The Edinburgh Geologist
Issue no 42
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The Edinburgh Geologist | | ||||||||
the Editor interviews David McAdam
Alan: David, you've just completed ten years as Excursion Secretary. Tell us something of your earliest memories of the Edinburgh Geological Society excursions? David: Well, one of my first memories was when I moved up from the Geological Survey in Exhibition Road in London and transferred to Grange Terrace in April 1964. On my first day there, the talk in the tea-room was of the previous Saturday and the excursion that had been led by Malcolm Howells to Gosford Bayó and how successful that had been. It was a sudden introduction to the Edinburgh Geological Society and over the next forty years I was to be involved in excursions in many different ways. In the early years, I remember coaches leaving St Andrew Square under the guidance of Charles Waterstone, Alec Mackie, Bill Harper and Ian Hogarth and how many varied and happy these days were. At that time, they ran two weekend excursions; they were on the May and September holiday weekends. Then in 1979, there was a trip to the Isle of Rum. Unfortunately I couldn't go on this, but they had a superb five days there, staying at Kinloch House and it was so thoroughly enjoyed that ever since, the Society has held a week excursion in May. The first one I joined was one to Islay. I had some family connections there and I arranged somewhere for them to stay. So having done that, I thought I had better join the excursion and it turned out to be a very successful and happy week. My memory of Islay was turning up at the Machrie Chalets with the minibuses. We unloaded our stuff plus all the food and it was carefully divided into six for each of the six chalets. Muriel Hogarth had arranged all the menus for us, but there was an appalling moment when she discovered a problem with the packs of bacon. There were six chalets by seven days by five people and one of the elements had been missed out so we were three hundred rashers of bacon short. I suggested that as we were going to Port Ellen; we could get bacon there. So Muriel walked into the butchers' and said, ìCan I have three hundred rashers of bacon please in packs of five.î And the chap said, ìCertainly,î and picked up a side of bacon and started slicing three hundred rashers. Well, after about ten minutes, he didn't seem to have made much impression on the side of bacon but a had queue built up behind us. So he asked if we could come back later. It was all very entertaining. I was on several week excursions and they were all very enjoyable. We gradually worked our way up the west side of Scotland. One other story I remember is that we specially got an eightieth birthday candle for Alec Mackie's birthday, which was on one of the trips, I think somewhere near Loch Carron, only to discover that he was actually only 79! So we had to repeat it the following year. And you know, the thing about those days is that the excursions were led by two members from the party, Wally Mykura and Frank May. And they did a tremendous amount of work in preparation. Of course, they were Highland geologists and the excursions were always in the Highlands so it worked out very effectively. Wally had a tremendous enthusiasm and Frank had a tremendous knowledge as well. Wally led and Frank backed up and filled in the gaps. They were very good. It was very sad when Wally died in 1988. (David rummaged around and took out a large rolled geological map of Scotland) I have this map which I made for an exhibit of in the early 1980s. It shows twenty years of localities to which excursions have gone and the spots cover most of Scotland. Perhaps it's time to update this and show where the Society has been in the past twenty years as well. There's virtually no part of Scotland where we haven't been in the last forty years. I haven't been on them all, but I've been on many of them. So when did you become involved with the Excursions Committee? I was Secretary of the Society in the early seventies so would have been on the committee at that time. One of the things I remember about the Excursions Committee is that was held in Ian Hogarth's house on a Saturday morning in early January and it was as much a New Year celebration as a discussion of excursions. But these committees were really think tanksó they put forward suggestions and then the Excursions Secretary arranged everything. The Excursions Committee is necessary as a sort of regulator on the Society's excursions but what happens is very much a result of the Excursions Secretary's benign dictatorship. So while the meeting was very effective, it was also a social highlight. And at that time, Ian not only arranged the Saturday excursions, he arranged the week and the weekend excursions too. Then for several years I didn't go on many excursions because I had a family, but once they had grown up I found I could start going on excursions again. To tell the truth, they had landed a bit on hard times and they weren't going very well, so I thought that if I was going to go on them I could organise them as well. So I rashly volunteered to take over as Excursions Secretary in November 1993. Were there any changes you made then? I have to say I was encouraged in the way it built up quite quickly. For the Saturday excursions, there were various places that were within an hour or two by coach from Edinburgh, most in southern Scotland. But we have some great geology in Edinburgh I tried to think of a number of Wednesday evening excursions, about four or five which covered the range of geology here. One thing I remember doing was an Arthur's Seat series; Arthur's Seat is too big for an evening and too close for a dayó and there's a problem with toilets at lunch time: so we did five different bits of Arthur's Seat on Wednesday evenings over five years. I remember when I came back from Hong Kong in 1997, the application forms for the excursions came out and I phoned you to ask you why were they back to front, with the first one at the end. Well, there was a simple reason. One of my main objectives when I started was to make it user-friendly, to make it easy for people to book on the excursions. My idea was that you had all the information at the top of the page and you could cut off the slips off the bottom of the page and send them in one at a time. People in fact sent the whole thing in; they decided at the beginning of the year what they wanted to do and they sent me in the whole sheetó and they usually stick to it pretty well. I had thought people would think one at a time, but they actually think the whole summer programme. It's just the practicality of it. But you farmed out the weekend and week excursionsó Yes. I am very grateful to Ian Jackson for building up the weekend excursion and to Caroline Paterson taking full control of the week's excursion. Caroline has been very efficient. She had organised trips of her own to Iceland and she put this experience to good use in arranging our week excursions. It's a lot of work. And the weekends actually hadn't been happening for several years but we managed to find a formula whereby we arranged a date, a leader, a location near a village and a list of accommodation. People made their own arrangements, which worked for several years. Now it's becoming more formal. The fact is that many of the members are growing older and instead of being happy with self-catering huts and school annexes, they really want the comfort of a hotel. That aspect is changing. Tell us something of the logistics of planning a programme.
How much do you consider the balance of the geology? And as well as seeing a tremendous variety of geology throughout Scotland and the north of England, it occurred to me that over the ten years I've been doing it, there's over a hundred excursions that I've arranged, both Saturday and Wednesday and given an average turn-out of twenty or twenty-five, that's two and a half thousand outings that people have enjoyed over that time! So what is it that you think makes a successful excursion? Good weather, a good locality, a good leaderó One tends to think of weather in the context of excursions. As you know, you go to all the effort of getting the leader organised, getting the coach organised and getting to St Andrew Square, checking everybody in and then hope that it's going to be a nice day weather-wise. I must say that most days we've been blessed with good or at least acceptable weatheró with one or two notable exceptions. I remember one day years ago when we were up the coast at Arbroath with Mike Browne and it rained and rained and rained. On the converse I can think of another Mike Browne excursion when we were doing the Kirkcaldy-Kinghorn shore and we looked across to Edinburgh which the whole day seemed to be plastered with rain and we had it dry the whole time. And when we returned people couldn't believe that we'd had a dry day. Just to go back to the excursion where it rained how did people cope with it? They weren't discouraged. You know the members of the Societyó a little bit of bad weather doesn't put them off. Having said that, it's much more enjoyable when you get a nice sunny day on a beach locality. We've had many great days out on the Fife coast and much of the Lothian coastó I seem to be attracted to coastal excursions. I suppose that if the weather's
nice people can just lie on the beach. We've talked about the localities; what
about leaders? And of course, he has to know his subject very well. He
or she! I say 'she'ó I don't want to mention names but there are people like Suzanne
Miller for example, who can lead at a high level but can take everybody with her.
You get other people who, after the first S1 and S2, have lost their audience.
Well, there's both highlights and lowlights! One nice thing that happened was on an excursion led by Maxine Ackhurst to Dumfries-shire. At lunch time, we had lunch on a bridge over a river and a birthday cake was produced for my fifty-ninth birthday. It was a nice surprise that had been kept from me. What I've found doing the excursions is it's been a lot of work. Each excursion I've been thinking as much about the logistics and the organisation as enjoying the geology. You appreciate just how much the participants are enjoying it and it's nice to have letters and cards of appreciation. It makes doing the job seem worthwhile. Do you get many of those, then? Well, just the odd one. I have a small book of them, but it makes it seem worthwhile when you get a little note to say thank you very much for arranging the excursions for the past year. I even got a bottle of wine the other month to say thank you for running the excursions! We've had no real disasters, perhaps the worst year was the Foot and Mouth, when there was a constant worry as to whether the programme would work. It was arranged just before the epidemic started. It was in a position to go out at that time, so we put it out but things that should have happened then didn't happen. Effectively what I had to do was to make addendum slips for the billet and hand them out or send them out to people. The main misfortune of that was the cancellation of the Anglesey trip, and it's never happened. It was the week excursion, and it was to one of the worst-hit areas. There are various factors to take into account on dates, as well as trying to get a nice spread of dates that work, it is important to avoiding things like home rugby matches. But there are things that excursions do clash with. One I rememberó we were going to Lesmahagow on the same Saturday as the very first Gardens Scotland was at Strathclyde Park. The news on the Friday night was that they were expecting the area to be solid with traffic jams. And it was through the middle of that that we were planning to go so I had to work out a devious route to avoid it. On another occasion, having arranged to be picked up from St Andrews Square, we discovered that the town centre was closed because 10,000 pipers were marching along Princes Street. You know these things are sent to try you as it were. I couldn't get in from Coprstorphineó the bus went round via Melville Street and Queensferry Road and I wondered what was going on. And cycling events have affected us as well, events such as the St Andrews cycle ride. We met that several years in succession. They didn't slow us down but we just had to drive through these hundreds of cyclists. We just happened to be going out by South Queensferry on the critical Saturday each year. How does it work with the Glasgow Geological Society? Do you plan the programmes independently? Traditionally we try to have a joint excursion each year, alternating who arranges it. I remember a couple of years ago, having planned an excursion to Lesmahagow which we held jointly with the Glasgow Geological Society, I was counting the people through the first gate. When I got above fifty, I realised that we had a big turn-out. These joint excursions are very successful, but they tend to be getting a bit too large to have them too often. But both Societies are doing quite well and can each get twenty-five or thirty people turning up. When you double that, you get a very large number. Lesmahagow could take that but at other localities it wouldn't be so easy. I remember when I first joined the Society, I used to go on quite a lot of excursions to begin with and I think nearly every time we stopped for High Tea. That was something that somehow fell by the wayside, but I think that you have brought back again. Yes, well, when I first went it was compulsory. I was just a participant but I was aware that it was part of the Excursion Secretary's remit to provide High Tea at every excursion. I think this involved actually going out to find somewhere to have High Tea, which was quite an imposition on the Excursions Secretary. When I took over this had stopped happening and I thought it would be a nice idea to re-introduce it. I thought that we could do it for the last excursionó so we tried it and it was quite popular. And as a variant of this, a few years ago we were doing an excursion to Stirling, which ended up near Tom and Alison Kerr's house. So I jokingly said that we could go back there for a meal afterwards, but Alison took me up on that! We had a lovely walk into the hills and back out and into Bridge of Allan and we ended up with a very pleasant meal at the Kerrs'. It's happened once or twice now. Suzanne and Keith Miller had us to her house in Pittenweem, after a walk from St Monans. The Robbs entertained us to a barbecue in Haddington, while we took turns in viewing Jane's superb mineral museum. Then last year the Society came back here to our new house in North Berwick after a five-mile walk along the East Lothian coast; the fresh air certainly gave people the appetite to do justice to the meal that Valerie had prepared. And perhaps this brings me to the point where I should maybe give due credit to Valerie who through the ten years has supported me and stood by me. She has come on many of the excursions and given me a helping hand. She has seen me out to the bus, driven the car round to Barnton to be picked up in the evening again. She has given me a lot of moral and actual support. When she was new in Edinburgh, she joined the Society and it gave her friendship, meeting a number of new people. Unfortunately it landed her up in North Berwick! Actually, it was Valerie who pointed out to me that we've had people going to excursions from eight to eighty, the eight being Jane Robb while people like Bill Harper are still in their eighties. But participants in the excursions seem to be more and more the amateur members. In a way, it's disappointing that less professionals tend to go. In the early years when I went, a high proportion of professional people went. We don't seem to be involving quite so many younger professional geologists unless they're actually leading. That's reflected in the Society in general isn't it? Yes, and the other thing that strikes me as odd is that every year we get new members of the Society but remarkably few of these come to the excursions. I would have thought that when you first join the Society, you might want to find out what it offers. So does it tend to be the same people who go on all the excursions? My first reaction would
be 'yes' but I'm sure If I looked over the lists of people that had come over
the ten years, it would be a totally different list of people coming in 2003 from
1994. Some people are the same, but there has been a regular slight change over
the ten yearsó which is encouraging. There is clearly a demand in the Society
for the excursions and I am pleased that I'm able to hand over to Con Gillen a
programme which is well supported. I've enjoyed my time as Excursions Secretary
and I wish Con all the best in keeping the excursions going.
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