Duncan Harley

Words and images by Duncan Harley with additional reporting by April McGinty Some 43 years after his death, the studio once inhabited by Aberdeenshire artist James Cairns is at risk of collapse. The largely forgotten painter spent his later life transforming the old coastguard cottage at Buckie into a place of colour, scent and spiritual rebirth. He named the place Parody in the Sands and a local charity – The Cairns Poppies Initiative, has been tasked with preserving his heritage. Born in 1921, James’s artistic career was blighted by his association with both the scions of London gang life and an unfortunate alignment with an emerging National Socialist Party.   Having travelled to Austria in 1938 as part of a Friendship Through Strength international youth initiative funded by the Boy Scout Association of Silesia, he attended several Nazi youth rallies and was present at an early Nuremburg Rally where both Hitler and Goering addressed an admiring crowd. He was later t...

George Square in Inverurie was built over several years by a town council intent on improving the local housing stock. Slum clearance was an issue and an enlightened group of councillors financed construction in the years prior to the Hitler war. The conflict of course intervened and it was not until the late 1940’s that the housing scheme was completed and fully occupied. Meantime Polish troops had occupied, and vandalised, some of the new-builds and a general rent-review had been agreed with slum-tenants from Constitution Street who had refused to move to the new-build properties on cost grounds. Oddly perhaps, the newly built housing scheme became a local icon for wartime self-sufficiency. Rationing during the early years of WW2 led to a dramatic increase in demand for agricultural land throughout the county of Aberdeenshire. Marginal land, parkland and golf courses, including the old course at Turriff, were sacrificed to the plough and fallow land was brought into use....

Seemingly anyone who has shown they have an IQ in the top 2% can submit evidence of this to join Mensa. I have never joined Mensa. Not that I can’t afford the application fee – some £26.87 plus VAT or other – it’s just that I can’t make head nor tale of the admission process. “Does your child prefer Charles Dickens to Cbeebies, or do they find school boring and unchallenging? You could have a bright spark on your hands!” “There are many confusing notions about what giftedness is and is not. Indeed, in several respects, the life experience of the gifted individual seems paradoxical.” “Mensa hosts a limited number of group supervised tests at centres around the British Isles. This package provides you with a rounded assessment of your capabilities, for a one-off fee of just £24.95. We also offer schools the chance to test their pupils aged over 10 and a half.” Oh really? Seemingly ‘Mensa is the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world. It is ap...

Writing the back-page fluff for a new book is both a pain and a pleasure. The publishers generally put out a pre-publication questionnaire some months before even a single word is placed on the final page. Well, not that final really since drafts more drafts and final drafts are likely to supersede the early content. So, ideas change and the final fluff might not resemble the initial hopeful words. Then of course there is the difficult issue of the title. Should it be ironic, reflective of some pun or simply be a play on some clever words such as ‘Here be dragons’ or ‘You should read this since it will make you cleverer than you were before’? I don’t really know. But what I do know is that the joy of holding the print in your grubby hand makes up for the hassle of getting into print and the lack of monetary rewards. Not many folks know this, but most books fail to make more than the cost of printing and sell just a few thousand copies or even less. At last week’s Ab...

Wall art is not entirely about pre-pubescent puerile penile fantasies and homophobia. Much of the creativity implies a need to be heard and a desire to communicate to a more adult world. The graphic sexual images, rudely erotic comments and insulting narrative may in essence be a cover for the need to be understood or indeed misunderstood. “FUCK HITLER”  when sprayed on a Stalinist inspired 1960’s damp concrete multi storey edifice may in reality be a subversive comment regarding planning policies. “Mo Mo is Fat”  when painted on a fast food outlet door is open to wide interpretation. Is Mo Mo fat because the business owners don’t care about the hydrogenated fat content of the burgers on sale? Or is this simply a meditative Buddhist take on the perception of a reality near you. Try reversing the text. The eastern oil boom came to Aberdeen some 40 odd years ago and the effects are still resonating. Fast wealth, fast drugs, fast cars and some extremely fast ladies ab...

Reviewed by Duncan Harley Five years in the making, Alan Stewart’s new book ‘North East Scotland At War’ will appeal to anyone even remotely interested in the history of the North-east of Scotland. There are plenty of home-defence books out there which record the difficult years between the Chamberlain peace accord and the Soviet conquest of Berlin. Osborne’s ‘Defending Britain’ and Gordon Barclay’s  ' If Hitler Comes’ are the classics. But this book is slightly different and there is certainly room for further historical accounts of the dark days when Hitler threatened our shores. With a decidedly local slant, North East Scotland At War launches the reader into the minutiae of the defence of the North-east against what was, for a brief few years, perceived as the Nazi threat. The archaeology of those distant times is laid bare and many of the official documents which record the difficult days inhabit the pages. A ground-based Invasion never came. But preparatio...

‘This morning the American Ambassador in Moscow handed the Russian Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by three o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from the Baltic States, then a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such understanding has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Russia. ’ Far-fetched perhaps but a not untimely reminder of the cost of appeasement. Trumps conciliatory rhetoric ‘Getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing’ exposes us all, both in Europe and world-wide, to the reality that the man at the helm is quite out of his depth and indeed possibly quite out of control. He appears to understand dollars and roubles but is maybe slightly lacking in the diplomacy department. An avid watcher of television, he has no doubt watched the old hoary documentaries depicting the so-called Munich agreement between the leaders of Germany and the U...

For the first time in nearly two years, the kitchen table is clear of books. The ‘writers box’ full of assorted press-cuttings has been consigned to the archive in the loft and the marking pens have been put away. All that remains is to edit and re-draft the next tome. And that is a milestone indeed. The folk at Inverurie library-central were not that surprised when I returned a shed-load of books and cleared my borrowing account and I am hoping that was a good sign. Mind you, given that it was 23 degrees in the Shire today and an early closing 2pm finish for the library operatives I am also not that surprised that my lorry-load addition to their stock – I am permitted to borrow a privileged number of local history books – went largely unnoticed. And that brings me neatly to the topic of the evening. The next book is yet another Aberdeenshire volume. As yet untitled, it encompasses the Shire from the year zero-dot to the present. Beaker people and pesky Romans feature alongside loc...

The news that three artists had been killed by a goods train came as a surprise to many who imagined that the slogans spray-painted along the rail-lines of the UK were simply part of a marketing campaign by fat-cat rail executives intent on entertaining dwindling customers in the wake of the recent timetable delays. But in the big reality, Twitter comments by the likes of former Transport for London board member Brian Cooke calling the dead perps “common scum and criminals who cost the railway millions and keep fares high” are unwholesome. Vandalism can of course be destructive. But one man’s vandalism can of course be another’s art. Wall art is not entirely about puerile penile fantasies and homophobia. Much of the creativity implies a need to be heard and a desire to communicate to an outside world. The often graphic sexual images, rudely erotic comments and sometimes insulting narrative may in essence be a cover for the need to be understood or indeed misunderstood. “FU...

That’s around 50k of the words written for the next Aberdeenshire tome. It’s taken much less time than I thought but at least the few weeks left prior the publisher’s deadline can be used to good effect. Ice-cream on a distant beach with a brown-eyed lover beckons at the very least. I have still to pen a second draft. And an index. And some final structure. And a third draft. But hey, it’s all looking good. Apart from the reviews. Yes, the reviews. They can make or break the budding author and in the big scheme of things can murder even the best-planned marketing strategy. I well recall being asked on occasion to review other people’s books. Most submissions were fine and even if I knew nothing about Highland bothies or Harper’s cast-iron Aberdonian fenceposts I soon got to grips with the authors mindset and produced a fair and balanced review. The only one I was unable to get my head around was a novel by a man called Bill. Rarely, aside from Joyce’s’ Ulysses, have I read such a ...

Well that's the new book published and, to date, it's selling really well. In fact Amazon ran out of hard-copies over the Christmas period however I am pleased to report that this situation was quickly rectified by my ever-attentive publishers: The History Press plus Macmillan Distribution. Respect to the both of them! Of course everyone should write a book at least once in their lifetime and I count myself one of the lucky few who have actually made it into print. Friends and colleagues along the way have contributed ideas for stories and relationships past and present have enabled it to happen.  In particular I would like to thank Nigel Lucas who showed me the value of being inquisitive. He is no longer around but is well missed. Judy Mackie, editor of Leopard Magazine , and that stalwart of the Northern Scot , Mike Collins, have encouraged my writing and indeed have often funded it. Mike freely gave me a platform and when, on occasion, he was unable to use my stories w...