George MacDonald Fraser

LESLEY DUNCAN
NOT many journalists can claim they learned their trade at the feet of a famous author. I can. The author in question was George MacDonald Fraser, then simply known as George Fraser and the features editor of what was in those days still called The Glasgow Herald.

His office was an eyrie in the pagoda-topped tower at the rear of the imposing Buchanan Street offices of the paper. The tower, attributed like the rest of the West Nile Street building to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, is now part of the Lighthouse Centre.

The third-floor office, approached by the "coffin lift" (an undertaker had apparently once practised on the premises) may have been shabby and starved of daylight but it was a place of enchantment for this novice journalist.

George Fraser was a pleasant-looking, slightly overweight man with dark hair and brown eyes rimmed with blue (a Fraser family trait). With his ebullient personality and lack of pomposity, he made the most engaging of mentors. He would joke that journalism was better than working, but his enjoyment of his job was of course no bar to total dedication to it.

I was quickly initiated into the mysteries of "the leader page", where the paper's opinions on issues of the day were aired; the weekend pages with their poetry and literary material; industrial supplements about shipyards (they still existed in those days), steel stock holders, and back-burning fire manufacturers; and the annual Trade Review.

George Fraser was the complete master of all these varied facets of newspaper work, from writing and editing to conjuring up sharp headlines and succinct introductions, and designing elegant pages.

These were still the days of hot metal presses. The printers manning the great clanking Linotype machines in the caseroom upstairs or assembling the pages on "the stone" were a formidable lot. Relations between floors were not always warm. George Fraser, with a respect for his fellows no doubt honed by his own wartime experiences, cut through these tensions and moved easily in caseroom company. The compositors were even prepared to be tolerant of me as his protégée.

One of his prized achievements as features editor was his Shakespeare supplement, to which some of the major scholars of the day contributed. It was a first-class production which would have graced any newspaper in the world.

His sense of humour was always ready. He sent me out to interview the avant-garde French composer Pierre Boulez at one Edinburgh Festival with the admonition, "Boulez for you!"

In the midst of demanding working days, he would occasionally burst into song: "You've got to have skin, just to keep your insides in." He admired the singing of the Goon star Harry Secombe. Once, I recall, he hid under his big mahogony desk to avoid seeing an importunate visitor.

At afternoon tea, he and the diarist Alastair Phillips, another veteran of the Asian front, would talk animatedly about such esoteric imperial topics as the First and Second Afghan Wars - an area of interest which would be reflected in the future Flashman books.

Even then I was aware how privileged I was to serve my apprenticeship in newspapers with such an unusual and many-talented man. One piece of very bad advice he did, however, give me: "Writers are 10 a penny, Les," he said. "Stick to layout"(I had shown some aptitude at page design). On reflection, this was more than a little ironic, coming from a man who was to achieve international fame as a writer.

George's talents in The Herald were acknowledged when he was made deputy editor to James Holburn, who had worked for the London Times in Berlin before the Second World War.

After Holburn left the paper George was for some months acting editor. He would have been admirable in the permanent role but was passed over in favour of another wartime veteran, Alastair Warren, who, unlike George, had a university degree.

In any event the rebuff probably galvanised George Fraser's creative writing. Flashman was reborn from the original character in Brown's Schooldays. With the rights to his first Flashman book making, it was rumoured, a six-figure sum, he left the Herald for tax exile in the Isle of Man and world-wide fame.

We kept in tenuous touch. When James Holburn died in the 1980s he came to the funeral in Dundee. The Herald's contingent was travelling first class on the Glasgow-Aberdeen train, but I found the great writer comfortably ensconced in second class, wearing what looked like the same greatcoat as of old. We took up conversation as though a decade or so hadn't intervened.

He was pleased when I interviewed his daughter Caro, who had trained as a barrister before turning successfully to fiction. He was immensely proud of her, as he was of his two sons (one of whom became a sheriff at a young age). Indeed, behind his gregarious front he remained a very private man, devoted to his wife Kath and family life. My last meeting with him was two summers ago when he was interviewed at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, as part of a lunchtime series. He was not in particularly revelatory mood but, to my embarrassed pleasure, mentioned me by name. I have from that day, too, a copy of his twelfth and last Flashman volume, Flashman on the March.

Inside he has written: "For Lesley - Happy memories of 65 Buchanan Street. Your aye, George." Something to treasure.

A literary appreciation

MARTIN LAING
George MacDonald Fraser's popularity as a writer has been enduring, though possibly somewhat diminished in recent years. However, he continued to work until very nearly the end of his life and his industry ensures his deserved recognition among the brightest stars in Scottish literature's firmament.

Leaving aside the dozens of screenplays he produced, and even his work as a journalist for The Glasgow Herald, which saw him elevated to the high office of deputy editor, it was as a prolific and hugely talented author of novels and works of non-fiction that he will be best remembered.

I was privileged last year to be asked to review his final offering, The Reavers, an Elizabethan nonsense (his description). His hilarious assortment of ne'er-do-wells, miscreants, villains, strumpets, doxies, heroes and heroines provided what I described at the time as a "froth of cheerful mayhem". I would still recommend it.

His most successful output, of course, was his wonderful collection of 12 novels chronicling the ribald life and unsavoury times of Harry Flashman, the womanising poltroon he so cleverly inserted into the seismic events that shook the world during the nineteenth-century. All Flashman fans have their particular favourite, and mine was undoubtedly Flashman at the Charge, Fraser's splendid account of the Crimean conflagration and the eponymous hero's role therein. As with all his comic historical novels, the research was meticulous and the history flawless - with the obvious exception of Flashman's interference.

Fraser also won widespread acclaim for his wonderful tales of Private McAuslan, the dirtiest soldier in the British Army. His narrative was so skilfully achieved that readers (me at any rate) were often known to laugh out loud - and at length - in public as well as in the privacy of one's own home.

He also employed his trademark humour, as well as pathos, in penning his autobiographical Quartered Safe Out. His interest in history also manifested itself in works of non-fiction such as The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers, and The Hollywood History of the World.

There were also other books, such as The Pyrates and Mr American, that are often overlooked these days. Indeed, in the obituaries and eulogies that I have read in the past few days, no mention have I seen of the novel I believe was his finest: Black Ajax. It remains an extraordinarily adept account of the lives and times of the characters involved in the world of bare-knuckle fighting in Regency England, and the arrival among them of a former slave, Tom Molineux.

For me, George MacDonald Fraser's storytelling talents are peerless. He leaves behind a significant body of work, and for that we must be thankful.