I WAS going to use this column for a few final observations from the council election campaign, but even after four months of door-stepping there are times when it just doesn’t seem to matter so much. Tuesday evening was one of those moments, when I learned of the death of Sandy Strang.
Some older Herald readers might remember AL Strang as a letters page regular in the 1970s, and journalism became an important if occasional part of his later life. Hundreds of cricketers facing Clydesdale and latterly Ferguslie knew that AL Strang on a team-sheet meant total hostility until the last ball was bowled, even deep into his fifties; but in the bar afterwards there was the guarantee of the companionship of a total sportsman who was also a Cambridge football blue with a spell on Queen’s Park’s books. And for the past 15 years or so, thousands of diners the length of the UK have rocked with laughter over the liqueurs and tablet at “The Strang” and his raucous and infinitely flexible after-dinner routines.
But a fair few Herald readers will know the name instantly because he taught them. From being dux at Hutchesons’ Grammar School in 1969, on completion of his studies he returned to the school as an English master and there he would stay for his entire teaching career. It was as an educator that Sandy Strang truly left his mark. I was privileged to be taught by him twice and even as a newly-qualified teacher his were not classes in which anyone was tempted to test the boundaries, not least because the engagement of a natural communicator made it unnecessary. In the days when belting was a daily occurrence I never saw him have recourse to the tawse. Well, only once and I was on the receiving end for mucking about in another teacher’s class. I was horrified to be shopped to him, but not as horrified as he was when I reminded him 20 years later and I’d recruited him as an Edinburgh Evening News columnist.
Eventually becoming depute rector, he worked closely with rector David Ward to build on the foundations laid by the brilliant Gilmour Isaac to turn the school into an educational powerhouse. But after Mr Ward retired results plunged under the new regime, the staff split and Sandy put his career on the line to make the governors act. And act they did, forcing him to resign in 2003 as the controversial rector John Knowles fell on his sword. Some might say the school is still recovering.
Shortly after Christmas we enjoyed a very convivial lunch in, appropriately, the Hutchesons’ bar on Ingram Street, the old education trust offices. Given the events which drew his time at Hutchie to a close it was perhaps an ironic choice, but he’d managed to procure some vouchers so neither of us was paying. Ever dapper, there was no sign of the illness which must have been ravaging his body but when the reality became clear he met it with typical fortitude, texting “Cancer with secondaries, and there was me taking Lemsip furr it”.
This Hemingway-style “grace under pressure” approach to life was severely tested by the death of his closest friend, the media lawyer Martin Smith, also from cancer at just 56. Martin’s instructions that his funeral be just Sandy’s eulogy, with no hymns or prayers, meant he had to suppress his emotions to deliver what he described as a “performance of total detachment”. It was as magnificent a piece of public speaking as anyone there will have witnessed.
The manner of his departure from Hutchie left him raw for many years and the tragedy is that under the promising new headship of Colin Gambles there were signs that a proper relationship could be re-established with the institution he would have served all his days if only they had let him. It is time for Hutchie to bring one of its finest sons home.
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