A Glasgow hard man

There was a time when, to be counted a hard man in mountaineering circles, a person must routinely engage in pursuits so insanely dangerous that keeping a club of such people in existence was difficult. Historically the Glasgow hardmen’s club, the Creag Dhu, had mixed poaching with climbing, providing sustenance as well as variety. Being a traditionalist, a fearless climber and an expert poacher, my pal John Ferguson was a member. How I met John is one of the many Society stories shared in my book, The Founders Tale, so I won’t go into that here.

John was a member of my whisky syndicate and to him I turned when, having had the daft idea that people might want to drink, and thus buy, such wonderful stuff. I realised that I might need expert advice, since I knew next to nothing about whisky. John promptly produced Russell Sharp, another former hard man: former, therefore still alive. Over a lunchtime beer in the Horseshoe Bar on Drury Street, Glasgow, Russell explained how the great Scotch whisky industry would crush any such enterprise. ‘But’ he said, ‘if you can think of a way of doing it, I’m in.’ He then went on to tell us just why the whisky we were getting tasted so much better than the stuff that was available in bottle. Since Russell was one of Scotch whisky’s foremost technical experts, this was grist to our mill.
John and I finished the afternoon in the bar and reeled home, rejoicing in the possibilities of fun offered by a conflict with the Scotch whisky industry. Russell had explained that what we proposed would probably lead us into legal bother, but neither of us were over-troubled by this. I, because I was in the grip of a good idea, and John because he was, by profession, a criminologist and knew something about the law. John taught criminology at Strathclyde University and also, surprisingly, to Scotland’s police forces, at their college in Tulliallan. I say surprisingly, for John’s past was somewhat obscure even to his friends, but rumour had it that his early life-experience was relevant to his profession – and I don’t mean the poaching, which was only to be expected of a Dhu.

To describe John as a hard man is perhaps to give a misleading impression, for though he was physically formidable and had seen some rough times, he was the most peaceable of people. He was hugely well-informed about all sorts of odd things, and of the kindliest disposition. He was never happier than in his tiny cottage in Benderloch on the shore of the Firth of Lorn, with a bunch of his motley friends playing guitar and singing songs – any songs, as long as they were good ones. His friends were from every social class and milieu. When he was diagnosed with the cancer of which he would later pass from, he was operated on by one of those friends, one of the country’s leading orthopaedic surgeons. As soon as he could escape the hospital, he had his little car modified so that he could drive it one-handed (his right arm being gone). He headed for Benderloch, sanity and some of the many, many people who loved him.

John brought a welcome breath of Glasgow to the Society, which thus far had been an Edinburgh-based conspiracy. Glaswegians had long seen Edinburgh as irredeemably bourgeois. The Vaults did something to dispel this for John; when I took him to meet Mary Moriarty in the Port o’ Leith bar, he was won over. When she invited him to sing, his conversion was complete. He would have liked the Society’s Bath Street Members’ Room in Glasgow; he would have liked the people behind the bar there, too. I wonder, do they sing?