Alastair Warren
Kenneth Roy’s excellent piece about Mullwharchar (23 April) and how the hill was saved from being a nuclear dump took me back to happier times when newspapers campaigned on issues that made a real difference to people’s lives.
I had been appointed regional editor of the Scottish and Universal Newspapers group and was sent to Dumfries ‘for a couple of weeks’ to assist Alastair Warren, the editor there, to oversee the transfer of production from hot metal to ‘new technology’. It was a huge learning curve for everyone involved and I enjoyed working with Alastair, who was determined that the quality of the Dumfries and Galloway Standard should not be diminished because the paper was being given a new look.
The company directors, whose eyes as ever were on the bottom line, wanted more emphasis on items they believed would boost the circulation figures – more court reports and tabloid-type coverage from Palmerston Park, where Queen of the South were playing not very well at the time.
But Alastair, an urbane man of principle, showed himself to be a cut above his money grubbing bosses. The former Glasgow Herald editor viewed the proposal to dump nuclear waste at Mullwharchar the best and most important story of the day and put it at the top of the news schedule. He dismissed claims to the contrary and batted away with contempt disparaging comments from the ‘suits’ that there was minimal interest in the nuclear waste issue and no way could they sell newspapers to sheep, Mullwharchar’s only residents.
Alastair, a former major in the Black Watch and HLI, who fought in various European war zones, out-manoeuvred his detractors, deployed his reporters the way he chose and mounted a successful campaign against the nuclear proposal. The courageous campaign attracted huge public support in the South of Scotland and – mainly because Alastair was so tied up in it – my ‘couple of weeks’ in Dumfries became three busy, memorable and happy months overseeing the shift from linotypes to laptops.
Later, in 2006, his former colleague, Lesley Duncan, paid Alastair a warm, well-merited tribute after he died, aged 83, in a Dumfries hospital following a stroke while out walking in the beloved Galloway hills he helped to save.
Lesley wrote: ‘Alastair was tireless in opposing the proposed dumping of nuclear waste in the depths of Mullwharchar. In the late 1970s he chaired a meeting at which an ill-briefed and arrogant spokesman for the nuclear cause was trounced by the measured, irrefutable arguments of local protestors, including a scientist member of the Tolstoy clan. Alastair conducted the meeting with exemplary courtesy and objectivity before venting his own views at the end. It was a notable victory for the articulate south-westerners’.
Bill Heaney is an award-winning newspaper editor and columnist
