George Davidson

An appreciation

by Jack Webster

GEORGE Davidson, the veteran Scottish BBC football commentator, has

died at the age of 93. Since his wife's death last year he had lived in

the Sir Gabriel Wood home for retired mariners in Greenock.

This commands a splendid view of his beloved Clyde estuary, but George

Davidson, a white-haired figure of quiet dignity, had been registered

blind for 15 or 16 years, though he retained a little peripheral vision.

Unable to read, he was glad that he could at least listen to the radio

and keep in touch with that sporting domain which was once so much his

own.

My memory of George Davidson dates from the post-war period when the

BBC Saturday night sports programme produced distinctive characters like

Peter Thomson, Jameson Clark, Jack Inglis, Bill Fraser, Andy

Cowan-Martin and, of course, George. What I hadn't realised was that he

was already a football commentator on the wireless in the 1930s. But, as

so often, it was just a hobby which took second place to a very

different professional interest.

In fact George Davidson, a master mariner, was head of the navigation

department at the James Watt College in Greenock for many years until he

retired in 1963. He had a lifelong connection with the sea.

At 17 he left Gourock and followed his father into the merchant

service, sailing five times round the world. On board the Ben Gloe, he

sailed into the Japanese port of Yokohama just in time to witness one of

the world's biggest disasters, the earthquake of 1923 which all but

destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama.

''Our ship just shook as the earthquake struck and we saw the flames

rising all the way down the coast from Tokyo,'' George told me. ''As the

lighthouse on the breakwater collapsed, we were the first British ship

ashore to take off survivors.''

On a happier adventure, George sailed into Fremantle and met Nell, the

Australian girl who would become his wife. They were married in 1934 and

settled back in Gourock, where they raised their three children, Marcus,

now a shipyard executive in Vancouver, Russell, a professor of

econometrics in Marseilles, and Lynn Chambers, a radio producer in

Scotland.

George would become an academic but his early passion for Greenock

Morton led him to the BBC, which was then based at Blythswood Square in

the heart of Glasgow. Producer Robert F Dunnett didn't take long to

employ him on the Saturday sports programme called Fan Fare, alongside

men such as R E Kingsley, better known as Rex. After the war that

programme became Sportsreel, produced by memorable figures like Eddie

Fraser, James Crampsey, and Archie P Lee, and fronted by Peter Thomson.

Even in his eighties, people would comment on his distinctive voice,

familiar from his broadcasting days.

Within that structure, George Davidson took his prominent place and

went on to become the first commentator of televised football in

Scotland. When I met him last year, he regaled me with memories of great

football occasions and the men who made them so: ''Nobody believed me

when I forecast that Scotland would beat England in the year that the

latter won the World Cup at Wembley. I told them we would do it with

old-fashioned talent like Baxter's. And we did.''

He also remembered that the film of Celtic's sensational 7-1 drubbing

of Rangers somehow failed to survive for posterity and that this led to

much ribbing of colleague Peter Thomson, whose leaning towards Rangers

was hard to disguise.

Last year, after Nell Davidson, his wife of almost 60 years, was taken

to hospital, a home-help found George unconscious on the floor. He was

taken to the same hospital, suffering from pneumonia. Still poorly, he

was wheeled to Nell's bedside and was there when she died.

Without his sight and much depressed, the wiry George nevertheless

subsquently went to visit his son in Vancouver. Then he settled back

into the mariners' home in Greenock, glad to have the loving attention

of daughter Lynn and her family, who live nearby. Glad too that, for all

the trials of advancing years, he could turn on the radio and listen to

a medium which played such an important part in his own more vital

times.