LITMIR.BIZ

       Standing, family Fleming: Minnie Needham, her husband Harry Fleming, their daughters Amy & Annie, circa 1930

      A FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH from 1914 or ’15 shows my father, Alex, in his Black Watch uniform, with khaki kilt standing beside his father and mother, who died long before I was born. At first a weigh-bridge clerk at the Glasgow docks, Dad was just 18, so old enough to join the army when war was declared – he bought his first pipe and tobacco with his first pay. His dour, hard-faced father was a kind man and industrial blacksmith in Bridgeton, then Glasgow’s east manufacturing quarter. Also an elder of a Congregationalist church, he taught Sunday schools and was a friend of Keir Hardie, the first Labour MP to enter Westminster. His sweet, plump, motherly wife had been a power-loom weaver before marriage, an excellent housewife after. Also in the group is a sturdy young girl, my Aunt Agnes, who worked all her life behind the counter of a bakery on London Road and never married.

      In the 1914–18 war my dad lost faith in his parents’ God but they never quarrelled about that loss. His father had admired Gladstone and Keir Hardy – was both a Liberal and Labour Party supporter. In post-war Glasgow my dad naturally became a Socialist and the works of George Bernard Shaw converted him to Fabian, non-revolutionary Socialism. After a spell in Stobhill Hospital he received a small government pension for a shrapnel wound in the stomach, and held a job in Laird’s box-making factory until the Second World War. He joined the Ramblers’ Federation, Holiday Fellowship and other non-profit-making societies formed by people of many social classes who liked the inexpensive pleasures of walking, cycling and climbing. He was a founder member of the Scottish Youth Hostels Association, did unpaid work as a hill guide and secretary for the Camping Club of Great Britain’s Scottish Branch. When climbing Sgurr Alasdair in Skye he was told the mountain’s name was Gaelic for Alexander, so it was given to me.

      He met his wife in a small Holiday Fellowship group climbing Ben Lomond. Her name was Amy Fleming and a photograph shows her with her mother and father, Minnie Needham Fleming and Harry Fleming on the left, and on the right her younger sister, Annie. Minnie and Harry came from Northampton, where he had been a foreman boot-maker. He had also been an active trade unionist, and was sacked for it and put on the English employers’ blacklist. He found work by coming with his wife to Scotland, where their daughters were born. The photograph shows all four with two Holiday Fellowshippers, probably in the hills near Carbeth that overlook the Blane Valley. The sturdy man squatting in the heather is Bill Ferris, Dad’s philatelist friend, who had a weekend hut at Carbeth. My father is not in the picture but may have held the camera because he was a keen photographer and filled albums with photographs he took when hillwalking and climbing.

      My mother Amy was a shop assistant in Campbell, Stuart and MacDonald’s clothing warehouse before marriage, becoming a housewife afterward for reasons already given. She loved music and when the opera came to Glasgow astonished her less daring younger sister (my Aunt Annie) by having a different boyfriend take her to it several nights in one week. She sang in Hugh Robertson’s Orpheus Choir and I am still haunted by the words and tunes of the songs she sang at home. Her wide circle of women friends contained most neighbouring houses, for she had a pleasant discretion that never passed on malicious gossip, so was trusted

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