Murdo Macdonald of Crola in Kinlochresort

This is a story that I know through a combination of my (long-dead) father, the Uig Historical Society[1] , the archives of the University of Glasgow and several other friendly sources.

My father was born in Shawbost in the Outer Hebrides in 1908 to a family that were very poor even by local standards of the time. Their story is well-documented by his younger brother Calum.[2]

But, by 1932 or thereabouts, a combination of his own father’s encouragement and a Carnegie scholarship had allowed my father to escape from poverty and he had become a head teacher. So he went to Crowlista in Lewis, 24 years old or so.

In the village obviously he had to meet the ministers and the doctor who (along with the head teacher) were the entire middle class of an otherwise working class community.

He was however a bit surprised when one minister said:

 “You must meet Murdo Crola, a local postman, a man who has never been to school. When I first came here, a few years ago, Murdo and I went for a walk along the local cliffs. And, as the sun was sinking in the Western sky on a beautiful evening over the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, I could not help but say two lines from the Odyssey. Murdo said to me ‘Yes, minister: the Greeks also loved the sea’ and then quoted to me the next two lines of the Odyssey.   

John, this is no ordinary postman”.

My father sought out Murdo Crola the postman and they became friends.

Now what follows is an exceptionally unusual story.

Crola in Uig on Loch Resort is a very beautiful place; isolated today as much as it was in 1907 when Murdo was born there. Today the houses are still standing, but deserted. ( I have visited it twice).

Its rationale was, as I was told, a bit of fishing and crofting and a place where deep sea trawlers came for shelter and to take on water. (But was also related to gamekeeping).

Why was child born in 1907 never sent to school? The probable answer: it was very costly for Education Boards to discharge the legal obligations they had inherited from the 1872 Education Act.  So, as happened in parts of the Highlands and Islands, his older sister Kate (who died not very long ago) was sent to school in Scarp: the Board had no choice but to send her to school somewhere- because she had no elder sibling.  She then went home, was designated as his teacher and given a small stipend; and that satisfied the legal requirements of the 1872 Act. (Although it is also possible that this arrangement was made in part because of Murdo’s health.)

Kate taught her little brother Murdo to read and to write; and he got so enthused about reading that, when the trawlers came into Loch Resort to get fresh water, he begged off them whatever reading material they had.

Crola was, and is, very remote. On Sunday evenings, the walk to the Church was 12 miles across a rough track. By the time Murdo was 8 years old, his Granny was too infirm to make the walk. One Sunday, the family went to church to listen to a distinguished visiting preacher. When they got home, Granny inquired “What did the preacher say?” Murdo’s parents explained that the preacher had been “very powerful”; but so powerful that the gist of the sermon had passed over their heads. The 8-yr-old Murdo said “Granny: let me tell you”; and did so. The Granny allegedly said, at the end of this disquisition by the 8-yr-old “My beloved grandson: you are a child who will either bring great distinction to this family- or great disgrace.”[3]

Murdo grew up, always reading a huge amount. He read religious literature; and became devout about that. He read a huge amount of socialist literature: Orwell, the New Statesman and Gollancz Left Book Club; and became devout about that. And he studied other things: certainly English literature. Meanwhile he acquired a job as the local postman and he worked on the parents’ croft. But hated the sheep: he regarded them as the obstacle to what he really wanted to do. Because he was clear about that. He wanted to go to university and get a degree. But how could a boy who had never been to school get to university? So he addressed his mind to that small problem.

Murdo wrote to the University of Glasgow; and he got a reply explaining that, although the University increasingly used Highers as a selection device, it still ran a completely separate preliminary entrance examination of its own (essentially a relic of the time when that would have been its main form of selection). That reply got Murdo thinking.

He and my father kept in touch with each other, loaning each other books and talking about politics; and much else. One day my father was teaching; and, as he looked out the window, he could see Murdo descending off the hillside towards the school. He asked Murdo why he was visiting in working hours, and Murdo said “John, could I come inside and sit at the back of the classroom?” Murdo did that for an hour and then slipped away, having said to my father “I often wondered over the years what it would be like to go to school and be in a classroom”.

In 1935 or so, my father left the area for another post. But Murdo and he kept in touch, rendezvousing on occasion in my paternal grandparents’ house in Stornoway. They corresponded. My father’s letters are lost (at least to me); but Murdo’s letters, from 1^st July 1935 to 19^th April 1939, were preserved by my father; and inherited by me.

In these years, Murdo speculated as to when he might go to university; he wrote Gaelic hymns (for he was no mean Gaelic poet); he did his duties as a postman; he wrote about the politics of the 1930s, international, national and local.

In the first letter[4] he writes

“I can only plead guilty to a charge of culpable neglect in not having written and forwarded books sooner. Nor have I any extenuating circumstances to offer, my only one being that day after day I allowed time and opportunities to slip through my fumbling fingers; a reason which may recall to you Shakespeare’s lines ‘Oft the excusing of a fault doth make itself the worst by this excuse’” [5].

And, in a comment which might interest Iain Duncan Smith, he says:

“Since I saw you I had a talk with a man engaged in necessary labour, work indeed as indispensable that if he -and his co-workers- should withhold his labours ….within a week it would produce chaos and confusion as the German blockade failed to achieve in four years. But does the country give him the equivalent of what it costs to sink a submarine? Of course not; ….(it gives him) what keeps them in passable condition, and his uniform a torn and patched pair of dungarees.

[Now a bit I find astonishing from a devout Hebridean Presbyterian of the 1930s; a bit my father must have found odd and disturbing – my father like most male Hebrideans hated talking about such things].

Murdo writes:  “This man, representative of his class, is willing to work as many hours as he can, but he is married to a young wife. If they have ever heard the phrase ‘birth control’, they probably think it a mid-wifery (sic) practice or… a different term for polygamy. So the little wife has a large brood. She looks an obvious case of malnutrition – our polite term for prolonged starvation. The over-worked father expressed to me the wish that he was still ‘on the dole’ as it is impossible for him to earn as much as he (previously) received in this manner”.

Then he goes into a more frivolous mode about a religious pamphlet.

“It may interest you to know that I gave a copy of this to the three Uig ministers (yes, including the Rev ‘Windy-Wordy’ of orthodox fame). I did not expect to hear any quotations from it in their pulpits. Worse for them - and for us”.

As 1935 moved on, he turned his attention to the General Election – where the local sitting National M.P. was being opposed by a 21-yr-old student, Malcolm Macmillan. And he was writing letters to the Stornoway Gazette under the name of “Responsible Citizen”, letters that are to this day in the Gazette archive.

Spurred on by his reading of the Daily Herald and the Forward, Murdo argued (in his letters to my father) that there was too much concentration on statistics and not enough on the underlying misery. Murdo was much obsessed with unemployment and poverty.  He wrote “Few people have the imagination to see and the tenderness to feel that behind the figures of employment schemes lie the pathos of lovers who cannot marry and the anxiety of mothers who cannot afford food for their ailing sickly children”[6].

And he quoted Carlyle “Mournful enough that an honest worker on English soil looks wistfully for what the horse he is driving is sure of – food and shelter”.[7] .

His letters are full of quotations from books. And he explains why this is so:  “Living here in solitude in ‘the back o’ beyond’ the only thing which makes its loneliness tolerable, at least to me, is that the door of reading is open to a larger world of fact and imagination”. [8]

He celebrates the fact that Macmillan had won the Western Isles for Labour (“It was the first time I felt consciously proud of belonging to the Western Isles”) but warns against complacency in future elections. (As it happened, Macmillan held the seat for 35 years).

In 1937, he is engaged in the Glasgow University entrance examinations. “I got a pass certificate for Gaelic and Greek, but failed, by what Principal Macgregor tells me was but ‘very few marks’, in English. I wrongfully assumed that there would be a range of optional questions, so I gave but little attention to the prescribed texts……I was so late in taking up the study of Greek – I didn’t know its alphabet until last September-   … that I had to concentrate mostly on it  …..which probably cost me my English Pass”.[9] (Principal Macgregor was the Principal of Trinity College, then a semi-autonomous part of the University of Glasgow)

But by October 1938 he has succeeded: - “I was successful in my recent Examination. I got 80% and imagine that I lost most of the other 20% through sheer nervousness. Anyway at this stage a Pass is as good to me as 100%.”[10] But “unfortunately, due to domestic circumstances, I am unable to enter University this year..,.. I feel it with a keener sense of disappointment than I care to give expression to:-

            But let us cheerful acquiesce

            Nor make our scanty pleasures less

By pining at our state.”[11]

(Some, but not all, of his interaction with Glasgow University is still verifiable in the archives of the University of Glasgow: my thanks to the University of Glasgow archivists.[12] And there is at least one surviving person, now aged 90, who remembers Murdo attending the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway to sit these examinations.)

In the same 1938 letter Murdo rails, in a letter to my father, against the Scott family who owned (at that time) all of North Harris. “In a time of poverty, they send 54 hinds of venison from North Harris to their rich London friends: while hundreds on their estate in Harris are starving”. Even more interestingly, he discourses on how many of the exploited conspired in admiring their exploiters.

And advises my father “If you have a shilling to spare, buy Bernard Shaw’s ‘Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism’ It is published in the ‘Pelican’ series of books at 6d each”[13]

The next month[14], he thanks my father for a parcel of books; “Jeans’ ‘The Mysterious Universe’ I had bought some years ago: all the rest are new to me”. He then launches into a long disquisition on the materialistic interpretation of history; and why he thinks it compatible with Christianity. Among the points he makes to defend the Church, he says “My grandfather had ten of a family and none of them was quite illiterate, because of the small schools founded and supported by the Church”.

And he quotes Browning:- 

“I cannot chain my soul, it will not rest
In its clay prison; this most narrow sphere—
It has strange powers, and feelings, and desires,
Which I cannot account for, nor explain,
But which I stifle not, being bound to trust
All feelings equally—to hear all sides:
Yet I cannot indulge them, and they live,
Referring to some state or life unknown.”[15]

He refers to the author AA MacGregor. [Alasdair Alpin MacGregor (1899 - 1970) was a Scottish writer and photographer, known for a large number of travel books. And for denouncing drunkenness in Stornoway, a point on which his Wikipedia entry is very coy: “MacGregor was forced to be critically realistic about certain aspects of life on the west coast in his book The Western Isles”[16]]

“Comrade Macgregor has given an unsolicited testimonial to Messrs Booze Stornoway Ltd. King Alcohol has enough loyal subjects there. But they are not quite such a ragged army as A A Macgregor imagines he saw”. (This comment from the teetotal Murdo was typical of island reactions, even from anti-alcohol Hebrideans, to MacGregor).

He goes on “he and I crossed swords, or pens rather, in the now defunct ‘Scots Observer’ and he published a full apology. I saw him here one day since, and asked him to tea. He came in and talked like a gramaphone(sic) out of control….I don’t think he is a bad sort at the depth (sic) but it would be better if his censor was not so often unemployed”. (Compton Mackenzie had very similar opinions of MacGregor).

There are four more letters in 1939. He discusses land reform and religion: - “The Church question in Uig from 1870 was primarily a land question. The Free Church minister did not take the Land League’s side; and that was the occasion of the first breach of the Free Church ranks in Uig. They did not know that they were entering the most Tory Church in Scotland, and it would take me too long to enumerate how. It is significant of this connection between both that all the new settlers in Uig, Reef, Ardroil and Carnish are nearly all ‘Seceders’ ” (i.e. left the Free Church to join the Free Presbyterian Church).[17] [18]

He writes much about politics, and scathingly about Cripps.  (In early 1939 Cripps was expelled from the Labour Party for his advocacy of a Popular Front with the Communist Party and anti-appeasement Liberals and Conservatives) .

“What do you think of our Local Branch supporting Sir Stafford Cripps? Likely enough, Comrade Cripps is sincere – as sincere as Hitler or Cromwell. Only a sincere man is capable of going to extremes; but Sir Stafford has never been much of an asset to the Labour Party….. When I entered the Lochcroistean schoolhouse to vote at the Election, I was confronted by a placarded saying of his, placed in a prominent place by the National Liberal supporters to frighten the electors against the party who condoned such a man!”[19]

In September 1939, Murdo took ill, and entered hospital in Glasgow. On the outbreak of World War II, he was sent home (this was the policy for all but the most critical of hospital patients – to clear space for anticipated war casualties). Some of my father’s family blamed this for Murdo’s subsequent demise, but I do not think my father held that view. Murdo, my father believed, had a brain tumour; other sources attribute his death to an unsuccessful operation for goitre.[20] Back in the hospital in Stornoway, he wrote his last religious poem – “Do Lorg ‘s Do Bhata Treun”. It was retrieved from under his pillow after he had died. Here is the last stanza from it:-

Thig aig a lorg seo feartan ur

Tha cumhachd triuir na Trainaid leis

Gu'n tig an truaghan leis on uir

Gu'm faigh e crun nach criochnaich leis

Is ged a rannsaicheadh tu chuis

Cha tuig thu tus a dhiomhaireachd

Ach gabh e, seinnidh tu a chliu

A stigh an Cuirt na Siornuidheachd[21]

And so Murdo died, his ambition to go to university unrealised. He was 33 years old.

Murdo was a learned man and a most exceptional postman. (My apologies to Alan Johnson.)

Postscript

So what kind of story is this?

Some of the readers of earlier drafts of this have already pointed out that it is a story that, in a slightly different form, happened across the UK many times in generations past.  In that sense it is almost a non-story. Although few such stories are quite as extreme as this one. (It has been unusual in the UK for at least 140 years never to have been to school at all).

It is also a story that, as I have told it, may well still have some inaccuracies. Much of it was told to me when I was a boy less than 10 years old by my father, whose friend Murdo had already been dead for some 20 years. But it (at least most of it) is cross-verified by Murdo’s own letters, by the totally independent version of it on the Uig Historical Society website, by University of Glasgow archives and by some still extant witnesses to his life.

My father more than 50 years ago told me an inspirational story. A story that he wanted the next generation to know. So I have now helped, I hope, to relay that story to a further generation.

Iain Smith

January 2011.

Acknowledgments:-

1. To many family relations who have helped me with this, not least my cousins Annice and Ann.
2. To the Uig Historical Society, who (unknown until recently to me) had already chronicled substantial amounts of this story. I hope I have added a little to their story.
3. To the Secretary of the University of Glasgow and the archivists of the University.
4. To Professor Jim Hunter, Professor of Scottish History in UHI.
5. To Professor Donald Macleod, Professor of Systematic Theology,

Free Church of Scotland College

6. To Hector Morrison, Principal of Highland Theological College UHI.
7. And to a father who told his 10-yr-old son a story so entrancing that it has gripped the son for the rest of his life. Which is what all good teachers and all good parents do with 10-yr-olds.

---

[1] see http://www.ceuig.com/archives/593

[2] Smith, C 2010 Around the Peat Fire  (Anthology Edition) Birlinn

[3] The account of this that I inherited from my father and that currently told on the Uig website disagree a bit in detail, but agree in substance.

[4] Letter of 1 July 1935

[5] A very reasonable paraphrase of what is actually in King John. Act iv. Sc. 2.

[6] Letter of 5^th November 1935

[7] This is actually a summary of a paragraph in Chapter 4 of  Carlyle’s “Chartism” rather than a direct quotation

[8] Letter of 2^nd December 1935

[9] Letter of 30^th November 1937

[10] Letter of October 1938 (no detailed date)

[11] The quotation, unattributed by Murdo, is from Robert Burns (The Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet, January, 1785)

[12] Personal communication from the archivist. (ref: R10/5/5 in the University of Glasgow archive)

[13] See http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/s/george-bernard-shaw/intelligent-womans-guide-to-socialism-capitalism-s.htm

[14] Letter of 1^st November 1938

[15] Pauline 1832

[16] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_Alpin_MacGregor

[17] Letter of 12^th January  1939

[18] There are various views on the Highland Church and land issues. See, for example, p157 in Andsell D 1998 The People of the Great Faith Acair. A more recent publication on church history in the Outer Hebrides (Macleod, J 2010 Banner in the West Birlinn) makes almost no references to land tenure issues.

[19] Letter of 10^th  February 1939

[20] http://www.ceuig.com/archives/2391

[21] http://www.ceuig.com/archives/2391

Learning and technology

I wrote this three weeks ago:-

As I write this, I am working in Lahore with a group of senior staff from a private Pakistan school system known as "The City School". Our theme is leadership development. Broadly speaking we are designing, not for the first time, professional development for groups of senior teachers which is based on a mixture of contact days, web-based self-study materials, web-based reading and mentored work-based action projects  

Some of my input is based on materials from the HMIe/LTS "The Journey to Excellence" initiative; and it is not the first time I have used these in Pakistan. There are a range of materials on the LTS/HMIe website: readings; self-reflective exercises; and videos of good practice. Altogether they form a formidable resource: and my previous experience is that senior Pakistan teachers have found them useful, even inspirational. So they certainly have had an influence on The City School (an organisation the size of a moderately large Scottish education authority i.e. with about 300 schools and 3000 teachers.

Whether they have had an effect on any of Scotland's 32 education authorities is more dubious: I suspect not. Most local authority staff I have spoken to certainly think not; and most Scottish school staff to whom I have spoken have not heard of them.

Why is this?

Firstly the sheer volume of material is overwhelming, and navigating one’s way around them deciding what to use and what to discard is a major task. I can do that because my time is paid to do it. For, say, an aspiring head to do that and fit that time around the day-time job would be a real challenge, and probably a frustrating and dispiriting one.

Secondly, and more importantly, we know that online material intended for individual self-study is largely ineffective (except possibly for some tightly defined skills enhancement) when that is the sole and only mode in which learning can be accessed. Embed it within other CPD experiences (e.g. provide some face-to-face interaction with other students, some mentoring support and so on) and the picture is rather different. That is precisely what the training designers in the City School decided to do.

To use the jargon, “blended learning” can work rather well. Which is why, from its very beginnings the Open University “blended” their distance learning study packs and radio and TV broadcasts with Saturday schools, summer schools, tutorials and tutor-counseling support. Within UHI, even the courses that are “on-line” have face-to-face induction days, on-line tutor contact and on-line discussion groups (none of which feature in the “Journey to Excellence” approach.)

(Edit point (5/2/2011) See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/business/06digi.html
 for a more recent and more cogent discussion of the point I am trying to make. )

The concept that individual study of e-learning materials can on its own produce a new generation of school leaders for Scottish schools is a delusion. We do not learn inter-personal or team-building or meeting management skills by sitting in front of a computer screen.

I suggested both in written and in oral evidence to the Donaldson inquiry that leadership development materials will have very little effect if they are deployed only on a website for individual self-study. My evidence was in vain. Instead, “Teaching Scotland's Future”, quite accurately but entirely misleadingly, talks about the high quality of the materials.

My Pakistani colleagues sometimes lack confidence in their abilities : which is why Westerners such as I end up working with them in Lahore and Islamabad and Karachi. I must tell them that, at least when it comes to developing school leaders, they are well ahead of the Scottish game.

Iain Smith

Lahore

(Iain Smith was formerly Dean of Education at the University of Strathclyde)

Mull and Karachi and Lahore

Today Joan and I did two significant things.

1. Joan and I drove up to Oban and took the ferry to our friend's house in Mull. Mull is a beautiful island off the North West of Scotland; and today was a particularly beautiful day : clear sky, buzzards overhead and a lovely ferry journey from Oban to Mull. Where we lit a log fire. Almost as good as being in Murree.

2. We booked a journey to Pakistan to work there in the last week of March. Joan to Lahore; and I to Karachi.

It is kind of hard to know why we love working in Pakistan so much. But we do.

Pakistan, and making speeches

I was reviewing things I have done in Pakistan over the last 16 years. Mainly because it has cropped up in my professional life again. A hard place to work in; and I made lots of mistakes.

But I remain proud of standing up in front of a large  audience a long time ago in Karachi and saying this. There is little in it that I would disagree with today:-

Graduates, family, friends, distinguished guest.

On behalf of the Principal and Vice - Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde,

I welcome you all here to this happy and important occasion.

This is an occasion for looking back - and one for looking forward. We look back

to celebrate the achievement of the City School, its tutors and its graduates, the

achievement which is the cause of this ceremony today. We look forward in

anticipation of the further challenges which lie ahead.

So let me start by looking back at what has been achieved. Just over two years

ago, 39 head teachers and teachers of The City School assembled here in Karachi with 2 University of Strathclyde tutors. The 39 were very uncertain of what lay ahead; and I can tell you that,

despite their outward confidence, the 2 University of Strathclyde tutors were even more uncertain.

Since then, almost 300 The City School staff have undertaken studies to postgraduate

certificate level, and about 40 have gone on to study at diploma level: and the

Diploma is running in Karachi this summer for the first time. 11 teachers have

under taken their studies in Glasgow at the Jordanhill Campus of the University of

Strathclyde and have gone on to take a leading and distinguished part in work as

teacher training tutors for The City School.

The City School is mature organisation, about celebrate its 20th year, and the University of

Strathclyde and my Principal send their congratulations to TCS and to you, Mrs.

Firoz, on that singular achievement. Pakistan owes a debt of gratitude to its

private school system and TCS is a leading contributor to that system. From small

and humble beginnings, its contribution has grown to be felt and acknowledged

across all the major cities of this great and challenging country. The growth of

TCS has not been achieved without struggle and sacrifice and we salute the work

and dedication of all those who have contributed to this story of survival and

success.

As TCS move into its 3rd decade, my colleagues and I are honoured to be

associated with the capacity building of which the certificate and diploma courses

are part. We look forward to that fast approaching day when TCS will have an

autonomous and independent teacher training college of its own. Of course, when

that happens, people such as Donald, Peter and I will be sad to leave our TCS

friends behind and we shall miss that noble highway in the skies which annually

has brought us out from Glasgow, through London and Dubai, to Karachi and the

other cities of Pakistan. But we will celebrate this further stage in the maturity of

TCS.

But today is a day and an evening for the graduates; and we join you and your

friends, your colleagues and your families in celebrating your achievement. I

congratulate these of you who have achieved the certificate. It has involved

dedication and hard work. I extend a special word of congratulation to the

diploma graduates. To Batul Ali and Seema Irfan who pioneered the route from

Karachi to the Jordanhill campus of the University of Strathclyde; and to Ghazala

Asif and Naila Durrani who followed a year later. Not only did you have to study

hard; you had to survive the cultural shock of twelve weeks in the city of

Glasgow. Despite the charms of that dearly loved city, I can tell you that there are

many UK citizens who would not readily enter a competition where the prize is

12 weeks in the city of Glasgow.

One of the few subjects you graduates did not study in the Certificate or Diploma

was history of education and, briefly, let me try to remedy that: it would be

appropriate today to look back at two figures from the history of education.

In 6 Jan 1907, a 1 - room nursery school, La Casa dei Bambini, opened in Rome,

with a cupboard of puzzles and learning games. Its founder was Dr. Maria

Montessori, a name well known in Pakistan and in TCS. She preached the

principles of student centred education. Students should have some freedom in

what to learn and when. Her idea were not favoured at the time, a time of chalk

and talk, of fierce discipline and of rigid timetables. But Maria Montessori said “Education is not acquired by listening to words but by active experimentation

with the world and its environment”. These are good principles for us and for you,

both as teachers of children and as tutors of teachers.

Secondly, and finally, I remember a second giant of education. Jan Amos

Komensky was born in 1592, over 400 year ago in the province of Moravia in

Central Europe. He died in 1670 in Amsterdam. Today his name is better

remembered as Comenius, and in his lifetime, spent variously in Poland, Sweden,

England, Transylvania and the Netherlands, he achieved many things. Comenius

pioneered visual learning with his book “The World in Pictures” - Orbis

Sensualium Pictus. As the distinguished historian Norman Davies writes, “Every

child who reads a comic or an illustrated textbook or watches a lesson on

television, film or video should hail Comenius as his mentor”

But Comenius has a greater claim to fame; and, as we think of education in

Pakistan and as the graduates think about their future careers, I would like us to

consider the legacy of Comenius. For Comenius, well in advance of his time,

advocated universal education, education for all, the idea that all our peoples

should have the right to schooling. And as we think about the educational work

still to be done, let us listen to the words of Comenius ringing down the centuries.

For he wrote “Not the children of the rich and powerful only, but boys and girls

alike, rich and poor, in all cities and in all villages, should go to school. And if

people ask ‘What will be the result if workers, villagers porters and even women

become educated?’ I, Comenius, answer them ‘None of these people lack the

capacity to think, to choose, to understand and to do good’”

TCS and its teachers have made a signal contribution to education in Pakistan.

But the combination of state and private education in Pakistan has a mountain as

high as K2 still to climb. As we seek to climb, let us remember the words of

Comenius. 

Karachi                                                          18 July 1998

Ian Garrow

This is the story of  a man who was my uncle (by marriage) for the last ten years of his life. And whose parents my family had known for a very long time. He was (despite some failings) an extraordinary person. It is a fairly astounding story.

As the narrative says (very gently) Garrow himself never truly re-adapted to life in peacetime and, while all concerned earned themselves the highest honours the Allied powers could award them, Garrow's contribution has perhaps been somewhat overlooked.  i.e. he became a spectacular and institutionalised alcoholic from 45-65. His last twelve years were somewhat happier


The first War Office communication received by Dr Alistair Garrow was a telegram identical to thousands of others delivered to anxious families all over Britain in the days that followed Dunkirk.
Dated June 25, 1940, it regretted to inform the Scottish doctor and his wife that their son, Captain Ian Garrow of the Glasgow Highland Light Infantry, had been reported by his unit as "believed missing". Further particulars would be forwarded as soon as received.
The last communication they received was a letter dated May 7, 1943, and written by Brigadier N. R. Crockatt, an illustrious chief in Britain's wartime Special Operations Executive [SOE/MI9]. It read:
"I expect you saw the announcement in The Times yesterday of the award of a DSO to your son. I am sure I need not tell you how delighted we are about this and how well deserved it is..."
It referred to:
"... the magnificent work he carried out under the most trying circumstances and with complete disregard for his own safety."
Between these two very contrasting communications is a thick bundle of small, neat, war-economy envelopes – all marked 'Secret' or 'Most Secret' – sent trustingly through the normal post and tracing the career of Capt. Ian Garrow during the intervening three years [see the full collection in thumbnail form].

What is fascinating however is that while the War Office SOE chiefs [notably Maurice Buckmaster and Brig. Crockatt] persisted in their official stance that Garrow was still 'missing' from 1940-43, they were able to comfort and involve his worried parents by a careful choice of words and the subtle implication that he was not only alive and well but also the subject of intense interest to the War Office.
And not surprisingly. It was Garrow, after all, who founded the line (later to be known as the Pat O'Leary Line) which got hundreds of escaping and evading Allied servicemen and agents back to Britain.
The best known of these was Airey Neave (on the run from Colditz), but 40 years on there are hundreds of others who owe their lives to Garrow's clandestine operations: operations known to only a handful in London and known to still fewer in Marseilles where he operated under the very noses of the French Milice and the German Gestapo [and Abwehr].

Capt. Ian Garrow DSO who established the secret escape line that allowed 600 Allied escapers and evaders to get back to Britain between 1940 and 1943. But the price for such freedom was high: 100 workers on the line suffered or died at the hands of the Gestapo. Among them was Dr Georges Rodocanachi, the author's uncle, whose flat in Marseilles became a safe-house and Garrow's headquarters.

In Scotland no-one knew anything at all – except that Dr and Mrs Garrow, if they had been good at cryptic cross-word puzzles, might have had a fair inkling of their son's activities. The secret MI9 letters were designed to make sense to someone who could read between their most secret lines.
Briefly, Garrow and four of his men had found themselves cut off from their unit in the chaos of Dunkirk in June 1940. Stuck behind German lines their only hope of survival, it seemed, was to head south towards the relative security of southern Vichy France. From there they hoped, they might be able to get back to England via Spain.
Two months later, in August 1940, they had trekked six or seven hundred miles, arriving in Marseilles. Garrow immediately turned himself in to the authorities and was placed in the mess-cum-prison of Fort St Jean beside the Vieux Port where he had, as an officer, much freedom to come and go.
While there, or wandering around the port, Garrow saw hundreds of other escapers and evaders similarly stranded among the flotsam and jetsam of the war and who had ended up in limbo in Marseilles – comparatively safe from the Gestapo in 1940 but unable to escape from France.

The Rev'd Donald Caskie OBE, (d. 1983) whose Seanmen's Mission at Rue de Forbin in the port of Marseilles was the foundation and inspiration for the 'Pat' escape line. He was imprisoned in seven gaols and condemned to death, though released just before the liberation of Paris.

He decided that there had to be a way of getting them home to 'live and fight another day'.
Almost immediately he met some influential and useful people with similar ideas.
A Canadian civilian, Tom Kenney [a.k.a. Lt. Johnson] and an English woman Elisabeth Haden-Guest were the first. Then he met Nancy Fiocca [Nancy Wake], a journalist. Finally he met two vital people, the Rev'd Donald Caskie and Dr George Rodocanachi.
Caskie, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, was already hiding Allied servicemen on the run at his Seamen's Mission in Marseilles.

Dr George Rodocanachi in his consulting room in the 1930s.

Rodocanachi a British doctor of Greek ancestry, who lived worked and represented British interests in Marseilles, was similarly busy 'fixing' the escape of threatened Jews [around 2,000 of whom were ingeniously passed by him as unfit for labour in work camps in Germany and thus able to reach the USA. Some of these were undoubtedly Jews who Varian Fry was tasked to evacuate to the USA].
Between them this team set up their headquarters in the large and elegant flat owned by George and Fanny Rodocanachi [née Vlasto] who also supplied the finance necessary.
Garrow went into hiding there, along with an endless succession of young, eager and boisterous young servicemen who were hidden in back rooms and taught to be neither seen nor heard while escape plans were made to get them smuggled across the Pyrennees.
The flat offered good cover because the consulting rooms naturally attracted a lot of coming and going.
Nevertheless, the risks taken by all concerned during 1940-43 were staggering. Gestapo activity became more and more intense as the 'line' grew more extensive throughout France, and the daily nightmare of being betrayed by collaborators, traitors or a single mistake by anybody grew ever greater.

'Achille' (Francis Blanchain), Mario Prassinos, Hugh Woolatt, Airey Neave and Louis Nouveau. This unique picture of Pat line organisers and British servicemen, was taken at the home of Louis Nouveau at 28a Quai de Rive Neuve, Marseilles in 1942.

At the centre of this growing network was the six feet tall Garrow who spoke no French and who would have stood out like a beacon had he been 'visible'.
By the time the first escapers were getting back to London, SOE already knew about the vital line in Marseilles. It was absolutely essential that Garrow should not be revealed – hence the necessity of continuing to regard him as 'missing', a word that also implied 'presumed dead'.

The Seamen's Mission at 46 Rue de Forbin, Marseilles, pictured during the 1940s. Here the Rev'd Donald Caskie first sheltered Allied servicemen adrift in France. His work inspired Garrow to found what later became known as Pat Line.

From that moment on the [MI9] letters to Dr and Mrs Garrow in Glasgow arrived thick and fast.
Who would have bothered to write so many letters about a missing man if he were truly missing?
Who would ever know that there had been so many letters since each should have been destroyed after it was read?
Why did the War Office chiefs suggest that messages might be got through to their son when his whereabouts were 'unknown'?
Furthermore, why were such senior people in such high places always asking the Garrows to inform the War Office immediately if ever they had news of their son? Did this mean they might expect to hear from him or did it, by implication, mean the War Office knew more than it was letting on?
In fact it seems certain that the parents of one of Britain's most important agents understood all along that their son was alive and well and somewhere doing something special and top secret. That's why they hoarded the letters.
It seems remarkable that during 1940 and 1941, when Britain truly was facing a seemingly endless succession of darkest hours, that men of the calibre of Brigadier N. R. Crockatt (Dep. Dir. of Military Intelligence [MI9]) and Major H. B. A. de Bruyne (P.A. to the Dir. of Military Intelligence [MI9]) should be writing to them so many personal and sensitively worded letters.
MI9's concern was well-founded.
Just over a year after Garrow established the line, he himself was betrayed. Fortunately there was a natural and brilliant successor to take his place – a man who was able to save Garrow's life in addition.

Lieutenant-Commander Patrick Albert O'Leary, RN – cover name for Albert-Marie Guérisse. This picture was 'snapped' by a Marseilles street photographer in 1941 and O'Leary is clearly unhappy about it. The fact that it survived suggests, unsurprisingly, that it was 'acquired' from the photographer for security reasons. 'O'Leary' was formerly a medical officer in the Belgian Cavalry. Following the arrest of Capt. Ian Garrow he led the first and most successful of the escape lines adopted by MI9 and SOE passing himself off as French. Earlier, Garrow fixed the escape of O'Leary from imprisonment in St Hippolyte du Fort. Eventually O'Leary returned the compliment. Operating under SOE/MI9's code-names of 'Joseph' and 'Adolphe', O'Leary was later to become one of the most highly decorated veterans of World War ll.

Not long after Garrow took up residence with the Rodocanachis, a Belgian doctor, serving with the Royal Navy on a requisitioned French vessel, was captured on the French coast when a secret mission went wrong [see: HMS Fidelity]. That man was Commander Pat O'Leary (real name Albert-Marie Guérisse, codenamed 'Adolphe' and 'Joseph').
Garrow heard about his capture by the enemy and arranged a brilliant escape bid which successfully sprung O'Leary from gaol and led to O'Leary becoming the Scarlet Pimpernel of World War ll. For his work with the 'line' O'Leary became a legend in his lifetime and the man most highly decorated for valour in the history of Europe.
It was fortunate that O'Leary arrived when he did because within months a double-agent called Fari lured Ian Garrow from his safe hideout at the Rodocanachis' flat for the first and last time. He was led straight into the hands of the Gestapo and arrested.

Jean de la Olla, a vital and loyal agent for Pat Line. He was betrayed and arrested, like Louis Nouveau and Pat O'Leary, by the French traitor, Roger le Neveu.

That he was not tortured, killed or made to serve out the 10 years' hard labour imposed on him was almost certainly thanks to O'Leary, Fiocca and others who arranged another brilliantly daring escape for their erstwhile leader. This escape would be worthy of a film all to itself.
In the meantime the Garrows were kept informed in the War Office's now familiar, cryptic style.
Garrow's parents were even sent a photograph of their son, taken while he was imprisoned, and smuggled back to Britain by secret agents. It was then passed on to the Garrows to provide the first concrete proof that their son was alive and well.

This extraordinary photograph of Capt. Ian Garrow and companions 'somewhere in France'. It was smuggled out and taken by courier to SOE headquarters in London. It appears likely that the background of this photograph was 'adjusted' by MI9/SOE to disguise the location. When Germany extended its occupation of France in the South Zone (Vichy) in November 1941, Garrow had been moved with others at Mauzac prison in the Dordogne and feared that the Germans would now transport them to camps in Germany. A message was smuggled out to O'Leary who then hatched an audacious and successful plan to spring them from jail. [Subsequent to the appearance of this article, research suggests picture was taken on the 'Roucas Blan', near the house of the Martin family at Endoume, Marseilles, which also provided a hiding place for Allied escapers and evaders. Bottom left is Louis Nouveau, just above him is Ian Garrow and in the centre Elisabeth Haden-Guest. The identities of the other are still not clear.]

As an example of the War Office's approach, the letter that accompanied this photograph, dated 7 November 1941, read:
"... enclosed is a photograph taken in August in which you will recognise Capt. Garrow. Our latest advices are that he is in the best of health and spirits. You will appreciate that we cannot give you fuller details about the photograph, such as how or where the group was taken and so on. Please do not show the photograph to others. We hope, but cannot promise, to be able to get a letter through from your son to you..."
The risks taken to obtain such a picture under the noses of his gaolers and back to Britain were phenomenal.

Lt-Col. James 'Jimmy' Langley, MBE, MC who, as a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, lost an arm at Dunkirk and was passed by Dr Rodocanachi, in February 1941, as 'unfit for further military service'. By March 1941, repatriated on a destroyer, he was a key figure at MI9 in London, alongside Airey Neave.

Following his escape from Fort Mauzac, Garrow was able to make use of the escape line he himself had set up for others and arrived back in London via Barcelona and Madrid. He was back in England early in 1943.
Meanwhile, and for several months thereafter, O'Leary, the Rodocanachis, Caskie, Fiocca and many others continued their extraordinary work, getting hundreds of men home again.
But, later in 1943, the line was betrayed and most of its personnel were arrested by the Gestapo.

Fanny Rodocanachi (née Vlasto) in the late 1920s or early 1930s.

O'Leary ended up in Dachau in appalling circumstances and was awarded the George Cross and the DSO., but survives to this day in Belgium. [He died in 1989, after this article appeared].
Caskie too survived the war and died early in 1984 [having written his account of these events in The Tartan Pimpernel].
George Rodocanachi was arrested, tortured and died within a few months in Buchenvald.

Garrow himself never truly re-adapted to life in peacetime and, while all concerned earned themselves the highest honours the Allied powers could award them, Garrow's contribution has perhaps been somewhat overlooked.
Early in 1984 the entire secret correspondence between MI9 and Garrow's parents turned up on a bonfire in Scotland and found its way into my possession.
They shouldn't have survived at all, of course. But, 40 years later, their survival gives us a remarkable insight into the way SOE treated its agents and their worried families – with concern, compassion and considerable finesse.

Dr George Rodocanachi photographed for an identity card in 1943, shortly before he was betrayed, arrested and sent to his death at Buchenvald in Brandenburg, Germany. The stress and personal price paid for all his work in 1941-43 is quite evident.

Readers are strongly recommended to read Fanny Rodocanachi's personal account of these events

Only the picture of Garrow himself (above with caption) appeared in the original published article.

See World War ll Index

Jim Rollo and going to university

I have been thinking about your tale of going to university and the question you ask. I must say that my memory of events, circumstances and above all my thought processes at the time is not as clear as yours but for what it's worth here is my story.

I made that transition from school to university in 1964. It was a bigger issue perhaps than for you and Alasdair as I was the first person in my family to go to university,  so I had not much direct contact with the world of  universities and no one in my family who could talk through the options. That said teachers (or at least some teachers) did take an interest and were encouraging and in retrospect my mother was fiercely determined that I shouldn't end up in the shipyards or similar - but I was so self absorbed that I am not sure I noticed any of  that at the time. Continuing education beyond school was not so novel however. My friends from school who had left at 16 or 18 and gone into the professions as apprentice solicitors, accountants, surveyors, civil and mechanical engineers, scientific and executive class civil servants etc  were doing professional examinations/HNDs on day release. They were all being paid to be trained - not least because their families needed the money they brought in -and as far as I was concerned that was the main cost of going to university: I did not get paid for 6 years - which left me a long way behind many of my contemporaries in social and economic terms.

Anyway back to the narrative: it  is was a much more graduated change than you faced getting on the Loch Seaforth at midnight and disappearing to a completely new life. On the appointed day (which I think must have been a Thursday since I remember it as the day of the 1964 General election and we were not sure if Wilson had got across the line until the Friday afternoon) I made my way to Gourock station, bought the Manchester Guardian and got on the (steam) train at around 7.30am (see above for the Gourock-Glasgow train of the mid-6os). Fifty minutes later I got off at Glasgow Central went to the 59 bus stop (with the  graffito on it "I died waiting for a 59", the truth of which I learned bitterly) and headed out to Gilmorehill.

I lived at home and commuted to University daily  like most students at Glasgow (and probably in Scotland) at that time and continued to do so until my third year. My friends were the friends from school who commuted with me to Glasgow and Strathclyde and the school friends now in work whom  I saw in the evenings or weekends. To that degree the main direct cost of me going to university was covered by my mother feeding and housing me  - a real sacrifice for her and one which I was very conscious of. Certainly my annual maintenance grant was around £100 plus fees & transport costs (I think) and working at Christmas and for all of the summer was a necessity (I seem to remember when I moved to Glasgow in 1966 (and after my mother divorced) my maintenance grant was of the order of £3-400 a year and I felt reasonably comfortable though the flats I stayed in were pretty grotty and not very warm - Margo may remember the horrible place I shared with John Galloway at the park end of Sauchiehall street in early 1967. For comparison, when I started work in in London in 1968 I was paid £1040 pa and was permanently in overdraft (costs in london were,  judging by the beer standard,  25% higher than Glasgow - a pint was two bob in Glasgow and half a dollar in London). Fees were not as I remember it that high and paid direct by the Scottish Education Department  to the University and so  generally below my radar. The main purpose of matriculation as I remember it was for the university to collect the fee authorisations and to pay the maintenance grant.

So to answer your big question : I am pretty sure that it would not have changed my mind about going to university to know that I would have to pay back the fees and the maintenance over 30 years. Despite living in a council house I understood at 16 the concept of borrowing money/making sacrifices  to buy an asset that delivers services over a life time. I was carrying costs of my own anyway - not working and earning from 16 to 22, a point made clear to me by all the former schoolmates in employment who offered (sometimes kindly, sometimes not) to buy me a drink when I was stony. So  I already felt I was investing in my own future. Above all I wanted out of Gourock, and university was a socially acceptable way of doing that. My family and friends did not feel rejected (the proud poppy syndrome was not unknown in working class culture) by the thougtht that to realise my own potential  I had to go universiy : rather it was seen a matter of pride for the family, and to a degree for the community. I was pretty clear however that I was doing it for me.


A final aside as I reflect on the career paths of my schoolmates is the way the private sector stopped  on-the-job professional  training combined with professional exams from the 1960s,  increasingly  outsourced professional training to the universities and thus pushed the cost onto government and/or the students and their families. Labour markets may function in such a way as to make sure firms pay the students' extra costs through higher life time earnings for their workers: or they may not. Certainly it is not clear to me that the tax burden on the corporate sector has reflected the increased costs of university education borne by the taxpayer in general but which benefits companies. So that is another reason for pushing the costs of university education onto the students because in the longer term it will need to be reflected in wages if it is to be sustainable.