jack was a regular and a friend,” says Benny. “I sold him SR Crockett’s inscribed copy of McCormick’s The Tinkler Gypsies of Galloway from my own collection.”
