Professor Sir Robert Grieve, planner and first chairman of the
Highlands and Islands Development Board; born December 11, 1910, died
October 25, 1995
PROFESSOR Sir Robert (Bob) Grieve, who died yesterday aged 84, was one
of the most influential Scots of his generation. While his career
encompassed some of the most important jobs Scotland had to offer, Bob
Grieve considered himself a civil servant in a very literal sense of the
term.
His ambition was more about giving the utmost to the current job than
longer-term personal goals. Indeed, with characteristic irony, he
reflected on his extraordinary, and extraordinarily successful, career
as a process of ''falling up the ladder''.
Born in 1910 in Maryhill, Glasgow, he had for his most fundamental
early influence his mother Catherine. She was fastidious in her care of
both her family and their overcrowded tenement home, well read,
radically socialist in her beliefs -- she was one of the Glasgow women
trusted by John McLean to feed him during his imprisonment -- and Roman
Catholic.
Recognising Bob's intelligence and potential she took him out of the
local Roman Catholic school and enrolled him in the non-sectarian
alternative, North Kelvinside. In this she was, as Bob would recall,
making a great sacrifice as she knew that while it was the best thing
for the boy, he would inevitably drift away from the religion which was
precious to her.
Grieve trained at the Glasgow Royal College of Science and Technology
(now the University of Strathclyde) and qualified as a civil engineer.
During the 1930s he worked in various local government posts, but also
endured periods of unemployment when he would, quite literally, take to
the hills, nurturing a passion for walking and climbing.
In this field, just as in every area of his career, he achieved
substantial success. He was subsequently to become the president of both
the Scottish Mountaineering Council and the Scottish Mountaineering
Club.
It was his postgraduate training as a planner, in the early days of
that discipline, which was to determine the course of the rest of his
life. That and his marriage to Mary Blackburn, who would always be known
as May. Their relationship was one of mutual adoration from the outset.
Bob Grieve's first major piece of work as a planner was on Sir Patrick
Abercrombie's team for the Clyde Valley Regional Plan, which was
published in 1946. Abercrombie, the greatest planner of his day, was
much in demand throughout the UK and therefore delegated substantial
areas of the work to Bob Grieve and his cohorts. The two years leading
up to the publication of the plan were immensely demanding and
inspiring.
The regional plan was a fundamentally important document which would
have a major influence on the evolution of the city of Glasgow. In the
years which followed its production, Bob Grieve occupied a number of
Civil Service posts, concluding in 1960 as chief planner at the Scottish
Office, where he was to remain until 1964.
During this time he influenced the planning of Scotland's new towns
and major aspects of road transport in the central belt.
In 1964 he was invited to become the first Professor of Planning at
the University of Glasgow, and just a year later, the first chairman of
the Highlands and Islands Development Board. This latter invitation was
to give him the most important role of his career, and he did not take
on the task lightly.
Indeed, the request that he become chairman led to a substantial
crisis of confidence. He would later recall spending a vexatious evening
in London, knowing that his response to the invitation was required the
following morning. He telephoned May to seek her advice which was
delivered with characteristic pragmatism: ''Bob -- you've got to do it
-- or they'll get somebody worse!''
It is much to May Grieve's credit and Scotland's benefit that he took
her advice. While at the outset one newspaper announced his arrival as
chairman with the headline ''Grieve for Scotland'' his success in the
post was to prepare the way for much of immense benefit to the country
that he loved.
The five years of his chairmanship were the most demanding of Bob
Grieve's life. Issues of land ownership, transport infrastructure,
industry and tourism had to be addressed, differences reconciled,
conflicts quelled and major decisions, which would affect all aspects of
the Highland economy and the welfare of its folk, had to be made.
On departing from the HIDB Bob Grieve returned to the chair of
planning in Glasgow where he continued to apply his skill as an
inspirational teacher until his retiral in 1974.
Retiral in no way signalled a stop to Bob Grieve's work for Scotland.
Indeed, his interests and roles continued to affect the Scottish built
and rural environments.
He chaired the Highlands and Islands Development Consultative Council
from 1970 to 1986, while simultaneously chairing the Royal Fine Art
Commission for Scotland.
His presidencies of the Scottish Countryside and Rangers Association,
the Scottish Rights of Way Society, the New Glasgow Society, the
Inverness Civic Trust, the Saltire Society, Friends of Loch Lomond and
numerous mountaineering organisations, were all undertaken with great
care and energy.
Similarly, his early involvement with the Scottish Constitutional
Convention (where he served as chairman in the production of the Claim
of Right for Scotland), in a major housing study for Glasgow and in
numerous architectural competitions and awards received his customary
care and decisiveness.
He was always able to make the most difficult decisions through a
careful balancing of all the considerations and conditioned by his
powerful feeling for ordinary folk, their needs, drives and aspirations.
The death of May Grieve in 1984 after a long illness caused Bob the
most profound anguish.
In his Who's Who entry, Bob Grieve listed his recreations as
mountaineering and poetry. The breadth of his reading and his ability to
recall substantial passages was always impressive, but never intended to
impress.
Like many of his generation, he recalled the early influence of Wells
and Jack London; he had read the great philosophers but unlike most he
could also quote from Robert Pirzig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance, his copy of which, scrawled with annotations, had been read
and re-read.
Bob Grieve's ability as a storyteller is legendary. His mastery of the
nuances of language and his ability to deliver excruciatingly funny
material with a totally deadpan expression made him much beloved as an
after-dinner raconteur.
His many aphorisms tell a great deal about his personality. He would
refer to the careful and deliberate process of thought about complex
matters as ''unscrewing the inscrutable''. His life was characterised by
achievement rather than talking, in his own words he preferred to
''exchange the unexceptional sentiment for the terror of action''.
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