PEOPLE: Killer in the family offers real-life case for Taggart star to probe

THERE has been, in the best tradition of gritty cop show Taggart, a murder.

Bloody and brutal, brother slaying brother, the killer on the run from his family and the law.

It's a drama that could have come straight from the pages of the latest Taggart script, with the show's regular crime-fighters - DCI Matt Burke, and his team of detectives, Jackie Reid, Robbie Ross and Stuart McCreadie - quickly on the scene.

As it turns out, DI Ross, aka Taggart regular John Michie, is rather bemused to admit that this particular search for a bloodthirsty criminal wouldn't take the detectives long to track down: in fact, he's one of the family.

Michie breaks into a gutsy laugh: "Yes, it's true. I'm descended from a murderer and a lot of sheep rustlers - fine, traditional Highland stock," he grins.

"Nothing wrong with that though - most of the Highlanders in those days would have probably been pretty much the same."

A bit of recent digging into family history revealed the murder connection.

"It was the 17th century, Michael MacDonnell murdered his elder brother and had to get out of Lochaber," explains Michie, settling nicely into the role of narrator. It's a bit like his latest television part, a documentary in which he uncovers the facts behind one of the most intriguing episodes in Scotland's past, the Clearances.

"He went east and allied himself to the Forbes clan," he continues. "He changed his name. As Michael, he was known as Michie, so he took that as his surname.

"Recently I was up in Lochaber and I met a guy who told me that my late second cousin, Donald, had been approached to contest the chieftainship of the MacDonnell clan.

"They thought I might be interested," he explains, "but the current chieftain can rest easy. First, I live in London, and secondly, it costs an awful lot of money to contest these things in the Lyon Court."

So with roots in the Highlands, a childhood that spans his birthplace of Burma, early years in Kenya where his father worked as a bank manager and now living in London, Michie has the classic background of a fully-fledged member of the diaspora.

Add to that the role of a Glaswegian TV cop, and you've got to wonder what he's doing in Edinburgh.

"My mother and father brought us here to live when I was 12, our home was in Barnton," he explains. "Dad had a lot of pressure to deal with in Kenya - racist pressure. I'm not saying his life was always in danger but he would be phoned at the weekend and the voice at the other end would tell him that someone would be coming in on Monday and he would give them the £2 million loan they wanted.

"There was an occasion when someone was sent to the house and broke down the door and he nearly lost his life. So it was pretty serious stuff.

"Although I was brought up in Africa, I was always very aware of my Scottish heritage - and the Scots abroad always seem very keen to hold on to that, much more so than the English."

The Michies returned to Scotland when his father took a less turbulent role with the Bank of Scotland on The Mound. Michie Jnr was sent to school at Glenalmond in Perthshire.

If his dad hoped it would give him a grounding for a sensible white collar career, he was mistaken. His son certainly appreciated the financial commitment to his schooling, yet is as firm an opponent of the "which school did you go to" system as you're likely to meet. No wonder his own three children - two girls and a boy, the result of his relationship with ex-Hot Gossip dancer Carol - have all been educated at an inner London comprehensive.

Perhaps if he'd gone to the local secondary, he'd have embraced the life of an actor sooner.

"It was too dangerous to join in that kind of thing at Glenalmond," he laughs. "It was an all-boys school then, and while there was a danger I'd end up playing a girl, I wasn't terribly interested.

"It was later that I kind of fell into acting," and he roars with laughter as he adds, "it was only because I thought it would help me get a few girls!"

Before the call of the greasepaint, Michie had his own mini drama to perform. It was 1976, he was 19, and for some reason a trip to the ends of the earth on a cargo ship packed with fertiliser seemed like a good idea.

"It was bloody horrific," he says now. "I'd hoped we'd get to Australia, which we did, but it took eight months.

"One of the best experiences of my life was getting off that boat and nothing would ever get me back on one. It was like this: the galley boy was just 16 years old and he started to go mad. So they just chained him to his bed. Crazy."

Michie spent over a year in Australia living on his wits to survive - at one point he sold paintings door to door, knocking them up and then passing them off as Royal Academy originals.

It was back home in Barnton with his parents that he decided it was time to make a career decision. "I realised I wanted to be an actor. I was working in bars - the Calton Studios and the Golf Tavern by the Meadows, but was desperate for a job in theatre.

"So I persuaded someone at the Traverse to give me a job as a stage hand. Once I saw actors working I couldn't wait to do it too."

He headed to London to work towards the Equity card he needed before setting off for Kenya to work in theatre and gain vital experience, cramming 17 plays into ten months. Soon he was back in Britain and a regular on TV screens in everything from Casualty to his first appearance in Taggart - he played a suspect, not a cop - and on the big screen playing alongside Richard Harris in To Walk With Lions, the follow up to Born Free.

DI Robbie Ross is Michie's best known role, and it's one he's happy to hang on to.

"ITV have just commissioned ten more episodes," he grins, "That's fantastic news, it's one of the biggest commissions and at a time when there's not a lot of money around, to get ten episodes is a sign of how much faith they have in Taggart."

Six months of filming begin next week - giving Michie plenty of opportunity to catch up with his Edinburgh family. His sister, Fiona, lives just off Leith Walk, and his nephew, Jamie, is carving an impressive name for himself within the acting community.

For Michie, in Edinburgh to run the 10k at the weekend in aid of his pet charity, Leukaemia Research, home may be London, home is in the English capital, but his latest TV series, Highlands, shows the strength of his bond for the land of his forefathers.

"As I've got older I've developed a real passion for Scottish history," he explains. "Now I'm finding out the truth of it, and it's fascinating."

For now though, there's murder on the cards and Taggart to film. Michie is content to carry on cleaning up Glasgow's mean streets.

"I'm perfectly happy to keep with it as long as they want.

Besides," he grins, "the easiest bit about being an actor is the acting. It's being an actor who's out of work that's hard."

Highlands, presented by John Michie, is on STV on Sundays at 5.20pm.

TAGGART THE SURVIVOR - STILL GOING STRONG AFTER 25 YEARS

TAGGART is the world's longest continually running police drama. The pilot episode went out in 1983 starring the original Detective Chief Inspector Jim Taggart, Mark McManus.

It was intended as a one-off but is celebrating its 25th anniversary with ten new episodes commissioned.

Created by writer Glenn Chandler and originally set around Maryhill Police Station in Glasgow it followed the tough-talking, gritty cop Jim Taggart, balancing his hardman no-nonsense image with that of caring husband to his feisty wheelchair bound wife Jean.

The series looked doomed in 1991 when McManus died during the filming of an episode, but it continued under slightly different titles.

Eventually the original name was revived.

The series has been seen

in more than 80 countries, from Iceland to New Zealand, and America to Japan.

Famous fans include film director Ken Russell, crime novelist PD James and the late Queen Mother.
Appeared Edinburgh Evening News May 2008

The day a bomber crash landed in craiglockhart

IT was just before noon, on a fairly normal Monday in an otherwise
ordinary yet smart part of town, where the street of neat bungalows and their equally neat little gardens must have seemed - until then - relatively unscathed by the horrors of war.

Women were going about their daily household chores, a few men had wandered down to Craiglockhart's "Happy Valley" allotments to tend to their ground. All were quite probably counting the days until Christmas and then the dawn of a new year. It would soon be 1943, maybe war would end soon.

They heard it before they saw it. The loud drone of a plane's engine - too loud, not quite right, it made them stop what they were doing and raise their heads up to scan the sky.

And what they witnessed must have made a terrifying sight.

Skimming the trees, a few dozen feet from the ground and heading straight towards the recently built bungalows and neat gardens of Craiglockhart View was the fearsome sight of Bomber Command's most trusted workhorse, the twin-engined Vickers-built Wellington, more than 60ft long with a wingspan of nearly 90ft, designed to be armed with up to four machines guns and capable of carrying a 4000lb bomb.

On board, her five frantic crew were embroiled in a desperate battle. Just over an hour into their secret test flight from RAF Defford in Worcester, the Wellington had experienced a critical and ultimately fatal equipment failure.

They surely knew they were in the final, terrifying moments of their lives. But as the neat rows of Craiglockhart View bungalows loomed before their eyes, they would also know that it wasn't only their lives at stake.

Next year will mark the 70th anniversary of one of Edinburgh's worst plane disasters, when five brave fliers on board the Wellington bomber perished just feet away from the bungalows of Craiglockhart View.

Incredibly - in a feat of flying skill under enormous pressure that almost defies belief - the 24-year-old pilot drew on all his abilities to bring the plane down in the heart of a tightly packed community without a single further loss of life.

All on board perished: five young men, one of them married, one an American seconded to join the RAF test flight and one whose remains now lie just a few miles away in a grave on Corstorphine Hill beneath a stone that, in a poignant indication of the sacrifice made by some families, also pays tribute to his pilot brother lost just a few months before him.

Hard to believe now, but the demise of the Wellington bomber on that fateful day in December, 1942, barely made headline news at the time. Details of the drama were sandwiched between stories about a New Year rugby match, a fire at a Hermand Street garage and the ongoing work to compile a Scottish National Dictionary, on page four of the Evening News. That's in sharp contrast to today, when the RAF is consistently making headlines for completely different reasons as cutbacks throw doubts over the future of Scottish air bases and trainee pilots face being made redundant.

Now, as the 70th anniversary of the accident looms, one local councillor believes the time is right to honour the immense courage of those unfortunate souls on board.

Fountainbridge/Craiglockhart Councillor Gordon Buchan began pushing for a memorial to the doomed airmen after he heard of how some locals in the area had dug up bits of the aircraft in their gardens.

"People spoke of finding little bits of aluminium, and when I asked around some people said they saw it as children.

"It seems that the pilot was trying to avoid the houses and land on the fields at Meggetland.

"If this had happened these days, there would certainly be a memorial of some description."

Because this was a secret test flight - and the middle of a war - the background to the accident remains sketchy. What is known is that the crew of five was flying from RAF Defford, the recently opened base for the Telecommunications Flying Unit, later known as the Radar Research Flying Unit. It operated flight trials, testing new equipment devised by civilian scientists designed to give Britain and her allies the edge in the skies over Europe. This was where radar systems which would revolutionise the capability of Allied aircraft were put to the test and where Air to Surface Vessel radar developed to spot German U-boats was devised - a crucial element in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Radar enabled accurate navigation and target identification - perhaps it was this that the Wellington Mk III crew were secretly testing?

The bomber was around an hour into its journey when it suffered some kind of equipment failure and was instructed to return to base. But as the crew wrestled with that problem, the port engine failed.

The flight stuttered over Turnhouse, went into a stall and began its plunge to the ground in the skies above Craiglockhart. The brief reports of the accident paint a vivid and distressing picture of the plane crew's final moments.

One unnamed resident said at the time: "I head the aeroplane and from the noise I judged it must have been very low. Then I saw it just skimming some trees. It seemed to be in trouble and I was horrified because it seemed utterly impossible to avoid crashing into the houses in its path.

"It went very low and I heard a crash. I ran down a side road towards the canal then there was a burst of flame and when I got in view of the allotments, the plane seemed to be awfully close to one of the houses.

"Ammunition was banging and popping and it was hopeless to attempt to get near the crash"

In fact, the plane had come down in the back garden of one of Craiglockhart View's bungalows, just feet from the back door and the startled middle-aged woman inside.

One man tending his allotment nearby had an equally narrow escape - rooted to the spot just 30 yards from the scene, he was showered by debris which fell all around him yet somehow avoided hitting him.

The crackle of exploding bullets, the flames and the noise sent residents scurrying to air raid shelters, many thinking the streets were under attack from a machine-gunning raider.

But those who had witnessed the drama were in little doubt that the pilot, Thomas Lennox-French, had skilfully manoeuvred his stricken plane in its dying moments and against all odds intentionally brought it down just short of Craiglockhart View's homes. The only damage was some broken windows and a small fire on the roof of the bungalow which, reported newspapers at the time, charred some wallpaper in the back room. The female occupant of the house was said to be slightly shocked but uninjured.

The outcome for the young crewmen on board was a dreadful death. Even if anyone had survived the impact of the crash, the intensity of the flames and the exploding ammunition meant there was no hope of rescue. The crewmen's deaths were registered, one after the other, with the Morningside registrar on Hogmanay, 1942: Flying Officer Lennox-French, 24, Warrant Officer Andrew McFadyen, 26, Flight Sergeant Charles McGregor, 28 and the only married man among them, John Harper, 29, a Flight Sergeant.

Missing from the roll is 1st Lieutenant S Kaulis, of the US Army Signal Corps, also on board the flight.

It's not too late to mark their sacrifice, insists Cllr Buchan. "We should remember what people did during the war," he stresses.

"We are trying to get a grant from the Neighbourhood Partnership and looking for somewhere appropriate to locate a fitting memorial."

"It's important the people are aware of what other generations have sacrificed. It's important to show respect."

POIGNANT STORY

PRECIOUS little is known of the crew who perished when their Mk III Wellington bomber dive-bombed into gardens in Craiglockhart View.

But a small section of Corstorphine Hill cemetery holds a poignant memorial to one.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission plot in the south-east corner contains 35 Second World War graves and it's here, in section B, grave 558, that the remains of Wellington bomber pilot Thomas Lennox-French lie. His grey stone tells its own remarkably poignant story, for as well as marking the details of his untimely demise, it also commemorates that of his older brother, Robert.

Sidney and Euphemia French's two sons were both doomed to perish while serving in the RAF.

Robert, Thomas' older brother by four years, was named in the London Gazette of April 9, 1940, one of several dozen RAF volunteer reserve personnel to become "pilot officers on probation".

But just weeks later, at the end of May, his name appears in The Scotsman as one of many reported missing. By February 1941, he was officially named as missing, presumed killed in action

NOSTALGIA: The bizarre Georgian love temple.

 

AS the doors to Dr James Graham's mysterious Temple of Health creaked open, the sight which greeted the crowds of curious Georgian gents and their blushing ladies was nothing if not intriguing.

Beyond rows of crutches and walking sticks abandoned by owners who had been "cured" of all manner of ailments, and lurking behind scantily-clad "Goddesses", was the ultimate prize.

Dr Graham's 12ft-wide tilting bed was lavish and extremely expensive - it is said to have cost the good doctor a whopping £10,000 to create - but for the desperate, childless and the sexually adventurous, the Edinburgh-born medic's invention brought hope and, no doubt, put a smile on many despairing faces long before Viagra was invented.

For a rather hefty £50 a night, the sterile, impotent or simply curious aristocratic Georgians were guaranteed a cure to their sexual woes by way of an aromatic mattress, several powerful magnets and a jolt of electricity.

Whether anyone actually did conceive courtesy of Dr Graham's wild invention is lost in the mists of time, but several of his other bizarre theories and ideas - and those of his fellow quacks - may sound familiar 250 years on.

Mud baths, vegetarianism, aromatherapy and electrotherapy are commonplace today, yet revolutionary for Dr Graham's blue-blooded audience, drawn to his temple by celebrity endorsement and shrewd marketing.

He was just one of many quacks who combined showmanship with a gullible public to earn himself a place in medical history. But just who was Dr James Graham and how have his wacky health ideas evolved to affect us today?

Born the son of a saddler and raised in the Cowgate, he studied medicine at Edinburgh University only to drop out before graduation. Still he pursued a lifelong career in medicine which, combined with his charisma and talent for showmanship, made him the toast of Georgian society and one of the first 'sexologists'.

He was in his 20s when he emigrated to America, where the electrical experiments of Benjamin Franklin prompted his idea that "electricity invigorates the whole body and remedies all physical defects". By 1775, Dr Graham operated clinics in Bristol and Bath. Now it was time to open the lavish London Temple of Health and Hymen and reveal Dr Graham's most bizarre invention of all - the celestial bed.

His name was already known to some of the cream of society - the Prince of Wales, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and British historian Catherine Macaulay - drawn to the smooth-talking Scot for his "famous aetherial and balsamic medicine" and his "elixir of life".

But that did little to prepare them for what they would find behind the creaking doors to his Temple of Health and Hymen. Payment of two shilling and sixpence allowed the curious to pass through the main hall and into one of the opulently decorated rooms, lit by scented candles and filled with erotic paintings.

While he delivered his lectures on health - or, more precisely, sexual health - Goddesses of Youth and Health, scantily clad young and attractive women, would pose provocatively in their virginal white silken robes. Among them was the Goddess Hebe Vestina, a 16-year-old former domestic servant named Amy Lyon, whose main role was to frolic naked leaping in and out of a mud bath which Dr Graham claimed would enable users to live to 150 years of age. Eventually, Amy would leave Dr Graham's employ to re-emerge as Emma Hart, better known still as Nelson's Lady Hamilton.

But it was the celestial bed that was the most intriguing of all of Dr Graham's inventions. Stuffed with spices and essences, surrounded by "the exhilarating force of electrical fire", the bed certainly commanded its users to put on a spectacular performance.

"At the head of the bed appears sparkling with electrical fire a great first commandment: Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth", declares Dr Graham's Temple brochure.

"No feather bed is employed, but sometimes mattresses filled with sweet new wheat or oat straw mingled with balm, rose leaves, lavender flowers and oriental spices," it continues.

"The sheets are of the richest and softest silk, stained sky blue, white and purple. Sometimes the mattresses are filled with the strongest, most springy hair, produced at vast expense from the tails of English stallions."

It also contained 15cwt of magnets and was built with a double frame, enabling it move on an axis and tilt at the vital moment to assist in conception.

"From a medical point of view he was not taken seriously at all," says writer Jacqui Lofthouse, who researched Dr Graham's bizarre practices for her novel, The Temple of Hymen. "But he was a great figure in society at the time.

"You could liken his temple to today's reality television, where there would be this fascination - it would be fashionable and a wonderful occasion as well as an element of titillation."

And although on the surface Dr Graham's theories seem outrageous and bizarre, they may not be a million miles removed from some of today's common practices, she adds.

"Some of the things he did can be linked to today," says Jacqui. "He was into eating seeds and nuts for health and lots of fresh air. A lot of what he advised is what you might hear advocated now."

Dr Graham is said by some to have invented the mud face-pack, vegetarianism and electrotherapy, still used in hospitals today.

His penchant for the use of celebrity endorsements and astute marketing of his Temple were also templates for today's advertising campaigns.

Despite his theories, however, Dr Graham did not live to a ripe old age. As his Temple fell out of fashion he found himself poverty-stricken and back home in Edinburgh. Sinking into madness, he took his theories on food to the limit and released a publication: How to Live for Many Weeks or Months or Years Without Eating Anything Whatsoever - a theory adopted by today's bizarre sect of breatharians, who claim to survive on light. Dr Graham died before he reached 150 - the age he seemed to think entirelly possible to achieve - some say from starvation, others from a ruptured blood vessel, yet his fame lives on.

The Temple of Hymen by Jacqui Lofthouse is published by Penguin Books.

Edinburgh Evening News June 2005

NOSTALGIA: Clued up Littlejohn inspired Sherlock

A BUZZ of excitement rippled through the High Court in Edinburgh. The scene was one of the most dramatic trials to grip Victorian Edinburgh, at centre stage was one of the most familiar faces to grace the halls of justice.

Henry Duncan Littlejohn took his time entering the witness box. Methodical and precise, no doubt savouring the moment, he made himself comfortable while the public benches, packed with curious spectators who had queued for hours to see for themselves the spectacle of this dramatic trial, settled into silence.

"The veteran doctor, without whom no great trial would be complete, stepped into the box, and having taken the oath, poured out a glass of water and settled down to an examination which lasted well over two hours," reported The Scotsman at the time.

Littlejohn's appearance in the trial of the year - indeed, that particular hearing in 1893 would go down in Scottish legal history for its unsatisfactory outcome, its high drama and its bloody detail - was sensational. So much so that his gruesome evidence, in which he dissected in intricate detail his postmortem findings, even down to the smell from the victim's opened stomach, his shattered skull and blown apart middle ear, was reported in intricate detail.

Indeed, so gripping was Littlejohn's testimony, that by the time forensic detective Dr Joseph Bell took the stand to support his colleague's claim that the victim could not possibly have simply shot himself, his evidence merited merely a passing mention in newspaper reports from the time, and it seemed simply a matter of fact that the accused would be found guilty.

The sensational trial - known as the Ardlamont case - brought two of the most dynamic characters of the time together in a powerful real-life drama that gripped Edinburgh society.

Of course, Dr Bell's impressive powers of deduction had already inspired his student and one-time clerk Arthur Conan Doyle to create the world's best-known sleuth.

But while he is typically given credit for providing the fictional detective's DNA, there's little doubt that the astonishing figure of Henry Littlejohn - forensic scientist, police surgeon and, when not dissecting bodies, the man responsible for completely transforming public health and sanitation in Edinburgh - played his own role in forging the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Interest in just who inspired Conan Doyle to create his multi-faceted and charismatic lead character has been revived with the BBC's contemporary adaptation of the classic stories, which have received rave reviews. On Sunday, the final episode in the latest trio of Sherlock stories starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the consulting detective, The Reichenbach Fall, hits screens, inspired by The Final Problem in which Holmes locks horns with his criminal nemesis Moriaty.

But while Conan Doyle's creation broke the mould when it came to delivering a super sleuth with skill, dazzling intellect and personal magnetism, in real life Henry Littlejohn - and eventually his son Harvey, born 150 years ago this year - was every bit as fascinating and remarkable.

For father and son not only helped develop forensic science skills that endure today, between them they helped bring to justice the perpetrators of dozens of bloody and brutal crimes. And in Henry Littlejohn's case, he would also help improve the lives of hundreds of poverty stricken citizens and bring comfort and medical help to their sick children.

This year marks 150 years since he was appointed to the dual role of surgeon of police and medical officer of health in Edinburgh. To hold one of those roles would have been quite enough for most men - as surgeon of police he was expected to carry out postmortems, testify in court and attend executions - to take on the public health role too was almost superhuman.

Father and son were, agrees Dr Paul Laxton, who is writing a book about Henry Littlejohn's life, exceptional characters. "Henry Littlejohn was very prominent in dealing with murder cases all over Scotland - to then take on a role in public health and at the same time lecture at Edinburgh University was quite incredible. His son, Harvey, succeeded him as chair of medical jurisprudence at Edinburgh University. There is a lot of academic writing that supports the theory that Sherlock Holmes is not based on one man, but on several people. And, of course, Littlejohn would have been well known to Conan Doyle.

"Edinburgh at that time was a village, all middle class people in the New Town wined and dined together and knew each other well. Bell and Littlejohn were two major characters."

Henry Littlejohn's impact on Edinburgh life was dramatic. Born in Leith Street in 1826, he was the seventh child of a master baker. Aged 21, he graduated in medicine from Edinburgh University with distinction and trained at the Sorbonne in Paris before becoming a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh in 1854.

His speciality, however, was forensics, a growing and fascinating area of detective work that seized upon scientific understanding and medical advances to help crack crime.

From the halls at Edinburgh University where he'd lecture for hours without notes, to the hush of the courtroom where he'd present evidence in fine and often nauseating detail, Littlejohn cut an impressive figure with his strong, determined jaw, top hat, long coat and Gladstone bag.

His ability to dissect a crime scene - and a victim - was legendary. But it was his new role as medical officer of health that impacted on most Edinburgh citizens' pitiful lives.

Tragedy had struck in 1861 when a High Street tenement building collapsed, killing 35 people. The horror led to calls to clean up the city's ruinous buildings and improve sanitation for Old Town citizens.

Within a few years Littlejohn had single-handedly produced a damning report that prompted the clearance of dire tenements. He pioneered smallpox vaccination programmes that dramatically improved the city folks' health and helped lay the foundation for the Sick Kids hospital.

Enough for one man, perhaps. But Littlejohn's other skill - the one that may well have planted a seed in the mind of Edinburgh University student Arthur Conan Doyle who attended his lectures - was forensic science.

"Littlejohn was very famous in Edinburgh and throughout Scotland," says Professor Dorothy Crawford, assistant principal for public understanding of medicine at Edinburgh University, who has written about Henry Littlejohn in her medical history book Bodysnatchers to Lifesavers.

"He made an enormous impact on public health but he was also in court a lot and was an incredibly popular lecturer to students who taught from his own forensic cases.

"This was at a time when photographic evidence and fingerprinting was being introduced and Conan Doyle would have been very much involved in that. Of course Conan Doyle's novels hit the public at a time when detective work was becoming more scientific and being a medic and a writer meant he excelled."

Conan Doyle penned The Final Problem, in which Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriaty apparently plunge to their deaths down the Reichenbach Falls, in December 1893. At the same time, the Ardlamont murder trial was creating a national sensation that held Victorian Edinburgh and beyond engrossed - one newspaper report of proceedings stretched to a staggering 44,500 words.

Forensic evidence provided by Littlejohn seemed certain to seal murder accused Alfred Monson's fate. Monson, described as a "gentleman's tutor", had gone shooting on the Ardlamont estate with a friend, Edward Scott, and young gent Cecil Hambrough in August 1893 when, they claimed, Hambrough accidentally shot himself.

Their story was accepted until Monson appeared with two life insurance policies in Hambrough's name, taken out a few weeks earlier, benefiting Monson's wife.

In two hours of gripping evidence, Littlejohn picked over the injuries to Hambrough: the position of the wound, the damage to the victim's skull, his stomach, scorch marks from the bullet.

His testimony - backed by Dr Bell - would have put Sherlock Holmes himself to shame. There was just one problem; the jury wasn't convinced and returned a not proven verdict.

It was one of the few occasions that Henry Littlejohn's wealth of experience, brilliant mind and astonishing charisma was not quite enough.

Appliance of science

FORENSIC detective Dr Joseph Bell is typically regarded as the main inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. But lesser-known Sir Henry Littlejohn was almost certainly another.

One case of which the young Conan Doyle would have been acutely aware caused a sensation in Edinburgh in 1878 - the same year he took up his role as clerk to Dr Joseph Bell.

Eugene Chantrelle's wife Elizabeth had been found ill in bed, apparently overcome by escaping gas. Littlejohn attended the scene and his knowledge of poisons quickly came into play.

He suspected that she was actually suffering from opium poisoning. Languages teacher Chantrelle was charged and convicted of her murder.

As Edinburgh's Police Surgeon and Chief Medical Advisor to the Crown in Scotland, Littlejohn was required to attend Chantrelle's execution.

In a curious twist that further entwines Littlejohn, Bell and Conan Doyle, Chantrelle is said to have turned to Littlejohn and muttered: "Give my compliments to Joe Bell. He did a good job in bringing me to the scaffold."
Edinburgh Evening News January 2012

PEOPLE: From rock legends to television faces... writers and soap stars...

It can be nerve wracking finding yourself on the other side of the couch or phone from someone internationally - or even just nationally - well known. It's particularly terrifying if they're either a fellow journalist (you wander off afterwards examining all the stupid questions you asked, thinking how daft they must reckon you are). And it's equally frightening when it's an acclaimed writer who you know will probably view your work with a critical and ruthless eye.
Thankfully most interviews come and go without drama or incident. And sometimes writing them isn't as bad as at first seems. Best memories for me are the two interviews with the guys from Nazareth... hilarious, real characters with larger than life stories to tell.
Next up come some well known names, faces and, hopefully, a few unfamiliar tales.

PEOPLE: Still rocking after a lifetime of riffs and hairspray

WITH a wild toss of his flowing bubbly locks and a bass guitar strapped over his shoulder, Neil Murray gazed out over a sea of more than a quarter of a million faces and struck another classic rock god pose.

It was Rio de Janeiro, January 1985 - in the days when trousers were tight, hair was big and rockers Whitesnake were on the cusp of massive international super-stardom.

Nearly 350,000 paying fans - at the time a world record number for a concert - had turned up to see Edinburgh-born Murray and his Whitesnake bandmates, along with Rod Stewart, Iron Maiden, Ozzy Osbourne, Yes and headline act Queen. A staggering 200 million viewers in 60 countries tuned in to watch.

And with their sprayed-on skintight jeans, carefully unbuttoned shirts revealing jangling medallions and the distinct aroma of several cans of hairspray lingering in the air, Whitesnake's bandsmen were the epitome of Eighties' power rock legends.

Today Murray recalls the gig as one of the key moments in a 30-year career and allows himself a gentle smile at the slightly over-hirsute image that the band had so eagerly embraced.

"OK, yes, I did have the big hair," he admits, rather awkwardly. "Well, we all did - it was the mid-80s!

"Really, it wasn't too bad at first, but then it started to get really over the top, we went head over heels for the glam heavy rock look. The hair was getting bigger, there were stylists being brought in to tell us what to wear while we were on the road.

"And there was this hairspray, loads, everywhere."

These days the hair is substantially shorter and definitely greyer. Murray, now 56, and fresh from a trip "home" to Edinburgh to tidy up loose ends of his late mother's estate, remains one of rock music's biggest unsung legends.

Indeed, his professional credentials read like a musical hall of fame.

Apart from providing the throbbing bassline to some of Whitesnake's biggest power rock anthems, Murray has shared his talents with household names from Black Sabbath to Pavarotti, Queen's Brian May to Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green, and performed alongside Eric Clapton, Sting, Robert Palmer, drumming icon Cozy Powell, Australian rocker Jimmy Barnes and even The Chieftains.

He's strutted at Buckingham Palace for the Queen's Jubilee celebrations, provided thumping rhythmic melodies for wildman Ozzy Osbourne at the historic first Live Aid concert and has notched up no fewer than ten million album sales.

Not bad for a musician that few people will have ever heard of, and whose early memories of public performance are of watching operas and classical recitals with his cultured parents at the Edinburgh Festival, and who still regards himself as a full-blooded Scot despite his soft south coast accent.

"I'm absolutely one of Edinburgh's own," he agrees. "People say to me, 'oh you can't be Scottish with that accent' and it really annoys me.

"I was born in the Simpson's, I remember going to see Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes at the Festival - I was taken to all the festivals when I was young. Art, dance, opera . . . I was exposed to it all. And, of course, there was a slight tendency to rebel against that high art and try something a bit more down-to-earth."

While his brother, Andy, followed in their father's footsteps and went to Fettes alongside Tony Blair - eventually becoming a key player in the music industry himself, working at a business level with the likes of Pink Floyd's David Gilmour and The Corrs - Neil was sent instead to a progressive, vegetarian boarding school in Hertfordshire.

He had already swapped his piano lessons for the trombone and eventually the drums, when a school friend converted a guitar into a bass and Neil discovered the key to his musical future.

Soon he had figured out a way to plug the guitar into his record player, teaching himself to play by practising along to recordings of some of the best bassists in the world.

Eventually his typographic design studies at London College of Printing couldn't compete with the thrill of playing guitar - even though it was several years of practising in his bedroom before Neil finally emerged on to the public stage.

"I was obsessed with the bass guitar," he remembers. "I was playing on records in my bedroom for five years. Eventually, when I did get on stage, I suddenly realised there was a lot more to it all than I had realised, the nerves came out and the lack of experience. It's not just about playing the notes."

Still, while he's the first to admit he has neither the extrovert character nor inclination to be a frontman, he certainly learned to hold his own on the rock stage. There would be stints strutting alongside guitar maestro Gary Moore, rhythm king Cozy Powell and eventually former Deep Purple frontman David Coverdale in his newly formed rock outfit, Whitesnake.

So did life as a rock star meet all the cliches of wild women, trashed hotel rooms and lunging from country to country in a boozy blur?

"To be honest, touring was more about playing silly practical jokes on each than anything else," he admits.

"Tony Iommi, Black Sabbath's guitarist, has this doom and gloom, very dark image - and to be honest you don't want to get on the wrong side of him - but he's really very humorous, there's a lot of silliness and joking with him.

"In Whitesnake, well we were just a bunch of guys having a good time.

"There was some of the booze and womanising going on but if you look at the likes of Ozzy or Motley Crue, we were much, much tamer than that," he says. "I mean, not exactly choir boys but not doing anything very different from the vast majority of the population.

"It just maybe seems to be a bit more glamorous, but it's not really," he shrugs. "Besides, I'm a bass player and we tend to be more in the background. OK, I had my moments, but I'm not a wild extrovert."

No smashed up rooms, television sets thrown out of 20th-storey hotel windows? "It was more practical jokes, to be honest," he admits.

"Things like covering door handles with shaving foam. And once someone dressed up as a lion from the circus and we had a laugh at that."

A far cry from the thrusting, posturing and drink and drug-fuelled rock star image. As is the notion that all rock stars are worth millions and live a life of luxury.

Although Neil worked on the recording of Whitesnake's US-breakthrough album, 1987, he was out of the band by the time they reached superstar status - missing out on a potential earnings windfall.

Not that he's too bitter - by that time the hair had got even bigger, the trousers even tighter and the on-stage thrusting even more extreme for a lad from the outskirts of Edinburgh.

At least these days there is the comfort of financial security - during the past five years Neil has performed in the Queen tribute musical We Will Rock You, at London's Dominion Theatre, and occasionally appears with the Whitesnake tribute band, M3 Classic Whitesnake.

Soon he will head to Germany with fellow Scot, singer Dougie White from Motherwell, to record with studio-based band Empire - led by rock guitarist Rolf Munkes.

But despite a packed schedule, Neil makes the time for regular visits to his family back in Edinburgh.

His parents have both passed away in recent years but his sister Charlotte, who works as a graphic designer in the Capital always looks forward to welcoming her brother home.

The days of appearing before quarter of a million-plus fans at a sweltering Brazilian rock festival may be in the past; the highlight of playing at the Queen's Jubilee concert then trading Fettes tales about his brother with Tony Blair just a memory - but Neil remains as understated as ever.

"There were good times," he reflects. "It was nice to be part of it."

HEAVY METAL'S CELEBRATED SERPENT

WHITESNAKE was started in 1977 by David Coverdale, formerly of Deep Purple, and found fame in the 1980s.

The line up has changed over the years but has included such legends as Jon Lord, Ian Paice, Cozy Powell, Neil Murray, Bernie Marsden, Micky Moody, John Sykes, Adrian Vandenberg, Vivian Campbell, Tommy Aldridge and Steve Vai.

The band has been compared by critics to Deep Purple, not only because three former band members were once in Deep Purple, but also because of their sound and influences.

Current band members David Coverdale, Doug Aldrich, Reb Beach, Uriah Duffy, Tommy Aldridge, and Timothy Drury still tour to this day.
Edinburgh Evening News April 2007

PEOPLE: Still the bad boys of rock

HE'S rocked relentlessly around the world for 40 years, but there was just one thing Nazareth founder Pete Agnew had to say when he heard pop megastars Girls Aloud had sampled one of his band's anthems for a new single.

"Er, who the hell are they?" queried the baffled rocker.

One of the best-known modern girl bands around had by-passed Scotland's rock legends, not because Pete and his fellow Nazareth stalwarts had disappeared into the musical wilderness - far from it. In fact, they were simply too busy taking their classic rock sounds to adoring fans across thousands of miles on yet another of their gruelling world tours to even register the existence of five girls from a reality TV show.

The Girls Aloud single peaked at No.5, thrusting Nazareth's raw guitar sound and catchy rock lick back into the charts 32 years after it was penned. Still, Pete, below, and fellow Nazareth stalwart, gravel-voiced singer Dan McCafferty, weren't exactly impressed.

"I really didn't know who they were," confesses Pete, now 61 and enjoying 2008 as the band mark 40 years in the business. "Someone said 'Girls Aloud have sampled Hair of the Dog' and I think we were supposed to be pleased. But it was a bit of a laugh because I didn't have a clue who they were talking about.

"Then I saw them on TV, they were miming and dancing about with hardly anything on and I thought 'ah, so that's why they're so big'. Well we'd all be superstars if we could do that."

Some acts might have been overjoyed to find their rock hook propping up a top-ten chart hit by one of pop's biggest names. Pete, however, a father of five whose thumping bass has provided the backbone for Scotland's biggest rock export since the late Sixties, managed to contain his excitement.

After all, when it comes to putting on a show, there aren't many acts that can match the Dunfermline-based rock gods for stamina, longevity and downright eccentricity.

And if anyone dares to suggest they might be Seventies "has-beens", they only need to check out Nazareth's anniversary tour schedule. While they might well struggle to fill a major venue in Scotland, put them in a stadium in Eastern Europe and you'll have a near stampede for tickets.

With their 2007 tour barely over - they played a private gig in Moscow three days before Christmas, flew home and then returned on Boxing Day for another private performance, this time for an oil baron's birthday - Nazareth are preparing for their next jaunt around the globe.

Starting in two weeks' time, they will play around 80 gigs in the first six months of the year alone, at venues strung between Norway and the Faroe Islands, Brazil and the Czech Republic. There's more of the same for the second half of the year.

"So that's why I'd never heard of Girls Aloud," shrugs Pete. "I never see television because we're always on the road and I don't listen to radio because it's absolutely dire. Someone wrote something about their record bringing us back from obscurity and I couldn't let that one pass. So I wrote back saying actually we were busy recording our 21st album in Switzerland when the single came out and that we'd been touring around the world, so does that sound like obscurity?

"I'd like to see what some of these boy and girl pop bands are doing in 40 years' time."

Chances are they won't be following Nazareth's remarkable lead, relentlessly crisscrossing the globe, still being mobbed by loyal fans and about to celebrate their fourth decade with a new album, their first for ten years. In typical slightly frenzied Nazareth style, however, it was recorded in September, is due for release in the next few months yet still doesn't have a title.

Pete hopes to resolve that this weekend when he flies to Switzerland to complete the finishing touches, but only once he's spent some time at his Dunfermline home with childhood sweetheart Jane - their 40th wedding anniversary is next month - and also sandwiched in a quick trip to New York.

It's a breathless schedule for even a young rock pup to tackle, but Pete and Dan - Nazareth's other members are Pete's 36-year-old son, Lee on drums and 43-year-old guitarist Jimmy Murriston - cruise through weeks on the road in rickety tour buses in far-flung corners of Eastern Europe performing in front of tens of thousands of adoring fans the way the rest of us commute to work in the morning.

"Every year's the same," shrugs Pete. "A couple of weeks to rehearse in January and put together a new set then we're on the road right the way through. OK, Dan and me are beginning to feel it and there's nights when I'd pay someone to go on stage for me but you get used to it."

Virtually unheard on the airwaves in their native Scotland these days, the wrinkly rockers are superstars in the likes of Outer Mongolia, Russia, Norway and Canada. In some parts of Eastern Europe they are mobbed whenever they venture outdoors, usually taking with them a crowd of bodyguards for personal protection from over-enthusiastic fans. "At home in Dunfermline, no-one bats an eyelid at us," explains Pete. "I go to New York for a few days, come home then go somewhere else, and the neighbours just think I'm having a long lie because they've not seen me for a day or two. But in Russia, go out for a pint and you need protection. It's a different world."

Nazareth were one of the first Western bands to play behind the newly crumbled Iron Curtain - Elton John beat them to it by just a few months. At one point in the Nineties, they notched up ten nights in a row in Moscow to an audience of more than 30,000 each night, followed by 12 nights of the same in Leningrad.

They were still perilous days in the aftermath of communism, and Pete remembers his late mum worrying about him. "She was really concerned about the Russian Mafia when things were going crazy over there," he recalls. "She said 'Now son, you just watch yourself'. I said 'Mum, who do you think is putting on the concerts? Mother Theresa doesn't do concerts, we're not running away from the Mafia because we're working for the Mafia.'"

Today, Nazareth are still crushing boundaries and breaking new ground. "We played Greenland last month," grins Pete. "The only other UK band to play there is Smokie. So they were due a visit from someone else."

On February 24 at the Liquid Rooms, Nazareth will mark 40 years in the business as part of their Scottish leg of another world tour.

But is the time now coming for Pete and Dan to call it a day?

"There's been so many good bits in the past 40 years. I've seen the world, doing what I love doing, I can't imagine doing anything else. Besides, Mick Jagger's still performing and he's older than us - and we're better looking," laughs Pete.

"Anyway, when he stops, we'll stop. Well, maybe..."
Edinburgh Evening News Jan 2008

PEOPLE: Nazareth, Lords of the Hard Rock Chalet

THE wailing guitar, rasping vocals and thumping drum beat blasts through the lounge bar of an empty pub in a dull 60s concrete block, where Scotland's forgotten legends of rock are busy rehearsing.

It's their last practice session - as if they need to practise songs they've played for the past three decades - before the opening gig of a gruelling 2005 world tour.

For the next year, ageing rockers Nazareth will trek across the globe, packing in more than 50 dates, travelling tens of thousands of miles and performing their decades-old brand of hard rock to hundreds of thousands of devoted fans.

"It all starts in Sinky's Pub in Dunfermline," explains Pete Agnew, the band's bassist for the past 30-plus years. "And it ends in - aye, I know it's hard to believe - Las Vegas. And we go just about everywhere else in between."

He's not joking. Indeed, with the band's two leading members nudging 60, Nazareth are about to embark on an exhausting schedule which would leave musicians half their age weak at the knees.

As world tours go, Nazareth's could well fall into the "Spinal Tap" variety. Take, for example, the string of gigs in unpronounceable cities in Russia - Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is just one - where they're regarded as one of the world's top rock bands and where the number of counterfeit Nazareth albums in circulation tops eight million.

There are gigs in Scandinavia, Switzerland, America, Spain and assorted other countries, organised by Pete. Despite some minor blips - he forgot how many days there are in February and booked back-to-back gigs in Nuneaton then Switzerland, leaving barely any time to travel - he has cunningly managed to build in a fortnight off for a summer break.

"We'll be playing Portugal - a Bikers' Festival - then I'm going to Center Parcs in the middle of July," he explains. "Nottingham, of course. I didnae bother with the Lake District one, but Nottingham's brilliant!"

So this is rock 'n' roll . . . Nazareth-style. And if it all sounds off the wall, that's simply because Nazareth don't really do rock 'n' roll the way anyone might expect. For a start, while they can still pack in an entire football stadium of crazed fans in Outer Mongolia and have Norwegian rock fans scrambling and clawing for concert tickets, there's an entire generation of young Scots music fans who don't have the foggiest idea who they are.

And while there's no danger of them being mobbed for autographs in their native country, Pete, along with his lifelong friend and the band's lead singer Dan McCafferty - the only two original band members - can barely walk down the street in some Eastern Europe cities without being accosted by delighted fans.

"Hey hen, we're the Scottish Beatles but naebody knows it!" laughs Pete. "You wouldn't believe the reaction we get over in the Eastern bloc. And we're huge in Norway!"

Back home they don't even register a second glance in the supermarket, despite clocking up more than 35 years in the rock business and being hailed among the main influences for later generations of heavy rockers. Justin Hawkins of The Darkness credits Nazareth as one of his main inspirations and Axl Rose of Guns 'n' Roses pleaded - in vain - with them to play at his wedding.

SO far, they've sold more than 20 million official records around the world, yet Nazareth don't even have a UK record label.

"You need someone in the industry to believe in you," rasps Dan, those gravelly vocal chords which launched Nazareth into the charts in the 70s with Broken Down Angel and This Flight Tonight now even rougher thanks to a lifetime love of tobacco.

"The record companies are only interested if you're 17 years old and beautiful. And naw, we're neither. But I'm no bothered - we don't give a monkey's. They are in the pop business, but we're the music business."

It's been that way since July 1, 1971, when Dan and Pete - who met, aged five, on their first day at primary school - along with original band members Manny Charlton and drummer Darrell Sweet, were persuaded to chuck their comfortable day jobs and become professional musicians, pledging to give it a year and see how they got on.

They left behind very understanding young wives and headed to a communal flat in London, where they were advised to spend some money updating their image into rock stars. In came long, corkscrew hair, wide flares, long scarves and platform boots - none of which went down terribly well on visits home to Fife.

Pete recalled being given £100 by the band's management and told to buy some glamorous stage clothes.

"Dan and I would spend about £90 on lager, and go home with a couple of T-shirts each," he told Classic Rock magazine. "It was hard walking about in seven-inch platform heels - we liked a game of football in those days. As soon as we could get rid of them, that's what we did."

And of course, the band couldn't survive almost 35 years without the occasional bizarre incident. But while other rock bands were busy trashing hotel rooms, scoring drugs and sampling the delights of the groupies, Nazareth were far more sensible.

"All right, so I like a couple of pints," says Dan, who'll spend his 59th birthday somewhere between the Robinson Bowling Centre in Illinois and Fiesta Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, "But all the rest of it? All that, 'Hello, you should take this and it will make you feel like you're Jimi Hendrix.'

"Well Jimi Hendrix is dead and I don't want to feel like that. Besides, my wife would dig up my body and kill me all over again.

HAVE I been tempted? Of course," he continues. "But it's not written down that you've got to get laid every night by some former model because you're in a band. I do rock 'n' roll because I love it, but it doesn't interfere with how I feel about others.

"Our wives deserve Brownie points for bringing up the kids while we were off all over the place."

It's not all been plain sailing for the families. Nazareth were touring with rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd in 1977, when the group's plane crashed into a Mississippi wood, killing three members of the US band, their road manager and the two pilots. In the confusion that followed, the tour's distraught road crew announced that Nazareth had been wiped out too - in fact, they had turned down the chance to travel on a plane they later describe as being like "Gaffer tape airlines".

There are, says Pete, too many wacky incidents in 35 years of touring. Such as one recent gig at a stadium in Outer Mongolia.

"Outer Mongolia isn't as bad as it sounds," says Pete, "We've played worse places. Anyway we were playing in a big football stadium, all was going well when suddenly this car drives on stage. It turned out to be the president in his limo, who decided it would be a good idea to drive on while we were playing. So there's this bloody great limo, about 152 bodyguards and Dan turns around and nearly shits himself! We never did find out what was going on."

He'll write it all down, says Pete, 58, if the band ever gets around to giving up the relentless world tours.

There's certainly no shortage of fans desperate to keep paying good money to see Nazareth, even if their home audience appears to have lost interest. The Nazareth website's fans forum bristles with pleas for tickets and information about tonight's tsunami benefit gig from music lovers as far flung as Norway, Germany and Washington. Typical of them is a 39-year-old Norwegian fan who calls himself the Beerman. He lists his hobbies as "President of the local beer club and collecting beer bottles" and his interests as "Nazareth, web design, Nazareth, family, Nazareth, fishing, Nazareth, beer . . . " and so on.

There's every chance he'll still be tracking down Nazareth gigs in years to come. For there's no sign of Scotland's forgotten rockers - with Aberdonian lead guitarist Jimmy Murrison, 40, and Lee Agnew - Pete's 34-year-old son - replacing the late Darrell Sweet on drums - hanging up their tour jackets just yet.

"I'm still younger than Mick Jagger," declares Pete. "Besides, this is what we do for a living - why would we want to give it up? After all," he adds with a laugh, "it's a bit too late to think about becoming a plumber."
Edinburgh Evening News Feb 2005

PEOPLE: From Rollers to opera via Springsteen, the tour boss who's seen them all

IT was an ordinary hotel in an ordinary English town on a fairly average day in 1980. Until, that is, Ozzy Osbourne arrived.

As tour manager of the Black Sabbath frontman's series of gigs, Jake Duncan was responsible for making sure things ticked along, - from organising transport to pampering to stars' whims - but Ozzy blew apart his carefully-planned itinerary. "He'd just come out of a heavy divorce - this was before he was with Sharon," says Jake, relaxing in the lounge of his Edinburgh home. "He wasn't in a very good way.

"We arrived at this hotel in Leicester but it must have been the briefest stay in history, because as soon as we got to the reception desk to book in, Ozzy unzipped and urinated in the foyer. Let's just say we checked back out again soon after."

Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and unfortunate toilet incidents are just part of life on the road with some of the world's biggest music legends.

Today, Jake is at home in Balerno surrounded by glittering gold and platinum discs from the likes of George Michael and, most recently, Westlife. It's brief respite after a gruelling tour that has seen him accompany Britain's Got Talent opera sensation Paul Potts across the globe.

"I've been working with Paul since July last year and he's had no more than three weeks at home," says the 56-year-old father of two. "Last year he was selling phones, now we're just back from Australia, where he played the Sydney Opera House.

"In just five months we did the UK, US, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and Korea, and we've done ten shows in Denmark. I don't think I've done ten shows there with anyone, yet his is the biggest selling album in Denmark. That's amazing success."

On the road with the rotund opera star might not sound terribly rock 'n' roll, but who could blame Jake from wanting a little less action after 35 years with some of the biggest names in music? Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Bruce Springsteen, George Michael, Westlife and Franz Ferdinand - all appear on Jake's "been there, done them" list of acts that he has worked with.

It all started with Edinburgh's very own superstars, the Bay City Rollers.

"I was in a music store on the Royal Mile, it was 1973 and I was buying some drumsticks when I started chatting with a guy who was working with the Rollers," Jake recalls.

"He was driving to Bournemouth that night alone after his co-driver pulled out.

"I didn't have a driving licence but he said to come along because he needed someone to help keep him awake. I thought, 'sod it, I'll go'."

Jake was 21 and a trainee manager at a city hotel. Nothing prepared him for the madness that would engulf everyone associated with the tartan-clad popsters as Rollermania took off.

"It was largely down to Tam Paton going through teen magazines that used to have girls writing in asking for penfriends," reveals Jake. "He would note down every one and send them a picture of the band to get them interested.

"Eventually the girls went out of control - nothing had prepared me for the way these girls behaved."

The next group he worked was Aerosmith, the wild men of American rock.

Jake laughs as he remembers touring with Steve Tyler and co at the height of their hedonistic days of excess.

"It was 1976-77 and Aerosmith were totally wired pretty much the whole time," he recalls.

"A lot of artists will stick a list on the stage floor to help them remember the song order, but Steve came on stage one night in Birmingham and started off with what was the last song on the sheet.

"He finished, looked at the sheet and was so out of it that he thought that was it for the night so he yelled 'Thank you, goodnight' to the crowd," grins Jake.

"We had to push him back on and remind him he still had 14 songs to do."

Recently Jake saw the band play in Glasgow and approached guitarist Brad Whitford to say hello. "I said, 'Hi, remember me? I was with you guys in 1977'. He just looked at me blankly and said he couldn't remember anything at all from 1977 - and I'm not surprised."

As a lad growing up in Penicuik and then Abbeyhill, the notion that he'd eventually tour the world rubbing shoulders with the cream of the music industry never entered his head. He was too busy dreaming of football - more precisely, Hearts.

When he left Boroughmuir High for a hotel management course at Napier, he had no idea that his life would eventually revolve around hotels but from the other side of the reception desk.

As his reputation grew, Jake became one of the UK's leading tour managers, working with the biggest names in the business, including George Michael.

"I was with George for eight years," remembers Jake, who runs Showtime International from his home. "There'd be five of us in a private jet - George, his sister, his personal assistant, a security guy and me. So I got to know him pretty well.

"We'd bring in new people and they would wonder why George didn't say anything to them. I'd explain, 'If you're not spoken to, then you're doing fine. The time to worry is when you're spoken to'.

"Barbara Dickson is the same. I remember driving her new Saab 2000 convertible with her in the passenger seat. She said, 'do you like driving my car?', of course I said yes.

"She said, 'why don't you put your f***ing foot down or else we'll never get there'. She's a straight talker, and that's good."

But while it might all sound like the height of glamour, Jake points out that it's tougher than it sounds.

"Touring isn't for everyone, the road finds people out pretty quickly," he says. "You need big reserves of strength to get through it. And there's not many women will put up with you being away for most of the year with a rock band."

Jake's relationship with the mother of his two children didn't survive his career. He's now single, while son, Bradley, 22, is fresh from a marketing degree course and daughter Jade, 19, has just started training to be a speech therapist.

"You're not home, you're with rock stars and all that it involves. Most relationships don't survive," he says, although

he's the first to admit it's been quite a ride.

"Yeah, I suppose the whole idea of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll isn't far off the mark," laughs Jake. "There's been plenty of that on the road, but I'm sworn to secrecy on quite a lot of it.

"So I'm afraid the best bits, well, they'll have to go with me to the grave."

BRUCE ALMOST SHOWN WHO'S THE BOSS

HE'S called The Boss, but when Jake brought Bruce Springsteen to Edinburgh, it nearly landed him in trouble with the law.

"It was 1996 and we went to Queen's Park next to the Palace of Holyroodhouse and parked two people carriers there with blacked out windows," Jake recalls.

"Bruce and his agent walked towards Salisbury Crags while a couple of park rangers drew up, naturally suspicious.

"We said we were waiting for Bruce Springsteen but it didn't go down well. One of them said 'I've had a difficult day and I don't need you pulling my chain', at which point Bruce appeared.

"The guy could hardly believe his eyes."
Edinburgh Evening News September 2008

PEOPLE: Gutted Fish on life after love

 

THIS time last year rocker Fish should have been a proud newlywed with a pretty wife 20 years his junior on his arm and a new album of upbeat songs reflecting his romantic peace.

His Haddington home would have been the marital abode for Mr and Mrs Derek Dick - the former Marillion frontman's real name - and there might even have been a chance his new wife could persuade him to think about becoming a dad for the second time.

Should have, would have been. Except it isn't.

Today, Fish is sitting outside a cafe, the contents of his packet of Camel cigarettes rapidly being depleted as he smokes one after another, mulling over his personal year from hell.

"Yeah, last year was pretty traumatic, what with the wedding that turned into a record launch party instead," he says, with a fleeting sardonic smile.

"It was rough, it's been rough for a while. But it's a long time ago now, it's gone. Other things are far more important."

He's talking, of course, about the marriage that never was. He wasn't quite left standing at the altar, but it wasn't far from it.

"Fish gutted as fiancée walks out after refusing prenuptial" sang the headlines. News that the singer and actor's relationship had hit the rocks came out of the blue, just months after he'd proudly announced he'd found the love of his life.

It was late last May, Fish and singer Heather Findlay had been putting the final touches to their August wedding plans. A spectacular string of disagreements between the lovers followed, however, and the nuptials were off.

Dark days followed. Fish threw himself into rewriting his new album, tweaking all those romantic songs to reflect the sudden dark change in circumstances.

Later, the wedding reception for 250 - already paid for - morphed into the album's launch party and the invitations were clear: "No wedding outfits and absolutely NO ruches!" they declared, referring to the frilly-ruffed collar he'd been expected to wear for the ceremony, Heather's feminine contribution to his specially designed Dick tartan.

Devastated as he was at the time, today he insists it's all history. He's halfway through a world tour and adopting a pragmatic approach to one of the bleakest of personal episodes. "Well," he shrugs, "I suppose it was good lyric writing country."

Certainly for an artist who pours so much of his personality into what he writes, having your wedding collapse around your frilly ruffs and tartan trimmings meant there was plenty of raw emotional material to work with.

Not that he was ever short of a bit of angst in his life. He'd already emerged battered and almost bankrupt from a messy divorce from his first wife, German model Tamara Schnell, which also left him looking after their teenage daughter, Tara. That, along with a string of financial rip-offs including one sting by an employee which cost him nearly GBP 70,000, and the struggle to emulate some of the success he enjoyed with Marillion as a solo artist, mean there have been plenty of traumas and upset to inspire his music.

So when the marriage blow came, Fish retreated to clear his head, seeking sanctuary in the strangest of places.

"I remember being a kid and having German measles," he recalls. "I was lying in a single bed downstairs in the house in Dalkeith and the Vietnam War was going on on television. My Uncle Charlie was there - he was an ex-regimental sergeant major with the Royal Highland Fusiliers. He was watching soldiers firing M16s over their heads and he was saying they shouldn't be doing that, they were wasting bullets."

It made such an impression that, earlier this year, Fish packed a rucksack and flew to Vietnam, to explore a country he'd first witnessed on television in the clutches of turmoil, battered and war-torn - perhaps matching his own mood - in search of solving his own personal traumas.

"Songs are just one side of a diamond," he explains. "When you write songs, you deal with emotions in a lyric.

"It's easy to put all those emotions in a box, but really all you've done is tidied up a bit and stuck it away. You put the boxes in a cupboard and you open the cupboard door one day and it all falls out.

"You think you've handled something but you haven't. You've just dealt with one side of it."

Four months of self discovery appear to have done the trick. Head cleared, Fish is now back at work preparing for the release next month of a new single, Zoe 25. He's well into a 120-date tour that has already taken in America - his first full US tour for 11 years - Canada and Mexico. It will climax in the UK in late November.

It's tough going, but with 27 years of touring and 1700 shows already under his belt, he'll cope.

After all, he's played to crowds of 120,000 people in Marillion's heyday and supported Queen. They had mega-group status, over 15 million albums sold, and every possible excess was on the table, from groupies to drink and drugs.

The present-day Fish might not match any of that, but the "Big Man of Rock", at 6ft 4ins, can manage a little rock and roll indulgence. "Oh, we enjoy ourselves," insists the 50-year-old. "We did a bottle count on the bus in Canada. We had 230 empties between nine of us. We even found some cheese as well, very sophisticated!

"Listen," he adds, "when you're doing three shows in a row you've got to be a bit sensible. It's okay for Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse who do one show every three months. The rest of us have got to be semi-sensible.

"I've had my share of wild times, there were some class As floating about in the Eighties, but you get to the stage where it just gets silly. From a legal perspective when you need visas to go to America, it's not worth the risk."

No longer only a singer and writer, he's diversified into an actor, with roles in Taggart and alongside James Bond star Daniel Craig in The Jacket, and writing his own movie scripts. He has won awards for his Planet Rock radio show and next year he'll write a novel based in Vietnam which draws on his personal experiences.

His internet blog, meanwhile, has a cult following with page after page of detail about his life which veers bizarrely from day-to-day trivia to sudden explosive drama.

Between that and his introspective lyrics, it's all out there. Well, almost.

Perhaps still stung by those "Fish gutted" headlines from last year, there's one element of his life he'd prefer to keep under wraps.

"I have got a new relationship," he nods cautiously. "Who is it? Hmmm, someone. It doesn't matter who, or what they do."

He lights up another Camel, takes a long, satisfying draw and shakes his head.

"Just don't ask . . ."

Fish's new single, Zoe 25, is released on October 6. For tour dates and further information, go to www.the-company.com

Dalkeith star's life and rhymes

FISH - real name Derek Dick - was born in Dalkeith in April, 1958, and went to King's Park Primary School and Dalkeith High School.

Marillion finally broke into the UK charts with top ten hits in 1985 - Kayleigh and Lavender. That was followed in 1987 with Incommunicado.

The band were known for Fish's highly introspective lyrics. However, he quit suddenly in 1988.

Marillion have continued with replacement singer Steve Hogarth. Fish joined the band for a one-off reunion gig last year.

Fish has continued to release albums. His last - 13th Star - came out last year. A six CD box set of Marillion material is due to be released in November
Edinburgh Evening News Sesptember 2008

PEOPLE: Snowballing success of ex-News man.

THE scene was one of sheer chaos. There were screams, perhaps the occasional retch as a stomach emptied its technicolour contents and a lot of angry words - some of the four-lettered variety - quietly muttered under exasperated breath.

All ingredients of a typically dark Christopher Brookmyre novel - albeit minus the pints of blood, extreme violence and gruesome killings. Still, as experiences go, it was certainly verging on murder.

The difference was this particular scene was played out at a heaving, over-populated and largely underwhelming kiddies' theme park, where the so-called Tartan Noir author had taken his young son.

"It was awful," he groans, recalling the holiday treat for Jack, eight, that involved standing in a lot of queues for a very long time in the vain hope of a 30-second turn on a not particularly thrilling fairground ride. "Not really recommended," he shrugs.

Unlike his latest book, Snowball in Hell, currently receiving a clutch of five-star reviews and following in the same pulsating vein as his previous bestselling darkly humorous, bloodstained and provocative efforts.

In it, Brookmyre unleashes one of his most disturbed characters Simon Darcourt - revived after apparently dying in his earlier book, A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away - and sets him on a bloody journey through myriad issues close to his own heart, from loud-mouthed journalists to the media's obsession with petty celebrity and blind religious faith.

Think Big Brother meets A Nightmare on Elm Street with outspoken newspaper columnists and religious fanatics as the unfortunate housemates.

Perhaps his theme is not surprising given Brookmyre's personal background - he worked as a sub-editor on the Evening News while perfecting his first two novels and spent his childhood in a community steeped in West of Scotland Catholicism.

"I suppose the character of Simon is a good way of taking your own prejudices and petty annoyances and blowing them up," he says.

The trademarks of Brookmyre's work - blood, terror, murder and chaos emerge just a few pages in, when his violent anti-hero imprisons and methodically slays one particularly vociferous newspaperman after first revealing his victim's pathetic hypocrisy to a captivated nation of viewers.

"The book is a look at the modern media as much as anything," adds the 39-year-old, whose own religious conversion from Catholicism was complete with his recent installation as the Humanist Society of Scotland's new President.

"I thought of these tub-thumping tabloid journalists, the hang 'em high brigade, how would they react if they were put in a situation where they had to choose between coming face to face with a prisoner who had been through rehabilitation and one who hadn't. Which prisoner would they choose?

"The book looks at the way that celebrities, no matter how minor and how little they have to celebrate, are treated as if they from a different planet and everyone else is a lesser being.

"The way kids see talent and celebrity programmes and read Heat," he adds, warming to his theme, "they think all that matters is to be famous and it doesn't matter what you are famous for.

"The book tries to show that there's something more to aspire towards, but just settling down and having a family isn't going to get anyone on the cover of Heat."

Yet it's one of his characters' thoughts on a far more delicate subject - Islam, the burkha and religious fanaticism that could put Brookmyre's latest novel under a more controversial spotlight. At one point his female cop Angelique de Xavia, another character along with magic man Zal Innez revived from A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away, rolls up in a niqab described as a "mobile gazebo" and reflects on religious worship as "mind control".

"I think I offend everyone in this book," he shrugs. "There's the female character who has issues with the burkha and jilbab, but the book also draws distinction in the ways radical Islamists are separate from the rest."

The people most likely to be offended by his books, he argues, are the ones who don't actually read them.

After his three sold-out appearances at the Book Festival, September will see him make a joint appearance at the Liquid Room with acclaimed singer/songwriter Billy Franks, whose fans include Bono, Oasis and Peter Gabriel.

Is there any chance he might return to the Evening News for a stint on the subs' desk? With a string of bestsellers, industry awards and ideas for his next novel already taking shape, you could say - like his book's title - there's not a snowball's chance in hell.

"Hmm, much as I'd like to," he says with a gracious laugh, "I really don't think so."

Snowball in Hell by Christopher Brookmyre is published by Little, Brown on August 14. Tickets for his appearance at the Liquid Room on September 9 with Billy Franks cost GBP 6 from Waterstone's (West End), 128 Princes Street.

A LIFE IN WORDS

WITH around a dozen dark novels now under his belt, each mixing political and social issues with sinister narrative, black humour, crime and usually a fair degree of inventive violence, stirring up strong opinions is nothing new to Christopher Brookmyre.

His childhood was spent in Barrhead and he studied at Glasgow University where he satisfied his urge to work with words on the student newspaper, involved in layout and sub-editing.

There was a stint in London with Screen International which proved handy when it came to overseeing the sale of his own work, including quite Ugly One Morning starring James Nesbitt, to film companies.

These days home is back over in the west, closer to his beloved St Mirren.
Edinburgh Evening News August 2008

PEOPLE: Capital is Marr's spiritual home

BLAME it on the girl, but if it hadn't been for a certain lady who happened to catch young Andrew Marr's eye, then London's political empire might have breathed a little easier.

But, perhaps more importantly, a nation of television viewers might never have come face to face with the small screen's most unlikely star.

Today Loretto-educated Marr is among the country's best known faces - and pair of ears - in television current affairs, balancing incisive political comment with celebrity interviews as host of a Sunday morning chat show and as a regular contributor to a catalogue of programmes and publications.

Soon he will adopt yet another, slightly more surprising persona: that of fearless action man, as he takes to the heavens on board a variety of flimsy flying machines and wobbly sky-borne apparatus to present his new series, Britain from Above.

In it, he tours the country from hundreds of feet in the air, swooping through the Great Glen on a microlight, plunging to earth tied to a skydiver and trying to keep talking through chattering teeth while strapped to a paraglider.

It's all intended to bring us a new perspective on a familiar landscape. Yet none of it might have come about if it hadn't been for a

romantic crush, way back when the young Andrew Marr was carving himself a name in journalism here in Edinburgh.

"My first job was on The Scotsman," he says. "It was quite some time ago now but I remember leaving to go to London thinking I'd only be going there very briefly. I fully intended to be back in Scotland quickly.

"I was chasing a woman, of course," he reveals. "But when I caught her, I fairly quickly realised that I had been the fish and she was the angler - she didn't waste much time in throwing me back."

The story makes him roar with laughter - it is, he adds, the reason why London is now home and not Edinburgh.

"But I very much feel that Edinburgh is my adoptive home," he adds quickly. "I'm from Dundee, sure, but I went to school at Loretto in Musselburgh and I feel very, very close to Edinburgh."

Which might make viewers of his newest television series wonder why the city he feels such a connection with is rather skirted around as the flying Mr Marr skims the nation's horizon, pointing out geological rarities, historical and industrial landmarks, hills and rugged coastlines.

Throughout the series he whizzes over the Welsh Borders in a hang glider, buzzes once secret military bases in the Midlands and soars over Oxford in a biplane. As for Edinburgh...

"The series is driven by stories about ancient history, geology," he says. "But it's completely non-comprehensive in terms of the places we were able to take in.

"The Scottish sequence ended up being the Great Glen - it's like the San Andreas Fault of Great Britain and Europe, it's a huge geological issue. So we did that.

"We did a lot of London too, obviously because of the size, and we looked at Oxford as an example of how a town has spread over the years."

Certainly, filming Britain From Above is about as far from Marr's typical working environment - a stuffy W12 television studio - as possible.

"I can't remember how many different ways I've been in the air but it's at least two or three different helicopters, four or five different planes, including historic planes from the Thirties, a Tigermoth and a silver Synergy jet - which is, apparently, Kylie's transport of choice," he says.

"On my first day I was strapped in a microlight, which is like a motorised tricycle with wings which goes faster, then dangerously fast until suddenly you are a couple of thousand feet up.

"It's an astonishing feeling. Zipping down the Great Glen very low and seeing it from a bird's eye view, a buzzard's binoculars, was spectacular."

He may not give the immediate impression of a James Bond in waiting - Marr's biggest claim to fame apart from his journalistic skills has been in having a set of distinctive lugs - yet it appears the new series has unleashed the action man in him.

Paragliding, he says, was a surprising experience that "essentially involves jumping off a hill holding on to a plastic bag attached to some string".

But most shocking of all was the skydiving. "There's no doubt that the biggest highlight was being dropped out of a plane twice, two miles up, which was completely unlike what I'd expected."

"I thought it was going to be the most fun, full-on moment - partly because you see all these pictures of people skydiving and they look like they're floating.

"I thought it would be a bit like floating. You get out the plane, there's a rush of air and a skoosh and then you would be floating.

"But, I can report, it is categorically not like floating. You are plummeting. You are going down as fast as the human body could go. You drop about a mile before the parachute is opened."

It all sounds terrifying, but having viewed Britain from angles most of us couldn't contemplate, Marr emerged a fan.

"In terms of sheer, unadulterated fun, this has been a wonderful shoot," he adds. "And it does truly give you a completely different perspective on life in Britain."

Dundee-born Marr went to Loretto School in Musselburgh before heading to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to study English. He joined the Scotsman as a trainee junior business reporter in 1981 and left in 1988 after a spell as political editor.

He became London-based, working for a variety of newspapers before hitting television screens as the BBC's distinctive political editor in 2000.

Amidst all of that, he has published five books and more recently evolved from hard news and comment to presenting his talk-based show on Sunday mornings and his documentary series, Andrew Marr's History Of Modern Britain.

Filming is already underway on a prequel to his History Of Modern Britain, Britannia, and a major documentary for BBC Two about evolution - Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

He certainly appears to live up to his workaholic reputation - even if there's a fine line between how much of what he does in the new series is work and how much is sheer personal enjoyment.

"It's been a blast," he says. "Most of us are familiar with being up there from our flights to various holiday destinations. But here we're in smaller planes or helicopters talking with experts who know exactly what they are looking at. The effect is completely different.

"There are so many of us on such a small, historic space the miracle is that we avoid some kind of dramatic national catastrophe," he adds.

"What I hope people take away from this is a sense of how extraordinary it is that we all manage to get along without tipping into utter mayhem and chaos."
Edinburgh Evening News August 2008

PEOPLE: Laying secret ghost to rest

 

MIND, body and spirit. The ethos that one of Scotland's most prestigious and oldest independent boarding schools was built on, a philosophy that moulded generations of highly educated young students.

Twelve-year-old Don Boyd, smart in his Loretto Junior School uniform of blue serge shorts, open-necked shirt and long red stockings, was about to undergo a particularly "special", secret lesson as he crept towards North Esk Lodge.

This would be a private lesson, the first of many. Just the young boy and his charismatic, popular and - although the schoolboy didn't realise it at the time - predatory, paedophile French teacher.

It was a lesson in life that pioneering 19th century headmaster Dr Hely Hutchinson Almond - whose "mind, body and spirit" values are at the heart of a school that counts Alistair Darling, Andrew Marr, Norman Lamont and racing driver Jim Clark among its past pupils - surely would never have tolerated.

Inside North Esk Lodge was Guy Anthony Ray-Hills' bedroom.

It smelled of gelatine cream, aftershave and semen. It reeked of sex and secrets, of terrible child abuse and broken childhoods.

Within this small bedroom on the top floor of North Esk Lodge, a ten-minute walk from the gates of prim Loretto School at the heart of Musselburgh in the late 50s and early 60s, curious, innocent boys - often deprived of parental affection at a lonely boarding school - were treated to Ray-Hills' full and undivided attention. They were stripped, abused and repeatedly raped.

Boyd kept secret how he became one of the outwardly respectable French tutor's "special friends" for decades. It tainted his life and relationships and hovered quietly in the background as his career in filmmaking led to working with stars like Sir Laurence Olivier, John Hurt, Richard Harris and Dame Helen Mirren, producing iconic movies such as controversial 70s film Scum, writing screenplays and directing.

He blurted his secret out, bizarrely, in an explosive moment after his father's death, when a friend showed off a collection of antique guns, fired one and the blast somehow broke the lock on decades of suppressed anguish.

Today he's back in Edinburgh, just a few miles from where Ray-Hills systematically abused him, to work with the Traverse Theatre and launch a new project which aims to beam live theatre to cinema audiences across the country.

It's also an appropriate location to launch his first novel, Margot's Secrets, with its themes of sexual abuse and mind manipulation, deep- rooted secrets and lives warped by depravity which run brutally close to Boyd's own experiences. So close, that one of his key character's own account of being brutalised by his teacher - even down to the animal nicknames Ray-Hills gave his pupils and the school uniform - could not be anything other than Boyd's own story.

"One of the victims is drawn from my own experience," nods Boyd during a break at a rehearsal room in Leith. "And yes, one of the other characters is the personification of what I imagine my former teacher might become as they enter the adult world away from boarding school.

"He is charming and dangerous. Intelligent, perceptive and a very, very clever manipulator of people."

Here in Edinburgh, so close to that small bedroom, Boyd might be expected to harvest fresh bitterness and anger at his betrayal. "But I'm one of the lucky ones," he stresses. "I can come back to Edinburgh which I feel is my 'home' and be completely forgiving to Loretto. It was a brilliant school educationally, there was the highest order of teaching staff and it gave me the opportunity to learn so much.

"One has to move on. You have to rationalise, otherwise you go around with a scar that never heals, a constant reminder of something that happened a long time ago."

He agrees that ultimately Loretto failed him - and other boys abused by Ray-Hills during the 16 years he taught at the Musselburgh school. But he insists it also introduced him to theatre and cinema, music at the Usher Hall and Shakespeare, laying down credentials for what would become a hugely successful movie career.

His 70s production company, Boyd's Co, was at the forefront of British cinema for a decade, bringing to the screen Alan Clarke's groundbreaking and controversial movie Scum - infamous for its brutality and sex abuse scenes - Derek Jarman's The Tempest, Sex Pistols movie The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and Lindsay Anderson's Look Back in Anger.

Boyd has worked with a string of British talent, from Ray Winstone to Stephen Fry, Kathy Burke and Tilda Swinton. In 1988, he worked with Jarman again (pictured below) on War Requiem, Laurence Olivier's final film.

Yet while his career flourished - he's been described as a "one-man film industry" - Boyd's private life and marriage was in turmoil. Events at Loretto between 1958 and 1965 lurked in the background, repressed but the catalyst for his own adulterous and duplicitous adult behaviour.

Boyd was born in Nairn and was ten when he was sent to Loretto while his parents lived in Africa. "School was horrendously brutal but I thought that was normal and life was like that," he recalls.

The abuse began after months of careful, cynical grooming by his tutor when he was 12. It continued throughout his year as head boy at the prep school and into senior school. As he prepared to leave Loretto as a teenager, Ray-Hills accompanied Boyd on holiday to Austria where the abuse continued. "I was ashamed and couldn't cope," Boyd recalls. "Then came hiding it. The impact on your life that hiding something like that has is huge. It caused a lot of turmoil and crises."

When he finally revealed his secret in 2001, Loretto acted immediately, contacting everyone who'd ever been taught by Ray-Hills. "There were 35 letters back from people saying similar stuff had happened to them," says Boyd. One man claimed the abuse had driven him to attempt suicide.

Ray-Hills, then in his late 70s, was charged with a string of sex offences but the case was dropped on grounds of his ill-health. The shame of being "outed" for years of abuse would, Boyd believes, have been enough of a punishment, jail a given if he had stood trial.

Ray-Hills is now dead. "Nothing was ever done to him while he was a teacher," Boyd recalls. "He left Loretto and it was brushed under the carpet in a way that must have been done by lots of organisations at the time - the Catholic Church, public schools. But I don't really hold Loretto to blame."

Today it's in Boyd's past, but curiously events from 50 years ago could also feature in his future too.

His X-rated psychological thriller, Margot's Secrets - based around an American psychotherapist in Barcelona's ex-pat community where everyone has a sexual history they'd rather keep hidden - is already the subject of discussions between his publishers and American film producers as potential movie material.

Although he insists it is fiction and not memoirs, drawing on elements of his own story and unravelling tracts of Ray-Hills' make-up for his characters has been a cathartic experience, Boyd adds.

"I suppose integrating Ray-Hills in a book as a character has been my way of laying the ghost to rest."

Teacher never stood trial to face charges

Guy Anthony Ray-Hills taught at Loretto School for 16 years and later at Cheam, Prince Charles's former school.

Don Boyd's 2001 abuse revelation sparked a police investigation after another former Loretto pupil - a Scottish university professor - complained he too had been abused.

Ray-Hills left the Musselburgh school in 1968 and was living in retirement in Twickenham when the allegations surfaced.

He was later charged with sexual offences against two boys, then aged 11 and 15, which allegedly took place 40 years earlier.

The case was due to be heard in summer 2003 but dropped because of the accused's ill-health. The Crown Office confirmed at the time that the case would not be "re-raised".
Edinburgh Evening News, August 2010

PEOPLE: A novel return to childhood locations

THERE'S just one word to describe the scene outside author Maggie O'Farrell's London home - "dreich".

But she adds: "I was just talking to my mum on the phone and she says the weather in North Berwick is absolutely beautiful."

There is fondness in her voice as she mentions her home town, but it's a very long way from North Berwick to the Big Smoke in more ways than just miles.

Maggie, once a slightly awkward 12-year-old "outsider" at North Berwick school, is now among Britain's best-selling authors, an award-winning novelist whose three books have all achieved critical acclaim and blockbusting sales.

Her life, which once revolved around, the slightly claustrophobic community of an East Lothian seaside resort and summers spent at the outdoor swimming pool, now takes her to book signings, hob-nobbing - she stresses that it's only very occasionally - with the London glitterati and mingling with fellow household-name writers.

All of that and she's a dab hand at changing nappies, too. Maggie added that particular string to her bow 19 months ago, when son Saul entered the world. She very quickly discovered her newborn had his own agenda - one that doesn't sound conducive to allowing mum time to create best-selling novels.

"He was a horrific sleeper," she confesses. "He's good now - asleep by 7.30pm - but for the first six months he just didn't sleep. I found it really, really hard."

Just as well she'd already finished her third and latest novel, The Distance Between Us. Published last January to the same kind of praise that accompanied her first two works, it provided her growing legion of fans with another tense, slightly dark and highly evocative page-turner set in a small Scottish village.

Like its predecessors, the Betty Trask Award-winning After You'd Gone and her second novel, My Lover's Lover, it delves into the complexities of modern relationships, played out against locations anyone with even a vague knowledge of life in the Lothians would find familiar - such as the quaint Italian cafe Maggie puts at the heart of the novel that could only really have been inspired by Luca's in Musselburgh.

She is clearly keen to put her little corner of Lothian on the literary map. After You'd Gone was partly set in North Berwick and followed the twisting and turning relationships of a middle sister with a literary background who heads to London and falls in love with a Jewish man.

None of which is exactly a million miles away from Maggie's own life. Nor is the experience of another of her characters in The Distance Between Us, who falls into a coma after a mysterious brain virus: Maggie was just eight when she was struck by just such a virus which kept her off school for a year and which, even today, can affect her balance.

Drawing on such familiar territory is only natural, she says, but is quick to point out that her books are not autobiographical. Writing out her own life would, she says, be boring. That said, she admits she can't escape the impact her life and her home have on her writing. "As a teenager we are at our most susceptible to influences, but I couldn't live today in a place like North Berwick," she says.

"Being a teenager in North Berwick was very frustrating.

"At every opportunity I'd be on the train to Waverley. When I was a teenager, everyone knew you, knew what you were doing. You couldn't walk down a street without bumping into someone who knew your mum."

Now 32, she is a self-confessed "city girl" having arrived in London ten years ago via Hong Kong and a series of dead-end jobs with the intention of staying for just a year.

Yet even now, she regards North Berwick as her real home, returning every couple of months to visit her parents and her two sisters.

THERE were other places she could have chosen to regard as "home". Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, her family later moved to Wales before her father Patrick's work as an economics lecturer took the family - mum Susan, Maggie and her sisters, Catherine and Bridget, to North Berwick.

"I was about 12 years old," Maggie recalls. "It wasn't that easy settling in and I had been a bit upset to leave our home just outside Cardiff. In retrospect, it was good we moved - the comprehensive in Wales was terrifying! I'd probably have ended up pregnant at 15 or something."

She describes herself as something of an outsider at school, a fan of indie band The Cure who spent much of her spare time shut in her bedroom reading challenging works by Albert Camus and writing the diaries she started at the age of six and still keeps today.

So perhaps it shouldn't have been too surprising to anyone when she won a place at Cambridge reading English. She says: "I didn't really like it. It was a bit of a shock to the system - going from a small comprehensive school in North Berwick to Cambridge. I messed up my finals and I thought I'd be in big trouble at home."

She was in more trouble with her family when she suddenly decided to travel to Hong Kong to teach English. "My mother was really angry with me - I just got on a plane and went out there. I'd never really been anywhere - my family are not big travellers, they've hardly left Scotland. I thought I'd go to Hong Kong because at least a lot of people there would speak English."

It was there she found inspiration for her first book. "I got the idea for After You'd Gone there. That said, I didn't start writing properly for another two years, until a boyfriend's mother gave me a computer. I'd never used a computer before but as soon as I had it, I was flying away."

The result was her first novel, described by enthusiastic critics as "beautifully constructed, unashamedly passionate" and "a first-class trip across the borders of the mind". Others talk of her special ability to combine emotional, contemporary fiction which is both literary and commercial - several levels above popular "chick lit" - appealing to broad generations of readers.

Not that Maggie tries to pay too much attention to what the critics say.

She says: "I read some reviews after the first book, but now I just put my head in the sand. When I read them then sat down to write, there'd be these little voices in my head saying: 'Maggie O'Farrell writes this' or 'is concerned with that'. I found myself writing to fit what they'd said. "I'm also chicken," she laughs. "My boyfriend reads them and he gives me a rough idea if they are good, bad or really rubbish!"

The good ones have far outweighed the bad. And it's not surprising that Maggie's work, with its focus on tangled relationships, dark plots - the genre is described as domestic gothic - spanning often far flung locations, has attracted the interest of film-makers.

After You'd Gone has just been snapped up by the makers of Calendar Girls, which starred Helen Mirren and Julie Walters.

Maggie has no interest, however, in "doing a JK" and retaining control of her characters. "They could well cast someone I think is wrong for a major part and, yes, you do often see films which bear no similarity to the book, but there's no point beating yourself up about it.

"Sometimes you're asked if you want to write the script but I can't imagine anything worse. I'd cut off my hand before I went back to it."

Instead she prefers to look to the future. Despite sleepless nights thanks to the son she has with fellow author William Sutcliffe - and her thoughts turning to having another - Maggie has still managed to complete her fourth novel.

"The first draft is finished but I have a superstition - I like to put it away for a couple of months and ignore it, forget about it for a bit," she explains. "It helps to give it a bit of distance, then I go back and often just rip it to pieces."

And what can Maggie's fans expect from her fourth novel? Again, it seems there is no escaping her Scottish roots.

"It's set in Edinburgh," she reveals. "And it's partly historical. But that's all I'm saying.
"Let's just say that talking about it too soon is another one of my superstitions."
Edinburgh evening News Feb 2005