A Man’s a Man for A’ That
This November is the 170th anniversary of the birth of Robert Louis Stevenson which made me think of my grand-father-in-law, John ‘Jock’ Ainslie. The picture above shows his leather-bound copy of ‘Treasure Island’, one of the few possessions in our keeping as a ‘minding’ of him. I never got the chance to meet him but have a sense that he and I would have got along fine. He was a Council roadman, an ordinary working-class man, and in his free time – a reader, a poet, and a fine musician. Synchronicity is something that has always fascinated me, so when in late November during a virtual event: ‘Landmarks’, recalling Hugh MacDiarmid and the landscapes he lived in, a friend of MacDiarmid’s was mentioned in the conversation whose name I recognized. The name was that of the Glasgow born actor, Alex McCrindle, who with other friends had helped to raise funds to upgrade ‘Brownsbank’, the cottage near Biggar that would become MacDiarmid’s final home. McCrindle was an actor of some repute, appearing in a long list of films, including the role of General Jan Dodonna in the first ‘Star Wars’. He was also a friend of my grand-father-in-law.
A copy of the dug-eared newspaper obituary that McCrindle wrote after ‘Jock’s death in 1961 was unearthed from the shoe-box below the bed. I hadn’t read it for years, and reading it again reminded me of the depth of that friendship evident in his closing words:
‘. . . The Rev. Mr Begg has well said that . . .“he made roads for other people to travel on” Schoolboys on the way to school, ploughmen on the way to the fields; many a poor old body living alone, tinklers and tattie-howkers will miss “Jock” as much as anyone. Shakespeare, in the mouth of Hamlet, says of his father, “he was a man, take him for all and all. I shall not look upon his like again”. These words seemed to me to fit a man I was proud to acknowledge as my friend in the last years of his life’
These words provide a measure of both McCrindle’s generosity of spirit as a friend to many, and they provided another small piece in the jigsaw of the life of Jock Ainslie ~ a Union man, a man who never turned down a request to organise a Burn’s Supper, or play a tune, a man who carried with him a pocket-sized copy of ‘Treasure Island’. It saddens me that we never got the chance to meet and discuss his books, his music, and his poetry.