June’s featured Scot
The Rt Hon George Reid
Co-Patron of the Scottish Disability Forum
George Reid is as near a Clackie — someone born in the Wee County of Clackmannanshire — as anyone can be.
The earliest relative he has traced is John Reid, a shepherd in Muckhart in the 1680s. Until George started travelling, his family never lived anywhere other than the Hillfoots — at the bottom of the Ochil Hills.
“If they were there in the 17th century,” he says, “chances are they were there a long time before. Sometimes I fantasise about an earlier version of me standing on a crag and shouting at Roman legions and the army of Edward I ‘Thus far and no further!’”
Reid did travel, though, on a 45-year journey through politics at home and abroad. To London, Strasbourg and Edinburgh as an MP, Member of the Council of Europe, MSP and Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament. And to wars and disasters in 87 countries, where he handled tricky political situations as a director of the International Red Cross.
Now he says he is back where he belongs. “The first thing I see each morning out one bedroom window in my Bridge of Allan home is the Wallace Monument and the Ochil Hills, and out the other Stirling Castle and the River Forth.”
Roots, he says, are important in a rootless world. “Continuity is part of my heritage, of being a link in a long line of folk who come from here”.
He is profoundly grumpy, however, about the outside genealogists who wrongly corrected Hillfoots to Hillfeet. “Absurd,” he said. “They certainly weren’t Clackies.”