The long-running performers - Logan, Milroy, Fulton - have gone, turning the lights out after them, leaving us sitting bereft in the stalls. Now the diminutive Molly Weir of boundless energy is the latest departure. But she has the last laugh, with a remark worthy of Mae West. ''I was offered roles in One Foot in the Grave. One of the parts I didn't get was because they wanted someone a bit dull - and they reckoned I was too vivacious.''
There were two girls and two boys in the Weir family in the Springburn tenement. The eldest (born 1910) was christened Mary, but decided to call herself Molly. Their soldier father was killed in 1914, and the mother painted carriages in Cowlairs railway works to feed her four children, assisted in their rearing by a dedicated granny.
Molly recalled her tenement home. ''We called our room and kitchen a 'house', for we had never heard the word 'flat' when I was a wee girl. It was a red sandstone tenement . . . The tenements were lit by gas . . . an outside toilet had to be shared with two other families. There were several large families living in a single room. One family had 14 children, and they all lived in one room with a box-like compartment leading out of it.''
A month after war was declared in 1939, Molly Weir married Sandy Hamilton, her childhood sweetheart. While Sandy was serving abroad, Molly, British shorthand typing champion with a speed of 300 words per minute, worked in the typing pool of a munitions factory. During the lunch-break she put on a Workers' Playtime, performing the entire show with the help of her great friend Mary. She found time to learn German, in case ''a German paratrooper landed in my garden. I wanted to know what he was saying. And I always kept a pepper-pot so that I could throw pepper in his eyes if I had to''.
During the war, Molly got the chance to do some radio broadcasting with Gordon Jackson and Janet Brown, going to the BBC studios in Queen Margaret Drive by tram after work. Molly moved to London in 1945, and had a part in the 18-month West End run of The Happiest Days of Your Life. During this period she joined ITMA (It's that Man Again) starring Tommy Handley, and was introduced to millions of radio listeners as Tattie McIntosh. When the show ended with the death of Handley, she continued her radio work, and went on to become Aggie in Life with the Lyons, which later transferred to television. She also contributed to Children's Hour and had a part in the McFlannels.
The media of television suited Molly. She acted in Dr Finlay's Casebook, All Creatures Great and Small, and Within These Walls. She was in the 1976 children's programme, Rentaghost. Her film appearances included: Floodtide (1949) as Mrs McTavish; Value for Money (1955) as Mrs Matthews; The Bridal Path (1969) as the second waitress; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) as Miss Alison Kerr; Scrooge (1970) as a woman debtor; One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing (1976) as the Scots nanny. Her accent was in demand for television commercials, and she is remembered for exhorting the nation to buy the wonder floor cleaner Flash.
Molly recalled: ''The one thing I took with me when I left my first office was my typewriter. That was because I wanted to be a writer. I had to buy it, and I was incensed because I had kept it in such immaculate condition that they wouldn't even give me a reduced price. They'd only sell it at the full market price of (pounds) 15.''
Molly certainly made use of her typewriter and her memories of her Glasgow tenement upbringing. Her trilogy of Scottish childhood, Shoes were for Sunday, Best Foot Forward and A Toe on the Ladder, are valuable social documents as well as appealing stories. The Scottish Theatre Archive, at Glasgow University Library, contains a collection of Molly Weir's scripts for radio, manuscripts and correspondence. In 1996 she left her distinctive voice to posterity in an audio adaptation of Stevenson's Treasure Island.
Molly, a popular public speaker and newspaper columnist, moved to Pinner, Middlesex. When Sandy failed to get over a stroke, Molly sang to him in the ward and brought back his speech. Sandy passed away some years ago, and Molly is survived by her sole remaining brother Tom. When he heard that his sister had become British shorthand typing champion, the grocer's assistant asked her to give him lessons because he wanted to become a writer. She charged him 2/6d a lesson. He could only afford three lessons, but mastered the typewriter - fortunate for us, for Tom Weir, now approaching 90, is one of our foremost writers and broadcasters, particularly on the Scottish countryside. We should be grateful to that Springburn tenement, and to the widow who painted carriages, for giving us such a gifted brother and sister.
Molly (Mary) Weir, actress and writer; born March 17, 1910, died November 28, 2004.
Lorn Macintyre
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