Magnus Magnusson: The Scotsman years

IT WAS an elegant era at The Scotsman in which leader writers inhabited wood- panelled rooms in the newspaper's old North Bridge building in Edinburgh and reporters' assignments were written in a diary kept on a lectern.

But while the paper had, in the words of one staffer, "something of the atmosphere of an exclusive gentlemen's club", Magnus Magnusson paid a key part in the 1960s in its drive to break exclusive stories.

The journalist, who died aged 77 on Sunday, was responsible for setting up the "Close-Up" team, a three-man investigative unit modelled on the renowned Insight team at the Sunday Times, which, like The Scotsman, was then owned by Thomson newspapers. The team was made up of David Kemp, later to become political editor of Granada Television, and Gus Macdonald, who went on to become chief executive of Scottish Media Group and a Labour peer.

Before joining The Scotsman in 1961, Magnusson had honed a reputation as a determined reporter on the Scottish Daily Express. Kemp, now 70, recalls that Magnusson headed the Express's Scottish "hit squad", a team of reporters tasked with concentrating on the big stories of the day.

Magnusson told one reporter to join a controversial Mull-based cult, dubbed "The Nameless Ones", which had acquired a reputation for men leaving their wives to join up "because God had ordered them to".

Kemp said: "The Express reporter would stop as he followed the cult around and, with a straight face, explain, 'God has ordered me to file a story to the Daily Express'."

Both Kemp and Macdonald had experienced the Insight team in London, and the former recalled: "They were a scary bunch who walked around with things like skeleton keys for opening filing cabinets."

Magnusson was a scholarly man - he co-edited a series of books on Norse legends in the 1960s - and is also remembered for his ferocious work ethic.

Kemp said: "He was incredibly hard-working - my impression was he worked all hours of the day and night.

"If there was a big story, we used to be told to come over to his house in Glasgow and work on it, sometimes all through the night, which, as you can imagine, for indolent hacks was not a pleasant prospect.

"Magnus was also a very good writer - the Close-Up pieces were quite long and his experience was very useful for us in doing them."

The Close-Up team existed for about three years and specialised in in-depth pieces. One of its greatest coups came in 1966 when it revealed that one of the board members of the newly formed Highlands and Islands Development Board, Frank Thomson, had a major interest in the proposed petrochemical complex at Invergordon.

Mr Thomson was chairman of Invergordon Chemical Enterprises, which had entered into an agreement with Occidental Petroleum to establish the plant. The following year, he quit "to avoid any possible misunderstanding".

The team also wrote a major series that exposed the workings of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders.

Other pieces reflected the state of Scotland at the time. One investigation was into a caravan park on the Isle of Bute, which had annoyed the Marquess of Bute, who complained it spoiled his view from the terrace of Bute Castle. It ran under the headline "Mr Smith and the Marquess: a case of feudal superiority".

The marquess objected furiously to the story. Kemp recalls the then editor Alastair Dunnett's relief when he managed to calm him down, revealing: "I'm taking a National Trust cruise down the Clyde on Saturday, and we're calling for tea at Bute Castle."

Macdonald, whose working life began as a marine fitter, said: "Magnus gave me my first job in journalism, really, so I was eternally grateful for that - he hired me when I had no qualifications of any kind; I had no shorthand and I couldn't type."

He said Magnusson was also a great delegator to staff that he rated.

"Magnus was doing stuff for the BBC as well as being an assistant editor on The Scotsman. He once said to me, 'We need a couple of big pieces on the Scottish economy', about which I felt I knew very little.

"He said, 'Oh no, you've got to have confidence in yourself', and went and caught a plane - so I found myself opining on the future of the Scottish economy."

Macdonald, who went on to edit Granada's World in Action, added: "He was a brilliant journalist in his own right. He could knock off 2,000 words without correction in a very fluent and flawless way.

"If you were in trouble, you could turn to Magnus and say, 'We don't have a story, but we've got 2,000 words to fill', and he'd pluck something out of the air."

The assistant editor was also a respected figure among the general news staff who did not take part in its specialist work.

Brian Sheppard, now in his early 70s, was deputy news editor of The Scotsman when the Close-Up team was established. Now retired and living in Glencarse, Perthshire, he remembers Magnusson as a gentleman, courteous and good humoured "but with an icy determination to get to the bottom of the story he was working on".

"Unlike some of today's journalists, he didn't just accept what he was told by politicians or business tycoons - he tested their statements and claims against other sources first," Sheppard said.

"He was a thoughtful and elegant writer and I admired the apparent ease with which he conjured with words. The Close-Up trio broke new ground journalistically."

Magnusson would also socialise with news staff who worked in an open-plan room complete with four wooden phone boxes - each with their own stools - from where reporters could make notes without interruption.

Sheppard remembers: "I had a drink with him on two or three occasions in the pub outside the paper's back door and he was always helpful and encouraging."

The Close-Up team did not survive long after Magnusson left The Scotsman in 1967 to join the BBC full time. But the subsequently successful careers of the trio - all of whom took their Scotsman experience into the world of broadcasting - stand as another accolade for a figure whose death is widely mourned by the broadcasting world.

Dry humour and an eye for the topical

MAGNUS Magnusson's work in The Scotsman extended to leader pieces, work for the Close-Up investigations and a column.

But invariably it was in sketch pieces that his erudition, underpinned by a wry sense of humour, came across.

One sketch from September 1963 described a rather eccentric arts fair held by the owner of Ledlanet House, Kinross-shire.

"On the terraced lawns in front of the house marquees had sprouted. A whole lamb was being barbequed [sic] over slow-burning charcoal cinders. There was a fellow singing in his bath - not just the usual tum-tiddly stuff but a great full-throated operatic aria."

Magnusson noted a nearby horse, adding:

"One can never be sure what is going on inside a horse's head, they look so surprisingly sagacious and thoughtful all the time. But I have no doubt at all that behind this placid judicious exterior, the old horse was agog with interest."

Another piece, also in 1963, dealt with the government's failure to provide £900 a year for the creation of an English-Gaelic dictionary. Magnusson ridiculed the fact that the secretary of state for Scotland could not fund the dictionary due to a bizarre loophole in the Education Scotland Act.

"Is it not preposterous that decisions of such far reaching cultural importance should be governed, not by a reasonable assessment of that importance, but by the totally impersonal and irrational workings of legislative bureaucracy.

"Do we in Scotland really need an Act of Parliament every time the Scottish Secretary wants to make grants for educational or cultural purposes?"

Another sketch piece on an international drama conference in Edinburgh dryly captured the vogue for artistic "happenings" in the 1960s.

"Much will, no doubt, be made of the brief appearance of a nude model being wheeled across a gallery above the platform of a literary debate - and in hallowed McEwan Hall last night."

Magnusson described the sense of theatre inside the Edinburgh venue.

"A piper played. A sheep's skeleton appeared. And a gantry of death masks was unveiled with a crash on the platform.

"The question now was: was this theatre in any recognisable form? Or was it merely mischievous, a prank to stimulate reaction - any sort of reaction?"