He began teaching, for example, in a tough secondary school in Glasgow where, at the job interview, the headmaster spat out just one question seven words long: “Are you prepared to use the belt?” before adding, “If you’re not prepared to use it, you’ve not got a job.” The leather belt, or tawse, with two tails and so thick that it stood up straight, had been designed in the seventeenth century by the Scottish education system to cause instant and ferocious pain to the palms and fingers of pupils judged to have misbehaved. Robin was given the toughest, roughest classes, where boys wore patched trousers held up with string. He describes “the quite extraordinary smell of unwashed bodies of kids from deeply poor backgrounds” as he struggled to avoid using the belt to instill discipline. Later, teaching in Kenya, he describes how he put down a riot by pupils that could have ended with the killing of unpopular teachers. He describes also meeting the Ugandan military dictator Idi Amin.
Before he made his political breakthrough into Scotland’s new Parliament, Robin had stood unsuccessfully in eleven elections and he describes how sometimes at school halls he hired for “rallies” there was an audience of only two – the janitor and the janitor’s dog. For a long time the Green Party’s “headquarters” was a photocopy machine in Robin’s bedroom. When he did make the breakthrough he was thrilled with the modernity of Scotland’s new Parliament which he said made
Westminster look like a museum, “a quaint Victorian establishment where tourists can go to see how politics used to be in the old days and laugh at the funny men in tights.”
Robin took a short break from his pre-parliamentary teaching career in an attempt to become a professional actor. He describes hilariously how this venture failed. Among his unsuccessful auditions was for the role of a drugged-out hippie in the avant-garde review Oh! Calcutta! in which the cast shocked society by appearing totally naked. Assessing his year as a thespian, Robin recalls: “My acting career had actually added up in time to only 11 weeks of paid work, including rehearsals. I had received about £80 in fees at most and, since I never claimed social benefits, had squandered my entire life savings of £800.” On abandoning acting, Robin resumed his teaching career at an Edinburgh school which had a very famous former pupil, Thomas Sean Connery, known as “Big Tam”. Reputed to have been easy-going but as hard as nails, Connery had “graduated” as soon as he turned 14 to become a milkman, coffin polisher and then a more successful actor than Robin – as MI6 agent 007 Bond, James Bond. Robin was just beginning his first teaching job in Glasgow when in the first Bond film, “Dr No”, Sean Connery made love – and banked the first of his many millions – to Honey Rider, played by blonde-haired Ursula Andress, whose emergence from the sea in a sensational wet white bikini was voted the sexiest scene in movie history.
Robin Harper’s story has too many twists and extraordinary turns to be told in a short essay. But in one chapter he tells the uplifting story of how, when he was in his fifties, he discovered that he had a previously unknown elder brother. Robin's mother had given birth to the boy in the 1930s, before she was married, and he was put out for adoption. More than 50 years later the long-lost brother Euan, sought out his birth-mother and now we all love him to bits and he is a wonderful addition to the family, however late.
Robin also had a musical career as a guitarist and lead singer with the group Fourth Estaite. In 1965 he sang at the bottom of the bill one night at Chalk Farm Folk Club in London with a young Martin Carthy, one of the most influential figures in British traditional music, as the star turn. A 24-year-old American singer, earning about £20 a week playing around British folk clubs, was also on the bill. He impressed Robin who went with him the next day to Martin’s home in north London. Robin sang for the young American a version of the traditional ballad Scarborough Fair, whose roots in British song can be traced back to 1670. It’s the song whose main verse goes:
“Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
Remember me to one who lives there,
She once was a true love of mine.”
Scarborough Fair was also in Martin Carthy’s repertoire. The American’s name was Paul Simon. He had never before heard Scarborough Fair, but within two years he and Art Garfunkel, a fellow New Yorker, had recorded it as part of the soundtrack of “The Graduate,” one of the highest-grossing Hollywood movies ever. The film helped make Scarborough Fair perhaps the most widely-heard folk song of all time, selling millions on various chart-topping discs released by the duo. Martin Carthy alleged that Simon and Garfunkel’s famous version of the song was adapted from his own special arrangement without acknowledgement: some kind of legal settlement was made in 1970, and in 2000 Martin and Paul Simon sang Scarborough Fair together in concert for the first time. Scarborough Fair remains in Robin Harper’s repertoire, but his role in the rise and rise of Simon and Garfunkel and the runaway success of the song has somehow faded into obscurity and the mists of time …
The final chapter of the book is titled Local Hero 2. In it Robin describes his role in the battle waged by local people in Aberdeenshire against New York property magnate Donald Trump who is bulldozing an exquisite stretch of Scottish coastline sand dunes, home to all manner of wildlife, including otters, badgers, barn owls, buzzards, skylarks and rare plants and vegetation, to create two golf courses and a small town of nearly 1,500 flats and houses and an eight-storey hotel. Robin has given his support to Michael Forbes, a 58-year-old salmon fisherman, farmer and granite quarry worker, a real life Local Hero who is refusing to sell his 25-acre property, in the middle of the proposed Trump development – despite the New Yorker’s offers of buyouts worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Trump, enraged by Forbes’ determination to stay on his property, has described the fisherman as a “village idiot”. Piling insult on insult, he told reporters that Forbes and his 86-year-old mother live in “disgusting conditions … a slum, a pigsty.” Forbes, with his wry northeast Scotland humour and sense of the ridiculous, closely resembling Ben Knox in the acclaimed movie Local Hero, riposted: “If I’m the village idiot, he must be the New York clown … He’s just a child. He’s never grown up. I don’t know why he’s getting his nappy all in a knot. My land has been in my family for more than half a century. It belongs to me and never will belong to him.”
You may recall that in the movie Ben Knox is a spirited but impecunious Highlander who refuses to sell his stretch of beach in the fictional fishing village of Ferness to a Texas oil magnate to make way for the construction of a refinery. The American tycoon, played by Burt Lancaster, tries everything to entice the Highlander to sell, even offering enough money to buy any other beach in the world. But the old man refuses to budge. He is content with what he has. In a happy ending, the magnate sees the error of his ways, abandons his refinery plan and agrees to finance an oceanographic institute to help conserve Scotland’s marine and coastal wonders. Local Hero won a BAFTA Award, the British equivalent of a Hollywood Oscar.
Well, sometimes truth proves stranger than fiction. As this book hit the shelves, a battle of epic proportions was continuing in Aberdeenshire between Michael Forbes and Donald Trump, with Robin Harper backing Local Hero 2. Robin observes that Trump’s business philosophy seems to be: "If you have got enough clout, if you have got enough money, then you can buy anything or anyone." And if he cannot buy, he seems to resort to insults. At the heart of this continuing saga is the integrity of citizens’ rights, the security of their homes, the Scottish people’s right to roam and the true meaning of “public interest.” It is also about the readiness and resolve of those who govern us to defend those rights against the hard-nosed encroachment of private power and wealth. To read more about the Local Hero battle against Donald Trump, go to the following website: