HOW long has Lesley Duncan been working for The Herald? Like her age, it’s not something she’s keen to put into figures, but let’s just say she was working for the paper (still The Glasgow Herald in those days) as a rookie journalist when the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin visited the House of Commons in 1961. She even managed to get herself chucked out of the press gallery that day for sitting in a seat reserved for the (London) Times.
And, to add insult to injury, Duncan said, recalling that day some 60 years ago, “When I went to get a taxi, I remember Herbert Morrison pushing me out of the way. Nobody would remember Herbert Morrison.”
That Duncan is still contributing to The Herald decades after the former Labour cabinet minister stole her taxi, is a sign of her indefatigability. But, finally, after many years of service for the paper, during which she has been a feature writer under George Fraser (better known as George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the Flashman novels), worked as a production editor, became the paper’s first obituaries editor and, for the last 25 years, as the much-loved poetry editor, Duncan is slowing down. Slightly.
Her daily poetry column will now become a weekly occurrence as Duncan toys with the idea of retirement. Not that that is a word she has much time for.
“I choose not to understand it. Why would one, if one still has health and people still want you to do what you’re doing?”
Born and brought up in Ayrshire (she attended Marr College in Troon), Duncan came to journalism after an English degree at Glasgow University, a master’s at Pennsylvania State University and a short spell teaching in Cumnock.
"At that point you couldn’t be a woman and be taken onto the Herald editorial straight away. You had to prove your worth in the library,” Duncan recalled. “And it was still the days of the cuttings. The cuttings were vital.”
However, she was soon given a job as George Fraser’s “dogsbody” and so began a long and productive career in journalism that took her all over the world and into every corner of British society.
She flew on Concorde, climbed up on the Forth Road Bridge, even went to Russia where she ended up toasting Robert Burns with the grandson of the doctor who performed the autopsy on Stalin.
“I would go to work with a light step. I never lost that,” Duncan said of her years with the paper.
In the middle of this she also raised her son David who is now a lawyer in London.
George Fraser was Duncan’s mentor. “I really think he had an important influence on my career, though I remember him saying, ‘Lesley, stick to design, writers are 10-a-penny.’ Said he, walking off to his six-figure film deal. But he was an all-round journalist and could do everything and he was probably more charming than was good for him.”
For the last quarter of a century Duncan, of course, has been providing Herald readers with a daily poem.
“It has been sustained, that column, by the readership. A lot of the readers of The Herald are university graduates. But I think Scots people generally are very at home with poetry. It’s partly Burns and the fact that he has gone down the generations. But, also, the Border ballads and the songs that Burns collected.
“Scotland is considered a kind of dour country, I think,” she added. But that is not the whole story. There is also, she believes, “an innate enjoyment of language and melody.”
Over the years Duncan has been kissed on the cheek by Hugh MacDiarmid, held hands with George MacKay Brown and generally been a supporter of poets old and young from around the world.
“My tastes are very wide. I get more and more amazed by Shakespeare and Burns the older I get. Of course, I’m an Ayrshire person.”
A book of her own poetry, Images and Icons, was published in 2010 and she’s hoping there will be more.
“I’ve got a book of love poetry which at some point I will have to look at. It’s been lying for five or six years.”
It’s one of the projects she can turn her hand now that she’s (not quite) retired. That and recalling a career that has been long and distinguished.
“I wonder on how many papers one could have had the career that I’ve had?”
One could equally ask many papers have had a journalist quite like Lesley Duncan?
In The Herald Magazine tomorrow: Lesley Duncan on her life and times on The Herald
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