The Times Great Scottish Lives: Obituaries of Scotland’s Finest. Magnus Linklater

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      INTRODUCTION

      Magnus Linklater

      From Sir Walter Scott in the nineteenth century to Tam Dalyell in the twenty-first, this collection of obituaries from The Times is a 200-year chronicle of great lives that have left their mark on the history and character of the Scottish nation. Politicians, artists, inventors, explorers, soldiers, academics, philosophers and troublemakers – these are men and women who have, in their different ways, broken the mould of their time, challenged its conventions and occasionally outraged them.

      They cover a period that ranges from the age of the Enlightenment to the post devolution era – the building of empire, the industrial revolution, through two world wars and the economic chaos between them – culminating in the creation of a new Scottish Parliament and the legacy it has fashioned. Through all of these, Scots were often at the centre of great events, and their obituaries are, to an extent, a commentary on the times in which they lived.

      This volume should not be read as a coherent history, nor is it necessarily a carefully balanced selection. These are lives judged, not from the vantage point of our time, but from the standpoint of their own time. That is its merit, and occasionally its idiosyncrasy. Great figures who seem to us now to loom large are sometimes dismissed with little more than a footnote; others are accorded page upon page of eulogy, which may seem, in the modern era, excessive. It is striking, for instance, that the Scottish colourists – artists like Peploe, Cadell or Fergusson, to say nothing of the designer and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose work is so valued today – were viewed by The Times, on their deaths, as worthy of only a few sketchy paragraphs. That may reflect a London perspective, but more likely the fact that their reputations have grown more in the last 50 years than during their own lifetimes. Statesmen and prime ministers, on the other hand, are chronicled with a depth of detail that amount almost to a political history of the age in which they lived.

      There has had to be some editing. The death of the writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, for instance, prompted an obituary in The Times of more than 9,000 words, amounting almost to a full-scale critical biography. Those were the days when long columns of small print, uninterrupted by pictures, were routine. Running Carlyle’s obituary at full length – to say nothing of others which frequently amounted to 5,000 words or more – would have required a volume three times the size of this one. Instead I have tried to keep the flavour of the tributes paid, rather than including every last paragraph.

      There has had to be selection, of course, and I am open to criticism for the lives that have been omitted. Legitimate questions will be asked about why there is no mention here of the writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon, whose Sunset Song is on every respectable reading list; Walter Elliot, who created the modern Scottish Office; Sir William Lithgow, last of the great shipbuilders; the debonair Hollywood actor David Niven; Ewan MacColl, pioneering folksinger; the ballet director Kenneth Macmillan; the iconoclast journalist Sir John Junor – the list goes on.

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