James McCash

JAMES Alexander McCash, who has died at the age of 92 in Ham, Surrey,

was a Scottish engineer with a taste for poetry.

A farmer's son, Mr McCash was born in Condorrat, Dunbartonshire, and

educated at Glasgow High School and Glasgow University, from which he

held a BSc. He worked with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Abadan, and

subsequently at British Petroleum's London headquarters and

Sunbury-on-Thames research laboratories.

On his retirement James McCash enjoyed writing both as an engineering

historian and as a poet. In the former capacity he penned studies of the

Scottish scientists Joseph Black (renowned for his work on the chemistry

of gases) and William Murdock (pioneer of gas lighting). As a poet,

James McCash won in 1972 the Johnnie Walker Scots poetry competition run

in conjunction with The Glasgow Herald.

This competition had as its theme a quotation from Sir Walter Scott --

''This is my own, my native land!'' It generated more than 700 entries.

Mr McCash's winning one was called Dies Aestivus. It describes -- in a

curious but invigorating mixture of couthiness and formal Latinate Scots

-- the farm-work of the boy poet.

The boy goes ''Tae fetch hame the kye frae their summernicht

habitude'' with his sheepdog Glen. Then, in demotic vein, to breakfast:

''Cheese is frae the hail Dunlop, the kitchen is oor salon./Honesty and

decency maintained withoot a hitch,/ And whisky's bocht in wickered

casks a twelve an' six the gallon.''

The sponsors, undisturbed by any invidious comparison with latter-day

whisky prices, awarded Mr McCash four pints of Red Label whisky as well

as #100.

Prizes (there were five runners-up) were handed over at a rather

surrealistic occasion in the Library of Glasgow Art School. The poet

Hugh MacDiarmid, who was patron of the judges, appeared with his wife

and small West Highland terrier, which proceeded to relieve itself

against the august pillars. A piper played.

The following year, James McCash himself turned patron of poets. He

endowed at Glasgow University the McCash Prizes (worth #450, #225, and

#150) in memory of his brother and sister, both medical doctors. These

were to be awarded annually for the best poem or poems in Scots and were

to be open to matriculated students and graduates and any officer of the

Scottish universities.

James McCash's own writing also encompassed a play, Resurrection in

the Gorbals, about Glasgow's grave-robber equivalents of Burke and Hare,

another play, Bedticks and Bloodstock, and a book of poetry called A

Bucolic Nickstick.

A small man with immense energy and enthusiasm for life, James McCash

was a freeman of the city of Glasgow by dint of being a hammerman. He

leaves a wife, Marion Ruth, a daughter, Anne, and grandchildren Claire

and James.