A history of high jinks

On the wall of my kitchen hangs a curious picture. It is a hand-painted cartoon which tells, in 44 frames, the story of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It was given to me by my lifelong friend, Ian Duffield, who bought it in Ethiopia in around 1960. In the earliest-known photo of the Society’s Tasting Panel, he is the guy on my left.

Ian was a member of my whisky syndicate and an enthusiastic shareholder in the early days of the Society. On the Tasting Panel, he was great. Besides knowing food and wine and being an excellent cook – his Charlotte Malakoff was to die for – he had an irresistible flow of language. He would quote Shakespeare in a rough Birmingham accent, pointing out that was probably how it originally sounded. Shakespeare came from Stratford, just down the road from Ian’s native Birmingham.

I remember the first time I met him. We had been asked to a party by a teacher friend of ours who lived in a top flat in Dublin Street, Edinburgh. After I rang the bell on the street door, there was a long delay and then appeared the most extraordinary figure. Tall, thin, with receding red hair and beard, and a huge toothy grin. He was dressed in a bright yellow Nigerian chief’s robe with matching embroidered cap and a pair of sandals. I took an instant dislike to him and climbed the stairs grumpily.

It was noisy and everyone seemed happy, my grumpiness receded slightly. There was a lot of food, some of it odd by the standards of 1960s Edinburgh, some of it odd by any standards. But what caught my eye was the centrepiece: a huge dish of boiled pigs’ trotters, which people were eating with their fingers (there is no other sensible way to eat boiled pigs’ trotters). My grumpiness instantly disappeared, for I have long loved pigs’ trotters. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Ian had got a job teaching history at the University of Edinburgh. Though his knowledge of history was prodigious, he was to specialise in the history of colonialism and of Africa in particular. He was first and foremost an inspirational teacher and, though he didn’t publish much, there are professors of history in universities around the world who look to him as their mentor.

Both in and out of university, Ian was a bon vivant and eccentric. In his fifties he took to smoking cigarettes long after it had been known to be dangerous;
I suspect for that very reason. He was a proponent of high jinks, a very Scottish kind of ebullience, and he was my comrade in many ploys; some of them mischievous, all of them fun. An irrepressible talker and a wit of the highest order, he was the best of company and, when he was struck by Alzheimer’s, it seemed the cruellest irony of fate.

If the Scotch Malt Whisky Society today retains anything of its original spirit, much of it is thanks to Ian Duffield.