Reading the Dunfermline Press of Thursday April 9 2025 I was struck by an article about a former Fife Council official, 70 year old James Beveridge, of Kelty, who had posed as a good Samaritan to gain access to the home of an 80 year old lady with dementia only to sexually abuse her there.…
The boom times. The Carnegie Dunfermline & Hero Trust survived two World-Wars, The Wall Street Crash, and the Great Depression that followed, and was in a very healthy position when it celebrated its half century in 1953. In a publication commissioned to mark the event, the Chairman, William Dick, boasted of the vast property portfolio…
Published on: Jul 17, 2021 In the previous blog I summarised my experiences of freemasonry during my working life ‘on the tools’, as being less than positive. But they didn’t dominate my thinking, as there were more good guys (Masons included) than there were bad/opportunistic Masons, and largely it seemed the good guys were non-Masons,…
Brown drops business-school bombshell. In November 2005 various press articles appeared suggesting that a Harvard-style business school was being considered for Scotland. Harvard and other US educational institutes denied any involvement in such a project. LINK In late January 2006—during the period when, unbeknown to the public, the Trust’s secret charter application was…
I believe that freemasonry in Fife is largely sectarian. My perception of freemasonry in Fife is that it is largely sectarian and this influences me as I am largely Irish-descended, and, nominally at least, Roman Catholic. While it is self-evident that freemasonry is sectarian in the narrow sense of the word, I believe that in…
How did Jim fix it so that his child abuse was never examined? As was the case with Thomas Hamilton after the Dunblane tragedy, many people seem to have known about Savile’s abuse, but why was nothing done about it at the time it was taking place? Did whistleblowers try to get the authorities to…
1978. I enter the business community. Coming from a working class background I did not need a solicitor till I was 32 years of age. In those 32 years I had served an apprenticeship as a shipwright in H. M. Dockyard Rosyth, then spent a few years in the merchant navy before working as a…
Magic Circle Man In “My First Lawyer” I told of how my first experience of the legal profession had been less than positive. Around about the same time that I was becoming disenchanted with the Bruce law firm the engineering business I had formed started to take off and as it became bigger and more…
A question for reasoned speculation. Having been largely responsible for bringing the Spec to the attention of the public in 2002 as a result of my public petition to the Scottish Parliament (PE306) I am keen to set the record straight on the, somewhat limited, extent of my knowledge on the subject, which was brought…
1816 – 2016 To mark the bi-centenary of the sale of the so-called ‘Elgin Marbles’ to parliament in 1816, I decided to review my 2004 entry and update it with new information and arguments that I feel were not adequately covered in my 2004, ‘Elgin Cheated at Marbles’ blog. At the moment it looks as…
Published on: Jul 6, 2018 Piper Alpha: To mark the 30th anniversary of the Piper Alpha disaster I felt I needed to write something about it, as, like so many in Scotland, my working life and to some extent my social life was influenced by the North Sea oil industry in general and that oil…
Published on: May 7, 2024 at 07:52 Andrew Carnegie Mass Murderer? The above headline poses a question that might seem far-fetched, but it is plausible based on recorded facts, which is more than can be said of the rose-tinted, dewy-eyed, self-aggrandising rubbish accepted as fact in Carnegie’s autobiography. Perhaps what’s more revealing is something that…
I confess that for some time I had a soft-spot for the lassie from East Lothian. I have long had a certain amount of sympathy for Mary Nisbet (18 April 1778 – 9 July 1855), unlike my feelings for her husband, father and friend Philip Hunt. Mary married an impoverished land-owning aristocrat on the opposite,…
Published on: Dec 22, 2021 1850 Irish Navvy Riot or Dunfermline Ethnic Cleansing? Part One: What the papers said. Having lived almost all of my life in the Burgh of Dunfermline I was surprised and shocked to read an online article from The “Wild Geese” website by Kieron Punch entitled “Paddy the Navvy”, which told…
If Burns lived today would he have voted for Brexit? Prior to the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 many newspaper articles posed the question: “How would Robert Burns have voted?” So as we approach the anniversary of The Bard’s birth I thought it would be a good idea to pose the same question…
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