Born in Dailly, Ayrshire, he was educated at Whitehill school in Glasgow and later at Glasgow University before serving with the Royal Medical Corps in, among other places, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast from the beginning of the Second World War, taking a 24-hour leave in July 1940, to marry Betty.

He had graduated from Glasgow University in 1942 but, on returning to his home city in 1946, he enrolled in the honours course, graduating in 1948. He was then offered a post in the English department by Professor Peter Alexander.

He taught a range of courses from Elizabethan literature through T S Eliot to contemporary American literature and, of course, Shakespeare. He once remarked, with some wit: “Titus Andronicus isn’t to my taste.”

However, it was his popularisation of American literature, writers such as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Robert Frost and the Beat Poets that excited many students in the late 1950s and 1960s. As a former student, my fondest memory of Jack was a one-hour lecture on Miller’s Death of a Salesman. It was electrifying and hugely influential in my life and career.

A former colleague, Marshall Walker, who now lives in New Zealand, writes: “Some cheeky students called him Flash Jack. Others chose to see in the hair, the moustache and the bow tie as a Robert Louis Stevenson clone.

“Whatever you called him, however you saw him, what you heard was incompar­able. Ignition the second he stood at the lectern, cleared his throat of the last cigarette and raised his hand in greeting as if to say, ‘See what I’m bringing you.’ If this was Eng Lit it was also news of life and we couldn’t get enough of it – this Windhover man and his dappled sports jacket mastering the air of the English classroom.”

Jack Rillie served in the English department for 35 years, later returning part-time for a further 10 years. He was also fully involved in the spread of extramural education, working for some years at Newbattle Abbey in Edinburgh under the poet Edwin Muir. And his valued contribution to the Scottish University Summer School was immense.

He was a spellbinding teacher but the centre of his life was his family, his late wife Betty, his daughters Judy and Jacquie, and his five grandchildren and two great-grand children.

When we saw him at home he often quoted Shakespeare. So Mark Antony’s lines on Brutus are surely as appropriate to Jack: “His life was gentle and the elements So mixed in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, ‘This was a man’.” His legacy, his influence on hundreds of former students, will be felt for a long time.

By Bob Cooper

MY first experience of Jack Rillie came on a dull winter morning in a lecture room at Glasgow University. I was already feeling disillusioned with the university, which seemed to me like a kind of hothouse where they cultivated exotic concerns that would shrivel to instant irrelevance if transplanted to the real world.

I was thinking of leaving.

Then a dapperly dressed man, with a hit of a young Einstein about the head, came in, put down his papers and started to talk. The day brightened. I imagined I could almost hear excited interest all over the room. What was this? Here was a man talking about books with a passion that suggested they were the humanist scriptures bringing us urgent news of ourselves. He exuded a kind of Pentecostal belief in the value of great writing.

I thought I might stay. Subsequently, I was lucky enough to have him as a tutor and an unofficial counsellor who nursed me through four years of continuing misgivings about university generally.

Many years later, I came across something Brecht had written that gave me a kind of eureka moment in my understanding of what was so special about Jack Rillie’s teaching. Brecht wrote: “Our feelings impel us towards the maximum effort of reasoning, and our reasoning purifies our feelings.” He helped us through that process.

He exemplified what I have always thought a university English department should be about: not writing obscure papers that no-one is likely to read but other academics, not issuing paper qualifications, not equipping students to pass exams – but enlarging them as people. He taught literature as a vital part of our experience, a way to help us find ourselves.

He certainly did that for me. Multiply my experience by many and you have the Rillie Effect. They should have found a way to bottle it for future generations.

Fairly recently, two friends (Bob Cooper and Jim McCall) and I had the good fortune to make contact with him again through his family. (His

family is generous-spirited and welcoming. But then – given his nature and the quality of his late wife, Betty, to whom he often referred as if she remained his emotional compass – how else would they be?) The three of us visited him at home a couple of times, with more sessions planned. We all enjoyed wine and nibbles and wide-ranging talk. No prisoners were taken. Those were great nights. They were just too few. His mobility was pretty well gone by that time but, until very near the end, his mind stayed deft as a chameleon’s tongue, darting around to savour again the old and taste the new. I’ll remember him that way.

These few words in no way presume to describe Jack Rillie’s achievements in education. That might take a volume. This is just a small, personal IOU. You should acknowledge your debts of gratitude. As must be true of many other people, some of whatever is best in me I owe to him. On behalf of all of us: thanks, Jack.

William McIlvanney