On July 25th 2002 George Bruce, the Scottish poet, broadcaster and critic, died at the age of 93.
George was eldest son of Henry George Bruce, the owner of a firm of herring curers, and his wife Jeannie Roberta Gray, daughter of a timber merchant. Although he was to spend most of his life away from Fraserburgh, the town and the north-east coast of Aberdeenshire were in his blood, as his poetry attested, and he remained a ‘Brocher’, which is the Doric word for someone from Fraserburgh.
Bruce was one of the poets of the Scottish literary renaissance, initiated by Hugh MacDiarmid in the 1920s, which brought to prominence Sorley Maclean, Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown, Hamish Henderson and Iain Crichton Smith. He became well-known as the producer of Counterpoint, Scotland’s first television arts programme.
In 1970 he left the BBC, becoming Glasgow University’s first fellow in creative writing. As well as publishing poetry and anthologies, he was for 12 years a theatre and literary critic for The Sunday Times.
Over a period of 60 years he was to publish eight books of poetry in both English and Scots; he also edited six anthologies of poetry, and seven books on Scottish art and culture.
The Curtain.
Half way up the stairs Is the tall curtain. We noticed it there After the unfinished tale.
My father came home, His clothes sea-wet, His breath cold. He said a boat had gone.
He held a lantern. The mist moved in, Rested on the stone step And hung above the floor.
I remembered The blue glint Of the herring scales Fixed in the mat,
And also a foolish crab That held his own pincers fast. We called him Old Iron-clad.
I smelt again The kippers cooked in oak ash. That helped me to forget The tall curtain.
