Person Sheet
NameAlexander ‘Alastair’ DUNN 
Birth Date22 Nov 1925
Birth PlaceClydebank
Death Date13 Feb 2007 Age: 81
Death PlaceRoom 27, Marine House Nursing Home, Rosemarkie
OccupationPeripatetic Primary School Art Teacher (and Potter)
FatherAlexander DUNN (1882-1966)
MotherMaggie “Meg’ WILLIAMSON (1893-1973)
Misc. Notes
He was always known as ‘Alastair’ rather than his birth name ‘Alexander’. He trained as a baker at his father’s bakery in Clydebank, before moving to Aultbea, Wester Ross, to run a bakery there. However, times were very hard due to independent bakeries being squeezed out by mass-produced bread. In addition, the deal to supply most of the bakery goods production to a local store (the main reason for moving to that location in the first place) fell through shortly after Alastair and Alison, now with 4 children, moved there, when the store reneged. So, after about 5 years the family moved to Cromarty, on the Black Isle near Inverness. Alastair and Alison were both very happy there. Alastair retrained as an Art Teacher in the late 60s early 70s, and worked as a travelling teacher across the Black Isle until he retired in 1990. He then worked part-time as a summer guide at Cromarty Courthouse Museum, wearing period costume, before fully retiring in 1992.
Alastair served on several ships during WWII, including the HMS Lamerton and HMS Norfolk, and was on the northern convoy routes to Murmansk. He didn't like talking about his experiences, simply saying that very few of his boyhood friends returned.
Memories of Alastair:
Jenny Boyd:
Some time, perhaps when Jamie and I stayed at Aultbea with Alison and Alastair, we heard the story how they first met. Alastair and a friend (Sandy Allison) were on a bicycling holiday in England. Alastair's attention was caught by the blonde wavy hair, beaming smile and very short shorts of a bonny lassie also cycling with a friend. So he then persuaded his friend to follow the girls to the Youth Hostel they were staying at. The same the second day and so, as they say, one thing led to another! Creative bakery in both Clydebank and Aultbea, creative pottery in Cromarty and of course six children and many years of happy marriage.
It was on that some cycling trip that Alastair discovered in the Youth Hostel kitchen that Alison swung a feisty frying pan which knocked him cold. There was no ill intent. Alison was surprised; "It was just a friendly swipe. In our family we all know to duck!"
From David Boyd:
Alastair had a special gift for friendship and I am the richer for it. We first met at the age of six in Boquhanran School in Clydebank and for 75 years have been special friends, and though we went for fifty years without seeing each other, we were still close friends when we met again in Cromarty about ten years ago. He was the best friend I ever had.
In these early years we roamed the country around Parkhall and Duntocher, following the Roman Road, visiting the Roman Wall in the cemetery in Milngavie, the cup and rings in the Druids stone in Cochno and the Druid's Temple on the Boulevard, or looking for Klips the witch in the old mill ruin in Duntocher; they were great years for two wee boys.
The 1939-45 war and the 1941 Blitz on Clydebank separated us. Toward the end of the war Alastair was on his way to Singapore in the navy. Alastair was no prim puritan but he did not care for swearing - there is something about swearing in the Kings Regulations - and at some stage when a foul mouthed petty-officer had been holding forth Alastair had drawn his attention to the regulations and said "If you go on swearing, I'll hit you." The petty-officer probably swore even more, so Alastair hit him and he packed quite punch - one nickname was Two ton Tony after the heavy weight boxer. Alastair ended up picking oakum for a week in the bowels of the ship but was satisfied he had made his point.
Alastair was an artist; all the Dunn's were artists. He drew wonderful Celtic patterns. He gave me a copy of Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography sixty years ago; I treasure it. In a different age, Alastair would have been a goldsmith. He was a golden man and we will miss him.
-------------------------------
Alastair Dunn 1925-2007 - EULOGY
Written by Alex Dunn, and read at Alastairs Memorial Gathering on 19th February 2007
Ladies and Gentlemen. We meet again. Rather sooner than some of us had expected.
Thank you all very much for coming here today. I would like to express particular thanks to the following people: To June Mackay, for her help and many kindnesses over the years; to the staff of The Marine Nursing Home, who have shown care and kindness above and beyond the call of duty, and who did more than their best to make sure that during his last days Alastair experienced as little pain and discomfort as possible; to Marigold Cameron, who was invaluable during Alastair’s first illness; to Mr. Alan Smurthwaite, for officiating at this ceremony; and to Helen, Fiona and Jane, for making the arrangements and organising the details and for not getting too impatient with the rest of us, although I’m sure we thoroughly deserved it.
Maureen Lipman was talking to an aged aunt. This aged aunt was deaf, and just slightly dottled. And for some reason they were talking about driving on the motorway. Maureen Lipman said that at least she didn’t have to keep looking upwards to make sure that people on the flyovers weren’t throwing rocks down on the cars.
The aged aunt looked startled at this, and said, “Why, did that happen often?’ Maureen Lipman replied that, yes, it used to happen quite regularly. There was a long pause while the aged aunt thought about this. Then she said, “Chinese people?” There was an even longer pause while Maureen Lipman worked this out. Then she said, “No, no, no, no, no, auntie. ROCKS. Not WOKS.”
Many of you here who knew Alastair well will know that he loved jokes and funny stories, particularly ones with strong images and word-play, and that he was quite, quite hopeless at telling them. Long before he’d reached the punch-line, long before he was even within a country mile of the punch-line, he would be convulsed with coughing and spluttering, a paroxysm of gasping, wheezing laughter, while turning an alarming shade of purple and usually having to clutch a chair or table or any unfortunate spectator near enough to stop him from falling over.
This experience almost perfectly illustrated Robert Louis Stevenson’s words, that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, since quite often the spectators had to make do with the admittedly very entertaining build-up, because there was never any chance at all that they would hear the punch-line. In fact, sometimes people new to this experience would actually beg Alastair not to give them the punch-line, since the imminence of Alastair’s death from laughter, or more worryingly the need to give him the kiss of life, when his false teeth had already flown across the room into the dog’s basket, seemed far too high a price to pay.
I remember one particular story, involving three politicians and a large tin of treacle, which caused Alastair particular trouble. Over a whole week whenever I asked him, begged him for the punch-line, he would open his mouth and gasp and fall over, a heap of gasping humanity useless to man or beast. Eventually, he suggested that if he went into our downstairs toilet with a piece of paper and a pencil he might be able to write it down.
Half an hour later, after noises like an elephant gargling a bucketful of trifle, he staggered up the stairs, sweating, gasping, and triumphantly holding out a crumpled bit of paper with two lines of scrawl of which I could only ever make out the words, ‘jelly babies’. It was, I have to say, one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. But Alastair enjoyed it hugely.
A minister in Achiltibuie was addressing his congregation. “And the next lesson will be read my Miss Mary MacInnes.” A voice piped up from the back of the church: “Mary MacInnes is the biggest whore in Achiltibuie!” (A long, long pause.) “Nevertheless………”
This is a ‘nevertheless’ moment. I have to say that because I don’t want Alastair’s fans, and particularly Fiona, jumping up and pelting me with rotten fruit after hearing what I’m going to say, without keeping in mind that after I’ve said what I’m going to say there will be a ‘nevertheless’.
Alastair’s life, by his own lights, was a failure. He wanted to be a painter. In fact, not only a painter but a good painter, even a great painter, one whose name would be recognised and live on as a painter. And it didn’t work. As with so much in life, it was the smaller things which carried most conviction, and in Alastair’s case these were his drawings and his designs for pottery. But painting is what artists do, so he painted; and I never knew whether he realised how much better he was as a draughtman than as a painter. I think that he did; but he preferred to treat it as a sort of joke. And he tried writing.
He wrote short stories and plays, and I even remember him trying his hand, years ago, on radio scripts, in the days when we lived in Aultbea and there was no television and newpapers arrived a day late and the radio was everything. And he could write, and he could write well; but he lacked whatever quality it is necessary to have to make his writing great. And similarly to his painting, I think that he would have had more success if he had tried memoirs and remembrance of things past; but short stories and plays are what writers write, so he stuck to his last. And it was never quite good enough for his ambition.
And sometimes I have to admit that I felt desperately sorry for him, and I wished that there was some way to flip a quality-control switch and suddenly make his painting and writing as good as he wanted them to be, as good as he thought he was capable of doing but somehow could never produce.
Nevertheless. Does it matter? No, it doesn’t, and for two reasons. The first is that, no matter how important all this was to him, it was in the end only of academic interest. He was intellectually attracted to the Gauguin story – how Gauguin abandoned his family and went off to the South Seas and painted great pictures of naked maidens – but morally he found it repugnant. He loved his wife and family and life in Cromarty far too much to approve of anything so cruel and irresponsible and what he considered to be essentially uncivilised.
And second, as most of you know, he went to Art School as a mature student in his forties, and so discovered a job he loved doing. He adored teaching art to children. In particular he loved teaching art to young children, in primary school – they were, he said, not yet shackled by ideas of what was and was not art, and he allowed them to draw and paint what they wanted. If a girl wanted to paint a picture of her mother five times bigger than her house in the same painting – why not? If the painting was fun and decorative and psychologically true, who was to say that she was doing it the wrong way?
In some ways he was a bit of a quiet revolutionary and his pupils loved his classes. I remember him telling me that he had found again and again that most children in primary school could instinctively ‘understand’ a Picasso, a Klee or a Chagall in a way that seemed to be impossible to children in secondary schools or even most adults. Significantly, when he was called to do some supply teaching in Fortrose Academy he found the experience boring and tedious and uninspiring – the pupils already ‘knew’ what art was, and they could not be persuaded to do anything else except ‘art’.
To sum up: Alastair’s failure in painting and writing was ultimately only a failure in his own head. In the things that mattered - the pottery, his teaching, the love for and of his family, his love of film and books and good food and Cromarty – he was a huge success. A towering success. And it cannot be said too frequently or too loudly: in these days of fifteen minutes of fame, of vile reality shows and fame at all costs, we need much, much more of Alastair’s kind of ‘failure’. His quiet influence through his teaching, his family and his example will be felt for years and years to come.
As you will be able to imagine, Alastair was considered as a bit of an eccentric in the schools – or at least he was considered odd by the teachers and eccentric by the pupils, but by both with affection and respect. It was an image which he welcomed and encouraged. One of the manifestations of this was his ties. He built up a huge collection of odd and colourful ties, and made a point in some of the schools in never arriving with the same tie twice. Much was the speculation in his classes about what sort of tie he would be wearing that day.
One day he turned up in a class to an unpleasant surprise: one of his favourite classes, with whom he never had any trouble, was quietly unmanageable. There was much giggling and sniggering and glancing sideways at Alastair, but no indication of what on earth was causing this anarchy. Eventually he grew impatient, and demanded to know what was going on. Silence. After much shuffling and looking at the floor a little girl slowly raised her hand. ‘Please sir…..” “Yes? Well?” “Please sir…….you’re wearing two ties.”
When I was thinking about this speech, I was reminded again just how little I knew about Alastair’s life before I was conscious enough to take things in. Like a lot of his generation who went through the war he didn’t speak much about it, preferring to put it in the past and get on with his life. Angus and I were convinced that he’d personally won the war – he even had a medal to prove it! – but he talked very little about his experiences, and when he did they were usually the more light-hearted episodes. Like being threatened with lynching by his fellow sailors because he’s said that no, actually he didn’t hate the Germans. Or the time he was thrown in jail and threatened with court-martial because he’d pretended to misunderstand orders broadcast over a defective tannoy. Or ordering a copy of “The Egyptian Book of the Dead’ from a Glasgow bookshop, and being contacted by them four years later, after the war had ended, to be told that they’d put aside the book for him and did he still want it?
If pressed he would talk about the cold and dark of the Northern Convoys, and the mountainous seas; but when he was contacted recently to talk about his experiences in the navy at that time, he wasn’t interested. And that’s how he was. He lived less in the past than practically anyone I’ve talked to of that age, and it was one of his most endearing qualities.
One last anecdote, and one of the most moving. Alison and Alastair were a wonderful partnership, and without Alison’s support and sacrifice – and that is not too strong a word – he wouldn’t have been able to achieve half of what he did. But there were rough times, as there are in every marriage. Sometimes Alastair would go in the huff, or Alison wouldn’t talk to him because she was furious, and occasionally these two states would coincide. On one occasion there was silence for four days, a silence as heavy as thunder; and on the fourth day Alison went up to their room for a nap, as she did every afternoon, and as she lay down she saw, pinned to the ceiling directly above her, a note which read, simply, “I’m sorry.”
Several weeks ago, I found in a newspaper article a quotation from Albert Einstein which perfectly encapsulates Alastair’s beliefs, or lack of them. With mild apologies to the believers in the audience, it runs as follows: “I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death: let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts.”
And so to last words. Alastair loved last words. A favourite expression was, “Bugger Bognor”, supposedly the last words of George V. (The history-book version is the far less interesting and frankly unbelievable, “How is the empire?”) Two others of which he was particularly fond were The Younger Pitt’s and Gertrude Stein’s. The official version of The Younger Pitt’s was: “My country; Oh, how I leave my country.” The unofficial version was: “I think I could go one of Bellamy’s veal pies.” Gertrude Stein is said to have muttered, “What’s the answer?”, followed after a long, long pause by, “Alright then , what’s the question?”
The last thing I heard Alastair say was, “Thanks”, after Colin had pulled a quilt up over his shoulder, which is a polite and gracious word with which to end a long, rich life. However, I would like to end with some words from The Bible.
Alastair loved The Bible, and he loved the paradox that he, an atheist, could love The Bible. He loved the fact that, though translated and collated by a committee it contained some of the most wonderful and awe-inspiring poetry in the English language. He would quote obscure passages, usually to do with violent deaths or sexual congress with animals, at the most inappropriate moments.
And I would like to close with the last words of Christ, which are three of the most moving and at the same time most dangerously ambiguous words in the entire book, but which in Alastair’s mouth would have been much more definite:
It is finished. It is finished.
Alastair served on several ships during WWII, including the HMS Lamerton and HMS Norfolk, and was on the northern convoy routes to Murmansk. He didn't like talking about his experiences, simply saying that very few of his boyhood friends returned.
Memories of Alastair:
Jenny Boyd:
Some time, perhaps when Jamie and I stayed at Aultbea with Alison and Alastair, we heard the story how they first met. Alastair and a friend (Sandy Allison) were on a bicycling holiday in England. Alastair's attention was caught by the blonde wavy hair, beaming smile and very short shorts of a bonny lassie also cycling with a friend. So he then persuaded his friend to follow the girls to the Youth Hostel they were staying at. The same the second day and so, as they say, one thing led to another! Creative bakery in both Clydebank and Aultbea, creative pottery in Cromarty and of course six children and many years of happy marriage.
It was on that some cycling trip that Alastair discovered in the Youth Hostel kitchen that Alison swung a feisty frying pan which knocked him cold. There was no ill intent. Alison was surprised; "It was just a friendly swipe. In our family we all know to duck!"
From David Boyd:
Alastair had a special gift for friendship and I am the richer for it. We first met at the age of six in Boquhanran School in Clydebank and for 75 years have been special friends, and though we went for fifty years without seeing each other, we were still close friends when we met again in Cromarty about ten years ago. He was the best friend I ever had.
In these early years we roamed the country around Parkhall and Duntocher, following the Roman Road, visiting the Roman Wall in the cemetery in Milngavie, the cup and rings in the Druids stone in Cochno and the Druid's Temple on the Boulevard, or looking for Klips the witch in the old mill ruin in Duntocher; they were great years for two wee boys.
The 1939-45 war and the 1941 Blitz on Clydebank separated us. Toward the end of the war Alastair was on his way to Singapore in the navy. Alastair was no prim puritan but he did not care for swearing - there is something about swearing in the Kings Regulations - and at some stage when a foul mouthed petty-officer had been holding forth Alastair had drawn his attention to the regulations and said "If you go on swearing, I'll hit you." The petty-officer probably swore even more, so Alastair hit him and he packed quite punch - one nickname was Two ton Tony after the heavy weight boxer. Alastair ended up picking oakum for a week in the bowels of the ship but was satisfied he had made his point.
Alastair was an artist; all the Dunn's were artists. He drew wonderful Celtic patterns. He gave me a copy of Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography sixty years ago; I treasure it. In a different age, Alastair would have been a goldsmith. He was a golden man and we will miss him.
-------------------------------
Alastair Dunn 1925-2007 - EULOGY
Written by Alex Dunn, and read at Alastairs Memorial Gathering on 19th February 2007
Ladies and Gentlemen. We meet again. Rather sooner than some of us had expected.
Thank you all very much for coming here today. I would like to express particular thanks to the following people: To June Mackay, for her help and many kindnesses over the years; to the staff of The Marine Nursing Home, who have shown care and kindness above and beyond the call of duty, and who did more than their best to make sure that during his last days Alastair experienced as little pain and discomfort as possible; to Marigold Cameron, who was invaluable during Alastair’s first illness; to Mr. Alan Smurthwaite, for officiating at this ceremony; and to Helen, Fiona and Jane, for making the arrangements and organising the details and for not getting too impatient with the rest of us, although I’m sure we thoroughly deserved it.
Maureen Lipman was talking to an aged aunt. This aged aunt was deaf, and just slightly dottled. And for some reason they were talking about driving on the motorway. Maureen Lipman said that at least she didn’t have to keep looking upwards to make sure that people on the flyovers weren’t throwing rocks down on the cars.
The aged aunt looked startled at this, and said, “Why, did that happen often?’ Maureen Lipman replied that, yes, it used to happen quite regularly. There was a long pause while the aged aunt thought about this. Then she said, “Chinese people?” There was an even longer pause while Maureen Lipman worked this out. Then she said, “No, no, no, no, no, auntie. ROCKS. Not WOKS.”
Many of you here who knew Alastair well will know that he loved jokes and funny stories, particularly ones with strong images and word-play, and that he was quite, quite hopeless at telling them. Long before he’d reached the punch-line, long before he was even within a country mile of the punch-line, he would be convulsed with coughing and spluttering, a paroxysm of gasping, wheezing laughter, while turning an alarming shade of purple and usually having to clutch a chair or table or any unfortunate spectator near enough to stop him from falling over.
This experience almost perfectly illustrated Robert Louis Stevenson’s words, that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, since quite often the spectators had to make do with the admittedly very entertaining build-up, because there was never any chance at all that they would hear the punch-line. In fact, sometimes people new to this experience would actually beg Alastair not to give them the punch-line, since the imminence of Alastair’s death from laughter, or more worryingly the need to give him the kiss of life, when his false teeth had already flown across the room into the dog’s basket, seemed far too high a price to pay.
I remember one particular story, involving three politicians and a large tin of treacle, which caused Alastair particular trouble. Over a whole week whenever I asked him, begged him for the punch-line, he would open his mouth and gasp and fall over, a heap of gasping humanity useless to man or beast. Eventually, he suggested that if he went into our downstairs toilet with a piece of paper and a pencil he might be able to write it down.
Half an hour later, after noises like an elephant gargling a bucketful of trifle, he staggered up the stairs, sweating, gasping, and triumphantly holding out a crumpled bit of paper with two lines of scrawl of which I could only ever make out the words, ‘jelly babies’. It was, I have to say, one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. But Alastair enjoyed it hugely.
A minister in Achiltibuie was addressing his congregation. “And the next lesson will be read my Miss Mary MacInnes.” A voice piped up from the back of the church: “Mary MacInnes is the biggest whore in Achiltibuie!” (A long, long pause.) “Nevertheless………”
This is a ‘nevertheless’ moment. I have to say that because I don’t want Alastair’s fans, and particularly Fiona, jumping up and pelting me with rotten fruit after hearing what I’m going to say, without keeping in mind that after I’ve said what I’m going to say there will be a ‘nevertheless’.
Alastair’s life, by his own lights, was a failure. He wanted to be a painter. In fact, not only a painter but a good painter, even a great painter, one whose name would be recognised and live on as a painter. And it didn’t work. As with so much in life, it was the smaller things which carried most conviction, and in Alastair’s case these were his drawings and his designs for pottery. But painting is what artists do, so he painted; and I never knew whether he realised how much better he was as a draughtman than as a painter. I think that he did; but he preferred to treat it as a sort of joke. And he tried writing.
He wrote short stories and plays, and I even remember him trying his hand, years ago, on radio scripts, in the days when we lived in Aultbea and there was no television and newpapers arrived a day late and the radio was everything. And he could write, and he could write well; but he lacked whatever quality it is necessary to have to make his writing great. And similarly to his painting, I think that he would have had more success if he had tried memoirs and remembrance of things past; but short stories and plays are what writers write, so he stuck to his last. And it was never quite good enough for his ambition.
And sometimes I have to admit that I felt desperately sorry for him, and I wished that there was some way to flip a quality-control switch and suddenly make his painting and writing as good as he wanted them to be, as good as he thought he was capable of doing but somehow could never produce.
Nevertheless. Does it matter? No, it doesn’t, and for two reasons. The first is that, no matter how important all this was to him, it was in the end only of academic interest. He was intellectually attracted to the Gauguin story – how Gauguin abandoned his family and went off to the South Seas and painted great pictures of naked maidens – but morally he found it repugnant. He loved his wife and family and life in Cromarty far too much to approve of anything so cruel and irresponsible and what he considered to be essentially uncivilised.
And second, as most of you know, he went to Art School as a mature student in his forties, and so discovered a job he loved doing. He adored teaching art to children. In particular he loved teaching art to young children, in primary school – they were, he said, not yet shackled by ideas of what was and was not art, and he allowed them to draw and paint what they wanted. If a girl wanted to paint a picture of her mother five times bigger than her house in the same painting – why not? If the painting was fun and decorative and psychologically true, who was to say that she was doing it the wrong way?
In some ways he was a bit of a quiet revolutionary and his pupils loved his classes. I remember him telling me that he had found again and again that most children in primary school could instinctively ‘understand’ a Picasso, a Klee or a Chagall in a way that seemed to be impossible to children in secondary schools or even most adults. Significantly, when he was called to do some supply teaching in Fortrose Academy he found the experience boring and tedious and uninspiring – the pupils already ‘knew’ what art was, and they could not be persuaded to do anything else except ‘art’.
To sum up: Alastair’s failure in painting and writing was ultimately only a failure in his own head. In the things that mattered - the pottery, his teaching, the love for and of his family, his love of film and books and good food and Cromarty – he was a huge success. A towering success. And it cannot be said too frequently or too loudly: in these days of fifteen minutes of fame, of vile reality shows and fame at all costs, we need much, much more of Alastair’s kind of ‘failure’. His quiet influence through his teaching, his family and his example will be felt for years and years to come.
As you will be able to imagine, Alastair was considered as a bit of an eccentric in the schools – or at least he was considered odd by the teachers and eccentric by the pupils, but by both with affection and respect. It was an image which he welcomed and encouraged. One of the manifestations of this was his ties. He built up a huge collection of odd and colourful ties, and made a point in some of the schools in never arriving with the same tie twice. Much was the speculation in his classes about what sort of tie he would be wearing that day.
One day he turned up in a class to an unpleasant surprise: one of his favourite classes, with whom he never had any trouble, was quietly unmanageable. There was much giggling and sniggering and glancing sideways at Alastair, but no indication of what on earth was causing this anarchy. Eventually he grew impatient, and demanded to know what was going on. Silence. After much shuffling and looking at the floor a little girl slowly raised her hand. ‘Please sir…..” “Yes? Well?” “Please sir…….you’re wearing two ties.”
When I was thinking about this speech, I was reminded again just how little I knew about Alastair’s life before I was conscious enough to take things in. Like a lot of his generation who went through the war he didn’t speak much about it, preferring to put it in the past and get on with his life. Angus and I were convinced that he’d personally won the war – he even had a medal to prove it! – but he talked very little about his experiences, and when he did they were usually the more light-hearted episodes. Like being threatened with lynching by his fellow sailors because he’s said that no, actually he didn’t hate the Germans. Or the time he was thrown in jail and threatened with court-martial because he’d pretended to misunderstand orders broadcast over a defective tannoy. Or ordering a copy of “The Egyptian Book of the Dead’ from a Glasgow bookshop, and being contacted by them four years later, after the war had ended, to be told that they’d put aside the book for him and did he still want it?
If pressed he would talk about the cold and dark of the Northern Convoys, and the mountainous seas; but when he was contacted recently to talk about his experiences in the navy at that time, he wasn’t interested. And that’s how he was. He lived less in the past than practically anyone I’ve talked to of that age, and it was one of his most endearing qualities.
One last anecdote, and one of the most moving. Alison and Alastair were a wonderful partnership, and without Alison’s support and sacrifice – and that is not too strong a word – he wouldn’t have been able to achieve half of what he did. But there were rough times, as there are in every marriage. Sometimes Alastair would go in the huff, or Alison wouldn’t talk to him because she was furious, and occasionally these two states would coincide. On one occasion there was silence for four days, a silence as heavy as thunder; and on the fourth day Alison went up to their room for a nap, as she did every afternoon, and as she lay down she saw, pinned to the ceiling directly above her, a note which read, simply, “I’m sorry.”
Several weeks ago, I found in a newspaper article a quotation from Albert Einstein which perfectly encapsulates Alastair’s beliefs, or lack of them. With mild apologies to the believers in the audience, it runs as follows: “I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death: let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts.”
And so to last words. Alastair loved last words. A favourite expression was, “Bugger Bognor”, supposedly the last words of George V. (The history-book version is the far less interesting and frankly unbelievable, “How is the empire?”) Two others of which he was particularly fond were The Younger Pitt’s and Gertrude Stein’s. The official version of The Younger Pitt’s was: “My country; Oh, how I leave my country.” The unofficial version was: “I think I could go one of Bellamy’s veal pies.” Gertrude Stein is said to have muttered, “What’s the answer?”, followed after a long, long pause by, “Alright then , what’s the question?”
The last thing I heard Alastair say was, “Thanks”, after Colin had pulled a quilt up over his shoulder, which is a polite and gracious word with which to end a long, rich life. However, I would like to end with some words from The Bible.
Alastair loved The Bible, and he loved the paradox that he, an atheist, could love The Bible. He loved the fact that, though translated and collated by a committee it contained some of the most wonderful and awe-inspiring poetry in the English language. He would quote obscure passages, usually to do with violent deaths or sexual congress with animals, at the most inappropriate moments.
And I would like to close with the last words of Christ, which are three of the most moving and at the same time most dangerously ambiguous words in the entire book, but which in Alastair’s mouth would have been much more definite:
It is finished. It is finished.
Spouses
Birth Date28 May 1925
Birth PlaceEastbourne
Death Date18 Jun 2006 Age: 81
Death PlaceWard 3C, Raigmore Hospital, Inverness
Burial Date28 Jun 2006
Burial PlaceCromarty Churchyard
OccupationRan Cromarty Pottery from 1965 to 1992
FatherGeorge Ernest VERNON (1902-1986)
MotherMarjorie Minnie VERNEY (1902-1971)
Misc. Notes
Alison was always affectionately called ‘The Boss’ by her family. Nominally the head of the family, Alastair always came second when managing the family was concerned.
Alison training to be a textile designer before this career was interrupted by the 2nd World War. After the war she worked in various jobs, including as a department store window dresser. Strangely, when she married Alastair in 1951 the wedding certificate had her profession as occupational therapist - a job she never mentioned.
After she married and had children Alison spent 10 years or more as housewife and mother. However, after the pretty financially disastrous move to Aultbea in Wester Ross, and her unhappines there due to unfriendly locals and the bullying of her children, she started buying in white pottery from Stoke-on-Trent to decorate with on-glaze colours and sell to tourists. This was both an artistic pleasure for her and a way of bringing in some much needed money. The pottery became a very important part of her life.
In 1965 Alison and Alastair realised that the bakery could not make enough money to support the family. On one occasion they had travelled to the East Coast, to visit friends I think, had come across Cromarty, and fell in love with the place immediately. In a short time the bakery was sold and the family moved to Cromarty. For the first year the family lived in an ex-war building at the top of the South Sutor whilst Alison and Alastair looked over prospective properties in the town itself. Eventually Seabank House was bought, and the family moved in.
Cromarty Design Workshop was started, and the Pottery shop opened. Most produce was sold to the tourist trade, and the shop did very well until the oil crisis of the early 1970s when there was a severe slump. After that, Alisn and Alastair had to take on a lot of wholesale trade to supplement income, exspecially over the winter, and for Alastair this meant a long day’s work - teaching each day at a school often 30 miles away, then working in the pottery often until midnight or even later if there were orders to complete. Fortunately this exhausting regime eased a little by the early 1980’s, and Alastair would have been happy to give up the pottery work entirely, except that this was clearly very important to Alison. She had built this successful business up from nothing, supported the family with it whilst Alastair was away at college retraining, and had supplemented their income through hard work for years afterwards.
To some extent Alison was the Pottery, and the Pottery Alison. Even after she could have retired, she insisted on carrying on decorating and slab building pots, and she continued to dabble with little bits and pieces until she was into her mid 70s.
Seabank House was Alison, Alastair and their family’s home for 41 years, until Alison died in June 2006 and Alastair in February 2007. They were very happy there, and I think that this made up for the years of struggle, hard work and isolation that Alison especially had suffered in Clydebank and Aultbea so far away from her birthplace in Eastbourne, Sussex.
Memories of Alison from her friends in Eastbourne:
Tessa Morton:
Her parents and mine knew each other when young - going to dances - but I know very little of Alison's past so can’t help with family history research, as we were never into our ancestors as people are today, so the subject never came up. Alison was studying fabric design at Art College and doing great things with her swimming. And I remember how she proudly introduced Alastair to us. Oh, happy days. I still miss our letters - a little of one's youth to hang onto.
Wyn Harrison:
I met Alison when we were both in the WRENS and stationed at Southwick Village near Portsmouth. Alison was a plotter at the establishment, known as HMS Dryad, from where Montgomery controlled and played a vital part in the Normandy landings. We kept up our friendship after we were de-mobbed, and I was living in West Sussex. All of the intervening years we wrote to each other, and I always wanted to visit her in Scotland when I was there, but was unable to do so.
Kathleen Brook née Gander:
Alison and I met at infant's school at the tender age of 5 years old. At the time 'Uncle George' managed a little hardware store in Seaside, Eastbourne, and they had the flat above the shop. The one difference with Alison and Colin, plus Uncle George, was their clothes. Mine were always good, but theirs almost put them in a class above us because Alison's Nanna (Ellen Verney) was widowed and left with three children to bring up. She got a post as Nanny to Mrs. Alison Settle's two children (a boy and a girl). Mrs. Settle was with Vogue Fashions magazine, and also 'The Lady', and to cut a long story short, all her children's cast-off clothes, plus her own, and before he died, her husband's, were passed on to Mr. and Mrs. Vernon, Alison and Colin. Lovely things which made all the other parents at school think how very well off the Vernons were, when in fact they weren't.
Oh, I'm not decrying them al all, but when Mrs Vernon decided their living quarters weren't good enough, and they moved across the road to 232 Seaside - and Uncle George soon lost his job. Times were hard fro them, and many times my mother had them at our house for a meal, to make sure that they had something in their tummies. I think Aunt Esh helped as much as she could too.
Anyway, Alison and i were at school together for almost all of our school days, although at 11, when we all took the Scholarship Exams, we were separated for a year when I went to Willowfield Central School, and she went to Bedewell Central School.. Mrs Vernon moved heaven and earth to get Alison moved to willowfield, and she moved at the end of the first year.
When we left school at the age of 14 our parents sent us to the Technical School. In 1940 we were evacuated to Knebworth in Hertfordshire, where Alison had a first rotten billet in Old Knebworth, where the lady was odd (didn't believe in baths during the winter), and also had a very peculiar son of our age. The alison was moved to a better place. We returned home to Eastbourne in 1941.
Alison and I were Brownies, then Guides together. We both swam a lot, Alison the Crawl sprint and distance, while I was sprint Breaststroke, and we were both members of Eastbourne Swimming Club and swam for Guide Galas
We also played Tennis and Stool Ball for the Tech, and helped to score the pants off the Knebworth children when we first played it there in the village, and they'd never seen seen our funny old Sussex game played with round bats, hard balls and high wickets. Alison had a pretty good all-round childhood, and I'm a bit surprised that she did not talk about it more.
I got a war-time job in local government, while Alison worked in an insurance office in town, then in the Borough Treasurer's Office, and then did a course at the School of Art before joining the WRENs. She was put on a charge during her first few days as a WREN for putting her bed-cover on upside down - an insult to the King! How we laughed.
Alison loved the Downs, and we used to spend lots of time exploring them, and the lovely villages there. On one occasion Alison found a very fluffy caterpillar and carried it home in her hands. Unfortunately the fur had a substance on it which gave her the most awful blistery rash. However, she kept it, and eventually it became a rather beautiful moth.
Another thing we used to do on the Downs was to go by bus to the village of Jevington, then take a path from there over the Downs and back to Eastbourne, either coming down into the old town, or walking to Beachy Head and then right along the beach - a three mile walk. At the right time of the year there were always wild mushrooms, blackberries or raspberries, and Alison would gather wild flowers such as violets and orchids for pressing and then mount them into little books. The views from the Downs were, and still are, lovely.
Another of Alison's favourite places was Birling Gap, where she used to go shrimping with her father. The cliffs there are part of the Seven Sisters, and are a lovely place to explore.
After the war Alison, with a little help from Mrs Settle, got a job at one of the big stores in London, working as a window dresser. She also did a course in Textile Design and, I believe, did some work in that line.
I still half expect to see a letter arrive on my mat, written in Alison’s distinctive hand. I am not sure I am right, but during the last few years I got the feeling that she was a wee bit home-sick for Eastbourne and all that she knew here, as she wrote in some letters saying how much she would like to visit here again but that, for various reasons, she did not think she would ever see her home town again.
------------------------------------------
Alison Dunn 1925-2006 - EULOGY
Written by Alex Dunn, and read by him at the Funeral Service
Thank you all for coming. I know that some of you have come a long way, and your presence is treasured.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are here to say farewell, but also to celebrate a life. However, I would find it impossible to talk in general terms about my mother, so what I am about to relate are my memories of her. Some of them may seem a bit quirky, so bear with me.
Alison Marjorie Ellen Dunn, nee Vernon, was thrawn. She was cussed. Sometimes she was cantankerous. She was stubborn to the point of immovability. She used tactlessness as a sort of conversational equivalent of a heat-seeking missile. And sometimes she was just downright strange. To give you an example: several days after my wife and I had returned from our honeymoon – this was over twenty five years ago, you understand – Alison presented us with a bin-liner full of odd socks. I mean, why? Was this some sort of weird fertility rite of which the anthropologists were not previously aware? Who knows? But at the same time she was loving and loveable. She was sympathetic, loyal, fiercely protective of her children – despite or possibly because of our many faults – and tolerant of others’ idiosyncracies. She was also, despite a husband and six children, very patient.
Some of you may remember that several years ago Alison had a hip operation, which was not successful, and at the same time contracted MRSA, which led to months of boredom, discomfort and misery in an isolation ward in Raigmore. But she survived. And I have the theory that she survived because she’d been practicing.
One of my most enduring and strangely endearing memories is of Alison falling downstairs. This she seemed to do on a regular basis. When we moved from the tin shed up on the Sutor down to the Shore Street house, Alison and Alastair slept in a room in one of the cottages, which was connected to the main house by a staircase which was really no more than a glorified ladder. (As was the case in most of the older Fishertown cottages.) It was vertiginously steep, and had several treads which were either split or rotten, or both. And in my memory Alison would launch herself down this stair at least once a month. It was probably no more than five or six times in all, but in my memory this adventure seemed to come round like bank holidays. There would be a thunderous series of crashes and bangs and hollow thumps, followed by a stunned silence in which nature seemed to hold its breath, and then a plaintive call of, “Will someone please come and help me?”
And the strange thing is that an accident which would have put a normal person at least into hospital if not into a coffin left her with nothing but slight bruising. Several of we children did speculate about the possibility of somehow making money from Alison’s indestructibility, by selling her to a funfair, but nothing came of it.
Alison and Alastair doted on each other, and they complemented each other in many ways. But also, Alison had a toughness, a psychological strength, in a way that seems to be particular to some women. It was she, after all, who started the pottery, and she who made sure that it continued even when it looked as though it couldn’t possibly go on. All it needed was a couple of bad tourist years and things could get very, very tight indeed.
I remember one weekend in particular when there was no money at all. Searches of the back of the sofa and behind the fridge and in the dog basket dug up a grand total of one shilling and tuppence, to do a family of eight for a week. And then a woman came into the shop and bought an armful of pottery, certainly enough to see the family through the next few weeks. No sooner had she left the shop than Alison and Alastair were whirling round the room, whooping with delight and relief and chanting “Money, money, money, money” at the tops of their voices. And in the middle of this mad and noisy celebration the woman came back into the shop to pick up her scarf.
Alison’s strength saw us through these difficult years; but much more difficult were the years Alastair was away at Art School, and then Teacher Training College. Nothing can take away from Alastair’s achievement. Studying in Aberdeen as a mature student. Puttering home through rain, snow, hail and sleet on a clapped-out moped just so he could be home at the weekends. And the weekends spent not only making pottery but also doing course-work for the Art School. And to cap it all, sleeping in a hearse in a back garden in Aberdeen through one of the worst winters since the war.
I am amazed he did so much – my own college years were a cake-walk by comparison. But without Alison at the helm none of it would have been possible, and I have nothing but awe and admiration for the way that she held us all together during these years. Some of us were crashing and blundering our way through our teenage years – I can remember myself as being quite insufferable and obnoxious – and we must have made her life particularly hard and miserable, but it is to her everlasting credit that she didn’t kill any of us.
Like any marriage Alison and Alastair’s had its swings and roundabouts. But one particularly entertaining characteristic was the huff. Alastair would go into a huff, and Alison would tell him not to be an idiot. In how many marriages is that true? But he was and is also a champion procrastinator. Again, some of the older ones here may remember that as well as the pottery my parents used to run a tea-room during the summer months. During hot summers this was very busy, with the room full and other tourists taking trays out to the sea-wall. My sisters and several other girls were kept busy in the kitchen or as waitresses.
One summer, a hot, bright summer with the town packed with tourists and the kitchen packed with girls making scones and sandwiches – one summer, as I say, Alastair hadn’t filled in his tax form. For weeks he hadn’t been filling in his tax form, and Alison was getting increasingly impatient with his excuses. Eventually it all came to a head one day, a particularly hot day, with the tea-room packed and the kitchen heaving – at just the moment when both connecting doors between the tea-room and the kitchen were wide open, the air was suddenly rent with Alison’s exasperated yell: “Oh for God’s sake, Alastair, stop grating the cheese and pay your income tax!” If I ever feel tempted to write Alison’s biography, that will be the title: “Stop grating the cheese and pay your income tax!”
After Alison had had her stroke, several of you used the word ‘independent’ to describe her when you were talking to us. This seemed strange, because when you live close to someone you perhaps don’t see them quite as clearly as others do, others who see from a distance; but yes, after thinking about it I can see that ‘independent ‘ is one of the good words to describe her. When The Cromarty Group was set up over twenty five years ago it included such artists as Sandy Hardie, Charles Bannerman, Mike Taylor and Bill Cowie. These were all larger-than-life personalities and gifted artists, but not perhaps the best people to help organise a group exhibition; and without Alison’s tenacity and determination I am quite sure that the thing would never have got off the ground, far less still be running to this day.
And of course there is the pottery. Alison was born in Eastbourne, and after marriage she moved to Clydebank. Eight years later, with four children, she and Alastair moved to Aultbea near Gairloch. She loved the landscape of the west coast and Inverewe Gardens, which was then more or less undiscovered as a tourist attraction; but she found the west coast society alien, and for a few years she was less than happy. But then she took up pottery again – she had studied pottery at Art School before the Second World War, and in Aultbea she bought in blanks from Stoke-on-Trent and painted them with on-glaze designs.
Then the family moved to Cromarty, and production expanded to include the making of pots and glazes. I can still remember, unfortunately, the rank and cloying smell of burning seaweed from which was prepared a dark-brown glaze. And recently Alison was delighted and amused to discover that not only was there a site in the barras in Glasgow which specialised in her Cromarty pottery, but also that some of her pots has started to appear on E-bay.
A couple of years after we moved into Shore Street Alastair eventually got around to painting a sign. As usual he did it beautifully: Cromarty Design Workshop – Alastair and Alison Dunn. Alison was furious. I can still remember the argument, and that it took me some time to work out what it was all about. She was furious because it was her pottery, she had started it, she had made it grow, and her name should have been first. At the time I thought this was all rather petty; but thinking back, at all her struggles and hard work, I can quite understand her pride in what she had done, and that yes, her name should have been first. And so Alastair had to wait for the paint to dry, paint over the names and then repaint it the right way.
Saying that we will all miss her is what everyone says in these circumstances, but it is no less true for being said so often. I already miss her very much, and I am sure you do too. I feel as though I have lost a trusted guide, and I feel guilty at having lost her. And of course Alastair has lost so much more.
Lastly, over the last fortnight all of you have wanted to talk about Alison, to give your support and sympathy, and for that we are very, very grateful. It has been a great help. After the internment refreshments will be provided in The Brewery. You are all very welcome to join the family there.
And very lastly, for those with an interest in such things: the bag of odd socks worked, and within a couple of years Alison was presented with the first of her grandchildren.
Alison training to be a textile designer before this career was interrupted by the 2nd World War. After the war she worked in various jobs, including as a department store window dresser. Strangely, when she married Alastair in 1951 the wedding certificate had her profession as occupational therapist - a job she never mentioned.
After she married and had children Alison spent 10 years or more as housewife and mother. However, after the pretty financially disastrous move to Aultbea in Wester Ross, and her unhappines there due to unfriendly locals and the bullying of her children, she started buying in white pottery from Stoke-on-Trent to decorate with on-glaze colours and sell to tourists. This was both an artistic pleasure for her and a way of bringing in some much needed money. The pottery became a very important part of her life.
In 1965 Alison and Alastair realised that the bakery could not make enough money to support the family. On one occasion they had travelled to the East Coast, to visit friends I think, had come across Cromarty, and fell in love with the place immediately. In a short time the bakery was sold and the family moved to Cromarty. For the first year the family lived in an ex-war building at the top of the South Sutor whilst Alison and Alastair looked over prospective properties in the town itself. Eventually Seabank House was bought, and the family moved in.
Cromarty Design Workshop was started, and the Pottery shop opened. Most produce was sold to the tourist trade, and the shop did very well until the oil crisis of the early 1970s when there was a severe slump. After that, Alisn and Alastair had to take on a lot of wholesale trade to supplement income, exspecially over the winter, and for Alastair this meant a long day’s work - teaching each day at a school often 30 miles away, then working in the pottery often until midnight or even later if there were orders to complete. Fortunately this exhausting regime eased a little by the early 1980’s, and Alastair would have been happy to give up the pottery work entirely, except that this was clearly very important to Alison. She had built this successful business up from nothing, supported the family with it whilst Alastair was away at college retraining, and had supplemented their income through hard work for years afterwards.
To some extent Alison was the Pottery, and the Pottery Alison. Even after she could have retired, she insisted on carrying on decorating and slab building pots, and she continued to dabble with little bits and pieces until she was into her mid 70s.
Seabank House was Alison, Alastair and their family’s home for 41 years, until Alison died in June 2006 and Alastair in February 2007. They were very happy there, and I think that this made up for the years of struggle, hard work and isolation that Alison especially had suffered in Clydebank and Aultbea so far away from her birthplace in Eastbourne, Sussex.
Memories of Alison from her friends in Eastbourne:
Tessa Morton:
Her parents and mine knew each other when young - going to dances - but I know very little of Alison's past so can’t help with family history research, as we were never into our ancestors as people are today, so the subject never came up. Alison was studying fabric design at Art College and doing great things with her swimming. And I remember how she proudly introduced Alastair to us. Oh, happy days. I still miss our letters - a little of one's youth to hang onto.
Wyn Harrison:
I met Alison when we were both in the WRENS and stationed at Southwick Village near Portsmouth. Alison was a plotter at the establishment, known as HMS Dryad, from where Montgomery controlled and played a vital part in the Normandy landings. We kept up our friendship after we were de-mobbed, and I was living in West Sussex. All of the intervening years we wrote to each other, and I always wanted to visit her in Scotland when I was there, but was unable to do so.
Kathleen Brook née Gander:
Alison and I met at infant's school at the tender age of 5 years old. At the time 'Uncle George' managed a little hardware store in Seaside, Eastbourne, and they had the flat above the shop. The one difference with Alison and Colin, plus Uncle George, was their clothes. Mine were always good, but theirs almost put them in a class above us because Alison's Nanna (Ellen Verney) was widowed and left with three children to bring up. She got a post as Nanny to Mrs. Alison Settle's two children (a boy and a girl). Mrs. Settle was with Vogue Fashions magazine, and also 'The Lady', and to cut a long story short, all her children's cast-off clothes, plus her own, and before he died, her husband's, were passed on to Mr. and Mrs. Vernon, Alison and Colin. Lovely things which made all the other parents at school think how very well off the Vernons were, when in fact they weren't.
Oh, I'm not decrying them al all, but when Mrs Vernon decided their living quarters weren't good enough, and they moved across the road to 232 Seaside - and Uncle George soon lost his job. Times were hard fro them, and many times my mother had them at our house for a meal, to make sure that they had something in their tummies. I think Aunt Esh helped as much as she could too.
Anyway, Alison and i were at school together for almost all of our school days, although at 11, when we all took the Scholarship Exams, we were separated for a year when I went to Willowfield Central School, and she went to Bedewell Central School.. Mrs Vernon moved heaven and earth to get Alison moved to willowfield, and she moved at the end of the first year.
When we left school at the age of 14 our parents sent us to the Technical School. In 1940 we were evacuated to Knebworth in Hertfordshire, where Alison had a first rotten billet in Old Knebworth, where the lady was odd (didn't believe in baths during the winter), and also had a very peculiar son of our age. The alison was moved to a better place. We returned home to Eastbourne in 1941.
Alison and I were Brownies, then Guides together. We both swam a lot, Alison the Crawl sprint and distance, while I was sprint Breaststroke, and we were both members of Eastbourne Swimming Club and swam for Guide Galas
We also played Tennis and Stool Ball for the Tech, and helped to score the pants off the Knebworth children when we first played it there in the village, and they'd never seen seen our funny old Sussex game played with round bats, hard balls and high wickets. Alison had a pretty good all-round childhood, and I'm a bit surprised that she did not talk about it more.
I got a war-time job in local government, while Alison worked in an insurance office in town, then in the Borough Treasurer's Office, and then did a course at the School of Art before joining the WRENs. She was put on a charge during her first few days as a WREN for putting her bed-cover on upside down - an insult to the King! How we laughed.
Alison loved the Downs, and we used to spend lots of time exploring them, and the lovely villages there. On one occasion Alison found a very fluffy caterpillar and carried it home in her hands. Unfortunately the fur had a substance on it which gave her the most awful blistery rash. However, she kept it, and eventually it became a rather beautiful moth.
Another thing we used to do on the Downs was to go by bus to the village of Jevington, then take a path from there over the Downs and back to Eastbourne, either coming down into the old town, or walking to Beachy Head and then right along the beach - a three mile walk. At the right time of the year there were always wild mushrooms, blackberries or raspberries, and Alison would gather wild flowers such as violets and orchids for pressing and then mount them into little books. The views from the Downs were, and still are, lovely.
Another of Alison's favourite places was Birling Gap, where she used to go shrimping with her father. The cliffs there are part of the Seven Sisters, and are a lovely place to explore.
After the war Alison, with a little help from Mrs Settle, got a job at one of the big stores in London, working as a window dresser. She also did a course in Textile Design and, I believe, did some work in that line.
I still half expect to see a letter arrive on my mat, written in Alison’s distinctive hand. I am not sure I am right, but during the last few years I got the feeling that she was a wee bit home-sick for Eastbourne and all that she knew here, as she wrote in some letters saying how much she would like to visit here again but that, for various reasons, she did not think she would ever see her home town again.
------------------------------------------
Alison Dunn 1925-2006 - EULOGY
Written by Alex Dunn, and read by him at the Funeral Service
Thank you all for coming. I know that some of you have come a long way, and your presence is treasured.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are here to say farewell, but also to celebrate a life. However, I would find it impossible to talk in general terms about my mother, so what I am about to relate are my memories of her. Some of them may seem a bit quirky, so bear with me.
Alison Marjorie Ellen Dunn, nee Vernon, was thrawn. She was cussed. Sometimes she was cantankerous. She was stubborn to the point of immovability. She used tactlessness as a sort of conversational equivalent of a heat-seeking missile. And sometimes she was just downright strange. To give you an example: several days after my wife and I had returned from our honeymoon – this was over twenty five years ago, you understand – Alison presented us with a bin-liner full of odd socks. I mean, why? Was this some sort of weird fertility rite of which the anthropologists were not previously aware? Who knows? But at the same time she was loving and loveable. She was sympathetic, loyal, fiercely protective of her children – despite or possibly because of our many faults – and tolerant of others’ idiosyncracies. She was also, despite a husband and six children, very patient.
Some of you may remember that several years ago Alison had a hip operation, which was not successful, and at the same time contracted MRSA, which led to months of boredom, discomfort and misery in an isolation ward in Raigmore. But she survived. And I have the theory that she survived because she’d been practicing.
One of my most enduring and strangely endearing memories is of Alison falling downstairs. This she seemed to do on a regular basis. When we moved from the tin shed up on the Sutor down to the Shore Street house, Alison and Alastair slept in a room in one of the cottages, which was connected to the main house by a staircase which was really no more than a glorified ladder. (As was the case in most of the older Fishertown cottages.) It was vertiginously steep, and had several treads which were either split or rotten, or both. And in my memory Alison would launch herself down this stair at least once a month. It was probably no more than five or six times in all, but in my memory this adventure seemed to come round like bank holidays. There would be a thunderous series of crashes and bangs and hollow thumps, followed by a stunned silence in which nature seemed to hold its breath, and then a plaintive call of, “Will someone please come and help me?”
And the strange thing is that an accident which would have put a normal person at least into hospital if not into a coffin left her with nothing but slight bruising. Several of we children did speculate about the possibility of somehow making money from Alison’s indestructibility, by selling her to a funfair, but nothing came of it.
Alison and Alastair doted on each other, and they complemented each other in many ways. But also, Alison had a toughness, a psychological strength, in a way that seems to be particular to some women. It was she, after all, who started the pottery, and she who made sure that it continued even when it looked as though it couldn’t possibly go on. All it needed was a couple of bad tourist years and things could get very, very tight indeed.
I remember one weekend in particular when there was no money at all. Searches of the back of the sofa and behind the fridge and in the dog basket dug up a grand total of one shilling and tuppence, to do a family of eight for a week. And then a woman came into the shop and bought an armful of pottery, certainly enough to see the family through the next few weeks. No sooner had she left the shop than Alison and Alastair were whirling round the room, whooping with delight and relief and chanting “Money, money, money, money” at the tops of their voices. And in the middle of this mad and noisy celebration the woman came back into the shop to pick up her scarf.
Alison’s strength saw us through these difficult years; but much more difficult were the years Alastair was away at Art School, and then Teacher Training College. Nothing can take away from Alastair’s achievement. Studying in Aberdeen as a mature student. Puttering home through rain, snow, hail and sleet on a clapped-out moped just so he could be home at the weekends. And the weekends spent not only making pottery but also doing course-work for the Art School. And to cap it all, sleeping in a hearse in a back garden in Aberdeen through one of the worst winters since the war.
I am amazed he did so much – my own college years were a cake-walk by comparison. But without Alison at the helm none of it would have been possible, and I have nothing but awe and admiration for the way that she held us all together during these years. Some of us were crashing and blundering our way through our teenage years – I can remember myself as being quite insufferable and obnoxious – and we must have made her life particularly hard and miserable, but it is to her everlasting credit that she didn’t kill any of us.
Like any marriage Alison and Alastair’s had its swings and roundabouts. But one particularly entertaining characteristic was the huff. Alastair would go into a huff, and Alison would tell him not to be an idiot. In how many marriages is that true? But he was and is also a champion procrastinator. Again, some of the older ones here may remember that as well as the pottery my parents used to run a tea-room during the summer months. During hot summers this was very busy, with the room full and other tourists taking trays out to the sea-wall. My sisters and several other girls were kept busy in the kitchen or as waitresses.
One summer, a hot, bright summer with the town packed with tourists and the kitchen packed with girls making scones and sandwiches – one summer, as I say, Alastair hadn’t filled in his tax form. For weeks he hadn’t been filling in his tax form, and Alison was getting increasingly impatient with his excuses. Eventually it all came to a head one day, a particularly hot day, with the tea-room packed and the kitchen heaving – at just the moment when both connecting doors between the tea-room and the kitchen were wide open, the air was suddenly rent with Alison’s exasperated yell: “Oh for God’s sake, Alastair, stop grating the cheese and pay your income tax!” If I ever feel tempted to write Alison’s biography, that will be the title: “Stop grating the cheese and pay your income tax!”
After Alison had had her stroke, several of you used the word ‘independent’ to describe her when you were talking to us. This seemed strange, because when you live close to someone you perhaps don’t see them quite as clearly as others do, others who see from a distance; but yes, after thinking about it I can see that ‘independent ‘ is one of the good words to describe her. When The Cromarty Group was set up over twenty five years ago it included such artists as Sandy Hardie, Charles Bannerman, Mike Taylor and Bill Cowie. These were all larger-than-life personalities and gifted artists, but not perhaps the best people to help organise a group exhibition; and without Alison’s tenacity and determination I am quite sure that the thing would never have got off the ground, far less still be running to this day.
And of course there is the pottery. Alison was born in Eastbourne, and after marriage she moved to Clydebank. Eight years later, with four children, she and Alastair moved to Aultbea near Gairloch. She loved the landscape of the west coast and Inverewe Gardens, which was then more or less undiscovered as a tourist attraction; but she found the west coast society alien, and for a few years she was less than happy. But then she took up pottery again – she had studied pottery at Art School before the Second World War, and in Aultbea she bought in blanks from Stoke-on-Trent and painted them with on-glaze designs.
Then the family moved to Cromarty, and production expanded to include the making of pots and glazes. I can still remember, unfortunately, the rank and cloying smell of burning seaweed from which was prepared a dark-brown glaze. And recently Alison was delighted and amused to discover that not only was there a site in the barras in Glasgow which specialised in her Cromarty pottery, but also that some of her pots has started to appear on E-bay.
A couple of years after we moved into Shore Street Alastair eventually got around to painting a sign. As usual he did it beautifully: Cromarty Design Workshop – Alastair and Alison Dunn. Alison was furious. I can still remember the argument, and that it took me some time to work out what it was all about. She was furious because it was her pottery, she had started it, she had made it grow, and her name should have been first. At the time I thought this was all rather petty; but thinking back, at all her struggles and hard work, I can quite understand her pride in what she had done, and that yes, her name should have been first. And so Alastair had to wait for the paint to dry, paint over the names and then repaint it the right way.
Saying that we will all miss her is what everyone says in these circumstances, but it is no less true for being said so often. I already miss her very much, and I am sure you do too. I feel as though I have lost a trusted guide, and I feel guilty at having lost her. And of course Alastair has lost so much more.
Lastly, over the last fortnight all of you have wanted to talk about Alison, to give your support and sympathy, and for that we are very, very grateful. It has been a great help. After the internment refreshments will be provided in The Brewery. You are all very welcome to join the family there.
And very lastly, for those with an interest in such things: the bag of odd socks worked, and within a couple of years Alison was presented with the first of her grandchildren.
Marr Date26 Mar 1951
Marr PlaceChrist Church, Eastbourne
Misc. Notes
The Wedding reception was at the Drive Hotel, 153 Victoria Drive Eastbourne.