Robert McLellan OBE was a Scottish Renaissance dramatist, writer and poet and a leading figure in the twentieth century movement to recover Scotland's distinctive theatrical traditions.
20 Facts About Robert McLellan
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Robert McLellan found popular success with plays and stories written in his native Scots tongue and is regarded, alongside William Lorimer, as one of the most important modern exponents of fine prose in the language.
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Robert McLellan was a frequent campaigner in defence of local heritage and a dedicated beekeeper.
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Robert McLellan today in literature is probably best remembered for the historical comedies, Jamie the Saxt and The Flouers o Edinburgh, and for his short story cycle, Linmill Stories, but his stage-writing career was a long and experimental one spanning over thirty years of crucial development for Scottish theatrical self-expression.
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Robert McLellan was awarded a Civil List Pension in 1968 for "services to literature in Scotland" and received the Order of the British Empire in 1978.
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Robert McLellan began life as a dramatist in the early 1930s.
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Robert McLellan is known to have been briefly resident in England as a screenwriter at some point around this time, but for whatever reason he soon came back to Scotland, marrying in 1938 and settling on the Isle of Arran.
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Robert McLellan continued to work with Curtain in mind, but his last production with the company, Portrait of an Artist, this time written in English with a contemporary setting, met with less critical acclaim.
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The war years would entail a significant interruption in Robert McLellan's developing career as a playwright.
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Robert McLellan served for the next five years as an anti-aircraft gunner in defence around the British Isles and on the Faroe Islands.
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That same year, the newly composed Carlin Moth was produced on radio; the debut production of Torwatletie, completed five years previously but kept on ice until his return from the war, was mounted by Unity ; and Robert McLellan himself was already embarked on composing his next major play, The Flouers o Edinburgh.
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Robert McLellan conceived Flouers o Edinburgh first and foremost as a professional vehicle for Bridie's recently founded Citizens, but in the later 1940s the two men began to have differences.
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Robert McLellan refused permission to tour Jamie the Saxt to London after Bridie insisted on license to make re-writes.
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Crampsie was more in tune with Robert McLellan's needs and aspirations.
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One of the next highlights of Robert McLellan's career was the broadcast of his award-winning verse drama for radio in 1957, Sweet Largie Bay, with its beautiful and elegaic evocation of generational change and decline in island life.
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Robert McLellan was born in 1907 at the home of his maternal grandparents in Linmill, a fruit farm close to Kirkfieldbank in the prosperous fruit-growing Clyde Valley region of Lanarkshire.
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Robert McLellan's father was John McLellan, a printer by trade, who circa 1912 founded, and thereafter ran, the Allander Press in Milngavie, still at that time a detached township to the north of Glasgow.
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Robert McLellan did not complete his degree, possibly abandoning his studies after the death of his mother from tuberculosis in 1928.
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Robert McLellan met his future wife, Kathleen Heys from Grindleton, Lancashire, sometime before 1933 while rambling in the Lake District.
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Robert McLellan died suddenly at home in High Corrie on the day before his 78th birthday in January 1985.