David Robertson, a founder member of the Friends of the Ochils and later editor of this newsletter, died in late June and will be greatly missed.
When David first joined the ranks of the Friends he was a retired journalist having held senior posts on the Stirling Observer and the Evening Times, and he used his retirement to walk and explore in his beloved Ochils. With his small beard, twinkling dark eyes and spectacles perched down his nose, he looked what he was: a cordial, warm man with a sharp mind.
He had a quiet and unassuming manner, but underneath was a questing mind and a strong will. He had difficulty tying the laces of one of his boots one day and mentioned in passing, as it were, that he had had a stroke some time before and it sometimes affected the use of one arm. Up to that point, few of us knew he had been ill.
He had an eye, too, for historical bric-a-brac. He and I once had an evening walk to Scott's View, at Dron Hill at the east end of the Ochils, and we came across the remains of some signs which in the early 1900s had directed walkers to the view site. These sign remnants were lying among the grass and heather, and nothing would do but David would go back later, rescue them, and hand them over to Auchterarder museum.
He kept in touch with his former journalistic colleagues and was a reporter and subeditor of the old breed, a stickler for accuracy, balance and fairness. The Stirling Observer editor, Alan Rennie, called him Mr Reliable.
David was 75 when he died, losing a fight against cancer. He managed to travel to New Zealand late last year for a reunion after 30 years with his twin sister Barbara. David's wife Doris died in 1990 and he is survived by their son, daughter and foster children. There was a large attendance of relatives and friends for his funeral in his home town of Tillicoultry.
I only came to know David Robertson late in his life, when I moved from Glasgow to Alva in 1997. On joining FotO I soon ended up on the committee, and David was a major influence in this. In fact, looking back, I'm not sure that I would have become actively involved without his encouragement and enthusiasm. He was a lovely man, always a treat to see when he came to the door or to hear when he called on the telephone. A characteristic shortage of breath meant it was possible to tell it was David on the line even before he managed to say anything, and his eventual slow-spoken greeting of "Hellooooo, it's David Robertson here" - with the R in Robertson rolled and indisputably Scottish - was utterly distinctive and endlessly endearing. It was hard not to warm to the man simply on that basis alone.
Our joint involvement in the newsletter meant that he quite often delivered snippets of copy to the house (by this stage I was in Riverside in Stirling), and he never needed much persuasion to come in for a cuppa and a natter. His genial and convivial nature - his love of, and interest in, people - was also to be seen when, on a couple of occasions, he turned up at my annual Shrove Tuesday pancake party: I have a clear image of him sitting there, in a room where almost everyone else was at least a couple of decades his junior, and not seeming at all out of place.
He was a tireless worker for FotO, much of it behind the scenes. Even after he stood down from the committee, in 2003 after ten years, he was still volunteering to take newsletter proofs to the printer, or to deliver the finished product here and there. Indeed, he had to be gently argued with not to do so much, even when he clearly deserved to be taking things a bit easier.
My main memory of him is of laughter, of a good humour born of kindliness. He was also very modest, such that one story from his past should be told here lest it be forgotten in years to come. A few of the FotO committee members once went for a drink in that apparently nameless pub just off Brook St in Alva, the one that used to be painted a gaudy pink (it's now a more restrained if less striking white), and with the notice above the door about Burns having "rested for refreshment" there in 1787. The bar was decorated with fine old posters for the Alva Games, elegant bold-print designs from the 1950s and 1960s. It was only well on in the evening that David let slip that the traditional slogan for those occasions - "The Famous Alva Games" - had been written by him. Typically he underplayed it, saying that the simple-but-effective tagline had been dashed off to meet a newspaper deadline - but the phrase is still widely used in the Hillfoots, and it deserves to remain as a once-a-year memory of David. Indeed, anyone driving through Alva on the day of his funeral would have seen the traditional billboards at either end of the village: The Famous Alva Games, followed by the early-July date of the annual weekend jamboree. A sure sign, in every sense, that he might be gone but he won't be forgotten.