Tony McManus was an outstanding and dedicated teacher, writer, musician, translator, activist, organiser, husband, and father. He died at home in Edinburgh last week after a long and determined fight against cancer.

He felt passionately about the future of Scottish education and the value of language and music for everyone, and equally so about the importance of geopoetics and the work of Kenneth White. He

combined his study of the most advanced thinkers on the planet with his daily work as an inspirational teacher of English, and his love of his French wife, Nanon, his daughter, Anna, son, Dominic,

and family.

In recent years he has become best known as the leading authority in the English language on the work of Kenneth White and the head of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, and also as the founder and chair of the Scottish Association of Teachers of Language and Literature, which led the campaign against the threat to the quality of Scottish education posed by the introduction of Higher Still.

He was born in Edinburgh in 1953, the second youngest of six children to John and Catherine McManus, both of whom were teachers, and were from a second generation Irish background. They encouraged him to learn to play piano and later guitar and each summer took him with his brothers and sisters on holiday to Kinghorn and Aberdour on the Fife coast.

His backyard for play was the farmland around Colinton Mains at the foot of the Pentlands, and these early influences were to feature throughout his life.

He went to Holy Cross Primary and Academy and graduated in English language and literature from Edinburgh University in 1975. It was in that year that he met Nanon Fourcade from Tarbes in France, who was working in Scotland as a French assistant. They met in Sandy Bell's where Tony would go with his friends, John Greig and Ray Ross, to join the craic and music making with the likes of Hamish Henderson, Norman McCaig, the Boys of the Lough and, occasionally, George Mackay Brown when he was

in town.

Tony began writing poems, some of which were published in Hayden Murphy's Dublin Broadsheet. He and Nanon went off to Algeria for a year where he taught English as a foreign language to secondary school students. When they returned, for many years they never lived far from The Meadows, always within walking distance of Sandy Bell's. They were married in Tarbes in 1980.

In the 1970s and 1980s, John Greig and he took their guitars and their moveable feast of traditional music and poems out to other Edinburgh pubs such as the Gold Tankard, the Tolbooth, and most notably the Glenelg.

They encouraged performance poetry and Celtic culture long before these became fashionable. They also led the Troops Out of Ireland movement in Edinburgh in 1979, and Tony participated in the anti-poll tax, anti-apartheid, and other campaigns and demonstrations.

After qualifying as an English teacher at Moray House College of Education in 1979, he taught at Deans Community High School for many years. He then became assistant principal teacher of English at Queensferry High School. He was the most dedicated of teachers. He sang pupils the poems of Burns, developed new courses in communications, literature, personal and social education, and media studies and was always an EIS member who took an active part in

his union.

Tony studied by correspondence at the Univeristy of Pau, being awarded the licencees lettres in 1987. He began to write many more essays, reviews, and poems for literary magazines. From 1989 he reviewed drama, opera, and dance for the Edinburgh Evening News. He published a tape cassette of his translations of songs of George Brassens along with poems in Scots and English, contributed to other cassettes like Songs from under the Bed, and recorded his own work in To Paint the Green Hill Brown.

It was his discovery in France in the 1980s of the work of Kenneth White, the brilliant Scots poet and thinker, that was to mark a watershed in his life.

He read everything he could find of White's work, interviewed him twice in depth for BBC Radio Scotland, and argued persuasively from the outset for the publication in English of White's

essay books.

He was a founder member of the Open World Poetics group based in Glasgow in 1989 and later founded the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics. He went on to curate the major exhibition, White World, for the National Library of Scotland in 1996.

He was an outstanding intellectual of his time who wore his learning lightly. His utmost integrity could not but inspire and motivate others. Nowhere was this clearer than in the principled and resolute stand against the Higher Still programme. He and others initiated a petition signed by more than 1300 teachers of English calling for the removal of internal assessment which led to the formation of the Scottish Association of Teachers of Language and Literature in February 1999, and by June that year the EIS annual meeting had adopted the association position on removing compulsory internal assessment procedures. He became a regular columnist in the Times Educational Supplement Scotland.

He was the most modest of men, to such an extent that even his close friends knew only some parts of his many-sided activities. Yet in the way he lived his life all of these were indivisible, and, as the journey of his life's great river has reached the wide open sea, those whose lives he has nourished and enriched will wish to continue his work.

Tony McManus, teacher and poet; born February 27, 1953, died April 8, 2002.