Bestselling author who wrote about growing up in Glasgow dies

Died: June 27, 2024.

THIRTY years ago Meg Henderson, a noted journalist and TV documentary maker, published a bestselling biography, Finding Peggy. It was not only an evocative account of growing up in 1950s Glasgow but was also an tenacious investigation into what had caused the death, at the age of 36, of her beloved aunt Peggy.

Peggy Clark was the sister of Meg’s mother, Nan. Both were strong women who had shaped Meg’s life and attitudes. Peggy’s unexpected death had a catastrophic impact on the family. “Unable to deal with what had happened”, Meg wrote, “the Clarks simply fell apart. My mother became a recluse within months and my childhood ended abruptly as I had to take care of her”. Peggy’s children had to be taken into care. The merest mention of her name was frowned upon by the Clarks.

What actually happened was that Peggy and her baby had died in childbirth after being left with a student doctor who botched the forceps delivery. “Finding Peggy”, Meg said in 2005, “was about this shocking event and the effect on the family. It totally destroyed my mother”.

Much of Meg’s adult life was spent fostering and adopting children who sometimes were very damaged. The reason she did this was simple: “The truth lies in the events of my childhood and in the guilt about Peggy’s children. I was trying to reclaim her children over and over again”.

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As a Glasgow Herald reviewer of Finding Peggy said in 1994: “The family guilts of these decent people are difficult to bear, but rewarding and insightful to know”. 

Meg later noted that some readers were so moved by Peggy’s fate that they began leaving flowers at the Blackhill tenement where she had lived. "I kept thinking of whoever then lived in the house coming out and finding flowers on their doorstep and thinking they'd had a message from the Blackhill Mafia. I still wonder what the heart attack rate was like in that tenement”.

Meg would go on to write characteristically frank newspaper articles about her adopted children, one of whom took her own life in 2016. Speaking to a journalist in 2005 she said: “Some people might look at my life and think how hard it has been, but I never look at it like that. I just roll up my sleeves and get on with it. I certainly don't want to be seen as some sort of tragic figure. There have been some very sad times in my life, but also lots of tremendously happy times”.

What occasioned that particular observation was her public fall-out with her long-time friend, the actor Sean Connery. In her words, he had “double-crossed” her and decided not after all to have her as his official biographer. Connery’s decision prompted Meg to write a newspaper article in which she gave justifiable vent to her hurt. Connery later rang her from his home in the Bahamas.

Meg went on to write several other well-received books, including the Clydebank-set Holy City, as well as Chasing Angels, Daisy’s Wars, Second Sight (which came about as a result of a family holiday to Normandy) and The Last Wanderer. “She had a real interest in people”, says her son, Euan, “and she drew a lot of characters in her books from people in her own life. She did that so well”.

Meg Henderson, who has died at the age of 76, was born in Glasgow in May 1948, to Laurence O’Brien and his wife, Joan (Nan), nee Clark, who had married in 1936. Home was a tenement block at 21 Balmano Street, Townhead, at the top of a brae that towered over the city centre.

Her childhood was populated by colourful characters including her Uncle Hughie who, aged four, had lost a leg when he was knocked down by a horse-drawn tram. Another uncle, a bare-knuckle boxer in the Twenties, was once cleared of a murder charge after being provoked by a drunk. Her own father was an alcoholic.

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The family home in Balmano had been condemned and was shored up on one side, but the building collapsed during a heavy thunderstorm in June 1951. The family was decanted, first to Blackhill and, ultimately, Drumchapel.

Meg was educated at St Philomena’s primary and at St Laurence the Martyr’s in Drumchapel and at Garnethill Convent, She was also a pupil at the Marian school in Dowanhill, run by the Sisters of Notre Dame, where a teacher, Mrs McGettigan, was so impressed by Meg’s composition skills that she predicted that her words would one day appear in print.

At length she embarked on a long career in the NHS, beginning as a Student Cardiological Technician. She made excellent progress, eventually rising to become a Chief Cardiological Technician at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow. In November 1969 she flew to southern India to work in a hospital outside Madras, thanks to a Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) initiative. She spent a year in India.

She worked for the NHS from the 1960s until the mid-1970s before turning to writing at the beginning of the 1990s once her children were teenagers. She was a talented journalist, contributing a weekly column to The Scotsman for much of the 1990s, as well as many articles for others including the Herald, the Daily Mail and the Guardian.

In 1976 Meg and her husband Rab, whom she had married in 1971, began adopting and fostering children. The experiences often left a mark. In a Guardian article in February 2000 she wrote: “In the past 24 years my husband and I have adopted three children and fostered many others. We are part of a mostly silent majority of adopters who have gradually become more vocal in an attempt to stem the number of adoptions taking place. Yes, that's right: we want fewer children to be adopted. We want the bandwagon halted in its tracks until social services get their act together and stop destroying well-meaning families”.

The trouble with the whole foundation of child adoption as opposed to baby adoption “was, and still is, that it is all a lie, because the majority of children in care are so damaged that ordinary, warm-hearted individuals have no hope of coping with them”.

In an article for the same newspaper, in May 2003, Meg wrote powerfully of the serious problems she and Rab had faced in raising two half-sisters whom they had first fostered then adopted. The couple, believing that they had been kept in the dark about the girls’ troubled backgrounds, asked the local authority for compensation, but to no avail. The compensation would have been for their other children in the light of the difficulties inflicted on them while Meg and Rab tried to cope with one of the girls.

Despite the problems she faced, including caring for Rab for almost five years until his death three years ago, Meg remained an indomitable, outspoken force. “She was a battler, and that came from Nan and Peggy”, says Euan. A writer to the end, she even had one or two books in the early planning and research stages. She is survived by Euan, his sister Lisa, Euan’s wife, Suzanne and their children Sophie and Max.