My father Andrew Erskine, who has died aged 96, was one of the last of the generation of Scots born before the Great Depression. His life was an exemplar of social mobility in action.
Despite the disruption of the second world war and his working-class background, the Alloa academy in his home town in Clackmannanshire helped him win a place to study classics at the University of St Andrews, matriculating in 1946. At the end of his first year, he contracted tuberculosis and had to spend the next few years in and out of TB clinics.
This was a formative period for him, with ample time for informal study but also for debate with fellow patients about social issues, postwar politics and new forms of cultural expression. His disease was finally cured, after near-fatal surgical interventions, when he became one of the first Scottish patients to receive the antibiotic streptomycin. He finally graduated with an MA in history in 1954.
Andrew was born in Alloa to Isabella (nee Archibald) and Andrew Erskine, a joiner. He used every opportunity to savour life. In 1953 he took a train journey to attend the Soviet-sponsored World Festival of Youth, visiting Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, Budapest and Bucharest. He retained vivid recollections of the ruination of postwar Europe, but also the friendship and kindness shown to him everywhere he went.
Advised to seek a “quiet” profession, his first job was with the Lanarkshire library service, where he met his future wife, Pamela (nee Bowell). After their marriage in 1958, he became a teacher, first at Wade academy in Anstruther, Fife, and later as head of history at Hawick high school in the Scottish Borders. There he combined school duties with writing (unperformed) plays and articles for local newspapers, and continued to add to his substantial personal library and to his collection of jazz recordings.
On retirement in 1989, Andrew and Pamela moved to Edinburgh, where they continued to travel, read widely, attend concerts, cinema and theatre, and entertain family and friends. In the early 2000s they took a plot at Edinburgh’s Inverleith allotments, which Andrew tended well into his 80s – not bad for a man with one lung and heart disease. He lived independently and was intellectually active until a month before his death. Pamela died in 2020.
Andrew is survived by his sons, Adam and me, and his grandsons, Andrew, Joseph and Thomas.
