Duncan Harley

It's amazing what you learn in a pub.  Although the Garioch town of Inverurie was never bombed during WW2 many, now elderly, survivors of those stressful days vividly recall being shepherding by  panicked primary school teachers towards the local bomb shelters when the air-raid siren sounded.  Coastal towns such as Fraserburgh and Peterhead bore the brunt of enemy air-action. Raiders from occupied Norway could make landfall over the Buchan ports, drop their bombs and make off over the North Sea well before fighters from airfields at Banff and Dyce were able to intercept them. The fishing port of Peterhead suffered at least 28 air raids during World War II with nearby Fraserburgh not far behind with perhaps 26 Luftwaffe raids. Retired railway engineer Joe Strachan recalls being in Peterhead visiting his auntie in 1940. “I must have been around eight or nine at the time. My aunt and my cousin panicked and I can vividly recall them jumping up and down on the double bed. ...

I t’s a funny old life. Many more years ago than I care to remember I considered an army career. The lure of the uniform and an escape from a post-WW2 factory job in a Lanarkshire light-bulb factory was at the back of it. An interview in Edinburgh followed - all expenses paid as I recall. A sad relic of the battles in Korea, replete with coloured gongs and khaki trousers sat behind a desk and asked various questions. “Would I be prepared to undergo basic training at Sandhurst? … did I have a relative who had served in the desert who might vouch for me … did I have backbone? Would I like a Sam Browne.” Well, the answer to most of those questions was a resounding maybe. And I returned to my light-bulb career for a brief period before taking up knitting for a hobby. I only say this since, and I know that I have harped on about this sort of exploitation of writers before, the library @ the Gordon Highlander Museum recently asked me for £60 per day to research within their h...

It’s been a funny old day. Firstly, I finally found an old photograph of Julian the Tank which had eluded me for years. I had been trying to find a review copy of Gordon Duthie’s early album ‘Thran’ and alongside Thran and his later ‘Dunt, Dunt, Dunt’ there, staring me full in the face, was Julian in all of his full glory atop the Broad Hill down by the beach. I mean, how serendipitous is that?  There are a very few on-line images of the steel monster but, until today at least, I had completely forgotten a folder headed war-bonds tucked deep within my research archives. Sounds grand really, but of course in reality the Duncan Harley Archives Collection comprise a three-drawer steel filing cabinet full of current projects plus a few dusty cardboard boxes of done and dusted folders heading for the loft to await, no doubt, my untimely demise in some forgotten year or other. Then there was the reading of the local paper. In amongst the piles of Auntie May and Theresa...