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Kenneth Roy
Such a lot of electronic dross accumulates in a week’s absence from the factory floor that it is always a joy to chance upon an unlooked-for gem. On this dazzling day in late March – what price blizzards by June? – I found one such miniature from our greatest living novelist:
Dear Kenneth
Almost as crass as Arthur Bell’s ‘joke’ about Brechin was your decision to print it.
Yours aye
James Robertson
This is a model of precision so admirable that I may have it framed, or inscribed on my tombstone.
Here lies Roy, who was almost as crass as Bell
I cling, of course, to the qualifying word ‘almost’.
The crassness of Arthur Bell gives me an opportunity to say something about him. He is an interesting character. His wife Susan will appear as a young woman in a cameo role in my forthcoming history of post-war Scotland, which is an attempt to discover where I have been all my life; I’m not sure there will be any room for Arthur Bell himself – but, since it threatens to be a very long book, I may award him an honourable mention.
His father was someone whose premature death hangs heavy on the conscience, if it has any, of the Church of Scotland. His name was Leonard Bell and he was the editor of the Kirk’s magazine, Life and Work. I had known of the Leonard Bell scandal for a long time, but only connected him with Arthur a few months ago. Leonard Bell, recovering from a serious illness, was fired by the Church of Scotland one Christmas. There was no justification for this decision or for its timing. It was simply an act of cruelty.
The good people in the Church of Scotland – the majority – had the decision overturned, but it was too late for justice: Leonard Bell died not long afterwards. The stress of his treatment by his Christian employers contributed to his death; of that there is little doubt. I learned of the awful business from a friend, James Drawbell, who wrote about it at length in his book, ‘Scotland Bitter Sweet’. I too will write about it, in my unauthorised life of post-war Scotland.
Arthur Bell went on to establish himself as a successful businessman and as an influential figure on the reforming left of the Scottish Conservatives: so influential that he quit the party in despair. Six weeks before the new millennium, he entered a National Health Service hospital for a ‘serious but routine’ heart bypass operation. ‘You’ll leave here a new man,’ they promised him just before he went into the operating theatre.
A clip was wrongly applied to a new artery, stopping the flow of blood to his spine; the person manning the intensive care unit failed to look at his blood pressure; and the hospital’s heart unit was without a vascular surgeon for 36 hours. For all these reasons, and maybe more, he did leave the hospital a new man. He left it as an above-the-knee amputee. Do I know how Arthur Bell gets out of bed in the morning, physically, mentally or spiritually? I don’t. But severe disability has not stopped him. He is chairman of that noble cause, the New Lanark Conservation Trust, a tireless campaigner for the protection of the South Lanarkshire countryside, and an occasional purveyor of sick jokes about Brechin.
I can’t speak for Bell, but my own crassness has never been in doubt. I have carried it as a badge of honour ever since Ian Mackenzie, head of religious broadcasting at BBC Scotland, told me that he proposed to ban the holy men, the writers, the politicians, and all the other totem poles of the establishment from his new Sunday night telly programme and instead bring together a group of ordinary Scots to discuss everything in heaven and earth. It was understood that they could be crass as they wanted to be, and they often were. There has seldom been a more popular programme on BBC Scotland. It ran for several years in the face of the wrath of the same Church of Scotland which fired Leonard Bell.
Mackenzie’s policies were routinely condemned as crass and, as his presenter and friend, I felt it a duty and a privilege to be crass with him. It got so bad for him that, one day, he wrote his letter of resignation to the BBC and kept it on his desk; this stratagem allowed him to go to work in the morning until his near-fatal heart attack.
Here is a confession. On the day I approved Arthur Bell’s offensive joke about Brechin for publication, I was attending a conference – helping to ‘facilitate’ it, as they say – and not bothering very much about the Scottish Review. Instead I was listening to a Welshman describe how he forced his way into the bombed carriage of an underground train, how the first charred corpse he encountered was that of the bomber, how he comforted a dying man the upper half of whose body had been severed from the lower, how a few moments after death he closed the man’s eyes and said a prayer for him, and how he then moved to the next victim, a young woman, who grasped his hand and made him promise not to leave her.
After his contribution to the conference, the Welshman and I had a drink together. When I returned to my room in the hotel, any idea of censoring Arthur Bell’s joke would have seemed pointless beyond belief. To be honest (m’Lud), it never entered my head; and, even if it had, I couldn’t have cared less.
Dear James
I’m afraid you’re right.
Yours crassly
Kenneth Roy
Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review
