Duncan Harley

I see that as part of this weekends Doors Open Day, Ramsay MacDonald’s family home in Lossiemouth is to open to the public. From humble beginnings he became not only the first ever Labour Prime Minister but also one of the first members of parliament to embrace aviation as a means of transport to and from his Lossiemouth home to the powerhouse of Westminster. In pre-RAF Lossiemouth days he regularly flew out of grass airstrips on the outskirts of the town. Born in 1866 he entered Parliament in 1906 as MP for Leicester following an early career as a journalist. A fierce opponent of the Boer War he was outspoken in his opposition to WW1. His pacifist convictions and unshakeable socialist stance quickly made him a hate figure both locally and nationally. He was blackballed by Moray Golf Club in 1916 and vilified in the likes of John Bull magazine as “A traitor and a coward, a libeller and a slanderer of his country … he is nothing more than the illegitimate son of a Scotch ser...

Dang. Read sign before engaging brain. It says something like 'please do not climb on me' . I, of course took this literally and wondered why anyone in their right mind would put that on a sign. Surely it would make more sense to simply not put the warning out in the first place. I mean, why tempt folk to break the rules. It was only after Janice had come back from the loo that I finally got it. The message, she pointed out, had nothing whatsoever to do with the sign at all and had much more to do with the blue and yellow plastic dolphin. A broken wing, if dolphins have such appendages, told the partial story. Bound to the dolphin's flank by rolls of brown fibreglass tape, the Tugnet dolphin shows signs of desperate life-saving surgery following the unwanted attentions of some five year old intent on high-sea bow-riding.. Not for them the attentions of a cash-strapped NHS physician. The plastic dolphins of the Moray Firth are dependant, in their hour of finest ...

It’s unusual for me to post two WordPress posts on the one day however a conversation with Janice’s brother Michael, also a Catto, earlier set me thinking about a visit to the RAF at the airbase at Lossiemouth. As usual, it was something to do with an article and as usual Janice drove while I consulted notes and gathered some thoughts. We were met at the gate by a Warrant Officer. I have no idea to this day what that is; but I have to say that he was pleasant and was as nice as ninepence. In the course of the day we were taken all around the base and fed lunch, for a miniscule and probably subsidised £2-32 per person, at the officer’s mess. Following that basic but splendidly adequate aviator’s lunch sat next to some highly trained fighter-pilots, we set off around the base taking in the fast-response units and the Typhoons sitting around the maintenance hanger. There were around 4 aeroplanes parked there and, although I am probably not allowed to reveal this, all were red and s...

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...

This is the tale of Garioch local-lad 'old Dod Mutch' and was first published in the May 2015 edition of Leopard Magazine. I recall that publication resulted in a payment of some £50 and that it made it into the Leopard's Tale spot near the back page. Quite why I chose to publish using the name of James L. Ramsay still escapes me. I may have been trying to hide my talent behind a bush - but I am unsure if that was a good strategy. In an effort to rectify the quirky 'nom de plume' e rror, here it is yet again. The names of the guilty parties have in the main been changed however, in the big scheme of things, much of what follows is completely true. I can reveal that 'Birtybogs' is near the village of Oyne however and that ' the Gairnie Inn' was situated in a former bank building  near the Garioch settlement of Durno. A one armed bandit -  By James L. Ramsay Old Dod Mutch was found dead in his chair. It was a stroke apparently and probably...

Well, that’s the so-called author questionnaire filled out ahead of the proposed next book. I can’t tell you what it is about just yet since I’d have to kill you if I let the proverbial cat out of the bag, but it should be a cracker. Well, I would say that wouldn’t I. What is the author questionnaire I hear you ask. Well, it’s a sort of collection of proposals intended to draw out ideas for both the substance of the tome and reassure the publisher that the author has at least a semblance of sanity and some idea of what they are proposing to write. I recall early days promoting a few web sites on Google. The rules were a bit draconian and unless you actually paid the internet giant some readies – in which case they generally left you to simply get on with it – website marketeers were in constant danger of breaking unknown rules leading to outright bans or in most cases demotion from the safety of the early algorithms. In short, break the Google-law and absolutely no-one, even the...

I am often amazed at human kindness. One of the scariest moments I have recently experienced was when I had to press a small green button in front of a bank-teller on Mid-Street in Keith. Keith, I hear you say. For the uninitiated, it’s a town in Moray just over the border from Aberdeenshire. Known as the friendly town – and I can vouch for that accolade – the inhabitants are in the habit of saying hello at every opportunity. Even if they don’t know you from Adam, an upbeat ‘hello and how are you today?’ followed by a reassuring pause to discus the weather usually interrupts any High Street jaunt. A selection of traditional shops, including a butcher who, alongside selling the traditional range of animal body-parts also sells local-history books completes the picture. But I digress. That scary moment involved the purchasing of a house and the button in question would, given the press of a single digit, send untold thousands of hard-earned pounds into the ether of the banking in...