INT: Today is the second of July 2015 and I’m here in Broughty Ferry to speak to John MacKay.
INT: So, John, can I begin by asking when you were born and where?
JM: Not in Broughty Ferry. My name is John Stewart MacKay, and I was born in Glasgow in Shawlands in Peveril Avenue on 10th January 1921 which means, if you can still count, I am now in my 95th year.
INT: Do you want to tell us a bit about your early childhood in Shawlands?
JM: I didn’t have any childhood in Shawlands because it was just after the First World War and my grandfathers, my father’s father and my mother’s father, got together and decided that as my father was a fully qualified chef, not a cook, a chef, he was a fully qualified chef, that they would invest in a hotel and the best place to buy a hotel was in the South of England where the good weather was. So, before I could say ‘knife’ I was whisked off from Glasgow to Bournemouth. We had a hotel in Bournemouth, and it was the Boscombe Bay Hotel, and it is there that I had my first memory. As a very small child I remember sitting on the beach with my nanny and my brother and sister and my mother arrived above us, because when I looked up I saw her, and she didn’t want me to see her, and she had an orange which she threw down to the nurse which we were to share, and when I caught a glimpse of her I howled, and that is the first memory I have on this earth.
Anyway, very shortly afterwards my grandparents fell out, as grandparents do, one was using the hotel for nothing, more than the other one was, and so they decided that they would draw out [withdraw] and my father’s father, my grandfather, he bought another hotel in Brighton and we moved to Brighton to the Court Royal Hotel on the front, not on the shore side, but above the sea looking over into France. This house had belonged to the Sassoon family and the Sassoon family had built a place for them to be buried in at the back of the hotel. Edward VII had stayed friendly with the Sassoons and he had several times stayed in the hotel, so it was really quite a famous place, and my father had the hotel and that was that.
So, we were there for a number of years and unfortunately my father, who was an inveterate gambler, had to leave and we went to Birmingham, and we stayed in Birmingham for two or three years and again for reasons of gambling again, we had to move to London. So, we moved around quite a bit in the South of England. It was pretty tough at that time, and I look back on it, and [realise]my mother she was very brave with what she went through; she had never really suffered in her life before. She came from a very ordinary middle-class family so all these moves that she was having and money difficulties, which my father bought upon himself. But he never changed; he never changed in his life, in the end actually he came out on top, which is very unusual for a gambler – they usually finish right at the bottom, but he didn’t, he finished at the top.
INT: Because of gambling or because of his success in the hotel trade?
JM: I think his gambling, his gambling, but he was a worker, even when we were down and out he would work very, very hard and he became a book seller. He was selling encyclopaedias and before very long he was a sales manager with a group of people. He was very hard working, and he was pretty clever.
Anyway, I was getting older and at the time I was about to leave school. I was hoping to go into the hotel trade as a trainee in management and my father promised he would get me into the Langham Hotel, which was one of the top hotels in London and it was right opposite Broadcasting House and full of very famous people – I’m not going to namedrop, but it was full of very famous people. But just as I was about to go, we had an illness, pneumonia no not pneumonia (INT .. TB?) no not TB, I forget the name of it [it was typhoid fever] anyway so many people got it and a number of people died. So, I couldn’t go to the hotel because we lived in Croydon where this outbreak occurred and there was over a hundred people dead, and three or four hundred people were suffering from it so eventually I had to wait until it was all over, and we were given all clear and then I started, and this was of course late 1937.
I was just seventeen and there was talk of war and the Germans and I decided I would join the Territorials, but I never thought about the Army at first. I thought about being a sailor. I always wanted to be a sailor having been brought up at the seaside. So I went down to the Thames where the Discovery was kept and it was the Headquarters of the Royal Naval Volunteers so I went in there and presented myself and told them I wanted to join and they said, well I am very sorry but we are absolutely full up at the moment; there are so many people coming to join that we can’t take you at the moment but we will take your name, number and address and we will send you a letter as soon as we have a vacancy. So, I turned round very disappointed, and I thought, well my brother Peter, who had been a Territorial, had been in the London Scottish, so I decided I would go to the London Scottish and I went to 59 Buckingham Gate to see if I could join the London Scottish and again I was told, we are very sorry, the Battalion was full and there were people waiting to come in, but they took my name and address and as soon as there were vacancies they would write to me.
I hadn’t been home more than a week or two when it was decided, the Government decided, that war was pretty imminent and that they would double the size of the Army. So first of all, of the Territorial Battalions doubled up from one Battalion to the second Battalion so I got a call to join the London Scottish Second Battalion and away I went and there I was, I signed in and I joined up. I started going twice a week to learn how to march and how to do this and that and the other. After six weeks I passed out , when I say I passed out I didn’t pass out, I passed examinations and then I went away to camp which was known eventually in the annals of the Second Battalion as the ‘wet camp’ because it rained every day, and it was absolutely ghastly, and I couldn’t wait to get home. So when I got home, I hadn’t been there more than two or three weeks, when I was called up. I came home, put on my uniform; we just got battle dress. We had just been issued with battle dress- something quite new – so I put on my battle dress and my boots and my tam-o’-shanter -TOS – and off I went to war, and I didn’t take that off for nearly seven years.
