Donald Dewar: "A
celebration of his life"
By Trevor Royle and Alan Taylor
Publication Date: Oct 15 2000 in the Herald
"NOW I know what it feels like to be
a horse," declared Donald Dewar. He was speaking at a lunch in
Glasgow in May last year, less than a week before the people of Scotland
went to the polls to elect its first parliament for 292 years. He paused
just long enough to let the words sink in before he delivered the
punchline: "Because these days I'm constantly being groomed."
The audience of hardbitten hacks and New
Labour apparatchiks dissolved in laughter. Here was Dewar in his
element, a stand up comedian in the Chick Murray mould "arms
flailing like a combine harvester out of control," as one friend
has described his speaking technique, he was the warm-up man for none
other than Tony Blair, his former roommate at Westminster.
It is a side of Dewar which was rarely
allowed to surface in public. Wry, witty, laconic, dry as a rusk,
deadpan as the Rev I M Jolly, he had the personality to charm even the
most cynical of crowds. His vanity, he once said with typical
self-deprecation, was "an incurable delusion that people like
me". But clearly it was not a delusion; people really did like him,
for himself and - not least - for his obvious aversion to being
"groomed".
The very idea that Donald Dewar would be
receptive to a New Labour makeover is risible. He would not countenance
fussing or fretting. Ron Ferguson, minister of St Magnus Cathedral in
Kirkwall, has described him as "a spin-doctor's worst
nightmare". Though his suits were expensive and well-cut, he
contrived, says Ferguson, somehow to make them look as if he had slept
in them.
Substance not style was his priority. In
that sense, he was a politician from a bygone age, to whom a soundbite
was an alien language not worth learning. He preferred the unglamorous
routine of constituency surgeries and the hard slog of the streets of
Garscadden and Anniesland to Saatchi and Saatchi slogans and appearances
on This Morning with Richard and Judy. "For him," wrote Ewen
MacAskill, the Scotsman's former political editor, in the Guardian last
Thursday, "a good night out was driving around Glasgow or some
other part of the west of Scotland, helping activists climb up ladders,
putting up posters, and then piling into a curry shop."
It was as if he was always wary of
getting above himself, of giving himself airs and graces, a peculiarly
Scottish trait. He knew his roots and remained loyal to them throughout
his life. "He had a great regard for the High Presbyterian
days," says Ron Ferguson. "He looked and moved like an 18th
century divine with haemorrhoids. You could never envisage Donald lying
on a beach - even reading Proust."
Famously, he never indulged in holidays.
While some of his colleagues last week took the opportunity of the
parliamentary recess to take an autumn break, for Dewar, who recently
had major heart surgery, it was the usual round of greetings, meetings
and briefings. Such a punishing schedule would have left much younger
and fitter men peching in his wake, let alone a 63 year-old with a
history of heart complaint. Married to politics as many have suggested,
he was driven by an insatiable desire to make the parliament, for which
he had worked all his political life, succeed and live up to the
expectations of those who had fought for the "unfinished
business" to be completed? Donald Dewar was under no illusion on
that score and was impatient to move things on. In doing so, he probably
hastened his death, a price which plunged the nation into mourning and
produced heartrending, hypocritical headlines in newspapers which only a
few days before he died had been virulent in his denunciation.
How he would have savoured the irony. No
one appreciated better than he the Scottish tendency to lambast the
living and hero-worship the dead. In the case of himself he was
embarrassed when eulogised, preferring to stay out of the limelight or
puncture praise with a joke told against himself. Only on the night that
the Scottish parliament was reconvened after a hiatus of almost three
centuries did he allow himself to enjoy a moment of glory, strolling the
streets of Edinburgh as night fell enjoying the celebrations, a proud
grin fixed on his face as his back was slapped to bruising.
"It was certainly the most
satisfying moment of my life," he said later, the apotheosis of a
career which had many highs and indelible lows. Throughout it all,
though, the remarkable thing about him was how little he changed.
"In one sense," says merchant banker Angus Grossart, who knew
Dewar from their schooldays, "you could say he was unreformed. He
really did retain a lot of his original qualities, including the
subversive wit and domestic indifference."
He was the only child of elderly parents,
which he did not recommend. However, he was at pains to stress that his
childhood was generally happy, if unusual. Both his parents suffered
from serious illness. His father, who was a well-to-do Glasgow
dermatologist, had tuberculosis, while his mother developed a brain
tumour. Donald Campbell Dewar was born in August 1937 as portents of war
reverberated around the globe and he was sent at the age of two and a
half to a small boarding school in Perthshire which was run by friends
of his parents. Two years later he went south to another boarding
school, Beverley, at Bonchester Bridge near Hawick, which was used to
house refugees from the London blitz. "I have memories of the
shrubberies, of the pets in the stable block, particularly a black and
white rabbit," he recalled last year. "I suffered from the
delusion that I owned it."
But when he was nine he returned to
Glasgow and went to Mosspark Primary School, where he spent a miserable
year. "I remember being puzzled by that," he said, "very
forlorn and lost because of the sharp change from a small, closed, rural
environment. There was a certain amount of teasing because of my accent,
which was part Hawick part non-English because of my previous
classmates."
Dewar may have hated his time at Mosspark
Primary School - he recalled rushing for the bus at four o'clock
"and it was not just because I thought it was leaving" - but
there were occasional glimpses of Eden. In the summer of 1945, as
war-time Scotland started getting used to the brave new world of the
welfare state, he and his parents went on the first of several
never-to-be-forgotten holidays to the north-east. He stayed on the farm
of their friends, the Allans, near the small Aberdeenshire town of
Methlick.
The farmer of Little Ardo, John R Allan,
was much more than that. He had written Farmer's Boy, a wonderfully
luminous account of his childhood in what he called "the thin, cold
shoulder of Scotland", an area which inspired in him extremes of
affection and dismay. Allan had also just tried his hand at politics,
having fought the Conservative stronghold of East Aberdeenshire for
Labour and been seen off by the sitting tenant, the dashing
wife-plunderer, Bob Boothby. And the Allans themselves were no mean
family, being related to the Mackies, farming magnates now also famous
for their ice-cream, who dominated the region's local politics.
For the shy eight-year-old, it was a
revelation. Little Ardo had been in the hands of the Allan family for
more than 150 years and the surrounding area was steeped in Scottish
history. From the farm he could see the Braes of Gight where the poet
Byron's mother was born; nearby was Bennachie on whose slopes Picts and
Romans fought; and the songs of the region echoed the glories of Mormond
Hill and Bonnie Ythanside.
All this must have been highly attractive
to the bookish Dewar but the bucolic idyll brought out another side in
him. Charlie Allan, his equal in years and later, as an author and
academic, his coeval in letters, remembers the two of them fishing in
the Ythan and "chasing pigeons in the barn till they dropped and we
could wring their necks", ideal training for the future chief whip.
All this was a far cry from the bookworm
who "could read whole books without pictures" and who taught
the locals to forsake cops and robbers for Wallace and Longshanks.
Allan, who went on to become something of a Renaissance man as farmer,
economics don, author and journalist, never forgot that grave, gangly
boy.
On learning of Dewar's death he said he
had only cried twice in his life. The first were "tears of rage and
humiliation" in 1991 when the local minister refused to grant his
father a funeral service because he had not been a member of the Kirk.
"The second time was when I heard the official announcement on
Radio Scotland that Donald was dead."
Later, in their teens, Dewar repaid the
debt when Allan visited him at his parents' house in Lacrosse Terrace.
Ibrox and Anniesland were visited to watch Rangers and Glasgow Accies
and although Dewar had never matured into a sportsman, he was
trainspotterish when it came to sporting facts and figures, a lifelong
enthusiasm that could leave the cynical claiming he had made it up as
statistics from the lower divisions were produced with unerring
accuracy. He also knew all about technique, teaching Allan to rugby
tackle in the classical style of the day, hitting the opponent low in
the thighs and sliding to grasp his ankles.
By then, Dewar was attending Glasgow
Academy, "where sons of Glasgow doctors ended up". It was a
school which championed sporting excellence, leaving Dewar, who had
Harry Potter-ish tendencies, cold. There were inexplicable rules
"such as wearing caps", which may explain his later aversion
to headgear, and random punishments if you were "caught in the open
by some authoritarian figure called a prefect". He found it hard to
make friends and later thought of himself in those days as "a happy
misfit". Towards the end of his time at Academy, however, he
encountered kindred spirits such as Angus Grossart and based himself in
the library, "not reading books, I hasten to say, but using it as a
social centre".
Nevertheless, he was never made a
prefect, the only person who repeated sixth year to achieve this dubious
distinction. "That must be some kind of a judgement on me," he
reflected.
His flowering, however, came when he went
to Glasgow University, which brought him into contact with a group of
men who were to influence him throughout his life. There was John Smith,
already a political animal but also a great party-goer. At his funeral
Dewar recalled: "Those who saw John as [sedate], dark-suited and
safe knew not the man. He could start a party in an empty room, and
often did." His death in 1994 devasted Dewar but it galvanised him,
too. Like Smith, he subscribed to the view that we are not put on this
world simply to enjoy. A Scottish sense of duty impelled both of them,
as did the idea that there could be no privilege without responsibility.
His was by any standards an outstanding
generation. As well as Dewar, Smith and Grossart, there were Menzies
Campell, the Liberal Democrat MP who is tipped to become Speaker of the
House of Commons, Jimmy Gordon, now Lord Gordon of Strathblane, Ross
Harper, the lawyer, broadcaster Donald McCormack, Cameron Munro, until
recently the European Union's representative in Edinburgh, and Derry
Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, who was to cause Dewar huge emotional
upheaval when he had an affair with his wife, Alison.
Dewar first did a history degree, then
law, which would give him a career to fall back on. But of more
significance was the milieu of the university and the role it played in
transforming the geeky, bookish, bespectacled teenager into a confident
and accomplished student, which he later confirmed. "I came up to
university remarkably inhibited and limited in my social experience and
all that kind of changed, which was a great thing. I discovered in the
debating society that I could, in a staccato kind of way, string
together words and phrases. It wasn't the debates that were important,
frankly, it was what was built around them. In those days there was a
tremendous social structure, drinking structure, social experience in
every sense." The hub was the union where, he said, "you could
eat, drink and find yourself a lumber for the night, or whatever".
You can almost hear the smile in his
voice as he said that. There can be few more incongruous notions than
Donald Dewar on the prowl for female prey. It was also at the university
that he acquired the nickname "Gannet", on account of his
gargantuan appetite. It stuck with him, as did his friends. It is one of
the constants of his life, a bond forged at a formative age. "We
didn't think we were marked for success or greatness," says Angus
Grossart. "Everybody thought they were ordinary. Our horizons were
getting a good degree and working hard. It was an immensely busy
life."
Grossart and Dewar's careers crossed
throughout their lives but when they met at official dinners it was
always a relief to find themselves seated together, when they could
ignore banking and politics and talk about books and painting and
history. Grossart confirms Dewar's navety when it came to the culinary
arts. They spent a weekend in Fife lately. When Grossart produced a
shepherd's pie, almost immediately after returning from an afternoon
visiting a private library, Dewar was astonished. Mastering a microwave
was beyond him. The same was true of dishwashers. There was one in the
kitchen of his new flat in Cleveden Road in Glasgow but he couldn't open
its door. There were signs, though, that he was tiring of dining out in
Byres Road or snacking at Safeway after he'd done his shopping. His
friend, Matt Spicer, recalls how Dewar called his wife, saying he'd
bought a chicken and didn't know what to do with it. She gave him
Nigella Lawson's recipe, which requires butter to be rubbed into the
skin of the bird as if you were applying the most expensive handcream.
Not an activity one would expect Dewar to be familar with.
But the image of the endearing eccentric
is in danger of overshadowing the immense achievement of a man driven by
a passion to eradicate inequality and poverty. Negligent he may have
been in his personal appearance and his domestic arrangements but he was
also pragmatic, punctilious and a stickler for detail. Menzies Campbell
was spot on when he said that Donald Dewar and Scotland were made for
each other. With his knowledge of his country's literature and history
and his respect for artists, particularly the Scottish Colourists, a
love honed by many pleasant meanderings down unexpected byways, Dewar
had the kind of hinterland once common in cultivated Scots. Indeed, he
was always slightly puzzled and embarrassed when his books and paintings
were mentioned, as if he found it difficult to believe that others did
not share his tastes.
But it was not just book learning or the
reading of Burns and Hume, or Cockburn or Chalmers, which provided
fodder for the mind and clutter for his flat in the West End. Scotland
helped form him in many other untold ways. Not only was he a product of
his Glasgow middle class roots, the lace-curtain respectability
celebrated by the novelist Guy McCrone, which gave him his early
education and his collection of Peploes, Fergussons and McTaggarts, but
his training in history and law helped form the radical inside the
anonymous - if crumpled - suit.
Partly, he was affected by Scottish
Labour history with its totemic figures of Keir Hardie and the more
recent Red Clydesiders, the Wheatleys and Maxtons who vowed to export
the revolution to Westminster. But these connections are too obvious.
There was always the touch of the Coventanter about Dewar that even his
best friends could not ignore - not the mood of religious exaltation
which took fanatics such as James Renwick to the scaffold - but the
calmer and more considered views of Robert Baillie, who struggled with
his conscience before signing the National Covenant in 1638.
In the late 1980s, when it seemed that
devolution was as far away as it ever would be, Dewar once confessed to
a Scottish historian that he felt many affinities with Baillie, also a
Glasgow graduate. It took time and much soul-searching before the young
minister of Kilwinning agreed to throw in his lot with the Covenanters,
because he realised that in so doing he might be violating his loyalty
to the Crown. His heart told him that the National Covenant had been
produced to protect Scotland's interests and was a statement of the
country's intent. But he also knew that it might be construed as a
threat to the authority of King Charles I.
"That's the beauty or the terror of
Scottish history," Dewar said. "We are all affected by it and
its influences are never far away." The comparison with his own
position on the devolution issue was left unsaid but its shadow hovered
uneasily over the conversation. Now he has sculpted his own place in the
country's story. His modesty would doubtless have it otherwise but there
is no denying it. "I am asked what I am," he said in Dublin at
the end of September. "I am a Scot, a citizen of the United
Kingdom, and someone who has a very real interest in the future of the
European Union."
It was a brilliant speech, casually
erudite, humourful, urbane and broadranging. But to those present it was
clear the heart surgery had had a profound physical effect. He told the
historian Tom Devine that in the next few months he would have to
reappraise the situation if there was no surge of the energy of old.
Sadly, he never got the chance. One slip and he was taken, like Burns'
snowflake on a river, a moment white then gone forever. But he leaves a
legacy which cannot be easily ignored. It can be summed up in the six
sonorous words he himself wrote and which will be his epitaph:
"There shall be a Scottish parliament." |
