Neil M Gunn: A Scottish 'silver darling' of literature

Perhaps not so well known as his friend and contemporary Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the author of Sunset Song, Gunn nevertheless was a prolific novelist and wrote one book, The Silver Darlings, which regularly features on lists of most popular Scottish novels.

As always when I write about authors, I leave the literary criticism to much more qualified people than me, such as our own Professor Alan Riach, who has described Gunn as “a great modern novelist”. I will concentrate on the facts of Gunn’s life and career, though I will say he wrote two of my favourite books set in Scotland, Highland River and The Silver Darlings.

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Neil Miller Gunn was born in Dunbeath in the county of Caithness, as it then was, on November 8, 1891. He was the seventh of nine children of James Gunn, skipper of a fishing boat, and his wife Isabella Miller. Thinly disguised versions of James and Isabella appear in Gunn’s writings.

With his father frequently at sea, it was his mother, often described as “bookish”, who ensured that Gunn had an adequate education. Gunn often acknowledged his debt to his mother and once wrote: “Where she was everything else was about her naturally, each in its own right and glad to be there.”

She must have been a good teacher for soon after he arrived at the local school at the age of five, it was noted that he had an aptitude for arithmetic, reading and writing.

Gunn left school at 13 and went to stay with his older sister, Mary, and her husband, a Dr Keiller, who was a local GP in St Johns Town of Dalry in what was then Kirkcudbrightshire but is now part of Dumfries and Galloway.

He completed his education there and came under the influence of the poet and writer JG Carter who perhaps inspired Gunn to think of writing for a living. At the age of 15, however, he sat and passed the Civil Service exams and that brought him a move to London.

He went back to Scotland after two years and worked first in Edinburgh and then in Inverness, having transferred to the Customs and Excise service. He would travel all over the Highlands on a motorbike and that gave him great familiarity with the places where he would set his books.

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In Dingwall, in 1921, he met and quite quickly married Jessie Dallas Frew, always known as Daisy, the daughter of the local jeweller who was also provost of the town. They would have no children but had a long and happy marriage.

After a brief spell working in Wigan, and then in Lybster, the Gunns relocated permanently to Inverness when Gunn became the excise officer for the Glen Mhor Distillery which was beside the Caledonian Canal.

The stability provided by his posting enabled Gunn to embark on his writing career, starting by publishing poems and short stories, and then his first novel The Grey Coast, in 1926.

By that time, Gunn had met and befriended both Maurice Walsh, the Irish excise officer turned successful novelist – he wrote The Quiet Man on which the John Wayne film is based – and Christopher Murray Grieve, otherwise known as Hugh MacDiarmid.

It was the latter who encouraged Gunn to develop his political thoughts and though like the exciseman Robert Burns he had to act covertly, Gunn nevertheless took part in the development of what eventually became the Scottish National Party.

With the proceeds from The Grey Coast, Gunn was able to build a house for himself and Daisy in Inverness which he called Larachan.

From there, his output became prodigious with novels being published in quick succession, including Morning Tide (1931), Sun Circle (1933) and Butcher’s Broom (1934), the latter being his take on the Clearances.

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It was his 1937 novel Highland River which proved his real breakthrough, winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and selling so many copies that Gunn was able to quit the Customs and Excise.

He bought a boat and with Daisy accompanying him, he sailed it up the west coast and wrote a well-received account of the trip called Off In A Boat after which he rented a house north of Dingwall.

Gunn was now able to speak and write openly for the SNP and helped “King” John MacCormick in at least one campaign.

In 1941, he published The Silver Darlings which became a best-seller in Scotland and is in print to this day. It was made into a film in 1947 but many readers and cinemagoers have missed the fact that Gunn was writing about people who had become herring fishers because they had been cleared from their crofts as shown by the line: “The people would yet live, the people themselves, for no landlord owned the sea.”

More novels followed, including The Shadow and The Serpent, and one quite mystical work, The Green Isle Of The Great Deep. As he grew older, Gunn became fascinated with Zen Buddhism and wrote about this in his 1956 memoir The Atom Of Delight, which followed his last novel The Other Landscape published in 1954.

He continued to write and broadcast into his seventies and in all, he published 22 novels, four other books – 1935’s Whisky And Scotland was a labour of love for him – and many short stories and poems. He always wrote in English and lamented that he never learned Gaelic.

Gunn died in Raigmore Hospital in Inverness on January 15, 1973, aged 81. Thanks to the Neil M Gunn Trust which was set up by local people 10 years after his death, there is a monument to him at Heights of Brae just north of Dingwall in the shape of a standing stone.

It was unveiled in October, 1987, by the great Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean and the writer Jessie Kesson. He is also commemorated in the Makars’ Court in Edinburgh and the Neil M Gunn Trust continues to promote his work of which no literate Scot should be unaware.