Farewell Norman, a Gael adrift in a world in which he didn’t fit

Norman maclean, whom we buried in north Uist on Tuesday, was the cleverest man I ever met, celebrated as a Gaelic TV host, singer, piper, comic and raconteur.

He was fluent in French, Spanish and Portuguese. He had – variously – run a citrus plantation in Florida, been a whaler and for 15 years a teacher of mathematics. He is still the only person to have won the mod Gold medal (for his singing) and its Bardic Crown in the same year.

He was a gifted novelist, a luminous poet, a hilarious mimic and, on occasion, a haunting and serious actor. not that norman was precious; one job he hugely enjoyed was overdubbing, in Gaelic, the Danger mouse cartoons for Scottish Television. Everything, even the theme song, for what was now ‘Donnie murdo’ was matchlessly voiced by norman.

But he drank. He began early, as a student, and thus – despite his brilliant mind – emerged from university with shabby third-class honours.

at 27, a troupe of doctors and psychiatrists told him bluntly he was an alcoholic. In his forties, Billy Connolly (a great fan, as was Sean Connery) begged norman to stop bevvying.

He did try. at one point he went two years without boozing. But drink destroyed both his marriages, estranged him from his only child, wrecked his television career and, in the opinion of the BBC’s neil Fraser, dashed the prospects of someone who could have been a global star.

The deoch led norman into dreadful scrapes. Brigitte Bardot, no less, sacked him as her piper in St Tropez when he made intoxicated advances to her. He was incapable of fidelity and could never be relied on to turn up for anything on time and sober.

once, in 1991, he found himself naked and held at gunpoint, in mexico, by a mariachi singer incandescent that the Highlander had copped off with his girlfriend. on another occasion he accidentally burned down his own hotel. (as firemen fought the blaze, norman staggered in and out asking them for an ashtray.)

HIS mother cursed the day he was born. on her deathbed, she insisted he was unclean, a changeling – that he should wear a leper’s bell around his neck. His 2009 memoirs were duly called The Leper’s Bell.

By the mid-Eighties, maclean was pretty well unemployable, though as his addiction permitted he toured Scotland and especially the Highlands, piping and singing but largely with his stand-up routine, deliciously exploiting local rivalries and acting a vast range of stock Highland characters, for perhaps £200 or £300 a night.

Those who saw norman going on the drink – often after long spells of abstinence – say it was terrifying to watch; one man’s self-loathing descent into Hell.

He had many falls, the odd beating. When, in 2009, a young couple who loved him hauled him from Glasgow squalor back to north Uist, he was within weeks of death, alone and surrounded by empties.

They say there was never such a piper as maclean. He could play, note perfect, the most intricate reels and strathspeys while running full-tilt around a hall; he could play, no less effortlessly, while lying flat on his back. and he had the most extraordinary way with an audience – and, indeed, a way of making connection with practically anyone he met.

‘norman wasn’t “bright” in the sense he was always happy or that he was always an emotionally easy man,’ mused his friend Jamie Chambers this week. ‘But he had a luminosity, a brightness that comes as close to a truly universal quality as I’ve seen in my lifetime.

‘I have yet to meet anyone who he couldn’t make laugh, who wasn’t captured by his charm and wasn’t hanging on his every word minutes after meeting him.’

His problem was one of identity. norman’s father was from Tiree and his mother from Benbecula. Born in Govan, Glasgow, in 1936, by his fourth birthday he and his mother had fled the bombers for the remote hamlet of Strathan in Lochaber, then a tight-knit, Gaelic-speaking community.

There were later years in Benbecula before, around 1947, the family returned to Govan.

after the small Teuchter had taken a few good beatings he was, in a matter of weeks, ‘fluent in Govanese’.

Fundamentally, norman did not know where he was from – as he often remarked – he felt always near the edge of either culture, be it Gaelic-speaking and Hebridean or urban and English-speaking, and not belonging to either.

It was compounded no doubt by the death of his father when norman was only 14. norman idolised him – although neil maclean, a womanising boor, was not worth idolising – and had a fraught relationship with his mother. There was an inability, too, it seemed, to find a clear calling; a difficulty in giving anything his full focus.

BEForE I knew him, I was always rather uncomfortable about norman maclean. Even as a child, as we watched him on television, his alcoholism was obvious. You felt involuntary witness to a slowmotion suicide and his scrapes played so pathetically up to gnarled old jokes about feckless, boozy Highlanders.

But there is perhaps a reason for such predilection.

‘norman’s generation has watched as the language which swirled around the communities of their youth has evaporated,’ pointed out broadcaster roddie Fraser in 2009.

‘They’ve been forced, in the main, to apply their talents and intellects to careers in English. That is bound to give even the most secure of people a sense of being overwhelmed, of insubstantiality, of being caught in a phantom existence between two cultures – that’s why drinking is an endemic problem in the Gaelic world, just as it is for the maoris, the Inuits and marginalised communities the world over.’

There has been much talk since norman’s death, last Thursday, of the ‘waste’ of his life and talent. I am not so sure. Even for a man untroubled by addiction, his achievements would have been prodigious – the verse, the volumes of autobiography, the novels and documentaries and recordings.

He was also extraordinarily loved. almost everyone has a good story about him.

norman blossomed on Uist. a local family, the Townsends, took him into their home and cared for him until his last illness. By 2011, he was sober, happy and never drank again.

Jaunty and stylish – norman was always rather the dandy; apt to sport a fedora and drawl like someone out of a Chandler novel – he became part of the community. He was sought out to mentor children in piping and dancing and drama.

He produced the best writing of his life and found a simple, profound Christian faith. Thus norman maclean shone in final Hebridean dignity – home, and home to himself, before he had lost himself for ever.