Robbie relaxing into the next stage of his retirement…

EInstead, Robbie’s family tale of Fisherfolk filled the slot but, in a classic “poacher turned gamekeeper” twist, my first interviewee for this column is… Robbie Dinwoodie!

AGLE-EYED iScot readers may have noticed that there was no Dinwoodie Interview in last month’s issue.

He is one of the most prominent Scottish journalists of his generation, and Robbie will no doubt be tickled by my use of the word “is” there as he now claims to have fully retired… we’ll see! His “first” retirement came in 2016 when he left The Herald after 27 years during which time he contributed variously as reporter, feature writer, diary columnist, columnist, political correspondent and chief leader writer. This period followed on directly from his 15 years at The Scotsman where, in addition to his reporting, and feature and leader writing duties he also contributed book and theatre reviews. His CV is therefore both comprehensive and impressive, all the more so when you consider the magnitude of many of the stories he was responsible for bringing to national attention.

As a young boy growing up in Edinburgh, Robbie was not blessed with good health. He suffered badly from asthma and eczema and had constant ear infections from the associated rhinitis. In his own words, “I was a sickly kid and saw a lot of doctors. I thought doctors were the good guys, so I was going to be a doctor when I was at primary school.” Medicine’s loss was to be journalism’s gain, however, when that youthful ambition changed overnight as a result of a Wardie Primary School excursion to see how a newspaper was put together.

“We went on an outing to see the old Daily Mail building down at Tanfield House in Canonmills. At that time the paper still came out as the Scottish Daily Mail, a broadsheet, so we’re talking about the mid-sixties, I’d be about 10, and I was just hooked, it was fantastic. We saw the newsroom clattering away with the big typewriters, and they took us down to the caseroom where we watched pages being made up and the print room where the typesetters worked. We queued up and gave the typesetter our name and he clanked that into the old linotype machine, then a slug of hot lead dropped out at the other end which we got to take away home. If you had a wee printing set then you had your own name that you could stamp in the ink – all that sort of stuff changed my outlook and I just thought, ‘no, I’m going to be a reporter, this is what I’m going to do’. So, I knew when I was literally 10 years old what I wanted to do!

An independent mind…

“At secondary school, Trinity Academy, all the subjects that I chose were single-mindedly in pursuit of a career in journal- ism. In my final year, I decided to focus on Norman MacCaig for my Sixth Year Studies English dissertation, while everyone else was doing Kafka or Camus. I just sidled up to Norman during an event at the Edinburgh Festival and asked if I could interview him. He was an ex-teacher himself, a lovely man, and he had me round to his flat in Bruntsfield and gave me as much time as I needed to interview him, and that formed a big part of my dissertation. With hindsight, even that was quite journalistic.”

By 1973, just as Robbie was leaving school, it was clear that the newspaper industry was contracting, particularly in Scotland. Yet, undeterred, the young Dinwoodie pressed on with his ambitions and, just like on that visit to Tanfield House almost 10 years previously, fate was to intervene in the most unexpected way.

“I had an application in to do English at Edinburgh University, and a more serious application in to do Journalism at the College of Commerce, now Napier University. But I had also applied for the weekly newspaper group, Scottish & Universal Newspapers (SUN), which owned the Glasgow Herald. While I was doing my interview tests for that in Glasgow, somebody asked if I’d gone for the Edinburgh Evening News job –I said, ‘what Evening News job, I didn’t know there was one’. When I got back to Waverley on the train I went straight up the stairs to North Bridge, went in and rapped on the counter and asked if anyone from Personnel was there. Someone came down and said, ‘Sorry, you’ve missed the Evening News job, that’s already been allocated, but we’re about to advertise a traineeship for The Scotsman’. I filled in the application form standing at the counter and, at the end of the form, it said, ‘give us a 500-word essay on why you want to be a journalist’. Now, in my inside pocket, not a word of exaggeration, I had a carbon copy of the one that I’d written in support of my application to the SUN group in Glasgow! So, I stapled that onto the application form, handed it back over and, after a couple of weeks had passed, I got an invitation to go into The Scotsman. I was taken through to see the Editor, Eric Mackay, and it was only halfway through chatting to him that I realised I was in – I’d got the job! The SUN interview had involved around 12 of us sitting in a room completing a range of tests and exercises, but this… I was just in!