Raising a glass to Grey Gowrie

A group of us had gathered together to raise a glass, tell stories, to laugh and to mourn. It was a lunch to mark the passing of Grey Gowrie. Although we were an interesting and diverse group (this writer excepted), we could all agree on one point. Over longish lives spent in lively company, Grey stood out, not only for his intellectual firepower but for his originality and his exoticism.

His family name was Ruthven, and his ancestors had played a conspicuous and frequently violent part in the chronic disorders of late-medieval Scottish life. Effectively, they were aristocratic brigands. After a couple of hundred years in which they disappeared from history, they made an appropriate return to the high peerage, via warfare. Grey’s grandfather won a VC, served as governor-general of Australia, and was rewarded with an earldom. Grey’s father, whom he never knew, was killed in North Africa in 1942. Like a lot of thoughtful young men in the late 1930s, he had assumed that war was inevitable — unlike survival. So he decided to have some fun before it was too late. One night, this led to a police cell. His father was staying at Windsor Castle. At breakfast, the papers were full of headlines such as: ‘Earl’s son spends night in the cells.’ George VI broke the embarrassed silence. ‘Sandie, I gather you weren’t the only member of your family enjoying my hospitality last night.’

The 20th-century Gowrie peerage was not accompanied by the lands and castles which had sustained their forebears. The Carse of Gowrie, in Angus, produces the finest soft fruit in the world and is therefore valuable. But as Grey lamented, he did not own a single acre of it. His sole contact with the Carse was via the inevitable schoolboy witticisms.