Culture

Scottish Review : Scot of the Month

6 January 2009 · Barbara Millar

     Dunnett immortalised this adventure in 1950 when he published ‘Quest by Canoe’, reprinted with the title ‘Too Late in the Year’ (the warning the boys were given when they told more experienced sailors of their intended voyage). It was again reprinted in 1995 as ‘The Canoe Boys – from the Clyde past the Cuillins’. Adam did eventually complete the canoe trip to Stornoway when he made the first solo crossing of The Minch. Waiting to greet him when he landed was his chum Alastair Dunnett.
     Editing Claymore got Dunnett a job editing the Aberdeen edition of the Glasgow daily newspaper the Bulletin. In 1937 he joined the Daily Record, leaving in 1940 to take up the position of Chief Press Officer at the Scottish Office, working for Tom Johnston, the Secretary of State for Scotland. It was in the press office that he met Dunfermline-born Dorothy Halliday, almost 15 years his junior. ‘He waited until her 21st birthday to ask her out,’ says Mungo Dunnett, ‘and they were married after the war.’ Dorothy Dunnett had many different arts-related interests – she trained to be an opera singer and was an accomplished portrait painter, exhibiting at the Royal Scottish Academy on several occasions. But her great love was detailed historical romances and when she ran out of stories to read, her husband encouraged her to write her own.
     Dorothy Dunnett became celebrated for her 23 books, including the six-novel ‘Lymond Chronicles’, which trace the life and career of a Scottish nobleman in the 16th century; the ‘House of Niccolo’ series, which tell the tales of Lymond’s 15th century ancestors; and ‘King Hereafter’, a long novel about Macbeth. ‘Mother became very famous,’ recalls Mungo, ‘and that was really down to father.’ Dunnett simply said of his wife: ‘She is the most interesting woman I know.’
     In 1946, he rejoined the Daily Record as its editor, staying for 10 years and leaving just six weeks after the paper was acquired by Cecil King, whom Dunnett disliked. In 1956 he joined the Scotsman – by then owned by Canadian millionaire Roy Thomson (later ennobled as Lord Thomson of Fleet) – as editor and has been described by many as one of the greatest of a raft of talented people who held that position. He always encouraged young people and among those recruited by Dunnett were Magnus Magnusson, who became chief feature writer and assistant editor, and Glasgow artist Emilio Coia, who became the paper’s first caricaturist. Dunnett assured Coia: ‘I will never tell you who to draw. I will never disapprove of who you draw and I will never interfere with your work.’
     He also took columnist Albert Morris onto the staff, announcing: ‘Albert, I’m offering you a column with thirty bob (£1.50) a week expenses and all the tripe you can write.’ And Ronald ‘Bingo’ Mavor, son of playwright James Bridie (Osborne Mavor), who himself was a playwright and, later, director of the Scottish Arts Council and who had studied medicine, like his father, practising as a doctor for nine years, was similarly lured by Dunnett. He wrote later: ‘Alastair’s proposal was that I should become drama critic of the Scotsman. I said that I had just been offered a job by the World Health Organisation but that it consisted of crawling about the jungles of west Africa, sticking needles into the natives. Alastair said: "That’s exactly what I want you to do in Edinburgh.".’
     During his time on the Scotsman Dunnett refused the opportunity to edit the Sunday Times because it meant moving away from Scotland, a prospect he simply could not consider. Originally Dunnett and his wife decided not to have children. ‘But I think this was really my mother’s choice,’ Mungo Dunnett says. ‘My father probably felt sad at the thought that he was the last of his line, as his brother had died in middle-age without having children.’

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