Special Scottish Issue
On leaving Edinburgh
Ludovic Kennedy
The last of the children had left for points south and beyond, and if we were to continue to see anything of them, we had to move too. In many ways it was a wrench: memories and associations stretched back to my own childhood; my grandparents' house in Belgrave Crescent where I was born; first visits to the cinema and zoo, tram rides to Leith Docks to look at the ships, golf at Barnton and cricket in the gardens. Later, on the step-ladder in my grandfather's library, I would learn the rudiments of criminal law.
My grandmother, name of Ethel, dres- sed herself in reds and greens, painted her doors the same colours. She had two sisters; Cecil married to Neville Dundas, a W.S., and Mabel, married to Tom Booth- by, chairman of Scottish Provident. Cecil was a sort of self-appointed one-woman RSPCA inspector, abusing men in the streets who she thought were abusing their horses. 'You brute! How dare you hit an animal like that! Grr! I shall report you to the police.' And did. Mab was round and tiny, never far from a lavender chiffon handkerchief, had flutters daily on the flat. And as Cecil berated men with horses, so Mab berated her son Bob, then a rising political star, as he arrived dishevelled off the night train: 'Bob, your shirt is filthy and you're smelling of whisky. Go straight upstairs and have a bath and shave.' Meekly the gravelly voice replied, 'Very good, mother.' Ethel, I'm glad to say, was milder.
Coming back 40 years later, there were good things too: chairing for several years the Lyceum Theatre Company where, as a boy, I had sat spellbound by the antics of Dave Willis and Tommy Lorne; the riches of the National Library of Scotland, the excitement of a Scottish win at Murrayfield (tempered by annoyance at the cowardice of the Scottish Rugby Union in refusing to match the `Marseillaise' or 'Land of my Fathers' or whatever with some rousing Scottish tune); the unending beauty of the city itself, where almost anywhere one wants to go is more than 20 minutes' walk from anywhere else.
Socially the place has less to offer. There are bores in every big city, but Edinburgh, it seems to me (and quite unlike Glasgow) has more than its fair share. It is not that people are not hospitable, but conversa- tion seldom gets airborne. The innate conservatism of the Edinburgh Scot (which makes him such a dour businessman) stifles the expression of any thought or idea that is in the least fanciful, made not to be taken literally but to see where it might lead or to attract a like response. Disapproval too is never far away. One year I was invited to preside over the annual dinner of the Sir Walter Scott Society, to speak on Scott myself and to introduce the speeches of others. The invitation said white tie, which I had abandoned years ago: So, knowing of Sir Walter's fondness for the plaid, I put on my clan tartan smoking jacket with the green velvet facings, of which I was sure he would have approved. The secretary's wife glared at me all evening, and only when I had completed my speech was she ready, as Edinburgh Scots too often are, to praise with faint damns. 'I enjoyed your perora- tion,' she bellowed at me across the table, 'as much as I deplore your jacket.'
Then there was the lady politician with Irish accent and social aspirations, now happily fulfilled. On our tare encounters she invariably gave me the old heave-ho, which puzzled me until a mutual acquaint- ance asked her to explain. 'That man,' she said loftily, 'consorts with the criminal classes.'
One Criminal actually — Patrick Con- nolly Meehan, convicted of murder in 1969 and subsequently granted the Queen's Pardon and £50,000 compensation for seven years' wrongful imprisonment. Time after time the Scottish Bench and successive Secretaries of State turned down his num- erous appeals, and the more they did so, the more (with one or two noble exceptions) convinced they became of his guilt. The climax came after his free pFclon when the self-confessed murderer of the crime, Ian Waddell, was tried for the same offence.
For the judge, Lord Robertson, a bear of very small brain, was, despite the free pardon, still chained to the idea of Meehan's guilt. After lambasting the Secretary of State for recommending the free pardon, the Lord Advocate for pro- secuting Waddell, and myself and others for supporting Meehan's case, he as good as directed the jury to acquit. During his charge to them, Meehan stormed out of the court, declaring his pardon was not worth the paper it was printed on. Thus, and thanks largely to Lord Robertson, a vicious criminal who should have been locked away for life, was later freed to participate in another murder before being strangled by a friend.
It was this case mainly that led to the only small hiccup, or brace of hiccups, that I experienced in seven otherwise very agreeable years. Some 20 miles outside Edinburgh lies Muirfield Golf Club, home of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, founded in the 18th century. The membership is mostly Edinburgh profes- sional people and Anglo-Scottish gentry. The press calls it exclusive, but it has always prided itself on not being so (one member is a duke, another a traveller in ladies' pantie hose). What are exclusive are the lunches, the best of any golf club in Britain.
Unfortunately for me the Edinburgh legal establishment is well represented. Among the photographs of past captains who beam down from the dining-room wall is that of Lord Robertson sporting his wig, a source of merriment to some members, a warning and reminder to others. It was, / suppose, inevitable that when after playing there as a guest for 12 years my name came up ,for election, the club's ancient black balls should be taken out and dusted over and then cast in some abundance (though the white balls were also, I was told, a record for the occasion). Not to be out- done, Edinburgh's New Club, having in- vited me to apply for full membership (I used the place occasionally on a reciprocal arrangement with a London club) then smartly turned the application down. The Edinburgh Scot is nothing if not canny. But there was one Edinburgh club which was always a joy to enter, where wine and conversation flowed, which had never heard of white or black balls, yet which was exclusive in a way that Muirfield is not. This was Puffin's, the luncheon and dining club founded by the now lamented lain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, and named after his first wife. The Ilk's idea was to set up a place in Edinburgh where he could meet his friends when he was there, and they could meet each other when he wasn't: this was the nature of its exclusivity. As his friends came from pretty well all over, the company tended to be catholic. Regulars included the odd laird from the north like Grant of Rothiemurcus, Jan Kilbrandon and Lionel Daiches from the Law (but not the legal establishment), Eric Linklater or Jo Grimond en route to the night train, Gavin Maxwell's chess-playing brother Eustace, a passing Herald or two, occasionally a Central European grandee whom lain had picked up on his travels. Recently, after letting in women and meeting only for Wednesday lunch, the place has gone rather quiet. But in the old days in the private room in the Aperitif we had some rollicking times. I knew the Ilk since pre-war Oxford, but it was as our host in Puffin's, presiding genially and usually inaudibly over the collection of oddballs he had caused to gather there that I — and I imagine most of his Scottish friends — will most remember him.
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