Under the hodden Hebridean sky: The burial of John Smith
Thirty years ago I was on Iona for the interment of Labour's lost leader
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NOTE: This is the first in an occasional series on The Jaggy Thistle where I look back at newspaper stories from almost 40 years in journalism and explain how they were written.
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Journalists like to josh each other about their intros. The into is the opening paragraph of a story, known in American journalism as “the lede”. Headlines in newspapers get a lot of scrutiny. Writers prefer to discuss intros.
My old friends usually mention two of mine. One is from a piece I filed from Northern Ireland in 1991 after the SAS ambushed an IRA active service unit in Coagh, County Tyrone, shooting dead three republicans. The IRA men had two AK47 assault rifles in their car, hence my intro:
“They call it the widowmaker.”
I still get some gentle ribbing for that. It was a bit too tabloid for some tastes.
My colleagues prefer a piece I filed from the Isle of Iona in May 1994, thirty years ago next month. I was covering the burial of John Smith, leader of the Labour party, who had died of a heart attack aged 55.
My intro began:
“Under the hodden Hebridean sky…”
Hodden is an old Scots word for a rough, grey sackcloth. I had borrowed it from the Burns poem A Man’s A Man For A’ That.
What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an’ a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ that:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.
When news broke on May 12, 1994, that Smith had been taken to hospital in London from his flat in the Barbican, I was with the rest of the Scottish political press corps in Inverness for the Scottish Tories’ annual conference at the Eden Court Theatre.
Ian Lang, secretary of state for Scotland in John Major’s cabinet, was visibly shaken. As worst fears were confirmed, the conference was cancelled. Lang, pale and barely containing his emotion, made one of the best speeches I have ever heard from a politician.
“There are times when heart and mind stand still,” he said, “when all the problems and worries of our daily lives fade into insignificance. Such a time is now as we learn with great sorrow the tragic news of the death of John Smith.”
Lang paid tribute to “a man without rancour” and praised “his quick-silver mind, the integrity of his approach, and his tenacity”.
He added: “We mourn alongside his own party a leader who honoured democracy and who loved his country, and served it with distinction. In our sorrow at his loss we are all united. Our parliamentary life is the poorer and so is our national life. ‘No man is an island,’ said the poet. ‘Each man's death diminishes me.’
“Today our hearts go out to John's wife, Elizabeth, and to Catherine, Sarah, and Jane. They may take pride in times to come in a husband and father who achieved great things and lived life honourably and to the full.”
Lang rose to the occasion. Others did not. One smirking Scottish Tory activist said within my hearing: “Oh goody, a by-election.”
Smith’s funeral felt like a state occasion. It was held in an Edinburgh kirk near his Morningside home and was a very public event. His burial would be different. Born in Dalmally and proud of his Argyll roots, Smith was to be buried on the Isle of Iona.
I was political editor of Scotland on Sunday and my editor sent me to the island with a staff photographer. Our instructions were to mark the moment but keep our distance.
We arrived on Iona a day early and checked into a B&B overlooking the jetty. I went to take a look at the small cemetery that would be Smith’s final resting place. There was a mound of earth next to the freshly-dug grave. On either side were two relatively recent gravestones.
I realised with a jolt I knew the two men buried there.
A word of explanation is perhaps required here. I knew Iona well. In my student days I worked on the island every summer as a volunteer youth worker. I was an associate member of the Iona Community, an ecumenical Christian organisation with a radical tradition, committed to peace and social justice.
So I knew lots of people on the island, including staff at Iona Abbey and owners of local businesses. I spent the afternoon talking to old friends, confirming what I knew about the two men and filling in some gaps.
That night the hearse bearing John Smith’s coffin arrived from Edinburgh accompanied by his family and close friends. It was dark by the time the small ferry crossed the Sound of Iona. The jetty was lit by Iona’s only streetlamps. The black-clad mourners, on foot, followed the hearse slowly up the slipway.
The next day was overcast but dry. We spent most of the day in the B&B. I was acutely aware of the need to keep out of the way of the mourners. I watched the service from a nearby hill at what I hoped was a respectful distance. Ian Rutherford, a fine photographer with a famously gentle manner, took pictures for the Press Association news agency, with the full agreement of the Smith family.
Why were we there at all? It is a fair question. You could argue there was a conflict between the right of the family to say goodbye in privacy and the media’s need to mark the occasion. Later in my career I worked as an editor, so I now know something of the moral conundrums of choosing what goes in a newspaper. Had I been an editor in 1994 I am not sure I would have sent a reporter to the island.
At the time, thirty years ago, my way of negotiating this moral dilemma was to do my research before the family even arrived, and then keep well out of the way. Other information I needed, including details of the short graveside service, came from wire copy provided by the family to news agencies, which was then sent to me by my news desk. I think this was done by fax, but I cannot recall exactly.
I wrote my story in longhand in my notebook and dictated it by phone to copytakers at North Bridge in Edinburgh. It was important to me to catch the meaning of what was going on, as well as report the plain facts. My theme was the contrast between the simple island cemetery and the nearby Reilig Odhráin, the burial mound of medieval Scottish kings.
Smith was Labour’s lost leader. Few doubt he would have been prime minister had he lived. Perhaps one of the great prime ministers. He deserved a resting place among kings. But that was not his style.
Many years later his daughter Catherine wrote, in a moving piece for The Sunday Times, about her father’s prosaic, everyman name.
He was, people thought, one of us — not one of them. I suppose if you are unpretentious by nature, the name John Smith gets you off to a good start. He was, as it happens, fiercely proud of not having a middle name: embracing all the aspersions his name gave rise to, he would proudly proclaim that at least he was “a real John Smith”.
This was what I hoped to convey with my piece, which ran on the front page of Scotland on Sunday the day after the service.
My intro in full was:
Under the hodden Hebridean sky, John Smith was laid to rest yesterday next to Walter, the dispenser of good food and drink, and Doodie, the stammering crofter.
Reading it back all these years later I have some regrets. The paragraph about islanders being worried about outsiders being buried on Iona is accurate but unnecessary. The mention of mourners being dry-eyed perplexes me. Was this in wire copy? Was I talking about the arrival of the family off the ferry? Whatever the reason, that detail jars. It shouldn’t be there.
I was later told by an Iona Community friend that my piece contained a factual error. I got a date wrong, or an age. At this distance I cannot now remember what it was, so I cannot correct it. The piece stands as I wrote it, complete with this mistake. I apologise to anyone upset at my errors of fact or tone.
The rest of the piece I am happy with, especially the intro. I must have picked up the word “hodden” from the pipe tune played over the grave by Smith’s old friend Neil MacCormick: A Man’s A Man For A’ That. Inspiration comes in many forms.
I have since come to know Smith’s three daughters a little. Each is a remarkable woman in her own right. Together they are a formidable force. Their father would be immensely proud of them. I have done a bit of work for Elizabeth Smith, John’s widow, on her mission to encourage democracy in the former Soviet republics. She is a force of nature.
Here’s my piece, published in Scotland on Sunday on May 22, 1994. You should be able to zoom in to the image and read the text:
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“A chield's amang you takin notes, And faith he'll prent it.”
Robert Burns
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I can’t believe it’s 30 years since his passing. I’ve visited his grave on two occasions and both times found it a very emotional experience. Truly a giant among men.
Thank you for this. I still remember the shuddering shock of his death. Of course, inevitably we moved on quite quickly to Blair's victory but something was lost to the quality of political life which seems, in some ways, even more apparent now.