Duncan Harley

According to last Sundays Observer Magazine the very-third-time-ever that the word fuck was broadcast live on the UK airwaves was on 1 December 1976. How do they know this? Well, seemingly the Sex Pistols appeared on the Bill Grundy Show and uttered the immortal words “Bill Grundy is a fuckin’ rotter”. That’s probably on record somewhere in the depths of the BBC archives but what about the first two utterances, of which writer Juliana Piskorz makes no mention whatsoever. I may have an answer . The art of swearing upon the airwaves goes back a fair wee bit beyond those heady seventies. Broadcaster Richard Dimbleby was a close friend and colleague of Robin Duff, the 32nd and last laird of Oldmeldrum. Aberdeenshire-born Duff inherited both his lairdship and Meldrum House, the family ancestral home, from his uncle in 1954. A Cambridge graduate, he worked as a presenter then as a radio journalist for the BBC. During World War 2 Robin famously stood on London rooftops during the Blitz de...

Well that’s Dennis Nilson dead and about time perhaps. A serial killer trapped by a plumbing problem as I recall. I penned an article on the town of Fraserburgh a good few years ago for Leopard’s Our Town series as I recall; but conspicuously failed to mention the man described in the Press & Journal as a ‘ Fraserburgh born serial killer’. Not a headline I personally would use about the place, but each to his own I suppose. In fact, if I were trying to flog a few newspapers in those far-flung fisher-towns at the very tip of Aberdeenshire’s circulation wars I might have chosen to ignore the association just in case of invasion by The Northern Scot or some similarly robust publication intent on taking full advantage of the slur that Fraserburgh is guilty of murder by association. My column that month focused much more on the positives of the town. Bill Gibb, Thomas Blake Glover, the local heritage centre and Marconi – yes Marconi – featured but certainly not Nilsen. Dennis of...

Readers of my new book are maybe wondering why a good few of the images are credited to foreign museum sources. The Tryggve Gran chapter is a case in point. There are various archives which hold local images of his aeroplane at Cruden Bay. Sadly, however only the Norsk Tecknisk Museum in Oslo was kind enough to allow me a fee free image for inclusion in the book. Scottish sources wanted what they imagined was a suitable cut from my author’s royalties. In a similar vein, Museums Victoria in Melbourne were more than happy to source and then send me images of a James VIII silver guinea for inclusion on the basis that a photo-credit would be nice. I can respect that. I have of course met this sort of kindness before and it is of course very much appreciated. Balmoral Estates went to a lot of trouble to find me an image of Balmoral Castle and Fraserburgh Heritage Centre bunged me an image of Buffalo Bill Cody atop his white charger on the wild West Pier at Fraserburgh. All good and all...

One of the greatest pleasures of writing about the North-east involves the discovery of the strange and unexpected. I mean, who would have thought that the devil had a wife and that – while she was wandering around the village of Midmar frightening the locals – he lobbed a giant boulder at her. He missed his spouse by a mile of course and the rock now sits in the policies of nearby Tillycairn Castle at Cluny. Seemingly, and this is according to no less a source than Victorian writer Alex Inkson McConnachie, ‘the credulous may yet see the mark of the Devil’s hand upon it’. To top the Devil’s unlikely feat, Scottish super-hero and revolutionary William Wallace seemingly chucked a 20-ton rock all the way from Mither Tap to Oldmeldrum, a distance of some six miles. Seemingly his aim was good, but the missile, known as Wallace’s Putting Stone, overshot his intended target and now sits just north of the Hill of Barra. There are many more tales such as this in my A-Z of Curious Aberdeens...

It’s been quite a heady week review-wise. On top of the – now four – feedback reviews of the new book on the Amazon platform several local and not so local newspapers have been brave enough to expose my curious writings to a wider audience. First of all, The Scotsman published a wide-ranging piece titled ‘7 gems from Aberdeenshire’s past’. Penned by Alison Campsie, whom I have never knowingly met – honest Injun’s – the article begins with the history of Aberdeenshire Alligators and concludes with a tale about Aberdeenshire toilets - I kid you not. And the full feature can be found on the Scotsman website at: https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/7-gems-from-aberdeenshire-s-curious-past-1- On the previous Friday a good friend had contacted me to say that I had finally made it into the Evening Express. Now, to put this in context, I have been trying to get the local Aberdeenshire papers to take my articles and theatre reviews for ages but without much success. On this occasion however,...