My Father

From My Choice of Words by Peter James Russell

My father was born in Troon in Ayrshire in 1920, two years after the First World War ended and nineteen years before the second one began. 

His father was a motor mechanic, probably the only motor mechanic in Troon then. As the Silver Ghosts of the Glasgow industrialists who had built their mansions there were now being joined by the Ford Model Ts of its doctors, lawyers, and Ministers of The Kirk.

In the Nineteenth Century, Troon’s harbour was developed by the Duke of Portland to export coal from his mines at Kilmarnock. In 1892 he built Scotland’s first railway to connect the two. His masterplan for the town imagined a ‘healthy and prosperous community’ with public parks and wide streets inspired by Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town.

It was the birthplace of Charles Kerr Marr who, like his compatriot Andrew Carnegie, had made a considerable fortune in business in America and who, like Carnegie, put it to work to improve the lives and the prospects of the people of Scotland. 

Carnegie built public libraries. Marr built a school ‘where education would be provided to people together no matter their background or levels of wealth’. Marr College was a model for the state comprehensive schools that became a key ambition of the Labour Party and eventually followed elsewhere. And what a model it was with its library, theatre, laboratories, and acres of playing fields. 

It opened its doors on 2nd September 1935. And that morning my father donned his purple and yellow school blazer and stood in line with his two best pals as its first pupils.