My father Andrew Erskine, who has died aged 96, was one of the last of the generation of Scots born before the Great Depression. His life was an exemplar of social mobility in action.
Despite the disruption of the second world war and his working-class background, the Alloa academy in his home town in Clackmannanshire helped him win a place to study classics at the University of St Andrews, matriculating in 1946. At the end of his first year, he contracted tuberculosis and had to spend the next few years in and out of TB clinics.
