TOM SMITH Singer and teacher of Gaelic; Born April 16, 1907; Died January 30, 2007 Last September, one of Helen T's devoted nurses asked her for her birth certificate. It was needed to send to the Queen for her impending 100th birthday. "Certainly not," she said, "my birthday's no business of the Queen. Why should she want to know how old I am?"
For Helen, an Edwardian whose values she carried into this century, people in polite society never discussed age or money. She didn't quite make the letter from the Queen, dying just months short of her centenary.
The seventh child of nine, Helen was born in Dervaig, Isle of Mull, where her father was village schoolmaster and a champion of Gaelic at a time when it was looked down upon as an unnecessary burden on island children. The enthusiasm for the language and its music spread to all his children, three of them (Helen herself, Annie and Margaret) being Mod gold medallists, and one (Mary) marrying yet another gold medallist, Donald McIsaac, originally from Jura. Four in one family remains a record.
In her professional life, Helen - known to all as Helen T - taught English and geography at Knightswood School, but her passion was singing.
From her twenties into her seventies she was in high demand at concerts throughout Scotland, broadcasting regularly on BBC Radio Scotland. In the Silver Darlings, Neil Gunn wrote of his entrancement by the "beautiful Helen T Macmillan, with a voice like an angel". She was a longstanding member of the Glasgow Gaelic Choir, affectionately known as the GG, and by 1944 she was the first conductor of the Glasgow Islay Choir.
The war was hard on her. When the family home in Scotstoun was bombed, she was badly injured by shrapnel and carried the pain for the rest of her life - but she didn't complain. On the same day her sister Margaret lost an eye: Helen always considered that she had been much more fortunate than her sister.
In her late fifties, Helen developed asthma for the first time - the doctors diagnosed a reaction to the new paint at her school. The illness made her take a decision she had considered for some years. She left her family home - and her four sisters - in Jordanhill and moved to Aberfeldy.
There she taught Gaelic at Breadalbane Academy, and took charge of the Aberfeldy District Gaelic Choir. With Helen T, the choir won many prizes and is still in full flow, thriving in an area with few native Gaelic speakers.
Sadly, her time in Aberfeldy was cut short as Margaret, her last remaining sister, needed full-time care. Although Helen was, by this time, in her early nineties, she took on the burden: her Edwardian sense of duty took its toll on her.
The two sisters spent their last years in Balmanno House, in Glasgow.
Even in the home, however, Helen T made her presence felt. Beginning to lose her memory in English, she met a nurse from the Isle of Lewis with whom she could speak Gaelic.
Helen brightened up and it became clear that her Gaelic had outlasted her English as her main means of communication. So had her teacher's discipline: she corrected her carer's "Lewis Gaelic" - the Mull version of the language was obviously, for her, the purer one.
We all have similar memories of Helen T. For many years she adjudicated at the Mod: many of those who had suffered her comments were at her funeral.
The consensus was that she was strict, but fair, sometimes terrifying, but in the end kindly and compassionate.
She leaves nieces, a nephew, great nephews and nieces, great-great-nephews and a great-great-niece. They all wish she had made that hundred. If only to hear how she would have reacted to that letter from the Queen.
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