David Toulmin (alias John Reid), distinguished author, born July 1, 1913, died May 13, 1998

DAVID Toulmin was a rarity among Scottish writers in that he was born with an undoubted gift for the task yet had to wait until his 60th year before his prose gained the permanence of a book.

It was perhaps a classic case of the reticent Scot who wouldn't wish to get above himself. For David Toulmin (real name Jack Reid) spent his working life in the role of the old-fashioned farm servant, ploughing and sowing the fields of his beloved Aberdeenshire, while dreaming of another world to which his temperament would have been better suited.

There was poetry in his ploughman's gait and at the end of a day of drudgery he would update his detailed diary as he sat on the edge of the chaumer bed, jotting down not just the affairs of the day but the thoughts and feelings of a sensitive man.

He read his way through Shakespeare and then discovered the delights of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, who was born on a farm at Auchterless, on the other side of Buchan.

The occasional Toulmin article would appear in the old Farmer and Stockbreeder, while the local paper in Peterhead began to print some of his stories and recollections. By good luck they were noticed by another Buchan man, Arthur Argo, who happened to be a producer at the BBC and arranged for them to be broadcast.

Thus it was that the writings of David Toulmin were first put into book form in 1972. The young publisher who took a calculated risk with this mixture of English and North-east dialect was Paul Harris in Aberdeen. The volume was called Hard Shining Corn and would launch a career which ran for the next 20 years, when Toulmin suffered a stroke.

For the past five years he has lived out a life of frustration, still active in the physical sense but unable to communicate coherently. On Wednesday he rose early and repaired to an easy chair where he died from a heart attack.

In those 20 years as a successful writer, his titles ranged from Straw Into Gold and Harvest Home to The Clyack Sheaf. He took a particular pride in his only full-length novel, Blown Seed, published in 1976, in which he produced passages like: ''Now the soft wind carried the seed over the parks, tiny motes in the sunhaze, each one its parachute of lighted down, blown seed in the wind, showering over the crofts and farms like snow in summer, sprouting in a year or two where folk scythed and hoed to keep their crops clean.''

Unveiling some of the more sexual aspects of country life, Toulmin sold an initial 16,000 copies and harboured thoughts of blockbusting success. If that promise was not exactly fulfilled, his popularity continued unabated. In 1980 he parodied Robert Louis Stevenson and wrote Travels Without a Donkey, about the journeys he and his devoted wife Margaret had made around Britain once they could afford a little car.

There was one last collection of short stories in 1992 - and a compendium of North-east words and phrases, called Buchan Claik, which he compiled with his friend, Peter Buchan from Peterhead, a contemporary who was writing about the sea just as Toulmin was writing about the land. The two men enlarged on that volume and the later version is soon to be issued by Toulmin's publisher, Gordon Wright of Edinburgh.

By the time his belated career had taken root, David Toulmin had exchanged farm work for the softer option of landscape gardening in Aberdeen. There he would tell me of his days of cycling into the pictures at Peterhead to catch the glitter of early Hollywood, pinning posters of Garbo and Dietrich to the chaumer walls at the farm of Newton in Kinmundy.

Margaret, the kitchie-deem, would note the glamour as she made the men's beds, but Toulmin was not slow to appreciate that there was more substantial beauty on his own doorstep. Garbo wouldn't have been much of a hand at milking the cows!

He and Margaret were married in 1934 and produced three sons, Eric, Jackie, and Graham, who all live in the Aberdeen area.

In 1986 Toulmin was honoured by Aberdeen University with the degree of Master of Letters (M Litt). It was a recognition of his contribution in bringing an authentic voice of the North-east soil to the pages of literature. He had captured the spirit of a bygone age, when the folk of the land devoted themselves to their rural task with a dedication which would be unthinkable today.

For all the drudgery, David Toulmin, like Lewis Grassic Gibbon before him, could not shake off a deep-seated love of that life and the folk who belonged to it.

That furrow he ploughed was straight and true and gave off an aroma which enriched his days. The rest of us were the beneficiaries.