This very brief tribute to Alasdair is overdue. He was my friend, employee and partner in the Finavon adventure, and he died at the age of 69 of cancer on 23 December 2009. The last twenty five years at Finavon would have been poorer had he not been here working with me on the development of the fishery, which is a fine example of a beat on a Scottish salmon river, in no small measure because of Alasdair’s commitment to it over 20 years.
Alasdair was the river keeper and ghillie at Finavon from 1989 to 2008. During this time he looked after hundreds of visiting fly fishermen and their friends and families, keeping their morale high, even in the most unpropitious conditions, with his unending stream of jokes and good humour. His knowledge and love of the South Esk, combined with his meticulous attention to the needs of his customers and the riverbanks, gave the Finavon Castle Water a champion throughout his long service.
Alasdair fishing Willows
His love of the River had an obsessional side: he couldn’t bear to see litter, especially polythene bags hanging in the branches of river bank trees after a flood, nor could he abide the sight of the invasive weeds which take over the riverside in the summer. I would often find huge quantities of seedling Himalayan Balsam or Giant Hogweed left in piles beside the hut, a visible result of Alasdair’s obsession with their eradication! Alasdair was the best of the old style ghillies, but he also had a modern approach to his work by recognising that the fishing tenants were his customers and that he was responsible to a large extent for their enjoyment of time spent on the river. Many of FCW’s international tenants, Godi Donnersmarck from Austria, Hiro Soda from Japan, Earnley Gilbert from England, Sennen Paz from Spain, Erik Alstrom from Finland and many many others became close personal friends of Alasdair. He often went to Finland, Iceland or Austria as their guest with his wife Elizabeth, who is a well known local artist and whose paintings of Finavon are much admired.
Alasdair Petrie & Ned Coates
Alasdair was brought up in Dundee and excelled at school, especially in English and Latin. At 16 he joined the Royal Navy and was a ‘Button Boy’ at HMS Ganges (Where he stood at the apex of the huge mast 100′ above the parade ground). He then joined the police and afterwards the prison service before doing what he had always wanted by living in Angus and getting involved with shooting and fishing. He was an ardent reader and a considerable expert on the Second World War. He was also a prolific poet and writer. Over the years 1990 to 2005 he kept a detailed logbook of his observations from the riverbank. Red squirrels, ospreys, otters, stoats, roe deer, and the huge variety of butterflies, moths and birds we see at Finavon were all observed and recorded, and interspersed with his own poetry, some of which deserves a wider readership. I have promised myself that one day I will use the FCW logs as a quarry to write (with Alasdair at my side) about Finavon and the South Esk.
Alasdair at hut
Alasdair was one of those original people who left a mark on people much greater than might at first appear from where he worked and what he did. I often think of his 20 years at Finavon as an insciption on ivory. By this I mean that he worked in the detail of a small part of a little river in East Scotland. But the people he met and influenced, and his own resulting impact on their lives, made him much more important than his localised life might seem. Alasdair was a highly intelligent man. In my opinion he could have done many different things with his life; for example, he could have become a senior police officer or prison governor; or he could have been a musician (he played in a well known Dundee group as a teenager), or a stand-up comedian (ask anyone who heard Alasdair in full flow: they would agree!).
We were all lucky that he chose Finavon, and he is already greatly missed. Alasdair is survived by his wife, Elizabeth and his children Mark, Barrie and Karen and his step children, John and Wendy. TA.
