Obituary - Douglas Gillespie, surveyor whose contacts led to Herald expose on Scottish oil

Died: February 17, 2017

DOUGLAS James Gillespie, who has died aged 62, was a dedicated and diligent chartered surveyor who became Assessor to Highland and Western Isles Valuation Joint Board and, subsequently, a member of the Scottish Lands Tribunal, which engaged his prodigious appetite for debate and the citing of precedent.

It could not be said of Douglas that his life was an open book. Rather, his personality was presented as a set of distinct narratives, the totality visible only to his family and closest friends. This diversity was so pronounced that many who attended his funeral in Inverness expressed pleasant surprise at the version of Douglas which had just been disclosed to them.

That was not a novel phenomenon. I first met Douglas in 1972 when he moved into May Barrowman’s boarding house, just off the Magdalen Green in Dundee, where he had joined the City Assessor’s department as a trainee chartered surveyor.

The younger boarders played football in an adjacent car park until the police booked us for trespassing. Asked for his surname, Douglas replied ‘Gillespie’ – surprisingly, because he had told us for several months that he was called Douglas Johnston.

It took us some time to verify that he really was Douglas Gillespie, while he regarded our attempts at authentication with amused detachment. This curation of his identity extended to his career. In 1974, he joined the Glasgow office of Gerald Eve, property consultants and chartered surveyors, where he was highly regarded for his application to the rating appeal portfolio, which included onshore installations of what was then the burgeoning North Sea oil industry.

In March 1977, however, he executed a sharp change of direction by going off to join the River Tay fisheries, where he worked the nets and lived in a company bothy at Inchyra. In his time off he studied philosophy, history and religion or engaged in wildfowling. On one occasion Douglas challenged me to join him in climbing a nearby very high-voltage electricity pylon, an endeavour we achieved while toting double-barrelled shotguns. These we discharged at a passing flock of geese, harming none. Thus, Douglas proved his contention that, no matter how high we climbed, geese would always fly just out of range.

He returned to surveying in Glasgow in October 1978. I was a news feature writer on The Herald and, one evening, Douglas revealed that he had been approached by a fellow surveyor who wanted to meet me.

This was during the period when the Scottish National Party deployed the slogan "It’s Scotland Oil" while Westminster governments routinely dismissed the notion that the North Sea mineral resources would last until 2000. My informant, who worked in the industry, duly provided copious files which indicated that the oil and gas reserves were far more abundant, a case which was presented in The Herald in a three-day series of articles.

The government in London duly denied the claim but cabinet papers released 30 years later demonstrated its veracity. Douglas, who was certainly not a Scottish Nationalist, was nevertheless fascinated by this insight into the machinations of politics. He enjoyed dissecting political arguments with the forensic skills which he later applied to disputes which came before the Lands Tribunal for Scotland.

He was a fan of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, although the latter became the subject of enduring complaint after he borrowed a valued pen from Douglas to sign autographs backstage at the Glasgow Apollo and failed to return it.

A second spell at the fisheries in Inchyra was followed by a post with Strathclyde Regional Council but the call of the land beckoned Douglas again during the 1980s, by which point he had met Iris Clarke, a speech therapist whom he would later marry.

He accepted a position as area valuer with Central Regional Council to be near the cottage and acre of land he had bought in Killin and proposed that he and Iris should become self-sufficient, a devotion to beekeeping being one manifestation of this enthusiasm.

As Iris revealed at Douglas’s funeral, a marsh was drained, rockeries, outhouses, fences and stiles were built and the keeping of goats was planned, but this Tolstoyan endeavour stopped when he was offered the position of depute assessor to the Highland and Western Isles Valuation Joint Board, going on to become assessor in 1996.

He enjoyed the to-and-fro of rating negotiations, but rigour did not preclude gentle mischief. “Douglas always took the position that Marks & Spencer in the Eastgate Centre in Inverness was the company’s flagship UK property,” one former adversary recollected wryly.

Upon retirement in 2014, he became a surveyor member of the Lands Tribunal for Scotland and his contributions were subsequently saluted by the president, Lord Minginish, who referred to Douglas’s electric intelligence. Sadly, his contributions to the LTS were cut short when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer last August.

Douglas spent the remaining five months of his life watching Supreme Court hearings keenly on his phone and writing farewells, both witty and poignant, to former colleagues and friends, including a group of fellow Inverness cyclists, whom he christened the Scroats (sic) and with whom he undertook the Highlands’ most gruelling circuits.

Douglas is survived by Iris, his daughter Rachel and sons Duncan and Graeme.

RODDY FORSYTH