[click here] for his SR poems of the year so…

[click here] for his SR poems of the year so far

Jean Reid

It’s 40 years this week since my father died. He went out one bright September morning to work in the garden but came back almost immediately saying he didn’t feel well. The doctor advised bed rest but he couldn’t sleep. By teatime he was gone.
     Just days before he had posted his publisher final proofs of the book which had meant so much to him over  the years. He wanted to call it ‘Why Scotland?’ or ‘The meaning of Scotland’ but it finally appeared under the more pedestrian title ‘Scotland’s Progress’ in 1971.
     The book was an update of ‘The Scots Tragedy – can Scotland hope to survive?’ written under the pseudonym Colin Walkinshaw in 1935. In it he analysed the forces which shaped the first nation in Europe and looked at those which seemed likely to smother it in the 20th century. It was an eminently readable work of scholarship which, I understand, caused something of a stir when it appeared.
     By then JM (only his closest friends called him Jim) was an established journalist with George Outram & Co, whose proprietors had little sympathy with the rising nationalism among intellectuals and other eccentrics. He had to keep a balance between his intense concern for his native land and the pressures of working to support his growing family – his third child was born in the year of publication.
     But it was also a job he loved. Born in 1900 in Paisley, he was brought up in Kilmacolm and gained an MA degree at Glasgow University before winning a scholarship to study history at Oxford. There he was said to have shocked his tutors by stating that he hoped to be good enough to become a journalist. For the winner of the 1922 Newdigate Prize for poetry it must have seemed a perverse ambition.
     More appropriate was the writing of two novels set in different periods of Scottish history. The only one to appear in hardback was a Celtic saga ‘The sons of Aethne’, published in 1923, but Walkinshaw was serialised in the Scots Magazine, and a number of short stores were taken by literary magazines.

I remember rare childhood visits to the office, where father assumed the image of the traditional journalist, sitting at a paper-piled desk wearing a green eye-shade, his beloved pipe at a jaunty angle.

Most of his time was spent in a study stacked high with books and papers in no apparent order. I had to laugh when one letter of condolence referred to his well-organised filing system.

Jean Reid was educated at Glasgow University and drifted into journalism. She worked for the Glasgow Herald and the Times Educational Supplement Scotland. For 21 years she was with the press office of Strathclyde Regional Council.