Hamish Maclaren Bio by Charlie Ipcar, 2024

According to his daughter Lucilla Maclaren Spillane, Hamish Maclaren was born in Tain, Ross-shire, on March 7, 1901, a coastal town in the Scottish Highlands. At the age of thirteen he was sent away for a nautical education at Osborne for two years and then the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, England, where he graduated in time to be assigned as an ensign on a World War 1 British supply ship. His first voyage was to Archangel in support of the White Russians who were opposing the Bolshevist takeover of Russia, and where he acquired a taste for vodka. After the War he was trained as a gunnery officer and sent out to the Mediterranean for several years, his experience in Malta is described in one of his semi-autobiographical short stories . In 1922 the Royal Navy sent him to the University of Cambridge for further education, before posting him to the heavy cruiser HMS Hawkins on the China station. He later was transferred to the Yangtse River gunboat Widgeon and began publishing poems and articles in British periodicals such as The Spectator, The Blue Peter, and The Cornhill Magazine. Maclaren mustered out of active service in Shanghai during the mid 1920s and spent some time as a marine engineer on a Yangtse River tramp streamer before returning to England. Once back in England he continued to publish poems and short stories, a long novel titled The Private Opinions of a British Bluejacket, ©1929, and his folk opera Sailor with Banjo, ©1929/1930. In 1936 he published his semi-autobiographical book of short stories titled Cockalorum. In 1939 he married Jean Dunn Tringham and they had one child, Lucilla Jean, who was born the following year. During World War 2 he was called up from the reserves, promoted to the rank of commander, and assigned to London to do naval intelligence work. After that War, Maclaren worked for several publishing houses but there is no evidence that he published any more of his own poetry or other literary works. According to his daughter Lucilla, "He spent his final years near Cambridge and died aged 86, on 25 July 1987, in Kidderminster, England." On his headstone were carved the final two lines of his last known published poem:

Under the trees, and lulled by wind and sun,
Fain would I dream till all my days are done.

In reviewing my notes on Hamish Maclaren, I can only say that I have a lot of empathy for what happens to artistic people when they attempt to survive in a world which has little to do with their interests or dreams.