I was privileged to be acquainted, separately, with three of the exceptionally gifted McEwen family. I was in the same year at Cambridge [matric 1952] as Alex's older brother Rory, with whom at one time he formed a well-known tv folk duo: we were both very average students of English, so, as our surnames began with the same letter, we appeared close together year after year in the II.2 section of the English Tripos list. Rory later became a well-known botanical artist, but died tragically at 50, under a London underground train after diagnosis of a brain tumour.

I first met Alex himself in 1957, when he and the late Robin Hall [very young and just come to London from Glasgow] and I appeared together at a Saturday night EFDSS concert at Cecil Sharp House.

Valerie and I met their sister Kisty, the dowager Lady Hesketh and mother of Margaret Thatcher's Minister of Trade, through a mutual Cambridge friend in the 1980s. She was a well-known and respected Scottish historian and expert on tartans, and [a great rarity] a keen female Rugby Union correspondent. She died three years ago.

I relate these personal memories as a tribute to three such gifted acquaintances: now, ah me, all gone.

Michael