Scottish arts need former Merchiston teacher’s quiet flair

The way that the arts can enrich lives means every effort must be made to sort out Creative Scotland, writes Tom Peterkin

This week work started on a state-of-the art music centre at St Andrews University, an admirable project in every way and one which has benefitted considerably from the largesse of Lord Laidlaw of Rothiemay.

The super-wealthy Scottish entrepreneur gave £4 million towards the project, which is to be named the “Laidlaw Music Centre”.

Given the scale of his philanthropic gesture, one imagines that Lord Laidlaw must have a keen appreciation of the way that music can enrich lives. Quite what role music has played in Lord Laidlaw’s own life is more difficult to discern in a quick browse of the newspaper cuttings profiling him.

They focus more on his role as one of the Tories’ most generous donors, his passion for yachting, his success in business and an unfortunate incident around ten years ago involving some prostitutes that saw him seek help in a sex addiction clinic.

What can be said with a little more certainty about Lord Laidlaw and music is that when he was a schoolboy he must have encountered someone who would fit the description of an inspirational musician.

As a boy, Lord Laidlaw – then plain Irvine Laidlaw – was a pupil at Merchiston Castle School, the famous fee-paying establishment in Colinton, Edinburgh.

For as long as anyone can remember, Merchiston’s success on the rugby pitch has earned it a reputation as a formidable nursery for the Scotland team. With alumni like Ross Logan, Roger Baird, John Jeffrey, Duncan Hodge and Phil Godman, it would easy to assume that the school valued muscular activities beyond cultural ones.

These days, of course, schools such as Merchiston pride themselves in the broad range of education they provide across all the arts. But one might imagine in the austere post-war years when Lord Laidlaw was there that it was a cultural desert. Not so.

On the staff was a dearly loved piano and organ teacher called Donald Sprinck. An unassuming man with a severe stammer, one might be forgiven for thinking he would not be a natural fit at a robust all-boys school. As a shy man wrestling with a speech impediment, the easy assumption would be that he would be ragged mercilessly by Philistine pupils. But Donald Sprinck was special. So much so that he was recognised by Merchiston boys at the time as a sensitive soul and, above all, a man with a sublime musical gift.

The son of a fashionable portrait painter in the court of the Czar of Russia, he was a pupil of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, who knew Brahms and was influenced greatly by the composer.

Donald Sprinck won gold medals for piano and organ at the Royal College of Music in London. He was blessed with perfect pitch and, by all accounts, his playing was virtuosic. But rather than pursue a career on the concert platform, he devoted his life to the school. My father, a contemporary of Irvine Laidlaw at Merchiston, had a study next door to Donald Sprinck’s rooms.

My father’s own efforts to learn the piano had not been entirely successful, but for hours he would listen to Donald Sprinck practise.

Despite being a member of the first XV, my father managed to acquire a life-long love of Bach and Brahms. Somewhere he still has a 78 record of Donald Sprinck’s playing that he was given by the man himself.