Playwright, author and luthier

Born: September 29, 1929;

Died: April 1, 2018

HECTOR MacMillan, who has died aged 88, was a man of many talents, but he will surely best be remembered as a playwright, a career he took up in his mid-thirties. Over the course of half a century, he created a cataract of work for stage, screen and radio. His most famous, and most controversial play, The Sash, which was first seen in 1973 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was one of the earliest to confront the scourge of sectarianism, and while the passage of time may have dimmed its initial shock, it still has the capacity to engage audiences and make a powerful impact.

Set during a few hours on the 12th of July in a Glasgow tenement, the play features a rabid, recently-widowed Orangeman, Bill McWilliam, who is preparing, suited and booted, to take part in the ritual of the annual Orange Walk. His rather less well-kept son, Cameron, challenges his father’s ardently-held beliefs. As well as about religion and the divisions it fosters, The Sash is also the story of a family at odds and struggling to come to terms with generational change. Reviewing a revival of it in 2013, the critic Joyce McMillan remarked on its author’s “razor-sharp perception of how an unjust culture of domination always leaves those who cling to it deluded and vulnerable”.

The Sash was just one of a number of plays which contributed to MacMillan’s reputation as one of Scotland’s finest 20th-century dramatists. Throughout the 1970s, his output included The Rising, Royal Visit and Oh What a Lovely Peace! Later, in the 1980s, he created inspired adaptations of the work of Moliere, including The Misanthrope and The Hypochondriack. A founder-member of the Scottish Society of Playwrights, he was subsequently made its honorary lifetime president, reflecting the 40 and more years “he has been a key figure in Scottish theatre”.

Hector MacMillan was born in Tollcross, Glasgow, in 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash. It was an event with world-wide reverberations which would undoubtedly have exercised those, such as the poet and polemicist Hugh MacDiarmid and the painter JD Fergusson, who frequented the MacMillan family home.

Robert Galbraith MacMillan, Hector’s father, was politically engaged and involved in the birth of Scottish National Party. He had been a miner who after escaping the pits worked for the Electricity Board. On occasion, his byline could be spotted in the pages of publications like The Freeman alongside that of MacDiarmid. Meanwhile, MacMillan’s mother, Chrissie, a nurse, looked after house, home and all who visited.

School for MacMillan ended in 1943, when he was 14 years old. His elder daughter, Mairi, recalls that her father and formal education “didn’t fit very well”. His first job was as an insurance valuer and assessor but any notion of pursuing a career in that business ended when, encouraged by the sight of the nearby office of the Anchor Line shipping company, he decided to become a sea-going radio officer. MacMillan then did his national service and was sent with the Royal Signals to Omagh. The period he spent in Northern Ireland undoubtedly sparked his interest in the island’s chequered history and its divided society.

MacMillan himself was no signatory to any particular religion, nor, indeed, did he ever feel inclined to join a political party, though he was a lifelong supporter of Scottish independence. Following his marriage to Chic Hicks, a woman of Eurasian extraction whom he met in Calcutta in 1947 before their marriage in 1954, he came ashore and worked first as an electronics technician at Glasgow University before going on to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. After four years there he returned in 1960 to Scotland where he was employed at Scottish Marine Biological Association on the Isle of Cumbrae. A year later he became technical representative for an electronics company and thereafter a director of Glasgow Nucleonics.

Throughout all this time he was writing what he liked to call “unsaleable material”. His first success came in 1966 with the play To Stand Alone. That emboldened him to become a freelance writer. In 1970, The Rising was broadcast on BBC radio; it was not performed live until 1973. His first play for the stage was The Resurrection of Matthew Clydesdale.

In 1966, the MacMillan family moved to Leadhills in South Lanarkshire where, in nearby Sanquhar, he met John Brown, a craftsman who specialised in making musical instruments. With no relatives of his own interested in learning the trade, Brown passed the baton on to MacMillan, who, it seems, was “always good with his hands”. Thus the erstwhile electronics technician and playwright added the profession of luthier – a maker of stringed instruments, including violins and violas – to the list of his achievements.

MacMillan said that he began a study of viola-making because the instrument – “long the butt of orchestral jokes” – intrigued him. “From the history of the instrument, and the available evidence, it was clear that copying existing models was unlikely to prove productive. I concentrated instead on ways to achieve the maximum possible balance and harmony between the many acoustic resonances involved in all members of the violin-family of instruments.” His obsession with the subject resulted in Luthery & The Helmholtz Equation: An Empirical Approach.

Another subject of fascination for MacMillan was the case of Thomas Muir who, in the 18th century, was put on trial and sentenced to 14 years in Botany Bay for sedition. For MacMillan this represented a social injustice and in his 2005 book, Handful of Rogues: Thomas Muir’s Enemies of the People, he explained why in lucid and persuasive prose.

MacMillan was the kind of man who, when he set his mind to do something, did it with a passion. He and his wife Chic, who predeceased him, divorced in 1986. He is survived by his two daughters, Mairi and Kirsty, four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. At his private funeral there was a tune composed by Kirsty and The Freedom Come All Ye by Hamish Henderson performed by Mairi and Sean.

ALAN TAYLOR