Vic Herman

So moved was this Gorbals street kid by his first encounter with the Dutch Master that he vowed one day to become as renowned an artist as Rembrandt. The boy who made that resolution was on a day outing from the Glasgow Jewish orphanage where he and his brothers and sisters had been placed after their mother was convicted in court of wilfully neglecting them.

Even more remarkable, however, was that, by the time of his death in London last week, Vic Herman, that Gorbals waif, had not only become a world-class boxer, and a celebrated piper and bagpipe-maker, but a renowned painter in America, and had

several of his paintings exhibited in the Kelvingrove gallery.

He was born in Manchester on February 12, 1929, to a Russian immigrant Jewish cabinet-maker and moved with his family to the Gorbals area of Glasgow as a toddler.

Vic reckoned his woodworking skills and artistic bent were inherited from his father, whose diffidence and obsession with his work, however, left Herman and his siblings to the mercies of a mother whose wanton neglect of her children led to her prosecution and their being sent to a Jewish orphanage.

It was there, while a member of the Jewish Lads' Brigade, that Vic learned to play the pipes, which became a feature of his professional boxing career when ''Vic Herman - Jewish bagpiping flyweight'' would pipe himself into rings from the Kelvin Hall, where he fought the Scottish ring legend Peter Keenan, to Bangkok and Tokyo, where his opponent was Japan's first world boxing champion, Yoshio Shirai.

Herman's boxing career was prompted in 1944 when Vic, as a 15-year-old apprentice barber in Glasgow's Anderston district, soaped the face of world flyweight champion Jackie Paterson. The youngster's enthu- siastic claim that he wanted to follow in the Anderston southpaw champion's footsteps was met with a scorn which he accepted as a challenge.

Consequently, when not developing his budding artistic skills with paintbrush and sketchpad, Herman launched his professional boxing career in 1947 by knocking out Charles McGroarty.

As Vic Herman told me in a 1999 interview, however, the non-stop aggression and mayhem of his boxing style was the brutal antithesis of his artistic approach.

It enabled Herman to knock British bantamweight champion Peter Keenan out of the Kelvin Hall ring twice (despite Herman losing on points) during the pair's 1950 battle. Herman was then nominated by the world-renowned American Ring magazine as the world's third-best flyweight in 1953, and in 1954 he became the first Scottish boxer to compete in Thailand when he fought then world champion Chamrain Songkrat.

Vic told me that his experience in Thailand had the same exotic influence on his artistic output as Tahiti had on the art of Paul

Gaugin. This fascination with the Far East also explains why Vic's last domestic partner was a lady from Laos called Bong - an artist in her own right who won an award from Time Out magazine.

After becoming the first Scot to box for a world title in Japan in July 1953, when he was knocked out by Yoshio Shirai, he decided to dedicate himself exclusively to art and redeeming that childhood vow made in the Kelvingrove gallery in 1938.

Thus, in the early 1950s, Vic Herman moved into a garret and, despite having a wife and two children, literally starved for his art in New York's Greenwich

Village. That cost Vic his first marriage and forced him in desperation to migrate to California, where his artistic career took off thanks to a rich patron, the millionaire Daniel Solomon.

Solomon not only bought Herman's early artistic oeuvre but ensured that around 100 Herman paintings were exhibited and sold in American art galleries.

A quarrel with Soloman in the late 1960s saw Vic return to London, where the woodworking skills he had inherited from his father re-emerged as he became a bagpipe maker in Catford in addition to being sought throughout the Home Counties as a portrait painter.

When the cancer that ultimately killed Vic Herman began to give him strong intimations of his own mortality he asked me for a favour: would I approach Glasgow City Council to ask if one of his paintings could be exhibited at Kelvingrove?

As a result, last year, Vic Herman had the enormous thrill of knowing that some of his artistic output did in fact appear in the gallery in a charity exhibition. The circle between childhood aspiration and adult ambition fulfilment had been closed.

Vic is survived by Bong and his children from previous marriages.

Vic Herman, boxer, bagpiper, bagpipe-maker, and portrait painter; born February 12, 1929, died March 6, 2002. #

Brian Donald