Cornerstone No. 187, page 16
, in the role of … McKillup( no joke – honest, and I haven’ t mis-spelled it) and The Lord Provost( typecast again) in
( 1961). Away from cinema and on to the‘ telly’ GS63 portrayed Mr. Justice Lorrimer in before going on, in 1963, to be Mr. Justice Duncannon, playing the title role in that series.‘ Typecast’ you say? Well, his final stage appearance was in the guise of Mr. Justice Treadwell in at the Queen’ s Theatre in 1987. His very last portrayal and appearance was as Mr. Hodinett( no‘ Justice’) in a television production of in 1988. It was on air just more than a week after his death. Andrew J. M. Cruickshank died on April 29th, 1988. He was chairman of the board of directors of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from 1970 to 1983 and, a little-known fact concerning his interests away from the theatre, he was a Scottish nationalist. He left a son and two daughters and perhaps one Dr. Cameron. However, his memory lives on in( of all places) Milton Keynes where there is a Cruickshank Grove and if you wish to visit the place of Dr. Cameron’ s practice go to Callander(‘ Tannochbrae’ in the series) a homely town that lies between Stirling and the‘ Road to the Isles’… yeh canna beat it!
The Beauty of the Rose
We have a very beautiful red rose on the first page of this edition of Cornerstone and red roses were very much in evidence at Helen’ s funeral. Several of the family members carried them and a single red rose was on the front page of the Order of Service under Helen’ s photograph. Everybody loves roses but they were obviously deeply symbolic and especially appropriate on that otherwise very sad day. I did not myself know until the day of the funeral that Helen was born and spent her early years in Lancaster, a city and county town in the north of England. The red rose was a very important badge of identification for Lancastrians during the bitter Wars of the Roses( 1455-1487) and later became and remains to this day the unofficial emblem of Lancashire. Then at the funeral Alice Goodman sang very beautifully what is unquestionably Robert Burns best known love song My Love is Like a Red Red Rose thus linking Helen’ s English upbringing with her future Scottish family and life and the fact that for all of us red roses will always remind us of her.
Pam Kirby
Deadline for the next edition of Cornerstone: 17th September 2017