Islay McLeod’s Scotland
Signs of the times
3. Slow
Sutherland
Rear Window
Hector
Sheila Hetherington
Students at Glasgow University have been occupying a building named in honour of their former principal, Sir Hector Hetherington. But who was he? Sheila Hetherington contributed a short pen-portrait of him as a young man in a book about his son Alastair:
As a student, Hector lived at the university settlement for Possil. The Edwardian years were times of terrible hardship for some of Glasgow’s population, which included some of the poorest and most deprived people in Britain, many living in appalling conditions. The aim of the settlement was social rehabilitation – providing food, shelter and basic clothing for the down-and-outs, visiting the local sick, and generally helping those in need: they did not have to look far for clients.
Hector’s closest friends were fellow students Walter Elliot, a medical student who became a Scottish Conservative MP and pre-war minister, and another medical student, Osborne Mavor, who would also become famous as the playwright James Bridie. These three rented a spartan, remote cottage between Fintry and Lennoxtown in the Campsie Hills, and went out there at weekends to tramp through the long glens during the days and hammer out their philosophies in discussion by the fire in the evenings. [It was said of Elliot, though the story is probably apocryphal, that as a young doctor just after the first world war, he received a telegram from his home town of Lanark, asking him to stand for parliament, to which he replied, ‘Yes. Which party?’]
After graduating, Hector became warden of Possil settlement and joined the university staff as a junior lecturer in philosophy. Meantime, Alison Reid was studying for her first-class honours degree in modern languages, which included a year in Osnabruck and Saumur. She and Hector had once met casually as fellow students, and by some stroke of fate they met again a year or two later. They fell in love, though Hector later said, with a cheerful grin, that with so many beautiful sisters to choose from, it had been a remarkably difficult decision to make. They were well-matched, with similar backgrounds, keen minds, and a dry sense of humour.
Both Hector and Alison believed – it had been instilled into them by their own parents, and they in turn instilled it into their sons – that a sound education laid the foundation for life; and that it was essential to have a personal goal. Achievement of that goal depended on dedication and hard work. These attitudes, of course, reflected both their times and backgrounds. The Hetherington and Reid families were steeped in a staunch, unquestioning presbyterian faith combined with a politically Liberal outlook.
From Alastair Hetherington: A Man of his Word (edited by Kenneth Roy), Carrick Media, 1998