Culture

Scottish Review : Scot of the Month

20 November 2008 · Barbara Millar

The
Canoe
Boy

Scot of the Month: Barbara Millar profiles Alastair Dunnett, one of Scotland’s greatest journalists, who was born 100 years ago this year

Mungo Dunnett waited until his father had died before he left Scotland to set up his management and marketing consultancy business on the south side of the border. ‘Dad was a great Scottish patriot,’ recalls Mungo. ‘Everything to do with Scotland was important to him. He turned down the opportunity to edit the Sunday Times because he would not leave Scotland. It would not have been right to have left while he was alive.’
     Mungo’s father was Sir Alastair Dunnett, revered and respected Scottish journalist and newspaper editor, but also great supporter of myriad Scottish educational and cultural bodies, serving, at various times, on the committees and boards of Pitlochry Festival Theatre, the National Trust for Scotland, the Scottish International Education Trust, the Scottish Tourist Board, Scottish Ballet, Scottish Opera and Scottish Television.
     Dunnett was born in Kilmacolm, Renfrewshire on Boxing Day 1908, into a family the paternal side of which hailed from Caithness, near Dunnet Head, the most northerly point in mainland Britain. His father was a master baker, his mother Bel MacTavish came from a fishing family on Loch Fyne, which is where young Alastair spent the summers. ‘It was fairly miserable for him,’ says Mungo. ‘Everyone was very elderly and it was an austere, Presbyterian part of the country, with church twice on Sundays and the sermon given in English and Gaelic.’ But he was also brought up steeped in the historical, cultural and natural heritage of Scotland. ‘His view of the country was never the simplistic Braveheart vision but an intelligent perspective of Scotland’s role in the world and its contribution to it,’ adds Mungo. ‘This is also how my brother, Ninian, and I were brought up.’
     Dunnett went to Hillhead School in Glasgow but left when he was just 15, although his inspiring English teacher, George Menary, stirred in him a desire to write and become a journalist. His father, David, however, was an invalid, having been injured at an England versus Scotland international football match, when a wooden stand collapsed and his heart valves were crushed, so family finances dictated that Dunnett’s first job was with the Commercial Bank of Scotland. He found the work tedious, although he did win the prestigious Institute of Bankers’ annual essay competition with his submission on ‘The Art of Investment’.
     In 1933, with a friend James (Seumas) Adam, Dunnett launched a weekly magazine for Scottish boys called Claymore, which emphasised the physical and intellectual adventures to be had in Scotland. The magazine, however, was short-lived, folding because of financial difficulties, although many of the stories that had appeared in Claymore were given life again in Dunnett’s book ‘Treasure at Sonnach’, published in 1935. The two founders also decided to undertake an adventure themselves and set out in single-seat canoes from Bowling on the Clyde, attempting to canoe all the way to Stornoway on Lewis. They never made it as far as the Outer Hebrides, calling a halt to the escapade in Skye. But they not only earned some cash by writing despatches for the Daily Record, they also forever revelled in the soubriquet ‘The Canoe Boys’.

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