Law Life and Laughter: My Personal Verdict by Irvine Smith QC

Legendary Sheriff Irvine Smith QC is one of the most formidable criminal lawyers of his generation. Called to the Bar in 1953, he was involved as Counsel in some of Scotland’s biggest cases, including the Glasgow Bank Raid, known at the time as ‘the crime of the century’. He also defended five capital murder trials before the abolition of the death penalty and knew the full responsibility of trying to keep defendants from the gallows.

He later became a Sheriff, quickly building a reputation as a no-nonsense judge with a sharp intellect and a dry and ready wit. He presided over the test case in the Ibrox Disaster.

He was also one of the finest after-dinner speakers of his generation, especially on the theme of St Andrew and Burns. This talent took him to many venues across the world.

Irvine Smith’s personal recollections are both frank and entertaining, charting the highs and lows of a remarkable life and career lived to the full.

BLACK & WHITE PUBLISHING

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Sheriff James Irvine Smith has encountered many of the renowned figures in the Scottish legal system over the last fifty years. He has given his life to the law. His recreational pursuits have mainly been entertaining people throughout the world, walking on gentle hills in Scotland, classical music and his family.

Cover photographs © Ali Miller

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LAW, LIFE AND LAUGHTERA PERSONAL VERDICT

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‘I look upon anecdotes as debts due to the public, which every man who has that kind of cash by him,ought to pay.’

Lord Orerry to Dr Birch, 1741

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LAW, LIFE ANDLAUGHTERA PERSONAL VERDICT

Irvine Smith, QC


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First published 2011by Black & White Publishing Ltd

29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 11 12 13 14

ISBN: 978 1 84502 356 0

Copyright © Irvine Smith 2011

The right of Irvine Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing

from the publisher.

The publisher has made every reasonable effort to contact copyright holders of images in the picture section. Any errors are inadvertent and anyone who, for any reason,

has not been contacted is invited to write to the publisher so that a full acknowledgment can be made

in subsequent editions of this work.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Ellipsis Digital Limited, GlasgowPrinted and bound by Scandbook AB, Sweden

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Lord McEwan vii

1. A Thirties Childhood 12. The Folk That Begat Me 93. The Cult of Speech 334. The Years Between 385. Fortunate Encounters 486. Edinburgh and Glasgow 617. First Beginnings 738. Sheriff Alistair MacDonald 889. Baptism of Fire: The First High Court Trial 97

10. The First Glasgow Bank Raid 11211. Capital Murder Trials 12212. The Sheriff Court 15413. The Summary Trial 17614. A Spanish Hotel 19215. Two Contrasting Glasgow Characters 19816. The Stair Society 20517. Questions of Law 21118. The Ibrox Disaster 22219. Affiliation and Aliment 24620. The After-Dinner Set 25321. The Dinner Scene 27322. Leaving Glasgow 28123. The Last Laps 289

Epilogue 298Endnotes 310

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks are due to the widow, Dr Jill MacDonald, and the children of the late Sheriff Alistair MacDonald for their permis-sion to print two of his letters to me; to Mr John Black of BexleyHeath for permission to print his letter and to Jack Webster forpermission to quote from his autobiography Grains of Truth.

My thanks are also due to Lord McEwan, Sheriff KennethMitchell, Professor Charles Hennessy and Mr Paul Reid, SolicitorAdvocate, who read and commented on the manuscript and, again,to Lord McEwan for accepting my invitation to contribute the foreword.

The publishers of the Scots Law Times gave me permission toquote from their Journals, reports of cases in which I was involved.

As the stage of publication was reached and communicationsbetween an anxious author and a schedule-conscious staff of thepublishers became numerous, my lack of email literacy and practicepresaged delays and difficulties, to which my uncertain health wasalready contributing. These difficulties have, I think and hope,been avoided by the intervention of Alison, my elder daughter,who has readily, willingly and inexhaustibly discharged throughout,the roles of inspired Personal Assistant and first-class secretary.Had it not been for her, supported by the patience and encourage -ment of her mother, I would not now be writing these acknowl-edgements.

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FOREWORD

by Lord McEwan

I first met James Irvine Smith (known to all as Irvine) when I wasa law student at Glasgow University. He opened the door for meto the life of the Bar, the world of advocacy and legal learning.He encouraged me and others like me to pursue and attain excel-lence. It is a great privilege and pleasure to write this foreword.

The opening chapters are both stern and amusing. He has agood and detailed memory of his childhood, his early years andthe privations suffered and cheerfully borne on ‘holidays’ inAyrshire with some of the main characters in his life. On visits toDailly, newspapers assumed a special importance as the readerwill discover!

To Irvine his friends were valued and a source of pleasure. Atthe Bar those who are your friends are also your professionalrivals. The present generation of advocates may just rememberRanald Sutherland but almost certainly never knew Sir RandallPhilip, the great Manuel Kissen and Sheriff Alistair MacDonald.Mere names in dry legal text books now, come vividly alive inIrvine’s pages.

The book takes on a dark mantle when the writer returns to thedifficult days of Capital Murder trials. Irvine defended a numberof men and one woman who faced the death penalty, and lost onlyone to the hangman, and he was but a boy. I know from my manycommunications with him about that case how the execution hasnever left his mind, and will haunt him for ever.

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The author’s mid life was spent and enjoyed as a sheriff- substitutein Glasgow and his insight abounds into the fun and subtleties ofthat ‘holy city’. It was a large part of his life which changed whenhe went to another Sheriff Court, and not for the better. For thelast quarter of the twentieth century Irvine was the best after dinnerspeaker in Scotland, and his reputation at Burns Suppers was inter-national. The reader will find in the chapter ’The Cult of Speech’a veritable quarry of information about how to acquire these skills.Reading aloud, elocution, learning by rote and the value of poetryare all commended. To an older generation these were secondnature. Today’s generation should pay attention.

This book is a splendid work about a valuable and useful lifewell enjoyed and happily ongoing. It will be read and appreciatedby the legal profession and layfolk alike, even, I venture to suggest,by the many miscreants who appeared in Irvine’s court beforebeing returned to ‘secure accomodation’. I wish the book all success.

ROBIN G. McEWAN

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1

A THIRTIES CHILDHOOD

Falkirk, where I lived in or close to for fifty-seven years, is anancient Scottish burgh with a long vivid and chequered history. Itwas the scene of two significant battles. One, at which the fortunesof William Wallace saw their first serious setback, and the otherwhich did nothing to halt the retreat of Prince Charles EdwardStewart’s army to its ultimate destruction at Culloden. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was famous for its ironindustries and annual autumnal ‘cattle trysts’, where all the droveroads of Scotland terminated.

In the l930s, however, Falkirk was a town uncertain of its present,anxious about its future and nostalgic about its recent past. It wasanxious because the decline of the industries, on which its pros-perity had been built, was becoming all too obvious. That prosperitybegan with the founding of Carron Iron Works in 1759. Thereafter,with the rest of central Scotland, where iron and coal lay in abun-dance, it became a town of iron foundries. These foundriesemployed not just men, but generations of men from the samelocal families. My paternal grandfather, who died before 1914, wasemployed there. My father, too, worked there as a fitter all hisworking life, as did his brother, John.

Iron foundries and the Carron Company, in particular, were themajor employers of men in the town in the 1930s but with theDepression, which only ended with the start of the Second WorldWar, like the rest of the country, many a man had no job. My fatherwas one of the lucky ones. He was never unemployed, althoughwhen the war started in 1939 his work changed from assemblingiron grates to assembling implements of war, and he and his contem-poraries, for the first time, earned significantly greater wages. The

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‘war work’, as it was called was intense. He would start at 6 a.m.on a working day and I recall, as a boy of thirteen, walking thetwo miles or so from our home to Carron Foundry with his break-fast; a flask of tea and bacon rolls, the bacon being always mymother’s choice, Wiltshire bacon. Between 12 and 1 p.m. he wouldcome home for what was then the main meal of the day. He andhis like lived their whole working lives to the sound of the factorywhistles, which, in recollection, I can still hear.

In the 1930s, in Falkirk, like many Scottish industrial towns, youwere never far from a foundry and never far from a church. It wasa phenomenon by which an over-abundance of spiritual comfortwas provided for the people of these towns. At Stenhouse ParishChurch, which I attended, there were services at 11 a.m. and 6.30 p.m. Most children, like myself, were taken to church on Sundaymornings where we sat through the service and then went to Sundayschool. I fear my early experience of sermons of twenty-five-minutesduration, sometimes more, did not encourage in me any enthu-siasm for their institution. Sunday school attendance was notonerous, but it too could certainly be boring. I recall one Sundayschool teacher who considered it essential that a class of nine orten year olds should be able to recite by heart the names of all thebooks of The Bible in their proper order. The object of this, heclaimed, was that we could then more easily look up the text whenit had been quoted by the minister, without wasting time lookingup the index. Now in my eighties I can still recite, in order, thebooks of the Old and New Testaments: the value of which, I confess,I have never been able to discover.

Attendance at Sunday school did, however, qualify one for thetwo highlights of the year: the summer Sunday school trip andthe Christmas Party. The trip in June usually set out fromStenhousemuir in buses, with streamers flying and a general excite-ment and noise, which the adults abandoned all hope of trying tocontrol. The favoured destinations were the Hillfoot villages suchas Alva and Tillicoultry, with Doune, near Stirling, a specialfavourite. Once there, if the weather was good, there were races

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of all kinds and for all ages, ball games and walks to the neigh-bouring towns to purchase presents – very modest presents – forparents unable to be present. If it rained there was always a hallavailable. Alva Glen was, as I recall, the best equipped with thisalternative, and there the adults did their best to occupy theirexcited but disappointed charges by organising games and runninga concert in which every child was expected to volunteer to dotheir turn. This was an exercise productive of some unusual talentsand results. If one of the objects of the ‘trip’ was to preserve thechildren’s loyalty and encourage their attendance at Sunday school,it certainly succeeded. For the adults who came with the children– it was my Aunt Bella who always took me – the trips had theentirely laudable conclusion of exhausting their charges. Therewere very few streamers on the way home. The fathers, inciden-tally, rarely attended the Sunday school trips.

The Sunday school Christmas Parties were more sedate affairs.One such party for all the children was held in the church hall bythe Sunday school organisers. Another was held every year by afamily of, I recall three sisters, the Misses Bauchops, all unmar-ried and all comfortably off in their own large and comfortablehome. The three, always in black, sat in the pew in front of oursin the church, and my attendance at church being something theywere bound to notice, it invariably became more committed asChristmas approached.

At the end of one’s youth, one was expected to be admitted tofull membership of the Kirk and to be grateful for the privilege.

Attendance at and adherence to a particular church in thesedays did not just mean expressing one’s faith and practising a reli-gion. It admitted one also to the many activities of which the individual church was then the centre. In particular, StenhouseParish Church, in my childhood, had an annual Kinderspiel – aform of musical which had the triple object of keeping the chil-dren occupied in practising, the adults occupied with rehearsalsand preparation, and the parents and congregation, being enter-tained when the first night was reached. The context of the piece

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invariably carried a moral message and ended, of course, in thetriumph of virtue. I recall one snatch: the chorus was sung byRobin Hood and a company of junior archers who were his ‘men’,who had somehow found their way into this unlikely scenariowhere fairies and goodwill abounded. It ran:-

Learn a lesson from the archers,Take a hint from Robin Hood,And whatever may befall you,Ever let your aim be good.

Some of the more ambitious city churches in Glasgow at that timeselected, rehearsed and presented a musical, such as Chu, ChinChow, The Girlfriend or Rose Marie.

Church halls were the regular scenes of concerts at which localamateur singers, instrumentalists and elocutionists purported toentertain the congregation and raise money for some charity, usuallya necessary church repair. The repertoire did not vary much: itwas the old Scots songs, which then everyone knew, and the familiarVictorian and Edwardian ballads: ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ and‘The Trumpeter’, together with the more recent song ‘Bless ThisHouse’, which then everyone also knew.

In the 1930s, of course, there was another significant form ofentertainment, which was not amateur and which was to find itsapotheosis in the world’s fixation with television from the 1950sonwards. I refer to the recently invented ‘talking films.’ We had asmall theatre in Falkirk, then called ‘The Electric’, later ‘The Roxy’,which attempted to continue the tradition of the music hall butwhich declined in popularity before the films. The screens, silentand then talking, which were then to be found in no less thanseven cinemas within a half-mile radius of the centre of the town,were a weekly draw to the population. The number of churchesand the number of cinemas were about equal.

Falkirk then was a town and a neighbourhood; not a village buta community that had many characteristics of a village. There was


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much familiarity with the comings and goings, the ups and downsof fellow citizens and their children. The academic, sporting, artisticand other successes of its children and youth were of interest, and,as a consequence, became the talk of the town. The successfulgraduates gave satisfaction, not only to their parents, but to fellowcitizens. The departure of a minister and who should succeed himinterested all who had a connection with any church. The birth ofa child to what was called ‘an old Falkirk family’ evoked all theinterest it would in a village community. We knew where most ofour contemporaries went for their holidays, if they went anywhere:I knew only one family – the father was a prosperous grocer –who regularly went on cruises. This for most was still the goldenage of the Costa Clyde.

It was into this town and in my parents’ house that I was bornon 26 November 1926, in a small three-storey tenement buildingin Grahams Road.

I was the only child my parents were to have. They were marriedcomparatively late in life. My mother had me when she was forty-one, and, I am told, a sore time she had of it. She told me longafter that, Chrissie, one of my father’s sisters and a spinster, hadonce asked her if she had considered the whole experience hadbeen ‘worth it?’ When they married, my parents bought their homewhich was rather special because it gave them a bathroom whichhad a toilet and a bath but, as an Edinburgh ‘friend’ once remarkeddisdainfully ‘no wash hand basin at all’. It gave us, again for thesedays, more space than most. It cost £340 in 1924. They took out amortgage, which must have been paid regularly since both wereworking. Our house was, I fear, a wholly unlovely building archi-tecturally. It had been built, partly to house a successful herbalistbusiness on the ground floor and partly as regards the rest – threehouses and two other shops, – as a speculation. This was to bemy home until I married in 1958, at the age of thirty-two, and itwas my father’s house until the end of his life. He died there, agedseventy-four, by which time my mother was in hospital, a victimof senile dementia.


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In later life, I have often been accused by affluent and public-school educated left-wingers of ‘knowing nothing about theworking classes’. I consider it my privilege and advantage that,in my origins, parental and local, there was to be found what Iregard as the Scots working folk at their best. What my parentsgave me was a more intimate experience of what the working manand woman were in the 1930s than those who challenged me. Inaddition, I could and can speak the language of the folk I camefrom, with the accents which I have never forgotten, and whichdid me no harm in what I did later in life.

Ugliness, inconvenience, and an entire lack of domestic coherencyin the architecture characterised that house of my parents. Therewere many steps and what was called a ‘lobby’, but at the end ofthe lobby there was ‘the front room’ – it was never called a loungebecause lounging was not an activity with which my parents werefamiliar – but they had a ‘front room’ with a piano, which neitherof them could play, and a wind-up gramophone with about twentyrecords, mostly of the songs and singers of the day.

My mother’s younger sister, Jean, also had a piano in her flatin Glasgow and she and her children were self-taught, amateurpianists. It was from our gramophone and the songs that I learntat Aunt Jean’s, where I went every summer for a fortnight’s holiday,that music came into my life and I first tried to sing. From bothsources I managed to acquire a modest repertoire which my fatherdecided to put to a somewhat unusual use.

Immediately to the north of Stenhousemuir Tryst, separated byBellsdyke Road, there was a mental hospital, built with all the sizeand confidence that characterised the Victorians in these things. Idid not know how many patients it treated, but it seemed to be aconsiderable number. You saw them as gardeners keeping thegrounds immaculate – though at a pace which would not impressa commercial enterprise of today. My father called them ‘thespeedies’, but the leisurely approach they had to landscapegardening gave them ample opportunity to converse with any ofthe public who happened to be passing on Bellsdyke Road, or


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walking in the grounds of the hospital itself, which was not, as Irecollect, regarded as a risk, even for the young. These patientscame to know people, like my father, who, when he was notworking, went back to Stenhousemuir and made his way to theTryst Cricket Club pavilion – an unlovely but practical buildingto which the retired men of the village could not only take theirdaily walk, but could sit and talk there in all weathers and seasonsfor as long as they wanted. There was then a certain camaraderiebetween the habitués of the cricket club and the more nomadicpatients of the mental hospital. The former learned from the latterall that was happening in the hospital – which it did not appearwas very much. There was, however, a regular, possibly a weekly,concert for the patients to which some of their own numbercontributed, but also for variety, relied on amateur talent from thesurrounding district. It was in this unconventional milieu that Ihad my first introduction to making public appearances.

The patients of that mental hospital were, fortunately, not aparticularly critical audience though, sometimes, they could be adiverting one. Occasionally, in the course of the performance, oneor other of them would, for no apparent reason, shout an inartic-ulate shout and then relapse into silence. It was never possible todetermine what they were shouting about. Their shouts were word-less and certainly did not appear to be abuse, or disapproval ofany of the performers. There was no quarrelling among them-selves – they just felt like shouting wordless noises which, howeverinnocently prompted, were not always conducive to concentrationon the part of a teenage soprano who was making an attempt tosing some operatic aria. Such interruptions, however, did not deterthe amateur singer and reciter from offering and giving their serv-ices at these hospital concerts.

My link here was my father. He would be told there was aconcert coming up and he volunteered my services as a singer. Ithink this started when I was about the age of seven or eight andnot averse to trying to sing. My father certainly thought I couldsing or, perhaps, he thought I should sing.


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I have mentioned our wind-up gramophone and its twenty orso records, with Harry Lauder, Songs of the First War and of themusic hall and such sentimental gems as ‘Granny’s HighlandHame’. We boasted no opera in this modest collection and the onlyorchestral item that I can remember was Ketelby’s ‘In a MonasteryGarden’ and one 10-inch, 78 rpm record, which gave music for apolka, a barn dance and a waltz,. I learned the words of the songsfairly quickly, and by the age when I made my bow to the patientsin Larbert asylum, I possessed a small repertoire of such songs.

For these concerts I would be appropriately dressed in a kilt ofthe Crawford tartan because I was told my father’s mother was aCrawford. But this choice was not dictated by any clan or matri-lineal sentiments: it was because my mother liked the Crawfordtartan, and the only person the family knew with a name entitlingthem to take the tartan, was my paternal grandmother.

In this appropriate garb, I had the colossal juvenile imperti-nence to mount a platform and sing songs and invite the patientsto join in the choruses, which they invariably did. Usually, therewas a pianist present but I was unable to enlist his services becausethere had been no rehearsal and I had no music except in my head,and I was afraid the piano would put me off. These ‘performances’went on for about three years. I have mentioned earlier theKinderspiel produced in the church we attended, and for these Iwas also an enthusiastic participant. In short, it would seem thisboy liked to be on stage.


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2

THE FOLK THAT BEGAT ME

I have often been addressed, to my embarrassment, as if my namewas double-barrelled: Irvine-Smith. It certainly was not. I was christened James Irvine Smith, the ‘James’ from my late paternalgrandfather, the ‘Irvine’ as a Christian name, after my mother’sfamily, whose surname it was. The Irvines were a Border familywhich, in the past, made a significant and frequent contribution tothe criminal statistics and criminal jurisprudence of that area. Theantisocial reputation of our ancestors, however, was unknown tomy parents and I am satisfied they named me as they did becausethey thought Irvine as good a Christian name as it was a surname.

THE SMITHS

My father came from a large family. The Smith grandparents, bothof whom died before 1914, had eight children: Madge, Elizabeth(Bett), Agnes, Christina (Chrissie), John, Isabella (Bella), my father(James) and another daughter, who died of consumption. It wouldappear to have been the custom in those days in working classfamilies to have at least one child who died of that condition. Johndied in 1929. Madge, the eldest, emigrated to Australia before theturn of the century. I was brought up to know all the others; somebetter than others. They were, undoubtedly, an interesting groupand their parents must have been a determined and formidablecouple. How they brought up such a mixed family in the restrictedovercrowding of their house in Union Street is, to me, inconceiv-able. Indeed, I would say they were very fortunate to have lostonly one child from ‘consumption’. When I knew that house, ithad a bed in the kitchen, a bed in the parlour and, in the upstairs

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room two box beds – accommodation which would have been asfamiliar to many generations of Scots as it was to Robert Burns.Small wonder some of the more restless of these generations lefthome as soon as they could fend for themselves.

I had little contact with Madge and Bett, but the remainingaunts, Agnes, Chrissie and Bella, were not only very much partof my childhood, they were among the characters of my life. Agnesdid what most girls of her station did before 1914, she went ‘intoservice’ – that is domestic service – at first, I think, with localgentry, and she nourished a lifelong and uncritical regard, indeedreverence, for the gentry. Theirs were the standards she admiredand, in her eyes, they could do no wrong. If, as a child, I ever leftfood that had been put in front of me, her comment was, ‘Thegentry’s weans aye cleaned their plates’, which may have beenexplained by the cuisine of their public school, or by their hungeror their manners – or all three.

She had other ‘places’ but, before the First World War, she enteredthe service of the Houldsworths of Kirkbride House, Crosshill,Ayrshire, and became a respected and trusted member of theirestablishment and, as she told me many times, bitterly regrettedthe day she left them, as well as the reason for which she did so.As she put it: ‘I would have been housekeeper at Kirkbride if Ihad stayed’, and of life she would have asked no higher promo-tion. She left to marry an older man, James McCrindle, a widower,and regretted it for the rest of her life.

From about the age of eight, I used to spend part of the Easterand summer holidays there. She lived in what had been built asa substantial farm-type house on Dalquharran Estate, Dailly, aboutseven or eight miles from Kirkbride House, which had been builtto house a grieve or cattleman. One small section of the groundfloor was a separate dwelling consisting of an entry lobby, a kitchen-cum-living room to the right, and a mini-sized bedroom to theleft, in which it was just possible to have a single bed with abouttwo feet between it and the wall, and no other furniture. It had asmall window at the foot of the bed, which never opened because


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it could not. It was in this unventilated and unheated room thatmy Aunt’s ageing husband habitually slept – alone – in the singlebed. She only ever joined him when visitors, like my parents, occu-pied the double bed in the kitchen.

Facing the door of McCrindle’s little bedroom was another shortcorridor to the ‘front room’ in which room, in my day, it wasimpossible to move for the collection of memorabilia my aunt hadbrought from her various places of service – modest ornamentsand a multitude of framed photographs of her various employersand their offspring. She regarded the lobby at the entrance to herfront room as the coolest part of the house and any foodstuffswhich were not for immediate consumption were stored there ontwo stools, under wire covers. These covers may have kept theflies out – I stress ‘may’ – but they did not keep in the smell ofwhatever was under them and, when I recall that lobby, I recallalso the almost perpetual smell of Finnan haddock, which lay thereuntil their smell made their consumption inevitable and urgent.The only attempt, indeed, to combat the flies, which, in summerwere everywhere, were two flypapers, like ribbons coated with acaramel-coloured glue, which hung from either end of the pulleyin the kitchen, above the kitchen table at which we ate.

The house floor was stone throughout, not like a cement floor,but earth covered with flat stones about 20 inches square, with theearth showing between them. Taking a bath was impossible – notonly because there was no hot water – there was no bath. Eventhe conventional zinc hipbath was unknown there. I recollect onlytwo rugs on the floor, one a patch rug, the other made of pack-sheet. The only running water to this house was an outside tap tothe right of the only door. There you washed – if you did wash –in cold water.

It will be appreciated from the singular water supply that therewas no toilet. There was, some forty or fifty yards from the house,a patch of wood in which was situated a wooden privy – a hutcontaining an unvarnished wooden seat with a twelve inch diameter hole cut in it and beneath it a pail. No money was ever

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spent on toilet paper, but the daily newspaper, which came withthe milkman each day, eventually found its way to the privy, whichwas emptied when the pail became so full that there was no alter-native but to empty it, for to abandon the privy, which, since ithad served the house since it was built, was unthinkable.

Elementary sanitation, however, was but one of the inconven-iences of a stay with Aunt Agnes. The kitchen housed one highdouble bed, entry to which was only possible by means of firstclimbing on to a chair. When Bella and I were there, the two sistersslept in the kitchen bed together. Since it had apparently beendecided at an early stage that I would – with Bella – regularlyspend part of the Easter and summer school holidays with AuntAgnes, a camp bed had to be got for me, which was unfolded eachnight and folded up each morning. Much time was spent in bedby the occupants of that house. It offered an idea of what life musthave been like for the majority before the invention of gas or elec-tricity, and assuredly there was neither gas nor electricity inDalquharran Mains. The only lighting was by candle or by theceremonial and – as I remember it – rare lighting of a paraffinlamp. The light given by this ancient lamp hardly justified theeffort taken to light it. You certainly could not read by it. Later, ina cottage where a friend and I, as students, used to holiday atCrinan, they had a sophisticated paraffin lamp with a pump actionwhich gave an admirable light by which we all could read. Agnes’sone lamp knew no such sophistication and if you went from thekitchen to any other room it was by candlelight. Any reading orhousehold activities depended on the kitchen being lit by the lightof day. I was never there in the depths of winter but on my holi-days there, as in the Middle Ages, the day was dawn till dusk –in winter a very short day, in summer a very long one, and bedthe only quasi comfortable place in which to pass the hours ofdarkness.

Due to the inaccessibility of the village by virtue of distanceand Agnes’s rheumatism, the household foodstuffs were deliveredby the Dailly grocer on his pony and trap once a week, except the


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milk, which came daily. Fresh bread was only available while thebread brought on Fridays lasted. Bread, however, here, was anirrelevance. Instead of bread, we ate Aunt Agnes’ soda scones,baked on a girdle over the uncertain fire, which had been coaxedinto some life especially for the occasion, but I still recall the firstday I tasted these girdle scones.

In the 1930s, my Aunt Bella’s and my journeys to and fromDailly were major and traumatic occasions. They certainly did notsupport Robert Louis Stevenson’s view that ‘it is better to travelhopefully than to arrive’. These journeys involved the carriage ofmuch luggage, and seemed, in retrospect, to occupy a full day’sjourney by bus from Stenhousemuir to Dailly. There were trains,then as now, from Glasgow to Stranraer which then stopped atthe little station Dailly possessed, but the train was more expen-sive than the bus, so we went by bus. My mother provided sand-wiches to sustain us in what, I seem to recall, was about a seven-hourjourney in all. These were not the days of fast intercity bus jour-neys. Eventually we arrived at the Dalquharran Toll where we –and myself with a profound feeling of relief – alighted.

Arriving at Dalquharran Toll however was not the end of thetravelling. We were now about a mile and a half from our desti-nation and we walked that distance carrying our own luggage,though I recollect we sometimes left part of it at one of the cottageswe passed and went back for it later when we were less encum-bered. It was a road from this bus stop to my aunt’s home whichthen knew little or no traffic and never once do I recall any passingvan or lorry offering us, or our luggage, a lift.

By the time we arrived at the house, we were undoubtedly‘ready’, as Agnes invariably said we would be, ‘for our tea’. Icertainly was so hungry that, the first day I encountered them, Ihad to be stopped from consuming the whole of the particularbaking of girdle scones Agnes had prepared for our arrival. Thesescones were unquestionably the most prominent and acceptableelement of her uncertain cuisine. The other fresh food, of course,was eggs. She kept some twenty or thirty hens to whose care her


13


life was dedicated. Much of the day was devoted to preparingwhat she called ‘the hens’ meat’ and, each day she collected theeggs and sold them, mainly to the wives of the miners from thenearby pit. Her hens and their eggs were her staple presents toher family. When Bella and I left after a holiday with her, weusually carried each a basket of eggs and a hen whose neck hadbeen wrung and the feathers plucked the day before we left. Inthe years she had a turkey cock, it was usually sent to my motherfor Christmas. In those days, there was no difficulty in packing alarge turkey. Her practice, to which no one took exception, was towring its neck, tie a label round its neck addressed to us, and postit. Its smell preceded its actual reception at Falkirk.

Agnes’ life was without laughter or even company and all theyears I knew her, she was crippled with rheumatics. The reasonshe never became housekeeper at Kirkbride was because she hadmarried a man she had never loved and, by the time I knew her,detested. To her he had become an anathema. She never called orreferred to him other than by his surname. When she spoke ofhim, it was always ‘McCrindle will do so and so …’ or ‘McCrindle!Your tea’s ready.’ How she came to marry him was always a mysteryto the family.

Her existence I could only describe as grim, solitary, unrelievedby companionship, even by a radio. There was a daily paper whichcame with the milkman and the only time I ever saw her relaxwas when occasionally of an evening – in the light of summer –she would sit down on a hard wood settle, read the paper and,from its contents, lament the state of the nation and the disap-pearance of the gentry. She was indeed a female version of one ofCunningham Graham’s characters of about 1914, an ‘old Celt’ whocould as he himself said: ‘discern a gentleman a mile away ...Gentry and gentlemen, by which he understood those of old family,for money could not make nor want of it mar, in his opinion, werethe chief objects of his creed.’

Her life in Dalquharran Mains with McCrindle came to an endabout 1950 when they were no longer physically able to continue


14


to live there. They split up – McCrindle was given a home by oneof his children, who had always ignored his second wife, andAgnes came back to the family home her father had built in UnionStreet, Stenhousemuir. There, in about 1953, she took a massivestroke which incapacitated her from speech or movements but shewas still able to make us understand how ashamed she was thatshe had been reduced to such a state and, I think, was relievedthat the life that had given her so little joy was soon to be over. Ican date this, because the last bit of diversion she knew was mytaking her in my first car, a little pre-war Austin 7, from the housein Stenhousemuir to Linlithgow Palace, to see the illuminationson the night of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth. She was a littlestunned by the lights and the crowds and I recall that, during itall and all the way home, she sat silent, as if it was all too muchfor her and the world had got beyond her and she was tired of it.

If much of Agnes’ life had been a negative, disillusioning andunlovely experience, largely spent in one miserable place, Chrissie,her sister, aspired to and achieved the opposite. To use her ownphrase: her ‘lines had been much cast in pleasant places’. In herappearance, as in the life she led, she differed from her sisters.Bett and Agnes were physically small, but solidly built. Bella wassmall and slight. Chrissie may not have been tall, but she gave theimpression she was – tall, slim, animated and civilised. She, too,left the family home early and I never heard her speak of whereand how she first entered service, but that is what she undoubt-edly did. By the time I came to know my aunts, however, she wasthe one who appeared only occasionally at the family home andthen for short holidays or between jobs. She always came fromfaraway places with faraway names and, until the late 1930s, mostof her life was spent abroad. Just how she became the woman shewas, is very difficult to appreciate. The education she would havereceived at Stenhousemuir School as a child would have beenelementary. Her accent must have been the unpolished and thesame Scots tongue that my father spoke throughout his life. Butescape she did, by her own efforts. She made herself a reputation


15


as a governess to children and, latterly, a ladies’ companion. Itwas still an age where wealthy and lonely women liked to havea companion and were prepared to house and pay them. In herearlier life, parents with children who were travelling and whowanted a governess who could teach their children manners andthe fundamental three Rs were numerous. Chrissie was able to fillthese roles. She lived for long periods abroad, in America, espe-cially in New York, India, Ceylon, Australia, Tasmania and Paris– in the house of the Aga Khan, the erotic decoration of whosetoilets she never failed to comment on as inappropriate for a maidenlady like herself. Certainly, she remained a spinster and one canonly speculate on whether she had affairs with men. She certainlyhad male friends and distinguished ones at that. I have from hera coconut with the shell hollowed out to make a drinking vessel.The lip is encased in a rim of silver and silver also forms the baseand stand. It is the donor, however, who is remarkable. There isa coat of arms and a motto, presumably his, on the silver standand on the base, the words ‘To Chrissie Smith from her friend,Admiral J. Moresby RN.’ He was the founder of Port Moresby, thecapital of New Guinea. He also gave her a copy of his book, TwoAdmirals, written about his father and himself, inscribed ‘ToChrissie Smith from her friend, the author’, dated September 1913.

In the late 1920s, she became governess to a wealthy Americanfamily with two children, George and Kathleen. When she was inScotland the names of these two children, their doings and theirbehaviour, which was apparently angelic, were never off her lipsand, at the age of about six, I came to develop a passionate resent-ment, and later a hatred of, the reported behaviour of these twochildren. The great crash of the Wall Street stock exchange in 1929eventually put an end to the ability of this family to live in Parisand on the Riviera and to have a nanny for their children. Whathappened to these children, I never knew and neither did theirnanny: the break was complete. Thereafter, her services as acompanion to elderly ladies continued, mostly in the south ofEngland. She was an inveterate letter writer and, throughout her


16


life, kept an active correspondence with her family in Scotlandand with friends in all parts of the world from which, as a child,my stamp collection derived considerable benefit.1

She continued to lead her somewhat nomadic existence untilabout 1953, when she returned to the family home for a brief spellto live with her sister, Agnes – an ill-assorted couple – until thelatter died. Thereafter, her health gradually failed. Her mind wentand she eventually died in March 1962; the last survivor of thatlarge family which set out in life from 22 Union Street,Stenhousemuir. Even at the end, she displayed independence ofspirit and practicality. After her death, I arranged for the funeralto take place at the family grave in Stenhousemuir Cemetery. Thegrave was partly dug when I obtained a copy of her will, whichrequired that her remains be cremated and disposed of by thecheapest means possible. Cremations are never happy occasions.This one, attended by three people, – my second cousin, my oldestfriend and myself – of a woman who had seen and known somuch of the world and people, was among the most melancholyI have known.

Isabella – ‘Bella’ – was the youngest of the Smith sisters I knew,and the first to die. When her parents died and the other sistersleft home, only Bella and the two brothers, John and my father,were left. Bella was their housekeeper. She, like Chrissie, nevermarried and her life must have been a monotonous drudgery.What she relied on for money I do not know. She had certainlyno income and there was then no social security. She never consid-ered she could afford a wireless. Probably her parents had left hera little and she would save from the wages her brothers broughtin, when they lived with her. I know that she had saved money,and the best kind of money, because at my birthday or at Christmas,her highly acceptable gift was a gold sovereign. It gave me a littlecollection of them which, in the foolishness of youth, I exchangedfor £4 each when I found myself short of cash as an undergrad-uate.

In the mid-1930s, she developed diabetes and, thereafter, every


17


day I was with her I saw her injecting insulin into her leg, an oper-ation which saw liberal use of iodine before and after the needlewas used. I still associate the smell of iodine with these days. Herannual diversions were the holidays she had at her sister, Agnes’home, the Sunday school outing to which she invariably took me,attendance at meetings of the local Liberal party, and an annualChristmas visit to the Royal Princess’s Theatre pantomime inGlasgow, taking me with her.

On Saturdays and school holidays, I spent much time at herhome and I have no doubt she gave me much of my own way.As a child, I always wanted a dog. Since, however, we lived, asmy mother put it ‘up a stair’, she considered we were disquali-fied from having a dog. The only pets allowed in our home werebudgerigars and, at one time, goldfish, each species being replacedwhen their brief lives came to an end. Bella, however, allowed memore ambitious and experimental pets. Someone made me a cage,into which I proposed to put pigeons and breed pigeons. A pairwas acquired from a small zoo in Glasgow. They proved fertileand I soon had three pigeons, which my aunt fed during the weekand I saw at weekends and holidays. Unfortunately, I was igno-rant, as was Bella, of the ways of pigeons and this experimentcame to an end when the cock bird killed its chick. That endedthe keeping of pigeons. The pigeons were followed by Java spar-rows whose principal merit was that they were cheap to buy. Theyproved so lively, however, that I never found a way of openingthe cage door without one of them escaping and, when Java sparrows escaped, they never returned. That breed ended my exper-iments with pets until 1959 when, having married a patient wife,I at last acquired my first dog, a black Labrador bitch.

At the start of the War a new play place came to Bella’s garden,in the form of an Anderson Shelter. It kept out the rain and it washoped that it would keep out bombs and their consequences. Therewhen it rained we could sit, talk, and even, when an older boy foundus, be introduced into the mysteries of a pack of playing cards.

Bella died very suddenly in about 1942 and I had my first expe-


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rience of seeing a dead body, a freshly dug grave and a coffin, ofwhich I held a cord as we slowly lowered her into the earth. Thepigeons and goldfish excepted, it was my first experience of death.

THE IRVINES

The family from which my mother came was dominated by herown mother, who was indeed a formidable woman. She was bornin 1855 and died in 1948 at the age of ninety-three with her facul-ties clear to the end, and able to care for herself in the room andkitchen house in which she had spent her whole life from the timeshe married, and in which she had reared her family, until sixmonths before she died, when she went to live alternate monthswith my mother and her youngest daughter in Glasgow. All mychildhood, from its earliest memories, were dominated by thatgrandmother, who early on impressed that she was made of sternstuff and, from what I know now, was made of even sterner stuffthan I had realised. She was born in Slamannan and, in her earlydays, was in domestic service to one of the local gentry. She marriedSamuel James Irvine, who was two years her senior, in 1879. Theyhad four children: Mary, my mother Anna, one son James and theyoungest daughter, Jean. Mary went to London before 1914 andreturned to Scotland only occasionally to see her mother and hersisters. Beyond giving his wife four children, and then desertingthem and her, I know nothing of Samuel James Irvine. The dateof his desertion must now be a matter of inference. Neither mygrandmother nor my mother ever mentioned his name to me. Iwas told, when in my teens, by the older cousin I referred to, thatour grandmother had been deserted by her husband and left tobring up the children with no support from him. He was said tohave gone to sea on merchant ships. Nothing was heard from himfor years, until he appeared at the door of what had been theirhome and where his wife still lived. She went to the door in answerto a knock, opened it, saw who it was and slammed it in his face.She brooked no excuses, no pleading and, therefore, she allowed


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him no words. She was, undoubtedly, a strong woman and hadher values of what she had a right to expect from a husband andhad not received. How she fed, clothed, housed, brought up thatfamily as a single parent in the late Victorian age with none of thesocial security benefits of today, and in doing so, kept the respectand regard of her neighbours as she did, I know not, but I marvelat it. The old-age pension was payable from 1909, but would notgive her any benefit until she was seventy. Certainly, her daugh-ters and her son, when they began work, would bring in wagesand, when I remember her in her old age, the two younger daugh-ters were unquestionably good to her, especially in kind and espe-cially my mother, whose married home was a five-minute walkfrom my grandmother’s little room and kitchen house with anoutside stair, a landing and an outside toilet beneath the stair. Mymother went to see her every day after she came home from work.If we had anything special to eat, like chicken, then very much atreat, I was sent round with a portion for my grandmother. Shestill managed to have a little cash by her. I recall when I was aboutseventeen and becoming an enthusiast for classical music, she wasable to give me five shillings when I asked for it, the price of twoplaster busts, of Beethoven and Mozart, which I had seen in asecond-hand shop in Camelon and which I greatly coveted. I stillhave them and still recall the readiness with which she partedwith those five shillings. She brought up her children alone and Ithink she could claim she did it successfully. Her second daughter,my mother, was one of the earliest businesswomen in Falkirk. Itwas because my mother had her business and attended to it, thatI saw so much of my grandmother, because she, with my AuntBella in Stenhousemuir, was always there to look after me.

Her youngest daughter, Jean, married David Ferguson a son ofa Perthshire farmer, a gem of a man, who eventually had his ownmodest dairy business in the Gorbals of Glasgow. As a boy I usedto deliver milk there and got to know that legendary area verywell, where, I must confess, I never felt afraid or threatened andhad many kindnesses from its people. David Ferguson and Aunt


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Jean had two children, a girl and a boy, the only cousins withwhom I had any contact and familiarity. Both older than me, theywere regular visitors to their grandmother’s and our home, but Irealise now I was always a little jealous of the generosity and affec-tion my mother always showed them. Willy – the son – we tookon holidays with us to Morecambe and the Isle of Man. Jess, wholooked very like my mother, took I fear what looked like veryunfair advantage of my mother’s affection for her. When mymother’s mind failed she gave to Jess – and Jess took – any jewelleryshe had and any that belonged to my father.

I saw much of these cousins. I spent two weeks of each summerholiday with Aunt Jean in Glasgow and there were there only threebeds in the house. I shared a cupboard bed with Willy. Aunt Jean– like my mother – had a piano. She however had taught herselfto play the tonic sol-fa scale on it: many a wet afternoon duringmy Glasgow holidays I spent listening to her playing the songsof the First World War. It was there I learned the words and thetunes of these evocative and tragic songs. I can still sing them. Ondry days, in the afternoons, I would walk a mile or so to QueensPark – on my own – to sail a model yacht on its boating pond. Iwould doubt if any responsible parent or aunt could allow a tenyear old to do that now, especially carrying a model yacht.

My grandmother’s only son, Jim, a conscripted and reluctantsoldier, was one of the many to be killed at Passchendaele in theFirst World War. He must have had at least one leave from Francebefore he was killed when he brought back two brass Pickelhaubenfrom German helmets, which sat at either end of her mantelpieceand were polished every day. Framed and hung on the wall, inthe centre of her mantelpiece, was a printed in memoriam noticewith a list of the battles of the Great War, with a facsimile of thesignature of George V. There must have been as many of thesenotices as there were deaths in those battles. There were photo-graphs of some at the memorials. In the centre, was a small type-written slip of paper giving the name and rank of the soldier fromthat family, who had been killed.


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My most familiar recollection of my grandmother is of her sitting,knitting or reading, in a chair before her grate with a low fireburning. She knitted every pair of stockings I had as a boy. Forher reading she was fascinated by the politicians of the great ageshe had known – the Gladstones, Roseberys and Disraelis – andI often brought her political biographies from the local public library.Until my early teens I was with her every Saturday night. Mymother usually came late from work to collect me. My father wouldgo off for the day and I would spend the morning and afternoonat my aunt’s in Stenhousemuir and come back in the evening tomy grandmother and sit there reading, learning multiplicationtables, doing homework and, when she eventually was given abattery wireless by my mother, listening to that. I can still see herwhen George V was dying, kneeling beside the wireless that shemight not miss any of the many health bulletins on the monarch.Her house was always illuminated by gas, and I still vividlyremember sitting in the chair reading with the hiss of the gasmantle as the only background sound. In her eighties, the veinsin my grandmother’s hands stood out, and as a child I recall tracingthem as I can now trace them on my own hand. She was the oldestmember at the end of her days in the congregation of St Andrew’sKirk in Falkirk and to the end she subscribed to the Falkirk Heraldand the People’s Friend for the serialised stories of Annie S. Swan,as well as to the weekly Christian Herald. Each week, she dutifullysent copies of the Falkirk Herald – one her own, the other my parents’copy – to her daughters in London and Glasgow.

MY PARENTS

I was my mother’s only child. She married in 1924, late in life forthose days and was forty-one when she had me. For me and herhousehold, she worked till she could work no more and her mindwent into senile dementia. In everything in which I was to showan interest, she not only encouraged me, but also strove to makeits pursuit possible.


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My grandmother’s idea of a career for a young woman was whatwas called ‘good service’ i.e. domestic service. Indeed, pre-1914, thiswas the only opening for most girls from working class familiesand was a way of life that ceased to exist after 1918. My mother,however, had other ideas. She began by apprenticing herself to aMrs Henry who had a small milliner’s business in Grahams Road,Falkirk, and remained there until 1919, when she set up her ownmillinery business near the town centre. She was a milliner; she notonly sold hats, but she made hats and trimmed those she boughtfrom the millinery warehouses in Glasgow to suit the individualrequirements of her customers. Every Wednesday on the shop half-day she went to Glasgow for this purpose, and when I was onholiday from school, between the ages of seven and twelve, I usedto be taken with her. Millinery warehouses offered few attractionsto a child and, in order that I might pass the time and be diverted,I was regularly left alone in Argyll Arcade for up to an hour ormore, expressly to look at the window of a particular shop knownas the Clyde Model Dockyard. Its windows fascinated me. I gazedat them, coveting their contents: model aeroplanes, model ships, allthe fitments for each of them. I may add that we only made modestpurchases there at birthdays or at Christmas. I should also add thatneither my mother nor I considered there was then any risk inleaving a boy alone, to stand at a shop window or wander up anddown the Argyll Arcade, waiting for the arrival of a parent.

In the 1930s, when the shop had three other employees, she stilldid much of the sewing herself. It was open from 9 a.m. until 5.30p.m., which were the hours the employees worked. My mother’sown hours were much longer. She was usually home from 6.30 to7.00 at night, but at what she called ‘the busy season’, the spring,especially before the celebration of communion in the local churches– for which, in those days, a new hat would at least appear tohave been as essential as a desire for salvation – her hours becamemuch extended. At such times, she would not be home, havingwalked the fifteen minutes from the shop to the house, until 8 or9 p.m. and, even then, she brought work home with her to be done


23


that night. As a child, when I could not sleep, I often went down-stairs to the living room, where I knew I would find my motherand there, at 11, 12, 1 o’clock in the morning, she would be indus-triously trimming hats at a table covered with the jobs she haddone and had still to do that night. It was often my function todeliver these to the customer the next day, travelling around bytram or bus to Larbert, Camelon and Grangemouth and, from pastexperience, knowing the houses where I was likely to receivetuppence or a threepenny bit for my labours. It was, of course, anage where women wore hats every day and on every occasion. Itwas only after the Second World War that the fashion declined,though my mother’s business continued until 1965, four years afterher own death, when I had made over the business to the threestaff who had been with her through all these years.

The only time I remember her having time to herself was onSunday afternoons, when she would be cleaning cupboards, doinggeneral housework and occasionally some millinery and, all thewhile, singing to herself Moody and Sankey hymns or hymns fromthe Church Hymnary. Moody and Sankey were American revival-ists who visited Britain in the late nineteenth century but whosehymns long outlasted their stay here. They believed in simplesentiments and, like General Booth of the Salvation Army, in goodtunes. Some of their sentiments would earn little sympathy today.One I still remember had a verse whose meaning could have beenin the mind of Karl Marx when he described religion as the ‘opiumof the masses.’ It ran:

When you look on others with their lands and gold,Think how Christ has promised you a wealth untold.Count your blessings, count them one by one,And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.

I still remember the words of most of these hymns she used tosing, I heard them so regularly and so often. She was a womanwho had hope, quiet determination and optimism. I would add


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courage to these qualities – courage, that she would be able tocarry through whatever hopes she had for her only child; a couragethat when business in the shop was slack, made her call person-ally on customers who were, as she put it, ‘bad debts’, to obtainpayment of what they owed her. The shop eventually became themain provider for the household and in many ways her dedica-tion to it made possible the life we lived and for many years.

My father, following the family tradition, worked in Carron asa fitter until about 1945, when he finally became so crippled withosteoarthritis of the hips, that he could only walk, with difficulty,with the aid of sticks, in constant pain and living on painkillers.Surgery failed to help and, as a result, the house which had hadthe support of two wages was reduced to existing on one. Thetwo wages, admittedly, did not amount to affluence but, ineveryday matters, they were careful of the pennies. The bankaccount, which was opened for me when I was born bore, on thebank book, the maxim – no longer true – ‘Take care of the pence,the pounds will take care of themselves’, and they both carriedthat maxim into their own affairs.

Their social life together was minimal. They would, very occa-sionally, visit friends of my mother, the MacDonald family, for aSunday tea and the MacDonalds would sometimes come to us. Myparents never went together to a cinema. My mother, to my knowl-edge, never went to a cinema. The annual holiday excepted, theynever had a night out for a meal or a drink, except once, whichwas such a special occasion that I can still recall it in detail. It wasto a touring company’s performance in Glasgow of the musical TheDesert Song. A childminder was got for the night for me and theshop had to be left early in order that my mother might catch thespecial bus. It was talked about, looked forward to, as in its dayone might have looked forward to a flight on Concorde.

Their only joint holiday was their annual holiday, the first twoweeks in July. We could never all get away on the first Saturday ofthat fortnight, however, because the shop required my mother’sattention. Accordingly, their annual two weeks’ holiday lasted only


25


twelve days. We could only travel on the Monday, though I recallthe odd occasion when my father went on the Saturday and mymother and I followed on the Monday. We never had a car until1952 and, depending on public transport, if you wanted to go tothe Isle of Man, or Southport, or Morecambe, which were the favouriteresorts, you had to travel on the Monday. The boarding houses inthese resorts – we were never in hotels – cost about ten shillingsper person a day, for bed, breakfast, lunch and an evening meal. Inselecting accommodation, it was an annual question whether wewent to a house which served high tea, or to one which served latedinner. My parents preferred what they were used to, namely, hightea and they preferred it also for the additional reason that an eveningdinner would be too much for their son and a high tea enabled usall to go out in the evening to the theatre because, if a late dinnerwas considered to be too much for me, the music hall certainly wasnot. For my parents and their like, theatre was not drama: it waswhere you were entertained, and that was the music hall.

It was then nationally in decline but, in these resorts we went to,it still flourished, supported by a generation which had enjoyed itin its and their prime. I have memories of dancers, acrobats, conjurers,damsels with dulcimers and, above all, comedians, comediennesand singers. The last of these holidays was in 1939, when we wentto Douglas, Isle of Man, taking with us Aunt Bella. I cannot rememberif it was then I saw and heard the great Florrie Ford. I certainly sawher, and more importantly, heard her once, and I can still recall thatrobust looking woman, with a voice that neither had nor neededamplification, singing ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ or ‘Kellyfrom the Isle of Man’: songs that were peculiarly hers. There wasno limit to what could be presented as entertainment in these holidayresorts’ music halls. I think it was in 1939 an artist appeared whoseperformance I never quite understood. His name was Jack Doyleand he appeared on stage, in boxing shorts and with a punch ball,and proceeded to dance around this punch ball, punching it, appar-ently in the secure knowledge that it would not punch him back. Iwas told that he was a great boxer, or was going to be a great boxer


26


though, from all I have learned, he never really fought in a big fight.There is an essay on him by the late Patrick Campbell, called TheGorgeous Indestructible Gael, which described him thus:

Jack Doyle, the well-known tenor, all-in-wrestler and formerlight heavy-weight boxing hope – a man who had once filledthe White City even if he was carried out of it feet first thirtyseconds later, having been felled by the first blow deliveredby his opponent Eddie Phillips.

However, having danced round the punch ball he then disappearedand would reappear in full evening dress to sing sentimental Irishsongs. There may have been straight theatre available but, if it was,it was not my parents’ idea of entertainment. I doubt if either ofthem in their entire lives ever saw a three-act play. The followingyear, the year of the Battle of Britain, we still had our July holiday,but this time nearer home, at Callander in Perthshire – a destina-tion which by its proximity to home and its then reputation fordouce quietude, astonished my fathers’ friends. There certainly wereno music halls or dance. It was my first opportunity to becomefamiliar with the Highlands – the start of a fascination that remainsunimpaired.

These precious holidays were interrupted, I think, about threetimes by my taking some childhood ailment and being unable togo. On these occasions my father went off alone on a holiday whichhad been booked at Douglas or Morecambe. He would not havebeen lonely without wife and child since members of other fami-lies he had known in Stenhousemuir usually went to the same places,at the same time, and he ‘teamed up’, as he would put it, with them.There was, I am satisfied, nothing suspicious about this. The innu-endos that would be inevitable today were unheard of as they wouldhave been unjustified. This, however, left his wife without a holidayand when the patient had recovered it was to Rothesay on the Firthof Clyde, and then as now an hour and forty minutes from Glasgow,that my mother took me and usually, her own mother, for a week


27


or a fortnights’ holiday. These were the only holidays in the realsense of the word my grandmother ever knew.

I have come to know the island well as I have had a house heresince 1971, and I now know that there was no scarcity of splendidbeaches as well as Ettrick Bay. When I went there as a child, however,with no car, we relied on local buses and I never recall going roundthe island or indeed going anywhere but into Rothesay, playingon the rocky shore of Ardbeg, or going to Ettrick Bay. Most of theisland was under the direct ownership of what was then reputedto be one of the wealthiest families in the United Kingdom. It wasobvious that they wanted to keep the island beautiful. An ambi-tion which, when I came to live here in the 1970s, it was clear theyhad succeeded in doing. It is an island well-wooded and well-farmed which makes for a landscape which could have been partof the Wessex, Thomas Hardy described in his novels.

Such a holiday place gave my mother some of the rest she needed.For my grandmother, it was a novel experience. For myself, it wasnot like the Isle of Man and I can still remember being alone andbored by the monotony of passing the days especially when itrained, and then as now, the West of Scotland deserved the repu-tation it has of heavy rainfall. There were, however, three memorableexceptions to the boredom: one was Rothesay Castle, where I wentfrequently, enchanted by the allegedly haunted stair, the dungeonand the ramparts. At the castle they vended a guide book whichcontained a penny ballad – indeed a genuine ‘penny dreadful’ –about the ghost on ‘the bloody stair’.

The second was the beach at Ettrick Bay. Third, and perhapsthe most vivid in my memory, was the music hall entertainmentgiven in the then elegant Winter Gardens. This was a small attrac-tive theatre, characteristic of the Clyde coast towns in the 1930sand earlier, which thrived on the holidaymakers, for whom it wasthe only live entertainment. There was, of course, the cinema butit was the Winter Gardens that offered the live theatre. My memoryis that one could go there twice a week and see a different showeach time. Probably, they had four or five set shows which they


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would play over a period of a fortnight, and give the fortnight’svisitors changes of programme, and when that lot of visitors hadgone, the same sequence was repeated to their successors.

The last holiday I spent at Rothesay with my mother and grand-mother would have been in 1941. By then the bay was full ofwarships of all sizes, and submarines. The town was full ofservicemen. During the Second World War, Rothesay was changedfrom a holiday resort to become part of the base for the war atsea; the Firth of Clyde.

I said their joint annual holiday was my parent’s only jointluxury. It would be more correct to say it was their only jointactivity. I except from this the one-night visit to my Aunt Agnesat the May or September weekend holidays – a tradition whichwas short-lived. It ended, I think, about 1935, by which time mymother had had enough of the sheer physical discomfort the visitinvolved. For my mother, her shop was all-demanding. From thestart, she always employed a daily help in the house to help lookafter me, do the housework and make a midday meal. In about1931, that role was taken by a Mrs Helen Lowe (Nellie) who stayedwith us until she died in about 1956. She became one of the familyand, if there was any entertaining done, it was confined to hightea on a very occasional Sunday, to which Nellie was invariablyinvited and to which Nellie invariably came, especially after shebecame a widow in about 1938. Indeed, her presence was one ofthe features of a Sunday tea and, I underline, it was a tea, therewas no alcohol and Nellie was usually invited by the womenpresent to ‘read their cups’, which became a well-known traditionin the house. There were some women, it was thought, could tellthe future from the shape the tea leaves eventually left in theteacup. Whether Nellie was a good prophetess, I know not. I doknow that she had a fertile imagination as to what was going tohappen to the various people whose tea leaves had settled in acertain order in the tea cups she was studying. That apart, shewas someone in whom my mother placed complete and justifiedtrust. Without her, my mother could not have run the business she


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did. The negative side, however, to my mother’s dedication tobusiness, was that she and my father, while living together, largelypursued independent lives. Their relationship was not a particu-larly happy one. My father was never a demonstrative, emotionalor ambitious man and would never have done what my motherdid, namely start up a business on his own. There were quarrelsbetween them, not rarely, and I have no doubt now that, if it hadnot been for my presence, my mother would probably have sepa-rated from him, though in those days she may have been deterredby the knowledge that that would have been a dreadful thing todo in the eyes of her family and the community. There was neveranything between them in these disputes but words, but thesecould be bitter and I have memories of being taken as a child frommy bed, when she and I would go down the street to her mother’shome until tempers had cooled. Time and time again, shereproached my father for not being willing to be something otherthan a fitter in Carron Company. Time and again, he made it clearhe was quite content the way he was. He was not easily movedto make any changes and, the older he became, the more stub-born he became in every aspect of his life. In my seventies, mywife told me, that in this respect at least, I am my father’s rein-carnation. In the 1950s, even to have the front window framespainted was a source of friction and when my mother was nolonger able to make decisions, he grudged even putting coal onthe fire, and, if coal was put on the fire when visitors were presentand, if any remained unburned when they left, he removed it tothe hearth to be able to burn it another day. In the 1930s, his lifewas his work, for five days of the week, reading a paper at nightand, at the weekends, going off with his own friends, as he haddone in his bachelor days. I never recall him taking me out onSaturdays. He would take me to Stenhousemuir and leave methere at his sister’s. He would go to the local football match: I wasnever taken, not that, personally, I had any great interest in going.Then he went off to see his friends, or – and that was his habitfor several years – to go to Edinburgh, where his best friend’s


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sister ran a successful public house in Leith Walk. He did not goto drink to excess. I never saw him the worse of drink but hewanted to meet company and have what he called ‘a change.’

After such visits, he would invariably bring my mother a half-pound box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates. The differencesbetween them, however, never reached the ears of the public as amarriage in danger. My oldest and most perceptive friend, wholived in Larbert and came much about our house in our studentdays from about 1944 when I first met him at Glasgow University,was able to say, referring to my parents, when he toasted me atmy sixty-fifth birthday, that I came from ‘thoroughly decent folk’.

The fact, however, that my father took little part in my child-hood and my mother was at her business, meant that I was – asI have already described – looked after by the housekeeper duringthe day on weekdays, but, more importantly by my grandmotherand my maiden aunt on Saturdays and holidays. I visited mygrandmother every day after school and, when I went to univer-sity, I visited her every day until, at the age of ninety-two, shecame to live with us. For this situation, I allocate no blame. Myfather married late in life, his ways were set and he liked set ways,and the arrival of a son, I think, was a novelty to which he foundit difficult to adjust. My mother gradually became the principalbreadwinner and she knew and accepted the responsibility, andknew also that it was a responsibility she could only discharge byrunning her business to the best of her ability. Both my parentsand, particularly my mother, wanted to do their best by me. Onreflection now, I often wonder if their somewhat unsettled life inmy childhood, created in me the sense of insecurity and uncer-tainty that has been part of my inner self for my whole life, andis the despair of my ever-patient and ever-understanding wife. Itmust, I think, have been my father’s genes that made me leavethe Bar in 1963 and seek the comparative security of the SheriffCourt. My mother would never have done that – she would havestayed in the Parliament House, especially when that adventurewas proving rewarding.


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One thing my parents and especially my mother did not lackwas an interest and an enthusiasm for my doing everything theythought a child, in these days, should do. To my father, my totallack of any interest in, or capacity for, any sports must, however,have come as a disappointment. He, himself, had been a golfermuch of his life and, in his youth, a footballer of some distinction.He did his best to have his enthusiasm reproduced in his only sonbut without success. I was enrolled as a boy member of the TrystGolf Club at Stenhousemuir, where he arranged for me to have aseries of golf lessons from the professional but, I fear, I derivedno pleasure from the game of golf. At school, I detested football,the only game played there and, throughout my life, my interestin ball and team games has been non-existent. This is unusual andis a serious defect in a Lowland Scot.

Besides golf, however, my mother had other ideas. At home,we had the upright piano in the front room – not a particularlygood piano, but one of those found in nearly every house at thatperiod that aspired to better itself. There could have been no otherexcuse for my parents buying that piano when they married,because neither of them played a note, other than it might benefitany child they might have. Because of the presence, however, ofthat piano in the house, my mother’s view was that I must havepiano lessons and, for two winters, I attended a charming elderlyman in Falkirk, who did his best to encourage my interest in pianoplaying. I was and am now passionately interested in music, butI am not – except for attempts at singing – an executant and anycapacity to read music which may have resulted from my twoyears’ tuition, has long since gone. I could only have learned toplay the piano had I done what those of my contemporaries whosucceeded in this did, namely practised every night between 5 and6 p.m. At that hour, neither parent was in the house to make surethat I did. The housekeeper did not know what was expected ofme in the way of playing notes on a piano. What I did then, inthe front room between 5 and 6 p.m. was left to me and, I fear, Ifailed to take advantage of the opportunity given me.


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3

THE CULT OF SPEECH

The 1930s was still the age of the elocutionist, part of a Scottishtradition from the eighteenth century, when the elite of the landtook lessons in how to speak English as against their native Scots.In Falkirk, in the 1920s and ’30s there was a lively popular interestin the spoken word, not just the English spoken word, but alsoScots. A man called Duncan Clark was the real begetter of thisinterest, as he was its inspiration, tutor and producer. Officially,he held the position of a teacher of English at Falkirk High Schoolbut, by the 1930s, his teaching of English was minimal, except forpoetry, Scots and English, and drama, which were the materialsof his regular class, known as ‘speech training’.

For what I would think must be at least forty years, DuncanClark ran elocution classes on Saturday mornings: Beginners 9.30–10.30; Intermediate 10.30–11.30; and older children 11.30–12.30. ExDuncan Clark pupils were measured in the Falkirk of those daysin their hundreds. One of his pupils from the 1920s was thedaughter, Nan MacDonald, of my mother’s closest friends, theMacDonald family. Nan was a splendid elocutionist. She becamea school teacher and, in about 1932, followed her former master’sfootsteps and set up a winter Saturday morning class. I was oneof her first pupils. It was said, by doting aunts and by some kindobservers, that I had some talent for learning and speaking verse.The first book that I recall being bought for me in this context wasRobert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verse, but the range wasconsiderable. Each Saturday, we would be given a typewrittensheet with on it the poem or poems, we had to learn for the followingSaturday. That, I apprehended, was not only an introduction topoetry – it was also an introduction to what is basic to any command

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of language, namely learning good verse. In these days, there wasmuch of John Masefield; there was a clutch of Scottish versifiers,like W. D. Cocker, Charles Murray, who passed in these days aspoets trying to keep alive the Scots verse tradition. There weresome of the easier poems of Robert Burns. There was Choricspeaking, in which one might be given an individual part. It isonly in later life that I have come to appreciate that it is not justreading good verse that helps to give one a vocabulary. Much moreimportant is to combine the reading of it with the learning of it,as well as learning to speak what one has learned, and speak itfrequently. Each year’s tuition had, at its end, a recital, a displayof the pupils’ achievements over the year and, for this, soloistsand choirs performed on a Saturday afternoon to interested, sympa-thetic and enthusiastic mothers, grandmothers and aunts in thelarge Oddfellows Hall, which was above the hall in which weassembled each Saturday morning. My mother could never attendthese performances, – Saturday was the busy day in the shop, –neither did my father. He had his own Saturday habits.

The Bellsdyke Hospital concerts which I mentioned earlier werenot the only public performances I had. Nan MacDonald andDuncan Clark taught elocution, but they also taught it to be usedin public performance. I attended these classes from the age ofabout five to twelve, and when I went to secondary school, FalkirkHigh, came under the influence of Duncan Clark. He was myteacher in this field until my late teens and I frequently rememberand constantly give thanks for what Nan MacDonald and DuncanClark did for and with me in this context. If I had any talent forspeaking verse, which I’m told I had, I had it because of theirteaching, their examples and their giving me the opportunity andthe encouragement to use it. If I had and have a love of verse,spoken verse, which I think I have, I had it from the same two.Duncan Clark gave an education at Falkirk High School an advan-tage over any other school of which I had knowledge at that time.He gave all the pupils the opportunity to learn and speak poetry,to participate in drama and that drama, namely Shakespeare, is


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the best in the world. Undoubtedly there were many who werenot interested in knowing poetry and drama, especially poetry,but the chance was there. I am convinced that when young, oneshould read, and above all learn as much verse as possible. Toread poetry gives pleasure. To read poetry aloud is to make a childrealise not just the capacity of words, to formulate and describeexperience – ‘to give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’– but also to appreciate how alliteration, how rhyme, how rhythmcan bring magic to the spoken word. To learn poetry moreover –and poetry because of its rhymes and rhythms is more readilylearned than prose – is to acquire an ever-widening vocabulary. Iwas once, in Canada in about 1991, given an immense and all tookind compliment after I had proposed the Immortal Memory ofRobert Burns to an audience of some 500 men at the Calgary BurnsClub. I was approached by an American who said he had twosons and wanted to know how they could be taught, as he put it,‘to speak prose like you spoke tonight’. I thanked him, demurredto the compliment and I told him I thought, as we were all different,there was no one answer and that I could only tell him what hadbeen my own experience; namely, to read the best verse and proseand to try to learn as much as possible of that verse which appealedto me most, and speak it at every opportunity and to whomeverwould listen. I have since learned that this method has long beena method used in Scotland, and was used by John Murdoch –Burns’ teacher – to teach his pupil the accurate use of literaryEnglish with the spectacular results of which the world is familiar.

Then, by my early teens at Falkirk High School, we were notreciting individual poems, we were offering scenes fromShakespeare and it was here, under Duncan Clark, that I first cameto worship the language, the poetry, the delight of Shakespeare.The parts I played included Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, BullyBottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, part of King Lear, as wellas speeches from Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Henry V. Ibecame wholly fascinated by Shakespeare to an extent which justi-fied the headmaster’s comment in one of my reports: ‘He spends

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much time on Shakespeare.’ Whether his final comment, ‘butShakespeare will repay him’, is correct is not for me to say but,certainly, Shakespeare became a part of me.

Childhood, for my generation, ended not just when we reachedthe age of twelve, but with the declaration of war between theUnited Kingdom and its allies and Germany on 3 September 1939.Not that that climate produced immediate dramatic changes inour lives. We were told about rationing and soon learned what itmeant. We discovered that sweets were no longer available on theproduction of a penny or two. There was much talk among theadults, with comparisons between 1914 and 1939. There was talkof their generation having borne the brunt of 1914–1918 and nowthat it was all to happen again to their children, a prospect theyfaced with anxiety and fear. There was the immediate problem ofcreating an effective blackout in every room in every house, withshutters, heavy curtains and painting some windows, especiallyskylights, black. Some houses in the 1960s, where the occupantswere then elderly, still had their painted blackout skylights. Schoolattendance and classes were briefly disrupted and re-arranged.One thing that the blackout did give our generation of town childrenwas their first experience of town streets lit by full moonlight,giving a clarity that was romantic, unbelievable and even magical.Here was what was meant by the phrase ‘The moon hath raisedher lamp above’. All of us became compulsive listeners to thefrequent news bulletins on the radio, but while the Phoney Warlasted there was a grim expectation that it could not last and therewas an impatience that it did last until the following spring.2 Noone knew what would then happen, but certainly my recollectionis that no one really believed that Germany could be retained bythe famous Maginot line, although no one suspected how terriblewas to be the realisation of that expectancy.

In 1940, as the Phoney War ended and disaster seemed to beeverywhere, it was to a depressed and frightened people that thespeeches of Winston Churchill came like the sound of a trumpet.To begin with the older generation remembered him most for the


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disaster at Gallipoli in the Kaiser War, but that criticism soon disap-peared. Here was a leader who knew where he was going, wherehe had to go and where he had to lead, and who was able topersuade his countrymen and women to go with him. When itwas announced that he was about to broadcast a speech, everyonefrom the youngest in a household to the oldest congregated aroundthe wireless set to hear him, and never left it without an uplift ofthe heart and a surge of confidence. Here was the whole nation’sfirst experience, because of radio, of the power of words. Smallwonder even an historian as left-wing as A. J. P. Taylor could sayof Churchill, in The Oxford History of England, that he was ‘thesaviour of his country’. These speeches were unforgettable to athirteen year old and some of the phraseology has stayed in manya lifetime’s memory.

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Legendary Sheriff Irvine Smith QC is one of the most formidable criminal lawyers of his generation. Called to the Bar in 1953, he was involved as Counsel in some of Scotland’s biggest cases, including the Glasgow Bank Raid, known at the time as ‘the crime of the century’. He also defended five capital murder trials before the abolition of the death penalty and knew the full responsibility of trying to keep defendants from the gallows.

He later became a Sheriff, quickly building a reputation as a no-nonsense judge with a sharp intellect and a dry and ready wit. He presided over the test case in the Ibrox Disaster.

He was also one of the finest after-dinner speakers of his generation, especially on the theme of St Andrew and Burns. This talent took him to many venues across the world.

Irvine Smith’s personal recollections are both frank and entertaining, charting the highs and lows of a remarkable life and career lived to the full.


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Sheriff James Irvine Smith has encountered many of the renowned figures in the Scottish legal system over the last fifty years. He has given his life to the law. His recreational pursuits have mainly been entertaining people throughout the world, walking on gentle hills in Scotland, classical music and his family.

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Law Life and Laughter: My Personal Verdict by Irvine Smith QC