I taught classical music in working-class Scotland. Then cuts came

The National

19-05-2025

If you weren't doing the job or had outstayed your welcome after three or four years in the same town, you started to lose your audience and were moved on to fresh fields.
It was the distinguished Scottish composer Tom Wilson (below) who encouraged me to take up work for his part of Glasgow University's extra-mural department, as it was then called. I had no experience, but my audiences taught me pdq.
The lectures had a two-hour slot. Rule one: there shall be a tea-break of absolutely not less than 10 minutes and anything cutting short the normal 15 minutes was best requested kindly.
An hour and three-quarters was still loads of time and the great thing for classical music was you had enough of it actually to listen to what was being studied. So we could study in depth. Deeper than regular university courses could manage, even at honours level.
I gave several series of 20 lectures: 20 on Beethoven; 20 on Haydn; 20 on Mozart; 20 on Schubert. Brahms, Handel, Monteverdi and Bartok each got 10. And many others besides.
Years after I had finished doing these, I got a phone call to my home in the Isle of Skye.
'Is that Mr Purser? This is Mr M******. Do you remember me?'
Of course I did. Mr M had a strong middle-class Glasgow accent, pitched a little high. He was in his 30s or 40s, I guessed, and he lived in sheltered housing. He would never ask questions in front of the rest of the class but would come up to me in the tea break so we could talk quietly between the two of us.
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How he had got my telephone number since I had moved from Glasgow, I have no idea – but he had moved on to the reason for the call:
'Do you remember that Schubert Quintet – I don't mean the Trout – I mean the one with the two cellos?'
'Yes, the Great C major. It's a masterpiece.'
'Do you remember that passage where the cellos are in thirds and it modulates?'
'Ye-e-e-e-s.'
'It's beaut'ful!'
I had no time to respond as his next remark was: 'That's ma doorbell.' And the phone was slammed down.
If you are looking for an objective measure of your legacy in such a job, you can't do better.
But before you think I am boasting, that measure can operate the opposite way.
I used also to lecture for the Workers Educational Association and was one day assigned to a hospital/care home for patients in Renfrewshire. I had been warned it was not an easy one. It wasn't.
I was placed in a gymnasium which was totally unusable by the residents but kept at a temperature of around 80F. There was one chair, no table and the LP player had to sit on the floor near an electric plug.
My audience of a dozen was wheeled in: all in wheelchairs, many with colostomy bags and half of them asleep. The atmosphere was soon redolent of ammonia.
Of those who were awake, two old ladies listened to my pathetic effusions on the sad life of Schubert and his beautiful music with apparent pleasure. Two others had joined the sleepers.
Two old gentlemen were, from their expressions, never going to be on my side. And so it proved.
Two-thirds of the way through my efforts, one turned to the other and, with a stage whisper worthy of a Lawrence Olivier, asked: 'Was I born to suffer this?'
It's not done to assault old men in wheelchairs, and I have expunged from memory how I reacted. Suffice it to say the gentleman was back the following week (I suspect he had no option) and asked the same question of the powers above at more or less the same juncture.
It was only then that I understood that this was probably one of the few occasions on which he could exercise a little of his own power over the lot fate had assigned him in his later years. I don't begrudge him his protest. Indeed I am grateful to him now for teaching me how to accept being put in my place.
Dumfries railway station
It could have happened more than once. I was giving a course on opera in Dumfries and was doing away fine, starting with Monteverdi, working through Rameau, Handel and Mozart and finishing up with Bartók and Stravinsky. In between, I deigned to include some Italian folk, such as Verdi, Donizetti, Bellini and Puccini.
Among my audience were the station master and signal man from Dumfries railway station. It was not a busy station and they had amassed an unparalleled collection of 78s of great Italian opera and opera singers to which they listened in the signal box.
They knew every aria, every recitative, every plot, every vocal star, every conductor. They knew the lot. Far, far more than did I. They would ask me searching questions in the tea break and I would squirm with evasive embarrassment trying not to admit my ignorance too frequently. They must have known, but these were kindly men who were never going to press their advantage and were happy to receive whatever I had to offer outside their chosen marshalling yard of delights.
Extra-mural lectures involved travel. A highlight was the flight to Campbeltown. It was in a De Havilland Heron and on more than one occasion the right-hand row of single seats had been removed. There were just 11 of us.
Campbeltown
The flight was to Machrihanish, sometimes via Islay, Machrihanish being an air base from which a bus took you into Campbeltown. We had wonderful views from large windows and, flying low, we could see right down the funnels of the many ships docked or still being built on the Clyde.
The approach to the Mull of Kintyre was spectacular – the aircraft swept round the cliffs of Davaar Island so close that the seabirds rose in protest. We then skimmed the top of Campbeltown's spires and landed in a kind of military no man's land.
I had all day in Campbeltown, time to explore Davaar Island if the tide was out for long enough, or to drop in on textile designer Veronica Togneri's shop. She would come to the lectures. But the town itself was not a happy place.
There were many unemployed people hanging about street corners or keeping warm with the newspapers in the library. Flying in and out after an overnight in the biggest hotel in town didn't feel right and still doesn't.
All that came to an end. No more overnights. I had been able to stay in the Selkirk Arms Hotel where I was assigned the room in which it was thought Robert Burns used to sleep.
But now I had to drive from Glasgow to Kirkcudbright and back that night and had to repeat the journey to deliver the same lecture in Dumfries the following night.
In midwinter the return home on the A74 with huge lorries, blinding spray, buffeting winds and lousy visibility climbing up to Beattock at 11pm was an exhausting misery of concentration.
The end was in sight when you could see the glow of the Bessemer convertors at Ravenscraig belching fire on to the underside of the grim cloud cover. It was like descending into the inner depths of Dante's Inferno.
Now and again, I was able to stay overnight near Kirkcudbright with generous class members and with the remarkable poet and playwright Betty Clarke (also known as Joan Ure, below). It was one such late autumn night and I was readying myself at the end of my class for the dark drive to her remote farmhouse.
But just as I was ready to leave and most of the class had gone, an elderly woman came up to me. She was easily as tall as myself and she took me by the elbows and looked me straight in the eye. I remember her well and wish I could remember her name.
She was a strongly-built woman and a strong character. Whenever she asked a question, it was an interesting one. I learnt that, despite being unmarried, she had managed to adopt a daughter, which in those days was no mean feat, and the adoption was a great success.
She had recently retired as a church organist but she had not come to me about anything to do with music. I knew she was dying of cancer and had not long left – we all knew – but that wasn't it either. She spoke very earnestly telling me to drive carefully that night; that there was some kind of devil in me and I must, must be careful. I was taken aback.
This was a rational lady with no hint of being superstitious, and there was nothing superstitious about the way she spoke. She knew.
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She knew, and she was right. I was driving fast so as not to reach Betty's too late, but it was more than that.
It was a spooky night. No wind, no rain, but dark as hell.
My headlights could scarcely pick out the narrow twisty road between the hedges and gaps for gates. The only other light came from sudden flashes of distant car headlights reflected from the underside of a dense, low cloud cover.
I was pushing it – driving far too fast for the conditions. There was indeed a devil in me and if it hadn't been for that strange warning, I would have gone faster still. But every now and again, her words and her penetrating look made me ease off and I made it – just.
The following week she was not in the class. She was dead. People near death sometimes have strange insights. I think this was one such. I believe that night she saved my life.