Orr addressing his staff in Washington, where he was director-general of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation after the second world war
For the few readers who don’t know which mainland local authorities have no railway stations, they are: Midlothian and Scottish Borders.
The world of the children 1
Kenneth Roy
The world of the children 2
Angus Skinner and others
The world of the children 3
Maggie Mellon
The world of the children 4
Bob Smith
Alan McIntyre, new patron of ICS, with his wife and family
I was born and brought up in Renfrew as the younger of two kids. My parents were a mixed marriage, meaning that my mum crossed the river from Clydebank to marry my dad. My dad on the other hand was Renfrew-born and bred. He was the son of the chief draughtsman of Simon’s shipyard and in his 74 years of life he never lived more than a mile from where he was born.
Expectations were high growing up. My dad had passed up a Paisley Grammar School place, leaving school at age 14 to go into the timber trade. He needed the money to support his mother and sister as his own father died young as a consequence of being gassed during the first world war. Despite turning his back on formal education, my dad was an avid reader and some of my earliest memories are of him bringing back Ladybird history books from sales trips and instilling in me a love of both reading and history – books that my seven-year-old son now has on his shelf.
My life was uneventful till the age of 12. Then over the course of a weekend my dad went blind. His blood pressure should have killed him, but instead it ruptured the blood vessels in his eyes. Our life was turned upside down, but ironically it was the making of my mum’s career, as she went back to work and succeeded in roles she never would have considered if my dad had been able to earn a living. Rapidly approaching my late 40s, I now recognise that my own joie de vivre and somewhat restless nature were probably shaped by watching my dad have so much of his joy in life abruptly snatched from him.
Graduating Glasgow, the parochial path of least resistance was to accept a financial services job in Edinburgh, but Maria then took a job with BP in London causing me to reconsider. The result was a brief and horizon-broadening stop at Pembroke College Cambridge for a masters in finance and then on to London for my first job in management consulting, followed within a couple of years by an MBA at IMD Business School in Switzerland.
Having got a taste for international travel, I jumped at the chance in early 1993 to move to New York and join Oliver Wyman & Company, a small 70-person management consulting firm specialising in the financial services industry. With an apartment in Greenwich Village we took full advantage of everything that the Big Apple had to offer, yet still managed to visit 42 of the 50 US states in just over four years. I also learned a lot about diversity and tolerance, much of it through becoming good friends with a Southern-born bisexual interior designer/theatre director who also happened to run cigarette concession stands in strip clubs.
Oliver Wyman became one of the great success stories of the management consulting industry and I was along for the ride. In 2003 I became chief operating officer which took us back to London and then in 2005 I took over the North American business and we moved back to the US.
We’re now settled in the US. With kids of 13, nine, seven and six you put down roots quickly. We love the optimism and can-do attitude of Americans and the strong sense of community where we live. Frankly our day-to-day lives bear little relation to the shrill caricature of the US you often see in the UK media. We like it so much that last October we all became American citizens, giving our kids the option of living and working in either the US or Europe when they are old enough to make that choice for themselves.
I also remain committed to helping to build and develop the Institute of Contemporary Scotland. My dad had a little bit of the spirit of Inveramsay that Kenneth Roy so eloquently invokes, and you always wanted him on your side in a pub quiz. My involvement with ICS dates back to 2000 and I have been a supporter of the Young Scotland Programme since its inception in 2002. I also occasionally write for the Scottish Review when I get the time; an oasis of objectivity and rationality in a media world where both are in increasingly short supply.
Alan McIntyre is a Scottish-born partner in a New York-based financial services company, and the new patron of the Institute of Contemporary Scotland, publishers of the Scottish Review
