BACKGROUND AND THE EARLY YEARS

      Ian Macpherson was born at Leslie Place, Forres, at 10.45am on October 5, 1905. His father, Ewan, was at that time described as a sheep dealer. Both of Ian's parents were Macphersons, but apart from the common clan name and the fact that both were native Gaelic speakers, they were temperamentally opposite. His father was a native of Badenoch whilst his mother, Mary, came from Strathdearn in Nairnshire.

      David F. Young tells us in his biography of Ian (Highland Search) that "The Badenoch Macphersons were a wild and joyful pagan lot whose essentially pastoral habits and ancestry allowed them plenty of time to delight in outdoor pastimes like fishing, shooting, playing shinty, and dancing, while the Strathdearn family were passionate adherents to a strict Highland sect which found even the Free Church a frivolous offshoot from the true faith of Free Presbyterians." Ewan was popularly known as the 'Black Officer' from his dark and flamboyant good looks, and he was as dark as his wife was fair.

      Ian's father and his paternal grandfather who was also Ewan came from the very limits of the habitable lands of Badenoch. He was born in 1862 at Garvamore, the year, as he liked to remember, when the railway came to Speyside and marked a watershed with the past. Garvamore was an old house that was physically linked to that romantic past. Standing on the road that General Wade had built in 1731 over the wild Corrieyarrack Pass, to help subdue the rebellious Highlands, the house had been a kingshouse to shelter soldiers, and then an inn for drovers who later drove their black cattle and sheep to the trysts at Falkirk. Grandfather Ewan was one of the famous stalwarts painted by Kenneth McLeay for Queen Victoria in 1867. The story and picture of Victoria's stalwart and a 'Family Tree' forms part of this exhibition.

      In 1909, the family returned from Forres to Badenoch and rented Biallid, a sheep farm on the outskirts of Newtonmore off the Laggan road. Shortly afterwards Ian was introduced to formal education when he attended the local Newtonmore Primary School.

      In 1914, they moved to Glensaugh, in the Glen of Drumtochty where they had a marginal hill farm, and Ian attended Fettercairn School. Ian won a bursary that took him to Mackie Academy in Stonehaven, and he boarded in the town during the week. He was to describe the trauma of the experience many years later: "I remember being a child, twelve years old and leaving elementary school near my home to go to a secondary school twenty miles away. My mother found lodgings for me there and left me with a Bible and a shilling. I had spent all my previous life on farms, amongst my people, and the familiar fields, and meal-hours, and beasts." However, he was academically successful and left Mackie Academy in 1924 as dux of the school and with several prizes.