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The Two Cousins Episode 9: Hector and Ronnie

 

 

 

The Two Cousins

Episode 9: Hector and Ronnie

Iain Smith

We left Hector MacIver in Episode 7 resuming his teaching career in 1945. One of his students of that era recalls him:

 “Hector MacIver became one of the outstanding teachers of English in Scotland in the two decades immediately after the war. This may sound like a very large claim, but its truth can be supported in three ways: by the achievement of his best pupils; by the intellectual stimulus and pleasure he gave to hundreds of boys who had no pretensions as English specialists; and by the way in which through his own example and enthusiasm he taught a large number of young English masters their job and encouraged them to go on to posts of higher responsibility.”

Another school student was the distinguished writer and critic Karl Miller (and the editor of the posthumous 1970 book tribute to MacIver). Miller (today celebrated as the most distinguished living alumnus of the Royal High School of Edinburgh) writes in 1970 about Hector that

 “ [In 1948], when I was his pupil at the Royal High School of Edinburgh, Hector used to tell stories about the faculty of second sight, which seemed to be an important matter, still, in the Hebrides where he grew up……….To Lowland school-children, Hector came as revelation: an exile from the Western Isles, from the ‘lone shieling of the misty island’, he had qualities of dignity, elegance, eloquence and fantasy that seemed not only exotic but literally portentous”.

Hector, like many of his literary friends, enjoyed the good life. Miller writes: “he may once have been in the habit of sending back his lobster to the counter in the Café Royal if he did not think it came from Lewis – nevertheless the world was his oyster.”  (This is a most unlikely, if fun, story.)

The Café Royal remains largely unchanged to this day, its rooms haunted by the ghosts of Compton Mackenzie, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas – and Hector MacIver. It was there, according to Karl Miller, that Hector MacIver one night assaulted the (now forgotten, but then Paxman-like) broadcaster Gilbert Harding for having called him “a bloody highlander”.

Apart from his full-time job, Hector in the 1950s was himself active in broadcasting.

            “… he still kept up a stream of radio broadcasts  and plays, and articles, in English and in Gaelic. ……

            “He also reviewed books on radio….. At this time too, his friend Louis MacNeice was broadcasting programmes of reading from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen’ and Hector used to go down to London to take part in these. He also featured in such radio dramas by Louis as The Dark Tower. At this time also he was taking part in radio plays and programmes by Neil Gunn and Robert Kemp.”

Hector maintained his friendship with Dylan Thomas, as his wife Mary recorded; and she paints a vivid pen-portrait of Thomas:

“I somehow found it difficult to think of him as grown-up, he looked so like a cherubic baby with his pop eyes and fat cheeks, loose lips and curly hair. He always seemed merry; but somehow I felt that at bottom he was rather a sad person, rather alone, always aware of the uncertainty and tragedy of life and the evanescence of time.”

And, of course, in almost no time at all, the evanescent Thomas was dead, not yet forty years old. This year the centenary of his birth is being remembered.

Comparatively late in life (in the 1950s), Hector MacIver married. 

Mary’s introduction to her mother-in-law was dramatic:  “She shook her head, sadly, and said ‘Ah, Hector was ruined by the Navy! The drink you know.’” Hector’s mother had been a pupil-teacher before, later in life, having upgraded her teaching qualifications and returned to teaching when her husband went bankrupt. As with many Lewis teachers of her generation, and indeed of later generations, she clearly could be blunt and open with negative assessments of the young. Whether she took pride in the more positive sides of her son’s achievement (Head of English in Scotland’s most prestigious state school; critic; broadcaster; writer) is not recorded.

Mary and Hector shared many literary and cultural interests, according to one of her ex-students:-

“The most inspirational teacher I had was Mary MacIver. We hit it off immediately. Mrs MacIver turned out to be probably the most formative person in my life. She had a profound effect on me.

She was married to Hector MacIver, who taught English at the Royal High School. I already knew about Hector MacIver because I had read critical articles he wrote in the Scotsman and other newspapers about all sorts of things, particularly poetry. Mary and Hector lived in the village of Temple, next door to the painter William Gillies and knew all sorts of poets, musicians, actors and painters. Over the coming years they took me under their wing and introduced me to people like the poet Robert Garioch, the painter Robin Philipson and the weaver Sax Shaw.”

Mary and Hector’s cultural interests were however not narrowly intellectual:

“Ronnie Corbett, a previous pupil of Hector, also became well known as a comedian. When we were first married I had to listen to every ‘Crackerjack’ programme with Hector, for he was so interested in following the beginning of Ronnie’s successful career.”

In 1962, Hector spent a term on a secondment to Balliol in the University of Oxford. He records some of that experience:-

            “I attended lectures by Professor Ayer, very impressive on ‘Facts and Propositions’; Professor Davies on ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Professor Trevor Roper on the Puritan Revolution; Tolkien on the Study of Old English Poetry; Mr Wordsworth on the Scottish Chaucerians; AJP Taylor on post-War History.”

In 1965, Hector took ill. Unknown to him, he had cancer of the liver. His cat was also ill, as his wife records: “When Hector was dying, Peader was terminally ill also, and Hector said to the tiger-striped Peader as she lay on the quilt on Hector’s bed - Ah, little one, we’re both on the way out.”

On 30 April 1966, Hector MacIver died. He was 55 years old.

Postscript: There our story of these odd, but talented, Macivers ends. It began when two little boys, a long time ago, speculated as to why Robert and Hector were so gifted, yet so different - and united apparently only by surname. And when a Lewis mother said to her two boys:  “It is obvious why they were talented. They were first cousins: both Macivers of the stock of Maciver’s Garage in Bayhead.” As always, a Lewis mother has the last word.

(Concluded)

Iain Smith