As is her way, Kate Forbes was being solicitous. “How have you been,” she asked me. We’ve met at The Herald’s Politician of the Year awards and in the course of the evening she’ll pick up two of them.
One of them is ‘Green Champion’ which she’ll accept with a cheeky apercu. Just being nominated, she says, is “some kind of trolling”. Those most likely though, to have felt trolled - the Scottish Greens - were nowhere to be seen. It seems a separate engagement had required their massed presence.
I tell her that I’d been interviewing Professor Sir Tom Devine and that her name had been mentioned. Sir Tom had recalled tutoring Ms Forbes on his post-graduate Diaspora Studies course at Edinburgh University. “She was so good that on two occasions, I’d attempted to coax her into pursuing a full-time career as an academic,” he’d told me. “But having seen her operating at the highest levels of government I realised she’d made the right choice.”
The Deputy First Minister adds a little more colour to his recollections. “He was so kind,” he said. “He personally secured full-time funding for a PhD, if I’d needed it.”
Earlier in the week, Catherine Salmond, my boss at The Herald had asked how “Tam” was, this being the common appellation accorded him by generations of his under-graduate students.
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In my newspaper career, no other figure features more often in the lives of friends and colleagues than Sir Tom Devine. Vast swathes of people occupying positions at every level and in every realm of Scottish public life have been taught by him.
This is exceptional enough. What’s more remarkable though, is that not one of them has ever had a bad word to say about him. Usually, when a highly-regarded public figure is mentioned, you’ll find a handful of dissenters.
Professor, author and Knight of the Realm he may have been, but they all talk of him as though he’d been a benevolent history teacher in Year Two of secondary school.
My interview last week with Sir Tom had come about following an 18-month period when he’d largely removed himself from writing or commenting on the affairs of the nation. He’d retired a few years previously from academia, finally bringing down the curtain down on a career that which included holding professorships at three of Scotland’s most gilded universities. Yet, he’d continued to give talks and lectures to most groups – high and small – who’d ventured to ask him.
He loved the newspaper trade and his articles peppered almost all of Scotland’s main public prints, broadsheet and tabloid alike. He’d be available for a quote about any subject concerning Scottish politics and culture.
And so, having recently turned 80, he’d invited me to interview him because, as he’d put it, “I’ve decided to lay down my pen and to retire from all writing.”
I’d found him in a good frame of mind, still sharp and conspiratorial about outrageous titbits he’d gathered about the lives of some of our public figures. This pleased me greatly. He’d recently turned 80 and I’d wondered if perhaps age had begun to dim his thoughts. Instead, after a couple of hours with him (and not for the first time) I’d paused to wonder if it was my brain that was for the watching.
His decision to retire from all forms of writing and public speaking is a rather momentous one. No other academic or public intellectual has made their discipline seem so accessible; few others have strived as much as he to dismantle the supercilious elitism that wraps around our top universities.
The accolades and awards meant that his company is eternally sought by Scotland’s panjandrum class, and he was comfortable in these circles. To those though, who didn’t belong in such elevated realms he was still one of them, and not in that contrived “wasn’t the footie exciting last night” kind of way.
Half an hour into our chat, I was trying to turn his thoughts to politics and wondering how I’m going to get a couple of spreads out of this in the time remaining. First, it was Celtic’s search for a new manager and did I think we should be turning to “Big Ange” once more.
This was followed by 15 minutes of profound concern about Scotland’s chances against Denmark that same evening and would I get out to the US if we were to qualify. “Will I just get Stephen McGowan, our football writer in to do the interview,” I’m thinking.
When written down end to end the list of letters after his name resembles the eye test in a Swedish opticians. It’s worth recording though, what most of them are. As well as his OBE and his Knighthood (I took it for the family, he once told me in a fit of mock guilt) he’s held Professorships at Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Strathclyde.
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He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; of the British Academy; of the Royal Irish Academy and the Royal Historical Society. And just a few years ago the Europeans chipped in with membership of the Academy of Europe.
All of them showered him with medals and awards for a collection of more than 40 books in addition to volumes of research covering 32 different themes. More than any other historian, he has illuminated Scotland’s story: where we came from; how we got here and why we behave the way we do.
I’m happy to stand corrected here, but there can’t be any other historian in the world who could write a 650-page chronicle of history that outsold that year’s Harry Potter book as The Scottish Nation did for a few months in 1999.
The term ‘public intellectual’ is too often conferred on clever people with loud voices. In Tom Devine’s case, it describes someone who can deliver an hour-long talk about a strand of Scottish history (without notes) to 600 day-to-day people in a book festival tent and have them thinking about enrolling for a history degree.
Have you ever tried to deliver a talk without notes? I tried once. It ended badly with the kindly audience reduced to filling in the blanks, by shouting out the dates and numbers from their seats.
His friend, Alan Taylor recalls the time when his wife, the author Rosemary Goring was appearing on Radio 4 with Sir Tom to talk about her book, Scotland the Autobiography. The presenter, James Naughtie however insisted at first on directing most of the questions to Sir Tom, who stopped him in his tracks and pointed out to him that they were all there to talk about Ms Goring’s book.
“He’s always interested in politics and the lives of real people,” said Mr Taylor, “but while he writes magisterially about the past he lives in the real world.
“He served on the board of the Scottish Review of Books and was instrumental in us getting serious funding from Edinburgh University when I’d been banging my head against a brick wall. When he was at Aberdeen University, he persuaded Bertie Ahern, the Irish Taoiseach to deliver a lecture to his students on the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies.”
My fondest memory of Sir Tom Devine came in the middle of an afternoon sesh in one of Glasgow’s livelier taverns. We were joined by an edgy bloke who’d wanted take issue with something he’d overheard in our conversation. Sir Tom invited him to join us; bought all his drink and then, on departing, left a few quid behind the bar for him.
On discovering that our boy hailed originally from the Western Isles, he gave him a boisterous history of his family, peppered with towsy anecdotes.
And while I accept his decision to stop writing, I’m still hoping to persuade him to give us a wee essay next summer on the cultural and sociological impact of Scotland reaching the World Cup finals. It would spare our readers from my scrofulous attempts at it.
Kevin McKenna is Scotland’s Feature Writer of the Year.
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