STAND-OFF
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Literary louts and layabouts (1)
At Milne's Bar? Oh no, we drink at the Abbotsford on Friday nights.
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Where beggars could be choosers
Bring your pipes and stay in the folklore flat, I was told.
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I repeated the police message on a 23 tram
His haughtiness had gone... all that emerged was a sort of strangled squawk.
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Booed along Princes Street by MacCaig
Astoundingly, the screaming face, the specks of spit had gone, and he asked for a drink. It was as if he had stepped in from another planet.
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The Merry Muses
...and he had set up the Society to publish his own dirty books on a subscription basis to escape the strict obscenity laws then in force.
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The several stages of Norman MacCaig
'He was brandishing his arms like skinny sticks and certainly did not care whose 80th birthday party he was ruining'.
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The muggings begin in earnest
The 17-stone yob leaned over and began mouthing at me in front of my girl friend: “You’re a coward. Come out and fight. You’re a coward. Come out and fight…” My girl friend was petrified. Little wonder, I had never met them.
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Literary louts and layabouts (2)
Even in the wilds of Kenya I felt safer than in Edinburgh, although I had been offered a job there, which I mentioned to Robert Reid in a letter, saying I might be back by Christmas to have a dram with him.
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End of the Weekly
I could feel the back hair on my neck rising in horror as I read the badly-typed piece. It proposed that Queen Elizabeth should make her lovelorn wee sister Queen of Scots.
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Fishy tales from Milne's Bar
Now the ploy had been elevated into the Scottish equivalent of a full-scale Himalayan mountaineering expedition...Base camp, mess tent... All very macho and military, plus their arduous sixty-mile march there and back.
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R.I.P. Robert Reid
He "went down to Cowal...for this was his dearest place... saying goodbye to all his fondest memories, the gathering of his own folk, where he had excelled, never to be diminished by the real outsiders".
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The Tartan Triad
They became the new despots of pibroch to whom all pipers had to toady. Not to do so invited even worse vituperation than Campbell and Grant ever nightmarishly conceived.
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The MacCrimmon Manifesto
The Broadcasting Council for Scotland claimed the BBC booklet Piobaireachd was "the first comprehensive survey of the Highland bagpipe."
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The Birth of the 'Glenfiddich'
It is also how an intended festival of piping, which would have helped to conserve the traditional styles, was turned into a vehicle to drive MacNeill's obsession with power...
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The Cameron style -- for yet awhile
"Ifs, buts, probablys, and maybes don't amount to facts, and the real authentic facts of Piob. Music stem from the Camerons". -- Robert Reid, 18 March 1956
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The unwanted audition
What the BBC said they didn't want to hear about a post I never asked for.
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How the spooks decide who works for BBC
...aided by a Reds-under-the bed producer with a grudge and a magnet.
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Launch of the MacCrimmon book
The book, "in its deadly way, exposed the concealed history of Scotland, when to this day the author of an 'inconvenient' book can have his human rights abrogated and his and his family's lives destroyed, simply by the act of writing it. Freedom of speech is thus annulled in Scotland."
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George A. Dixon's scurrilous letters
... drive the last nail into the coffin of the legend
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The snoopers
They came uninvited to our home, gobbled our free food and drink, then tried to incite me to defame Seumas MacNeill. A sour smell comes off these snoopers, leaving our house unclean for weeks, but it took years to be rid of the stench of the G.A. Dixon letters, now exhumed here.
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How the book discredited the legend
More lies have been told about the MacCrimmon book and me than any other Scottish author or his work in the 20th century, best summed up by one of my legal advisers who flung his arms in the air in outrage and roared: "It must be hell, Alistair, being called a liar by liars."
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How the BBC ruined the book
The book itself was of micro-interest to licence-payers...How was I to know the new director-general regarded the MacCrimmons as "gods" and wanted to retire to their spiritual home in Skye as the Laird of Dunvegan?
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Groping with history
Ian Grimble "was downright insulting to the Scottish intelligence. To be candid what right had this fellow to come into Scotland and pervert its history and music of which he was in abysmal ignorance? Was it just because he was a BBC employee and a ready toady to the chiefs?
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How the BBC handled the launch
I was then unaware of BBC's technique of trying to interview an intended victim at a distant link, when they could ask abusive and impudent questions in safety...
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Who took the dirty bawbee?
Now he had taken the dirty bawbee to betray his old chum. I had even given him the idea for the piping contest which later became the Glenfiddich after he told me his client "wanted to do something for piping."
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Death by tongues
The BBC threatened to sue me if I complained to my trade union, the very reason why unions had to be founded.
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The BBC's triple cross
The first intimation of the Second Coming of Kilberry was published in Piping Times
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Downfall of a director-general
Milne's sacking could never have been kept quiet as BBC is a gigantic gossip shop.
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Milne and the ministers
To be brought into odium in a small Scottish town by its leading Presbyterian minister was, to us, an act of unpardonable bullying.
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Smear Campaigns
"It was if the gates of a criminal lunatic asylum had swung open and out poured an interminable stream of homicidal maniacs, almost all apparently determined to destroy not merely me but my family. Truth was their first casualty."
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Search for the Gillies MS book
I could not afford a taxi from the station and had crippled my right leg during our flit in our aged car when we were first made homeless. After a painful journey on foot from the subway - you could have easily recognised me. I was the bloke who had to keep stopping to lean against the wall.
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