Angus Authors
Marion Angus (1866-1946) was born in Sunderland but schooled at Arbroath High School; her father was minister of the Erskine U.P. Church in Arbroath. She wrote prose pieces for the Arbroath Guide, and throughout the 20's and 30's produced slim volumes of lyric verse, much influenced by the Scots ballads. Selected Poems (1950) contains many of her best poems, typically subtle, tender and occasionally chilling. She died at Hayshead House, Arbroath.
Sir James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) was born in Kirriemuir, which became the Thrums of his early novels such as The Little Minister (1891) and Sentimental Tommy (1896). But he is lastingly famous as a dramatist - The Admirable Crichton (1902), Dear Brutus (1917) and Mary Rose (1920) and above all Peter Pan (1904), the most successful children's play of all time. Barrie's birthplace, a weaver's tenement in Brechin Road, Kirriemuir, is now a museum owned by the national Trust for Scotland.
George Beattie (1786-1823) was born at Hill of Morpie on the North Esk. He became a lawyer in Montrsoe and contributed verses to the local newspaper, and is best known for his long comic poem ’John O’Arnha’, about the Montrose town officer of the day. The poem is somewhat in the manner of Tam O’Shanter and went through numerous editions in the nineteenth century. Thwarted in love, Beattie shot himself on the beach at St Cyrus.
Helen Cruickshank (1886-1975) was born at Hillside and educated at Montrose Academy. Her poetry is gentle and couthy - the volume Up the Noran Water (1934) contains her most famous poem, Shy Geordie. Octobiography (1978) describes her career as a civil servant, and her long service to Scottish letters, as well as her love and knowledge of the Angus countryside.
Violet Jacob (1863-1946) was born at the House of Dun by Montrose, and much of her fiction is set in Angus, including the novels The Interloper (1904), and the highly-regarded Flemington (1911), a gripping tale of the aftermath of Culloden. She was an accomplished poet in both Scots and English, and The Scottish Poems of Violet Jacob (1944) contains her best-known verse. From 1936-1946 she lived at Marywell House, Kirriemuir. She is buried in Dun kirkyard. The House of Dun, now owned by the National Trust for Scotland, is open to visitors.
John Jamieson (1759-1838) was a Secessionist pastor in Forfar between 1781-1796 when he compiled the materials for his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808), the earliest British historical dictionary, this is, one which substantiates its definitions with dated quotations. Jamieson's Dictionary is particularly rich in Angus Scots, and is still a useful reference work. His house in Prior Road, Forfar, is marked with a plaque.
Charles Lyell, first Baronet of Kinnordy (1797-1875) was born at Kinnordy near Kirriemuir. He became one of the foremost scientific figures of the nineteenth century. His magnum opus was The Principles of Geology (1830-33) which observed that the Earth was formed over millions of years, invaluable support for Darwin's theory of evolution. Other works included Travels in North America (1845) and the Antiquity of Man (1863) which backed Darwin. Lyell is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Fionn MacColla (Tom MacDonald), (1906-1975) was born in Montrose, where he lived at Links Avenue, a neighbour of Hugh MacDiarmid. He spent over twenty years teaching in the Western Isles and he was a lifelong nationalist. His major novel And the Cock Crew (1945) is set at the time of the Highland Clearances. Other fiction includes The Albannach (1932), The Ministers (1979) and Move Up, John (1993). He was one of the leading figures in the Scottish Literary Renaissance.
Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher M. Grieve) (1892-1978) has close associations with Angus. In 1914 he was a reporter on the Forfar Review, "chroniclin' the toon's sma' beer", and from 1921-1929 he spent his most productive years in Montrose, where he stayed at 16 Links Avenue. (A plaque in Review Close commemorates his time with the Montrose Review.) In this period he produced issues of Northern Numbers and Scottish Chapbook, and the verse collections Annals of the Five Senses, Sangschaw and Penny Wheep, but most importantly the long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, which was conceived on a weekend at the Ogilvie Arms Hotel in Glen Clova. This poem was the cornerstone of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, and for a time Montrose was the unlikely epicentre of the movement. In his years in Montrose MacDiarmid was also a Town Councillor and JP. He left Montrose in 1929.
Willa Muir (1890 - 1970) one of the most important translators into English of the twentieth century, was born Wilhelmina Anderson in Montrose. She portrays Montrose as a town filled with mediocrity and hypocrisy in her novel Imagined Corners (1931), and returns to Montrose in her fictional portrait of the monstrous mother Mrs. Ritchie (1933). Assisted by her husband, the poet Edwin Muir, she translated many novels from German, including those of Kafka. Her memoir of life with Edwin, Belonging (1968) and a study of ballads, Living with Ballads (1965) are among her non-fiction works.
A S Neill (1883-1973) was born at Kingsmuir near Forfar. In a long career as an educationist he developed unorthodox and influential theories on child psychology and education at his independent school, Summerhill, in Suffolk. Among his books are A Dominie's Log (1915) and A Dominie Abroad (1922), Summerhill (1962), and an autobiography Neill! Neill! Orange Peel (1973).
Dorothea Maria Ogilvy (1823-1895) resided at Balnaboth, Glen Prosen. She was daughter of Donald Ogilvy, MP for the county, and was deeply attached to Prosen and Clova. Her greatest success was Willie Wabster's Wooing and Wedding on the Braes of Angus (1868), a glorious farcical poem in dense Angus Scots describing the misadventures of a drunken Kirriemuir cattle-drover pursued up and down Clova by an amorous witch. By contrast, her poetry in English is undistinguished. She is buried in Cortachy kirkyard.
Alexander Ross (1699-1784) became parish schoolmaster at Lochlee school in Glen Esk in 1732 and for the next fifty years scarcely left the glen. In 1768 he published Helenore or the Fortunate Shepherdess, a 4,000 line epic poem set in the Angus Glens, which deeply impressed Burns. It is written in rich local Scots and subverts the pastoral tradition. Ross also wrote songs. His grave is in Lochlee kirkyard, and his writing-desk may be seen in the Glenesk Folk Museum at Tarfside.
Eileen Ramsay has lived in Angus since 1986. She was born in Ayr and educated in Dumfries-shire, Edinburgh, and California.
After teacher training in Edinburgh she went to teach at a girls school in Washington DC where many of her pupils were scions of some of America’s most illustrious families. Her husband, a fellow Scot, took her away from all that high life to California where, between taking two degrees and having her two sons, she taught in the Migrant Education Programme.
She began to write seriously in California while pretending to watch her children swim competitively and published her first stories for children in religious magazines. She also wrote a Regency novel, The Mysterious Marquis, since she had decided to become the Scottish Georgette Heyer.
She returned to Scotland, went back to teaching, and tried to squeeze in a few hours for writing. Then she met Scottish novelist Elizabeth Marshall who told her that people who want to write will find the time. Eileen decided to write for two hours before school, and for two years was awake and writing by 4am every morning. Three Regional novels were finished and accepted for publication during this time.
Eileen decided to write full time a few years ago and has published three more regional novels, as well as short stories, serials for D. C. Thomson publications, stories for Ginn Educational Publishers, and articles on everything from life in the country to a neophyte’s look at opera. She is of the school of novelists who write about not necessarily what she know but what she is am prepared to find out.
In December 1998 Scottish Children’s Press published Danger by Gaslight, her first novel for 8-12 year olds and among her present projects is a children’s book about life in Aberdeen during WWII.
Eileen is Hon. Secretary of the Society of Authors in Scotland.
Betsy Whyte (1919-1988) is fondly remembered for her autobiography The Yellow on the Broom (1979) which tells of her girlhood as one of the travelling people and the prejudice she faced. It is an illuminating account of life in Angus and Perthshire between the wars, and continues in the sequel Red Rowans and Wild Honey (1990). Latterly she settled in Montrose and was a popular traditional storyteller at folk festivals around Scotland.
David Wishart studied classics at Edinburgh University. He went on to teach Latin and Greek in school for four years then retrained as a teacher of EFL. He lived and worked abroad for eleven years, working in Kuwait, Greece and Saudi Arabia, and now lives with his family in Angus. David Wishart’s novels include I, Virgil, Ovid, Nero, Germanicus, Sejanus and The Lydian Baker and the Horse Coin.
© Angus Council 1998 - 2008