Jean Reid

Born: March 31, 1931;

Died: May 30, 2024

For over eight decades she was usually the last person to walk away from good conversation, especially if it involved vigorous opinions, and often the first person to book her seats for another performance of the Wagner Ring, which once took her up the Amazon to the Manaus.

Today, there will be memories shared and old debates rekindled in Glasgow Art Club, as friends and family, at the invitation of their absent hostess, raise a last hurrah to one of its most committed members: Jean Reid, journalist, traveller, cultural activist and Glasgow patriot, who died at the end of May aged 93.

Jean, as she claimed on her 90th birthday, accepted she was living on borrowed time but still wanted to know – what happens next? If her greatest gift was intellectual curiosity, her second greatest was friendship – inclusive, cross-generational friendships as important to the wellspring of her being as the well-being of her close extended family, who found their trail-blazing relative “exceptional” in her energy and optimism.

The ground work for her personality began in Pollokshields. Raised by a family at the centre of Scottish cultural life and the revival of Scottish identity in the post-war years, she was immersed in both scholarship and newsprint as Scottish newspapers entered a golden age.

Her mother, Ruby, was an early graduate who taught French. Her father Jim, was J M Reid, editor of The Bulletin, a central Scotland institution until 1960, and author of several books on Scottish and Glasgow history. Their questioning middle child was clearly destined for Glasgow University, where she became president of Queen Margaret Union for women students.

Those were the days when the university’s union was gender segregated, and Jean’s major triumph as QM President was to get rid of the patronage of “professors’ wives”, whose extraordinary role was to “supervise” the decision-making of female students.

This was a woman who disliked labels but was an instinctive feminist before second-wave feminism got under way; who started travelling to places (the Soviet Union, Cuba, Albania) untouched by mass tourism before Cliff Richard began enticing British youth onto European beaches; whose independent mind was open to different political systems, as her beloved Glasgow and its hinterland struggled with post-industrial decline; and who, perhaps too eager to find solutions, was persuaded that Mao’s China had some of the answers.

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“They insist that every role in the workplace is valued, from street cleaners to scientists,” she enthused when she returned from China in 1973, the year after Nixon became the first US president to inspect the Great Wall. She was aware her group trip was both state and stage-managed and didn’t allow for questions on human rights, but was still charmed by the experience, including its cultural highlights.

Jean’s career in newspapers began with a brief spell at The Glasgow Herald, which was not innocent of gender discrimination back in her day. It did have a policy of employing women graduates, not to work in the rowdy front line of news reporting but in the orderly confines of the cuttings library. Despite the prospect of editorial work if the young women proved worthy, this initiation was too confining for Jean, and she took off for Dundee and the mighty publishing house of DC Thomson.

Here – under the care and tutelage, ironically, of one of journalism’s most enduring patriarchies – our paths first crossed: on their leading women’s magazine, My Weekly, where our tasks included sub-editing romantic fiction and problem letters and mastering the intricacies of page design, with the odd bit of modelling for knitting patterns thrown in. Like several of her friends from those joyful days I was a dozen years younger than Jean, a school leaver in fact, and relished the parties she threw with her more mature flatmates, who had travelled farther and knew more than any of us.

It was later, when both our careers and workplaces moved on – Jean’s to the Times Educational Supplement and mine to The Scotsman – that I first became aware of Jean’s implacable Glasgow “nationalism”. The TES’s Scottish office was in Edinburgh and although her work took her all over Scotland she was often there, commuting from the West. By one of these co-incidences for which tiny Scotland is famous she had also become friendly with two of my new friends in Edinburgh, whom she met on a rigorous National Trust for Scotland “holiday” – a work party labouring on basic conservation among the ruins of St Kilda.

More parties, more opera, theatre, galleries and travel, including several Highland holidays with some modest hill-walking. And many more good-natured arguments as Jean and I wrangled over the respective merits and demerits of Edinburgh and Glasgow. With some justice she believed the capital was privileged at the expense of Glasgow’s more grievous economic needs; more so when the Scottish parliament, for which she voted, secured its ambitious new seat at Holyrood.

(Image: The Tron)

Jean’s love for Scotland and its culture never faltered, but in her later years the political appeal of Home Rule mutated into support for the federalist option – one that has gained traction more recently. The apotheosis of her cultural activism came in 1990, when Glasgow opened its year of European City of Culture.

She had left the TES and joined the PR department of Strathclyde Region when it was formed in 1978, and retired at its demise in 1996, working first in education and social services, both areas for which her left-leaning convictions had ambitions. But the department had the sense to recognise her passion for the performing arts, her faith in their transforming power for impoverished communities, and her experience in campaigning for the establishment of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow. She was appointed lead contact for City of Culture publicity.

It was, she said, not only the high point of her career but of her life, and I would tease her that Glasgow had finally given Edinburgh some cultural competition. And The Herald, which to her disapproval had dropped the “Glasgow” from its masthead in the early 90s, even name-checked Jean Reid “for a perfect attendance badge for the Year of Culture” in the Diary.

By JULIE DAVIDSON

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