Public tribute planned for Scots peer
Banks fans’city stroll a memorial to writer
A PUBLIC tribute is being planned to honour influential lawyer and politician Lord Fraser.
A funeral for extended family including the couple’s three children Jane, Jamie and Katie, and seven grandchildren, will be held this Friday, it is understood.
Fellow Queen’s Counsel who vied with Lord Fraser in the High Court and Cabinet ministers who worked with him in the Houses of Parliament will pay public tribute to Lord Fraser of Carmyllie at an open celebration of career.
The service for the former Lord Advocate responsible for the Lockerbie bombing
his life and trial will be held on Friday, July 12, at St Mary’s Parish Church, Dundee, at 2pm.
Among those who paid tribute to Lord Fraser, who died at the weekend from a suspected heart attack, were Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, First Minister Alex Salmond, former first minister Jack McConnell, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, f o r mer Scott i s h secretary Lord Forsyth, Labour peer Lord Foulkes and current Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, QC.
Lady Fiona Fraser said earlier the family was “making arrangements and filling our diaries with plans for holidays, the Open Golf championship, visits to family and friends and the christening of latest granddaughter, Delphin, and the next morning he was gone”.
A former Angus MP, he was appointed Lord Advocate by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1989, and given a peerage.
As Scotland’s most senior law officer, he initiated the Lockerbie bombing trial after which Abdelbaset al Megrahi convicted for the attack. He also headed the inquiry into the Holyrood building fiasco. FANS of the late Scots author Iain Banks are to stage a walk through London in his memory.
Avid readers of the writer’s novels have arranged the walk for this weekend, after his death from cancer aged 59 earlier this month.
The planned route of the 1.5mile walk from Holborn to Islington mirrors one taken by the character Graham Park in Banks’ novel Walking On Glass.
The devotees will carry copies of the book during the trip and will finish by raising a glass to the author in the Hope and Anchor pub in Islington, one of his favourite watering holes.
The walk on Saturday is being organised by David Haddock, editor of the Iain Banks fanzine, the Banksonian, and around 50 fans are expected to turn out.
David said: “Walking on Glass, has three interlinked storylines.
“One of these has chapter names which are the roads in London that the character Graham Park walks in his journey from Theobald’s Road to Half Mo o n Crescent.
“This is an area that Iain was familiar with especially the final chapter that takes Graham to Upper Street/ Regent’s Canal.”
Urging fans to carry a copy of the book on the walk, David added: “The plan is to finish in the HopeandAnchor which was somewhere Iain drank when he lived in Islington Park Street.”
Ba n k s, from Nor t h Queensferry, Fife, revealed in April he had been diagnosed with gall bladder cancer and had just months to live.
He married his long-term par tner Adele Hartley shortly after the diagnosis.
Banks’ final novel, The Quarry, about a man dying of cancer, was published last week.