NELSON Mandela joins us for a working breakfast though, at 8am, he has already eaten. He does not look his 75 years, and he speaks to the journalists, with energy and conviction, for more than an hour. Our breakfast sits unnoticed on the side table.
From Arnold Kemp’s book, a personal history of post-war Scotland “The Hollow Drum”.
…Jim Sillars told me a story about himself which, he said, explained his character. When he was 15 he was apprenticed to a plasterer and was one of a team working on a job. Although he was the junior apprentice he found he was expected to do the labouring. On further inquiry he discovered from the boss that the job had been priced to allow for three labourers, a junior apprentice, a senior apprentice and a journeyman. The boss had not employed any labourers; he was skimming more profit by making the junior apprentice do the donkey-work.
Sillars walked off the job. There was an enormous row. His father was called to a meeting. But it was to no avail and that day the plastering trade lost a recruit.
Pat Chalmers, controller of BBC Scotland between 1983 and 1991, has retired from the corporation after a two-year stint in Hong Kong, and this week friends and colleagues attended a dinner given for him in London.
Pat belonged to an era of broadcasting that seems now to be disappearing. Both in the Birtian BBC and in the commercial world increasingly ruled by market forces, it would now be difficult for an independent and rumbustious spirit like Pat to survive.
SCOTLAND’S greatest gift to international cuisine is not, I submit, salmon, beef, mutton broth, haggis or oatcakes, or even the simple bacon roll, that blessed balm for over-indulgence. It is the finnan haddock, served with a poached egg on top.
ACROSS the Ness from the hotel policeman keep watch from the roof of the Eden Court Theatre where the Tory conference is in session. The Prime Minister is arriving shortly to bring this melancholy but oddly inspiring week in British politics to a conclusion.
It has been melancholy, of course, because of the cruel death of John Smith. In its grief the British political establishment has found a rare unity. Our adversarial system has the virtue of in the end producing a Yes or a No to any political question. Its defect is that its perpetual mutual slagging becomes arid. The prying eyes of television, and the eavesdropping radio microphones, have revealed also its petty, schoolboy side.
THE old saying that you don’t meet many poor bookies has a self-propelling logic. Once I did see a bookie at Kelso come close to a lynching after he had increased the odds to drum up trade: just in time a runner arrived with more cash as the punters turned nasty. It is a profession in which incompetence is quickly punished.
ONCE, during a short season on the staff of the old North British Hotel in Edinburgh, I took up in the lift such notables as Gene Kelly, Kenneth More, and Sir Arthur Bliss. Quite apart from acquiring a lasting appreciation of the patience of those who have to wait on the public, and a tendency, out of a lingering feeling of solidarity, to tip too much, I have been dining out on my days as a lift boy ever since.
Glamour rubs off on those who find themselves close to it but celebrity is a two-way street. This week in Edinburgh, a tourist in my own home town, shuttling about the place as a consumer of culture, I have again seen this truth at work.
THE class politician is recognisable, among other things, by his ability to improvise. It is a necessary gift not just in the bearpit of the Commons at question time. There are moments, too, when a speech has to be discarded or radically adjusted at the last minute.
NO THEME has preoccupied post-war British writers more than that of betrayal. It is arguable that Le Carre is our major post-war novelist and the figure of the spy is pervasive in the literature of our time. As in Le Carre’s An Honourable Schoolboy, he is a metaphor for more general infidelities in an age that has seen the rapid loosening of marital and familial ties.
The figure of Kim Philby, in particular, continues to haunt the imagination. His extraordinary career has already been thoroughly documented, by the journalist Phillip Knightley and others, and most people are reasonably familiar with it in outline.
A convinced Marxist, he was recruited as a KGB agent while at Cambridge. He entered the British foreign service in 1941 and was first secretary at the British embassy in Washington from 1949 to 1951. After the defection to Moscow of Burgess and Maclean, his friendship with Burgess led to an investigation. Although nothing could be proved against him he was forced to resign. He went to the Middle East as Observer correspondent until he disappeared from Beirut in 1963, surfacing soon afterwards in Moscow as a KGB major-general and confirming that he had been the ”third man” in the Burgess and Maclean case.
The Arnold Kemp archive you will find on the left hand menu on this page is an attempt to compile some of my father’s writing. For many years, he wrote…
Scotland and the North of England have been in relative economic decline for almost a century. This situation has not essentially changed. Between 1985 and 1987 the Scottish GDP grew more slowly than that of the UK.
Herald, Oct 5 1989. Stanley Budd was Scotland’s representative at the Commission of the EC. Arnold Kemp writes: Stanley Budd brought a whiff of exotic diplomatic circuits to his task of representing the European Community in Scotland.
His house in Edinburgh, with its grand piano (of which he was an enthusiastic amateur), had a friendly elegance to which was added a hospitable and convivial welcome. If one had to listen to an arcane discussion about the agricultural fund, there was no nicer place in which to do so.
Derivation v Equalisation: A row over Scottish funding from the 1990s, Arnold Kemp, the Herald. It is interesting to note how the debate over funding has changed since then, I think. Jackie Kemp.
The long-standing principle of equalisation means that all revenues (except local government tax) are remitted to the centre. They are then allocated according to a formula that takes account of need, sparsity of population and so on. This system reflects the essential idea of the unitary state — that all its citizens should have a similar expectation of services irrespective of the wealth of their region.
[Critics] assumes that a Scottish Assembly would be financed by a system of derivation rather than equalisation. Under this principle expenditure is related to revenue raised in a particular geographical area.
THIS week Mr Malcolm Rifkind attacked the Constitutional Convention proposals for a Scottish parliament. He chose to do so on political and economic grounds. Yet there is much more to the question than that.
Except among those naive enough to think that England would gladly part with North Sea oil revenues, home-rule sentiment does not arise from the perception that it will make us rich. It arises from deeper cultural feelings of loss and confusion.
THE Queen is dead, long live the King. As far as the Scots are concerned John Major will promise nothing but a change of style and perhaps the end of the poll tax. Scotland has barely been mentioned in the contest and none of the contenders has been ready to contemplate any change of policy. Mr Major has specifically rejected a parliament with tax-raising powers and all three evidently assumed that Mrs Thatcher’s departure and a review of the community charge would have a sufficiently tonic effect on the party’s fortunes north of the Border.
At Edinburgh university we were taught that Southern English speech provided an example of hypercorrection: they would talk of lawr and ordah in Indiar, and claim that buttah is bettah than mahgarine.
SINCE the storms of early January a plastic bag, blown by the wind, has lodged in a tree outside the window and has assumed the shape of a bird. In some lights it looks like a roosting heron. On the rare occasions when it is caught by the rays of the winter sun, its appearance is more that of some exotic dove from the rain forests, its dirty white transformed in the rosy glow of sunset.
Here in our corner of the West End the human zoo produces much spoor. From time to time its accumulation is such that I don gloves and old clothes and sally out with brush and shovel. As I work away in the midden, restoring it to some kind of order after the depredations of various visitors, or extract the week’s offerings that have been jammed into the hedge by passers-by, I amuse myself by reconstructing in my mind the provenance of the jetsam and flotsam.
THESE fine, or not so fine, spring mornings have found me walking in Kelvingrove Park for constitutional purposes, and I have stopped once or twice to admire the splendid fountain, by the architect James Sellars and the sculptor John Mossman, erected in 1871-2 to commemorate the inauguration of the Loch Katrine water scheme.
It is richly carved in Scottish Gothic and since its restoration a couple of years ago it spouts voluptuous jets of water behind which can be glimpsed the bright pink blossom of the Japanese cherry trees. Much of the detail piously commemorates Lord Provost Stewart, whose civic genius created the water scheme, but its crowning inspiration is Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake.
With my shoe I clean the inscription set in the ground and think it apt that Sir Walter’s name should be covered with mud. The neglect not only of Sir Walter Scott but of its own history is a striking aspect of contemporary Scotland. There can be few other countries that are now so cut off from their own past as is Scotland, so forgetful and so careless of it.
The archive on these pages contains some examples of Kemp’s writing, most of which are not in the anthology of Kemp’s journalism published by Neil Wilson Publishing on September 10 2012.
“Arnold Kemp was considered by many to be the most outstanding Scottish journalist of the second half of the 20th century, being instrumental in modernising and revitalising both the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald…In his 14-year editorship of the Herald, his urbane style attracted readership loyalty and reinvigorated what was an ailing newspaper when he arrived in 1981, as it took on the challenge of great technological change… In 1991 (under his leadership), the circulation peaked, record-breakingly at more than 127,000, before the Murdoch-inspired price-cutting wars began.” From The Herald 10.09 2002.