The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Author tells his personal history of the ‘Hunters’
Book: Writer recalls growing up on one of Perth’s most notorious streets
To many residents of 1960s Perth, a home in the city’s Hunter Crescent represented an aspirational step up the property ladder.
Designed as Neo-georgian tenements, it housed its first residents in 1936 and for a time it was seen as a model community.
Its decline came swiftly and brutally as, by 1981, it had become notorious, gaining the unwanted distinction of becoming known as “the most deprived area in Scotland”.
Author Anthony Camilleri spent the first 16 years of his life in “Hunters” and to ensure its lurid, sometime tragic and often comic history is not forgotten, he has written a memoir of growing up there in the 1970s and 1980s, entitled “Hunters: Wee Stories from the Crescent”.
Camilleri describes his memoir as a humorous and affectionate look back at Hunters between 1967 and 1984, but adds: “It pulls no punches: these were grim times”.
He recalls: “My mum and dad (Rachel and Fred) moved into 11D Hunter Crescent in April 1967.
“After a period renting a one-bedroom at in Shore Road for £1.10s, they were delighted to move up in the world to what was then a desirable part of Perth to live... even if the rent was a steep £2 per week.
“The following year I was delivered by the stork. It was 1968 and it was still safe for storks to fly over Hunters’ airspace.
“Three years later my brother John was brought home by my mum in an ambulance – storks refused to land by the start of the 1970s.”
By 1986 unemployment on the estate reached 80%. With crime rife, many homes standing empty and decaying and refuse littering the streets it had
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It was 1968 and it was still safe for storks to fly over Hunters’ airspace... storks refused to land by the start of the 1970s
gone from model community to a lesson in neglect.
The regeneration of Hunter Crescent began in the later 1980s and today it is rechristened Fairfield.
Camilleri’s book also reminisces about many of the characters who made up and visited the community. They include the ragman, who became “a vital component in the Hunters economy”.
“You gave him old clothes and in return you got a gobstopper, a bouncy ball, a balloon, or a goldfish,”writes Camilleri.
“Only problem was, some kids took their dad’s Sunday suit (I say Sunday suit, it was more than likely their suit for wearing when they had to go to court) or their mum’s wedding dress.”
The book will be launched at the Fairfield Neighbourhood Centre later this month and will be available from Tippermuir Books.
mmackay@thecourier.co.uk