We have come here to say goodbye to Thomas Mundie Hutchison.

He was my Dad. 

When I say we… I mean Dad's two sons….
If he had more than two, he kept that fact firmly to himself.
Dad's wife Audrey….
If he had more than one wife Dad never mentioned her.
Dad's two nephews, his sister's sons.
There is one first cousin, three….. well, less closely related cousins, the relationships would require several diagrams and helpful pointing arrows to explain.
Also present are colleagues from work, friends, and neighbours.
Thankyou so much for coming along today to support the occasion.

 Dad was born in 1914… then the first world war broke out.
We can be confident that Dad was not to blame for that.

He went to school in Aberdeen, primary school then the Grammar school, where he did well enough to go to Aberdeen University. He took his degree, B.Sc (Engineering), in 1936.

 After graduation he moved south to Lincoln where he worked for Ruston & Hornsby… agricultural engineers… for two years, returning to Aberdeen in 1938 to work for Scottish Agricultural Industries, of which his father's company, Barclay, Ross & Hutchison was a part. The company sold seeds and fertilisers and Dad designed and made farm machinery that was sold throughout the UK.

 His engineering career was interrupted by the second world war… another conflict that was not caused by Dad… and he volunteered for the Royal Signals.

His distinguished military service lasted all of a couple of weeks until someone in authority decided that an agricultural engineer had better things to do than string miles of military telephone wire across the home counties, and he was sent home to run SAI.

 After the war, SAI decided to split off the agricultural machinery business from its chemical fertiliser business and Dad was put in charge of Tullos Ltd in 1946 where he set up a manufacturing works on Craigshaw Road in Aberdeen.

On a visit to Aden House country museum, Dad commented that he should be restored and displayed alongside the 'historical' machinery that he had designed & built.

 Why he abandoned that career I don't know….. Dad had a senior position in a company…. ultimately owned by ICI… in which his father was a director….. but in 1949 he fled south to London to Join Urwick, Orr & Partners, a firm of management consultants.

 I am grateful that he did.
At Urwick Orr, he discovered that his boss… one Colonel Urwick… had a very pretty secretary……
I was born in 1951.

 Stealing his boss's secretary didn't do his career any harm. Dad stayed with Urwick Orr for 25 years… his job taking him to Canada (where Euan was born) India, Ceylon, New Zealand, Malawi, and Nigeria and provided him with the income to buy himself and his family many of the good things in life.

 He would never explain just what it was he did for a living….. consultants never do.
Keeping the client in the dark is a professional practice much beloved of consultants.
However, in 1972, I was driving him home from the Rolls Royce factory in Hillingdon in Glasgow when he let slip that the company was going bankrupt.
"Ah." I said, brightly. "That is the function of a consultant…. Bankrupting major British manufacturing companies".
He gave me one of his looks. You stupid boy!

 Dad retired to Aberdeenshire in 1974 to live the life of a leisured gentleman.

Unfortunately, owing to the political and economic eccentricities of the 1970's & '80's a generous pension of £6000 per annum soon became inadequate.

He went back to work, first to design fish processing factories and then, in 1983, to salvage Simpsons of Peterhead, a company, set up in part by his own father, that had fallen on hard times.
I joined him in 1984. His management technique still confused me but we must have done something right. Simpsons is still going strong.
I discovered at work that Dad loved an argument, and if his opponent proved unworthy, he loved to lecture the unfortunate victim, pinning him in a corner and explaining, with many words, figures and graphs the true state of affairs according to Thomas.
He met his match in 1988, in a Dutchman, the man in charge of developing Shell retail operations in the UK who arrived to discuss the future of the filling station in Inverurie.
With a delighted gleam in his eye, Dad demonstrated page after page of doom laden facts and figures, culminating in a magnificent graph that predicted the ignominious and inevitable bankruptcy of the Shell Oil Company.
His visitor followed it all with careful attention, all the way to the final, devastating graph.
"Vell, Mr Hutchison," He said. "I disagree vith everysing you have said…. But it is a very pretty graph."

 Dad retired to his garden and to an interest in genealogy that appealed greatly to his love of facts and figures, and allowed him to meet many new friends and relations. The interest lasted until he died.

 He also retired to ill health and the deaths of a great many of his friends and family. If he had had the foresight to hurl himself under a bus ten years ago we would have had to find a far larger hall than this in which to hold this meeeting.

 Dad had no religious convictions, a fact that will surprise those of you who heard him singing hymns in the bath. Church was for him a matter of supporting a minister who he liked and for meeting friends.

I know that those of us with faith will hold him in our prayers and those of us without will gladly remember a convivial and generous friend.

Audrey Margaret Haywood was born in Nottingham on the 25^th of June 1926.

Her father, George Haywood, who was a motor mechanic, had a steady job working for Boots the chemist, repairing the companies’ fleet of lorries. Her mother Hilda did secretarial/bookeeping work after the war. In the 1930’s she spent her time looking after her house and family.

Mum had an uneventful childhood growing up in Nottingham. She enjoyed school and the excitement of summer seaside holidays, mostly at Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire, where relatives had a hotel. An uneventful childhood that is, until war arrived in 1939 when she was 13.

She was evacuated briefly and remembered spending much of the summer of 1940 playing tennis as most of her teachers were busy doing war work.

In 1944 Mum joined the Womans Royal Naval Service, a military career she chose because the Wrens uniform had the benefit of much nicer stockings than the army or air force.

She was posted to the intelligence gathering operation at Bletchley Park, working on the code breaking computers which they called bombes. I was proud that Mum had been chosen for such a responsible job until she told me that, as the computers were forty feet long and eight feet high, she, along with many other girls, had been chosen because they were tall enough to reach the top of the machines.

After victory in Europe, Mum was very pleased indeed to be posted to an intelligence unit in Colombo, in what is now Sri Lanka. She was very cross indeed when the war in Japan ended so abruptly in August 1945, so doing her out of her trip to the exotic east. I suppose there are worse reasons for disapproving of the atom bomb.

Post war she stayed in London and became secretary to Lyndal Urwick of Urwick, Orr & Partners and it was at work that she met Dad. They were married in March 1951. Mum and Dad planned to get married in Westminster Register office but her in-laws put their foot down… No son of theirs would be married in a registrar’s office, so the wedding was held in St Saviour’s, Westminster, a church that Mum rather uncharitably described as a dreary hole. Mum got on well enough with her mother-in-law, Eleanor Hutchison. Her father-in-law she found, let us say, rather difficult.

There followed four years in Canada, part spent in Toronto, most spent in and around Sudbury, Ontario, where Dad was working as an engineering advisor to the nickel mines that dotted the area. Sudbury was back of beyond in the 1950’s, very cold in the long winters, hot in summer but plagued by insects. The in-laws paid a visit and father-in-law took one look at the landscape, another look at two, small, howling children and scampered back to the fleshpots of Montreal, much to Mum’s relief. It was in Canada that Mum was introduced to the delights of central heating, refrigeration, washing machine and clothes dryer, and an electric cooker. So pleased was she that, when they returned to the UK in 1955, Mum insisted on bringing the machines with her. Over the years, Dad spent much time making home-made spare parts rather than face the wrath of Audrey.

On their return to the UK they settled in the borders, renting a house in the village of Broughton. Mum walked her children to school, bought a pair of wellies and a very large white dog that liked to chase sheep, roll in cow dung and bite people.

She was pleased and considerably surprised to receive regular gifts of salmon from the local policeman. It eventually emerged that sergeant Shannon was not a secret admirer after all, but was redistributing the booty confiscated from poachers who worked the nearby river Tweed.

Mum was however, distinctly unimpressed by a coke fired Aga, open fires for heating and, owing to the eccentricities of the electricity supply, the absence of her clothes dryer and electric cooker. Drying wet clothes on a pulley hung from the kitchen ceiling was not what she had become accustomed to.

She found Broughton restricting, miles from shops or a cinema. The radio reception sounded like two cats fighting in a dustbin and the sheep were not good conversationalists.

Dad was commuting 45 miles each way to an office in Glasgow, and Mum resented the waste of time and money.

The final straw came when I took the entrance exam for Hutchesons Grammar school in Glasgow. Mum and Dad were dismayed by the exam results and aghast at Hutcheson’s comment that their eldest son was the most ignorant child presented for examination in many years.

The family fled into Glasgow seeking civilisation and education.

Mum adored Glasgow. A great dirty city, she called it, with considerable affection. The buildings might be black with soot and the air filled with coal smoke and diesel fumes, not to mention the last of the pea-souper fogs, but Mum, a city girl at heart, was in her element.

Mum & Dad bought a house near Byres Road, in the West End of the city. The local shops were within walking distance, the department stores in the centre of the city were just a short ride away on the bus or underground and there was a large choice of cinemas, theatres and even the opera. A great find was McTear’s auction rooms, a treasure trove of second hand bits and pieces needed to turn a house into a home.

Most surprising was the friendliness of the Glaswegians who, despite the reputation of their city, proved to be kindness itself. Mum soon gathered a large and varied circle of friends and taught herself how to organise a party.

Best of all, her cooker and clothes dryer worked just fine.

During the late sixties, Dad was often abroad and Mum would usually join him. They spent two years in Calcutta, Dad working for the Ford Foundation. The taxis were terrifiying, the monsoon floods a bloody nuisance and the occasional riot something to be avoided at all cost. Most irksome of all was the need to boil and filter the drinking water. Mum remembered it all with sighs of nostalgia. Like many other expats, she found the warm climate and affordable servants quite irresistible. It is surely no co-incidence that Calcutta is also a great dirty city, every bit as interesting as Glasgow. The Bengalis were friendly too.

New Zealand in the 60’s was a very quiet agricultural country. Mum said that it felt more like 1949 than 1969, and none the worse for that, for a brief visit anyway.

The next trip, to Istanbul, appealed to her very greatly. It was another great city, full of interest and friendly enough to let her wander about the place by herself.

Lagos, in Nigeria, did not appeal. The climate was dreadful and she found the Nigerians endlessly exasperating. Worst of all, the streets were too unsafe to wander about unescorted.

Dad retired in 1974 and Mum and Dad set about finding somewhere to live in Aberdeenshire.  Mum would suggest somewhere that looked promising and Dad would dismiss her suggestion as entirely unsuitable. Eventually, the Braes of Benachie came up for sale and they moved in in 1975. They stayed longer in the Braes of Benachie than any other house.

Mum quickly rebuilt her circle of friends, starting off with Dad’s old friends, and then the unsuspecting neighbours. Her diary shows so many appointments it is surprising she found time to deal with the garden. Living in the country proved no impediment to throwing a good party.

Round about the turn of the century Mum and Dad decided that the house and garden were becoming too much of a burden to look after and went looking for a retirement home, a bungalow, or a small flat, perhaps sheltered housing. One sunny afternoon they returned from yet another house hunting expedition, I believe to Inchmarlo, in Banchory.

Yes, said Mum, it was very nice indeed.

No, said Dad, we can’t move in there, the place is full of old people.

Dad died in 2006, Mum stayed on in the Braes with me for company. In May of this year she became too frail to stay at home anymore and moved into Muirhead care home. She died on boxing day.

Like Dad, Mum had no religious convictions. Church was for her a matter of supporting a minister who she liked and for meeting friends.

I am sure that those of us with faith will hold her in our prayers and those of us without will gladly remember a convivial and generous friend.

Funeral 12 January 2016. 2.00 East Chapel Aberdeen Crematorium.
Jack Duncan
Duncan & McCombie. Alford.

 John & Kate Hesketh.
Maggie Bradley & her mother Margaret Middleton.
Ian and ? MacLeod.
Chris & Sheila Glidewell.
Robbie & Joyce Gordon.
James & Mary MacKay.
Robert Smith.
Gavin Copeland.
Hamish Norbrook.
David Norbrook.
Vic & Ann Ezard.
Jamie Gilmour.
Duncan Allan.

Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospitals
339 Goldhawk Road
London, W6.
X ray fee 4 August 1951. £1/10/-.
Rohan Williams, x ray consultant. £3/3-0.

Twenty Seven Welbeck Street Ltd
Nursing home fees 3 September 1951. £31/4/6.

Mr D G Wilson Clyne.
110 Harley Street, W1.
Fee 5 November 1951. £52/10/- (50 guineas)