IN this week of 1930 the death occurred of Neil Munro, the journalist and author best known for his creation of the characters of Para Handy and the crew of the Vital Spark.

Munro holds a curious place in the pantheon of Scottish literature. Derided by Hugh MacDiarmid for being a member of the Kailyard school of Scottish writing, he was also hailed as a poet and published by MacDiarmid himself, while his short stories about Para Handy and a host of other characters were wildly popular in their day.

This brief account of his life and career contains no judgement of Munro’s literary aptitude. For me, I am happy to agree with Professor Alan Riach’s well-argued contention in The National on September 29, 2017, that close reading of Munro “opens up greater depths and complexities” than the simplistic sentimentality of the Kailyard school.

Munro was born the illegitimate son of a kitchen maid on June 3, 1863, in Inveraray in Argyll and Bute. There is a commemorative plaque marking his birthplace near Inveraray’s historic jail, a suitable connection as his mother Ann married the jail’s governor when Munro was a boy.

He was raised by his mother and his grandmother, both of whom were native Gaelic speakers who taught him the language, though he was schooled in English at the local parish school. His father was rumoured to have been a member of the household of the Duke of Argyll at Inveraray Castle, and perhaps through that connection Munro was found a good job on leaving school in the local Sheriff Clerk’s office.

His training as a clerk included shorthand, and at the age of 18 he left Inveraray for Glasgow to try for a career in journalism, starting in Greenock and then the Falkirk Herald before “graduating” to the Glasgow Evening News. He turned out to be a natural reporter and commentator – Victorian era journalists often had to be both, and Munro was such a skilled practitioner that he rose to become chief reporter of the News on a salary of £100 per year at the age of just 25. At the same time he married his landlady’s daughter, Jessie Adam – they would have two sons and four daughters.

Despite his journalistic success, Munro hankered after more serious writing and his memories of Argyll and the stories told to him by his mother and grandmother influenced his first attempts at fiction, published in 1896 in a collection of short stories called The Lost Pibroch.

One of the best stories in it was Castle Dark: “Once upon a time Castle Dark was a place of gentility and stirring days. You have heard it, you know it; now it is like a deer’s skull in Wood Mamore, empty, eyeless, sounding to the whistling wind, but blackened instead of bleached in the threshing rains. When the day shines and the sun coaxes the drowsy mists from the levels by the river, that noble house that was brisks up and grey-whitens, minding maybe of merry times; the softest smirr of rain– and the scowl comes to corbie-stone and gable; black, black grow the stones of old ancient Castle Dark.”

Munro then took to novels and wrote two successful ones in quick succession – John Splendid and Castle Doom, the first about the Marquis of Montrose’s campaign for King Charles I, and the second set against the background of the Jacobite Rising of 1745-46.

Having become assistant editor of the News, Munro retired from full-time journalism around 1902 to pen more novels, of which the best is The New Road, published in 1914, about the effects of military roads on the Highlands.

He retained his connections to the News by writing a weekly column under the pen-name of Hugh Foulis. They were really short stories featuring memorable characters such his “droll friend” Archie, the commercial traveller Jimmy Swan and the best-loved of them all – Para Handy, skipper of the Vital Spark.

The boat was a puffer, a small steam-driven merchant vessel carrying varied cargoes on the Firth of Clyde and up and down the West Coast. Para Handy and his crew became fixtures in Munro’s columns and indeed in his readers’ lives. The television versions of the Para Handy tales err on the side of humour and sentimentality, but Munro’s original writings are slightly darker and edgier, though nevertheless hugely entertaining.

As Riach says: “The stories are less easily given to sentimental coherence than the television series and the film, though they present reliable figures and structures as any genre series must. All Munro’s stories have a good journalist’s eye for light but serious social comment on events of the day.”

At the outbreak of the First World War, Munro returned to journalism and eventually became editor of the Glasgow Evening News. During the war he suffered the loss of his elder son Hugh who was killed in France – Munro’s health was never the same after that tragedy, and his output of non-journalism works diminished.

MacDiarmid may have dismissed him as ‘kailyard’ but he still included Munro’s poems in the anthologies Northern Numbers in the early 1920s. John Buchan, no less, collected those poems for what turned out to be a posthumous publication.

Munro received honorary doctorates from Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities but for him his greatest honour was to be given the Freedom of Iveraray. He said at the presentation ceremony: “The things we love intently are the things worth writing about. I never could keep Inveraray out of any story of mine, and never will.”

Retiring to his house Cromalt at Craigendoran near Helensburgh, Neil Munro died there on December 22, 1930, 90 years ago on Tuesday. He is buried in Kilmalieu Cemetery, Inveraray.