I asked him during a very uncomfortable voyage across the North Sea to
I asked him during a very uncomfortable voyage across the North Sea to address 700 children, many of whom were seasick, on farming. He turned out to be a spellbinder.His 15 years as chairman of the Aberdeenshire Education Committee were marred but not blemished in the end by a terrible long-running row which the Scottish and the national press simply could not resist. Mackie's farm was supposedly identified as being the source of dirty milk which had been given to schoolchildren in their morning break This was pretty scurrilous stuff. In the event, after lots of mud had stuck, it became clear that Mackie and his farm were innocent.Maitland Mackie was born on the family farm at North Ythsie, Tarves, in Aberdeenshire, still in the possession of his family.
After Aberdeen Grammar School he graduated BSc in Agriculture at Aberdeen University, where his inspiration was the famous Sir John Boyd Orr, an international inspiration for many of those who were to work in Rome and elsewhere for the Food and Agricultural Organisation. Mackie farmed at Westertown, Rothienorman.In 1935 he married Isobel Ross, a teacher in the village of Daviot, and was able to celebrate his silver wedding after an outstandingly happy marriage before she died in 1960. In 1963 he embarked on a second outstandingly happy marriage with the Texan Pauline Turner, who died three years ago. In his autobiography, A Lucky Chap (1993), written in conjunction with his nephew, the author and journalist Charlie Allen, he describes movingly what a vital part these two thoroughly nice women played in his life.He was first elected a member of Aberdeenshire County Council in 1951 and remained until the establishment of Grampian Regional Council in 1975. He was the first chairman of the North East of Scotland Development Authority from 1969 to 1975. I think that the parties which he and Pauline threw for oil industry dignitaries had a great deal to do with the fact that Aberdeen and not Dundee became the capital of the British North Sea oil industry.
His public interests were wide-ranging and he was a very influential member, along with Menzies Campbell QC, now MP, of the Committee on the Scottish Licensing Law under the chairmanship of Dr Christopher Clayson which reported in August 1973. I am told that Mackie was chiefly responsible for the recommendation that the seller's criminal responsibility should extend to taking due care to ensure that no sale is made to a person under 18 or that liquor is not consumed by such a person in a bar.Tam DalyellMaitland Mackie, farmer, politician and educationist: born North Ythsie, Aberdeenshire 16 February 1912; CBE 1965; Lord-Lieutenant of Aberdeenshire 1975-87; Kt 1982; married 1935 Isobel Ross (died 1960; two sons, four daughters), 1963 Pauline Turner (died 1993); died Westertown, Aberdeenshire 18 June 1996.. Jo Van Fleet was a powerful actress, described by Elia Kazan as "full of unconstrained violence", who frequently played roles older than herself. She won an Oscar for her first film role, as James Dean's mother in East of Eden (1955). On both stage and screen she created a gallery of stoic, fiercely dominant women, many of them proud or manipulative mothers. Born in 1919 in Oakland, California, she was educated at the College of the Pacific in Stockton.