I didn’t think interviewing the author Alan Temperley would be a walk in the park – and so it proves.
Chatting to him in his Rhonehouse home, it’s not as if he’s less than forthcoming, quite the opposite in fact.
Alan can talk the hind legs off a donkey and laughs apologetically as one memory kindles another, the second more often than not bearing scant relation to the first.
It doesn’t matter a jot.
Listening to the former teacher of English at Kirkcudbright Academy, whose Tales of Galloway is arguably the best collection of local stories ever brought to print, is a magical mystery tour in itself.
At 86, even yet Alan is possessed with a certain restless vigour, his life story a selection box of surprises which really needs told by way of a biography.
Picking out the highlights is no simple task – even his arrival into the world is worthy of note.
“My father was 50 when I was born in Sunderland, on September 12, 1936,” Alan informs me over a cup of strong coffee.
“And when my father was born in 1886 my grandfather was 48 at the time.
“My grandfather was born in 1838 – the year after Queen Victoria ascended the throne.
“He was a plumber and clerk of works to the Duke of Northumberland and was in charge of the upkeep of Alnwick Castle.
“His wife and three children died of consumption [tuberculosis], leaving him a widower.
“My grandmother Mary came back to Alnwick from Canada and met my grandfather.
“She had gone out to Nova Scotia to be with her husband but he was murdered there.
“He worked at a coal mine and there was a falling out between the engineers and the second manager.
“The men cut the cable and the cage crashed to the bottom of the shaft and he was killed.
“After my grandparents married they had two children, the youngest being my father Fred, who became a very skilled fly fisherman on the River Aln.
“He worked in a bank in the north east and married Eva May Holland, my mother.
“They were sure I was going to be a girl but they got a boy.
“My father went down to the registrar and named me Alan because he remembered his beautiful days fishing on the River Aln.
“I can’t think of anything nicer.”
Alan was not quite three when war broke out, but his recollections of Luftwaffe raids are still clear.
His brother Howard might never have survived had it not been for their mother’s eleventh hour change of heart.
“The shipyards were plastered by the Luftwaffe night after night,” he recalls.
“We had a shelter in the house we went to when the bombs began to come down.
“I remember being carried in on my mother’s shoulder.
“At that time they were sending the children everywhere to get them away from the bombing.
“Howard, who was four years older than I, was going to be evacuated to Montreal.
“It was all set up and his room was waiting but our mother had second thoughts.
“She felt his life would be split between his Canadian family and didn’t want him to go.
“So she cancelled Howard’s place on the ship, the City of Benares.
“In September 1940 the liner left Liverpool without him and the next day it was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the Atlantic.
“Most of the children were killed and the atrocity provoked huge outrage.”
Sunderland, Alan told me, once was known as the biggest shipbuilding town in the world.
“When I was a schoolboy an incredible amount of tonnage went down the River Wear,” he says.
“That’s why people from the town are called Makems.
“The yard workers made the ships which were taken out to the North Sea for sea trials.
“We mak’ ’em and tak’ ’em, they said – which got shortened to Makem.”
Alan attended Bede Grammar School in Sunderland where, he admits, he was lazy and “better than my results suggested”.
“I always got top marks for my essays and was top for English at school,” he smiles.
“The English language is a total joy to me and always has been – it’s one of the great creations of civilisation.
“But I only did O-levels and at 16 left to join the merchant navy as an apprentice deck officer with Shaw Savill.
“Straight away I was on a ship from Liverpool bound for Las Palmas and after arriving in port I was taken to this dive.
“I had thick fair curly hair and had never even been in pub before.
“This woman took a fancy to me and grabbed my goolies and wouldn’t let go – everybody was laughing.
“Those were the sorts of places seamen went to,” Alan adds, somewhat darkly.
Passages across the world followed, notably to Australia and New Zealand ports, including Sydney, Melbourne, Freemantle and Auckland.
“We would take out a cargo of machinery and cars through Suez and Panama and bring back frozen lamb, butter, wool and sheep skins,” he recalls.
“My first ship was the Coptic – all the Shaw Savill ships end in ‘ic’.
“In 1957 I took my second mate’s ticket.
“Two years more and you can take your mate’s ticket then go for a master’s after another two.
“I did neither – that year I left to do my two years National Service.”
Alan signed up for the RAF – but quickly discovered his preferred choice came with conditions attached.
“I fancied the Air Sea Rescue Launches – I thought that would be great,” he chuckles.
“But they told me I had to sign on for nine years and I wasn’t doing that.
“They made me into a shorthand typist instead and I was posted to the RAF Police HQ.
“Then, although I was Church of England, I was sent to be a typist for the Monseigneur.
“He got sent away and I was left to organise all the Catholic services at each RAF station.”
National Service over, Alan recalls, he scrambled enough A-levels at Sunderland Tech to embark on a three-year English and general arts degree at Manchester University.
During his studies, a hiking trip to the wild north west Highlands provided the inspiration for his next step in life.
Paul the Apostle had his flash of light on the Road to Damascus – for Alan it was the road to Achiltibuie.
“I had a friend Tom who looked after the youth hostel near Achiltibuie and during the summer holidays I went up there,” he smiles.
“I was wondering what I was going to do with my life – then suddenly there it was – this little school on the hillside.
“In that moment I felt that if only the gods were gracious I’d get my degree and go into teaching.
“I loved English and working in a wee remote school like that, I thought, would be a nice thing to do.”
Resolved upon a career, Alan recalls, he did a year at Moray House in Edinburgh and emerged with not one, but three certificates – primary teaching, secondary teaching and a Diploma in Education.
“After I got my teaching qualification I applied for jobs in Argyll, Ross-shire and Sutherland,” he informs me.
“Argyll Council offered me a job but did not say where while Ross-shire said there was a post at Dingwall but that was a town.
“Then Sutherland offered me an interview for a job in a place that was so small I could not find it on my map.
“It was at Farr Secondary School at Bettyhill on the wild north coast.
“At the interview the director of education told me somebody from Moray House had been offered the job.
“He went away to check and said as the other guy had not taken up the offer he was giving it to me.
“So on a misty August morning in 1965 I packed my little red BSA Bantam motorbike on to the train and headed north.
“I got off at Thurso on a Sunday morning and drove along the north coast road.
“It was very foggy and still and I stopped the bike to listen for a while.
“I had been living in the bustle of Edinburgh and Sunderland but up here there was nothing, only silence.
“Then, as if by magic, the fog lifted suddenly and there was Bettyhill in the sunshine. It was so small I actually drove past it and had to turn back.
“In front of me was this scattering of little white houses and the sky. I had never seen anything so blue – it was wonderful.”
The marvelling at the expanse of sky, a fascination for endless oceans during years at sea, the lure of Scotland’s lonely lands – there seems to be a pattern there, I suggest.
“Maybe you have something there,” Alan replies after mulling over the question.
“I hadn’t really thought of it in that way before.
“But I did love reading about Scott of the Antarctic’s expeditions across the ice cap.
“And my favourite film is Lawrence of Arabia, with its empty desert.”
Farr had around 100 pupils from P1 to S4, drawn from crofts and clachans from Melvich to Melness near Tongue.
Alan was one of only four secondary teachers and tells me he ran the English department – with free rein to try out new things.
“I had this idea that the children should find out more and write about Highland life,” Alan recalls.
“They surveyed where people worked – at the Dounreay nuclear plant, fishing, the forestry – and local homes, some of which still had no TV or electricity.
“I also got them to collect tales from old people in their own villages and polish them up so I could collate them for a 32-page pamphlet.
“I wanted to have a proper record because so many worthwhile projects end up in a cupboard then the bin.
“But I never had the time – and all these handwritten scraps of paper, many containing material never before recorded, were put in a cupboard.”
The little collection, Alan tells me, remained in his possession after he left Farr in 1973.
“It was when I was working in Sutherland that my son Andrew was born,” he says.
“He grew up in Edinburgh and lives there still.
“He’s a fine man and very successful solicitor with two beautiful and talented daughters.
“The Farr kids had done very well but their writings were never ready for publication.
“So I wrote all their stories up in a book I called Tales of the North Coast.
“I left in everything the children had done and spent three years expanding their stories, polishing and linking them together.
“But nobody was interested or would help publish it in any way.
“If you were a publisher in London or Edinburgh and somebody said to you ‘I’m this author with a collection of my pupils’ stories I’ve polished up’ you would say ‘pull the other one’.
“I would write to anyone – I knew nothing about publishing.”
After brief stints on a trawler and a gas rig supply ship operating out of Aberdeen, Alan recalls, he moved to Rhonehouse and went back to sea with his old company Shaw Savill.
“I was third mate on a freezer cargo ship sailing between Britain and New Zealand,” he says.
“Three months later I got a letter from a London publisher about my book.
“I left the sea and spent eight months trying to persuade him to see the book as I did.
“Eventually he agreed – and the first 2,000 copies sold within a week.
“Then it was another 2,000, then 4,000 more – and the book has been in print ever since.
“Five years ago a new edition was published and I don’t take any royalties.
“Half the profits go towards keeping the book in print for keeps.
“The other half goes to support the Strathnaver Museum in Bettyhill which is also known as the Clearances museum.”
Just as the book was taking off, Alan tells me, in 1977 he became a teacher of English at Kirkcudbright Academy.
“I had the idea of doing the same sort of thing at Kirkcudbright as Farr,” he says.
“At that time Tales of the North Coast was being reviewed everywhere and doing better than anyone could have guessed. So I decided to do it myself and drove round Galloway in my little Morris Minor collecting material. Elspeth Cooper lived at the square in Auchencairn and was a remarkable woman – she had a lot of tales.”
● Don’t miss part two next week and how Alan compiled his Tales of Galloway.
