LOVE him or loathe him, few Scots over the age of 40 are neutral on the subject of music-hall performer Harry McLennan Lauder, the Portobello potter's son who rose from working in Arbroath textile mills and Lanarkshire coalfields to earn the then colossal sum of #200 per week in the early 1900s.

To some, like his modern successor, Billy Connolly, Lauder, who died in the palatial splendour of his mansion Lauder Ha' in Strathaven 50 years ago today, was the ultimate in kitschy kailyard kilties.

He was a music-hall peddler of the worst kind of tawdry and trivialised Caledonian sentimentality, symbolised by the kilt and walking stick that Lowlander Lauder (born in Portobello on August 4, 1870) wore non-stop after becoming a full-time pro entertainer aged 24 in 1894.

Equally condemned is Lauder's projection on stage of his fellow Scots as rustic fly men, sentimental drunks, or skinflints. In contrast, contemporary Scots showbiz legend Jimmy Logan stoutly defends the man who made a fortune singing throughout the world, most notably during more than 20 triumphant tours of the United States, as being the author of a golden page in Scottish music-hall history.

Equally, some have claimed that, while many Lauder songs - such as his first mega hit I Love a Lassie (first performed in a Glasgow pantomime in 1905), Keep Right on to the End of the Road, and the classic Roamin' in the Gloamin' (first performed in Glasgow in 1910) - have retained today a perennial appeal, while many other of Lauder's ditties are viewed as cringe-making essays in banality.

Even worse, songs such as The Laddies Who Fought and Won, sung ironically by Lauder in the London-based flag-waving show Three Cheers in the same week of December 1916 when his own only son, Captain John Lauder of the Eighth Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, was killed in action, seem incredibly naive today.

Especially to those of us who now know the terrible human cost of the jingoistic sentiments of such songs to the British youths who idealistically responded

to them between 1914

and 1918.

A similar view might be taken of Lauder's stage-based recruiting drives aimed at providing more cannon fodder for the killing fields of the Somme and Passchendaele which, ironically, ended prematurely the promising musical career of his own son, a Cambridge music degree holder.

However, to employ this kind of historical hindsight would have one condemn Robert Louis Stevenson's family doctor for medical malpractice because he prescribed fresh air rather than the then unknown sulphonamide drugs to cure RLS's ultimately terminal tuberculosis.

Equally, many have claimed that while the public face of Lauder, a man who could still attract international stars such as Hollywood great Danny Kaye to seek his advice at Lauder Ha' shortly before he died in 1950, is well known, the real Harry Lauder remains an enigma clothed in myth and controversy.

Yet, if one accepts Dr Samuel Johnson's famous dictum that ''A man, sir, is never more honest than when he is at his pleasures'', then Sir Harry Lauder's 1927 autobiography Roamin' in the Gloamin' is a remarkable, truthful, and revealing guide to the character of the man who became both friend and icon to four British monarchs, Sir Winston Churchill, and American presidents such as Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, William Taft, Calvin Coolidge, and Teddy Roosevelt.

So what does this book reveal about the essence of the Lauder genius?

Firstly his natural ingrained skills as an entrepreneur. The view that Lauder was a simple coal miner turned comedian is as much an over-simplification as the myth of Burns being a simple ploughman turned poet. In fact, while still a teenager, Lauder became so successful as a

self-employed coal-mining contractor that long after he abandoned the pits for entertaining the world, there were still underground workings in Lanarkshire that were called ''Lauder Levels'' in honour of the man who first devised them as a modus operandi in the pits. Similarly, the same ruthless will to succeed was evident when he dropped Mackenzie Murdoch, the famed Scottish violin player. Murdoch was his business partner in a concert party early in his career but he was later promptly ditched because, as the man himself admitted in Roamin' in the Gloamin': ''My English stage engagements became too numerous and simply too profitable that I had to

resign from the Mackenzie

Lauder combination.''

Proof positive that, like Shakespeare's Prince Hal, Lauder ''hid his contemplation 'neath a mask of folly'' for, ironically for a man damned by his critics for facile sentimentality, Lauder revealed in the Mackenzie Murdoch affair a total lack of sentimentality and plenty of hard-headed business real politik.

Yet the future Sir Harry Lauder did not shy away from admitting his failures as a businessman. He himself told the world that his attempts to play the Highland laird (ironically recently duplicated by his erstwhile arch critic, Billy Connolly) at Loch Branther - where his wife, Ann Vallance, and his son

were buried - nearly bankrupted him.

Similarly, it was Lauder who told the world in his autobiography that not only did he lose thousands on dodgy investments in things such as engines for fishing yawls, but that some of the lyrics of his own early songs were rubbish.

On the other hand, the baronial splendour of Lauder Ha' in Strathaven, where he moved to live in 1935, may also be testimony to Lauder's business shrewdness but it also flags up another hallmark of his genius and success - his great networking ability.

Lauder might get the merciless bird from Greenock shipyard workers but the man who gave him that particular ''Tail o' the Bank'' engagement,

J C Macdonald, was at that time one of Scotland's premier comics and a key player in promoting Lauder's success. Similarly, smart networking with influential theatre impresarios, such as Dennis Clarke in Birkenhead and William Morris in New York, meant triumphs on stages in northern England and in theatres in every state in the US.

But only because behind the kailyard kitsch of the patter and the comedy routines was a shrewd recognition of what his audience wanted, plus his ability to deliver great songs of archetypal merit that still resonate down the years to modern listeners.

However, the networking that resulted in Lauder, accompanied on piano by his son, John, giving his first Royal Command Performance before King Edward VII at Rufford Abbey in 1909 and which led to Edward's son, George V, conferring a knighthood in 1919 stands as unmistakable proof that Lauder the performer had a universal appeal that transcended mere class or nationality.

Similarly, American presidents Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge were men of notably austere mien in public and private life, but even they willingly gave time to meet Lauder in recognition of his abilities to entertain them.

We Scots must acknowledge the flawed but immortal genius of Harry McLennan Lauder, who passed away bodily 50 years ago this week but whose timeless melodies will continue to survive the ravages of time and the even harsher ravages of revisionist social critics.