If you are in the world of showbiz then you have to be a bit of a showman and that was certainly the case with Albert Ernest Pickard.

He was described as an eccentric millionaire - but everything he did was aimed at winning publicity for his ventures, as this photograph shows.

Arriving with a crow-bar he is making a spectacular entrance to open his latest cinema, the Norwood, in St George's Road, Glasgow, in 1936.

Pickard took over The Britannia variety hall in Trongate and renamed it The Panopticon, known locally as 'Pots and Pans'. It offered movies, music hall attractions, freak shows, carnivals and waxworks, as well as mechanical games machines.

He also bought over picture houses and became a well-known magnate, with property in Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Stirlingshire, Dunbartonshire, Renfrewshire and Argyllshire.

He died in a fire in his home in Belhaven Terrace in October 1964, aged 90. He left a fortune of £212,381.