Death of naturalist Peter Cunningham

W A J ‘Peter’ Cunningham died peacefully, at Bethesda Hospice in Stornoway, on Tuesday 8th July.

He was ninety-six years old and, soon after posting to the town as an HM Customs official shortly after the Second World War, had fast become a widely known and universally respected pillar of the community.

Born in Jordanhill, Glasgow, in 1918 – then at the utter and rustic fringes of a fast-expanding city of the Empire, still in the 1920s boasting working farms - Mr Cunningham fell in love with nature at an early age as he roamed local fields and meadows, falling entirely in love with birds, trees, and wild-life in general - and in keen, observant and reverent detail.

He was besides an early pupil of Jordanhill College School – launched only in November 1920, as a ‘Teacher Demonstration School’ attached to the eponymous College – attending it from 1923 to 1937 and retaining close interest and contact with that academy for the rest of his life.

Peter vividly recalled the planting of commemorative trees for the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1937 on the school campus – they are still there – and, that summer, was one of several hundreds of fortunate Scottish scholars to join a sponsored, no less commemorative cruise round St Kilda and the Hebrides, his first sight of the Outer Hebrides and the beginning of a lifelong love-affair.

He had, though, first to launch his career as a civil servant – with HM Customs & Excise; he was rapidly planted as duty-officer in the vast Singer Sewing Machines factory in Clydebank – and, in short order, to serve in the Royal Navy from 1939 in the war to the final defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. (It was only in May last year Peter received – unlike so many other veterans he had outlived - his Arctic Star, from local Lord Lieutenant Sandy Matheson, for his duty on the hideous Arctic Convoys… described by Churchill himself as the ‘worst journey in the world.’)

With the coming of peace, Peter Cunningham resumed his career with the Excise and was shortly appointed to an official post in Stornoway. He subsequently married a delightful PE teacher from Carloway, Nan MacIver, duly launched a family, and in off-duty hours devoted himself in this glorious new environment to the joys of family life and close, kindly observation of all that flew, crawled or crept.

It was scant surprise that, in due time, Peter was persuaded to write a weekly ‘Nature Notes’ column for the local newspaper, and scarcely less – especially in retirement – that he produced a succession of worthwhile and widely praised books, from what has long been the standard text (‘Birds of the Outer Hebrides’) through ‘A Hebridean Naturalist, ’ to what will likewise remain the definitive description of Stornoway’s Castle Grounds. Finally there followed ‘The Castles of the Lews’ - and an ultimate volume on the photography of Dr MacDonald of Gisla, these last both published in his tenth decade.

By then Peter been long a widower; but he took avidly to a new home in Laxdale adjacent to his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren, took besides and with extraordinary despatch to the new tools of Internet and email, and maintained till almost the end his living, active part in St Columba’s Parish Church, which he served as session-clerk for half a century.

Peter Cunningham besides kept driving far into his nineties – though the gift of a personalised number-plate from kith and kin for his ninetieth birthday caused much affectionate ragging – and besides, jocularly, started to advise friends he was now ‘ninety and a half… that half was very important to me till I was five and it is, these days, very important to me now…’

He was, by some, and unfairly, regarded as just another Stornoway grandee; a grossly unfair judgement on one of the humblest men in public life most locally ever knew. To the very end, though, Peter took mischievous pleasure in the incessant confusion over his first name – he had, at birth, been prized by two formidable and rival grandfathers, and for the best part of a century thereafter bore the legal name of one and been known to everyone else by another.

Peter Cunningham - Jordanhill boy and Highland gentleman – will be buried at Dalmore Cemetery on Thursday afternoon, following worship in connection with his death at St Columba’s Parish Church at 1.30 p.m; in the soil he adopted near seven decades ago, as aptly put by Mr Matheson in 2008, as ‘the outlet for expression of his talents and fundamental desire for public service.’

Death of distinguished naturalist Peter Cunningham 10/7/14

By John Macleod