James Hunter Blair’s instructions for his funeral were very clear:  His coffin was to be pulled by an estate tractor to Straiton Church where he specified a short, simple and cheerful service.    There would be no amplification to anywhere outside the church, and certainly no memorial service.   They’ll all have forgotten about me long before then.

It may be difficult to believe that that dramatic misjudgement stemmed from genuine modesty.    Being modest is often associated with being quiet, something of which no-one could accuse Jamie.    I have no doubt however but that it did, and the fact that it did, coupled with the demand of those who couldn’t go to his funeral, that they should have an opportunity to say goodbye to him, is to me the justification for our being here today in direct contravention of his clearly expressed wishes.

That he should have remained so modest though is truly remarkable when you consider his attainments.   It’s easy to list the public offices he held:

President of the Royal Scottish Forestry Society
A co-founder of the Scottish Georgian Society
A very active member of the Scottish Landowners’ Federation
A member of the Historic Buildings Council
A Trustee of the Scottish National Galleries
A co-founder of the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust
A member of the Council of the National Trust for Scotland
First chairman of the Historic Houses Association in Scotland
Chairman of the Ayrshire Rivers Trust.
Deputy Lieutenant for Ayrshire

Add some important trusteeships, many local involvements, careers as a farmer, manager of an estate, a representative of Christie’s, creator of a highly successful but time-consuming corporate entertainment business, and you have a body of achievement and a lifetime of work of which anyone would be proud.     Indeed those who didn’t know him could be forgiven for scanning the list and muttering to themselves “I hope the fellow also found time to enjoy himself a bit.”   

But one of the amazing things about Jamie was that there was a large body of people, happily oblivious or almost oblivious to all that achievement, for whom he was simply the supreme wonderful party man, host, enjoyer and dispenser of pleasure to all the world.  

They would have difficulty in believing that there was room in his week for anything other than weekends, or in his life for other than parties.    Western Meeting weekends, shooting weekends, weekends to visit friends’ gardens, point to point weekends, bridge opening weekends, weekends about nothing for Heaven’s sake – time we had one, Ailsa Craig Boat parties, Laburnum dinners, Austrian ladies lunches, shoots for girl biffers, “hey hey ask me what I was doing last night  -  I had three loyal ministers to dinner”, bonfire parties, fiddlers’ rallies, swimming parties, Yeomanry Balls, Gaiety Theatre parties, picnics by the river, opera parties, roof parties, usually at 3 a.m, parties to plan the next party, parties where 40 girls had to be found at short notice to entertain Norwegian sailors……

The list was endless; the common factor that if he was giving it, it would be a good party, based on planning, generosity, the obvious enjoyment of the host, and his even greater determination that everyone else would enjoy it.

Dress instructions for a weekend, always sent by postcard, were undemanding, and usually enjoined jokey clothes.    Jamie’s own jokey shirt or tie would have been selected firmly by reference to the loyalty of the girl who'd given it to him, rather than because it actually met round his neck.

You were however required to bring something suitable for Voluntary Church Parade, leaving probably in vingt minutes.  He'd have been disappointed if the “voluntary” had been taken too literally, but was philosophical about a few absences from parade: “Quite smooth having both a Catholic and a doubter in the party.”

He was an interventionist host.  A dozen conversations would be stilled as someone at the far end of the dinner table was invited to “tell them about when you…..”

You could be abruptly and sometimes irritatingly detached in the drawing room from a chat you were much enjoying, and piloted across the room to meet a small shy girl who didn’t know many people, and who would sometimes be given a daunting build up:  “you know  ….  who I'm always banging on about endlessly: This is her !”

He enjoyed surprising his guests, enquiries about where we’re going this evening eliciting usually no more than “Time will tell.”   Couple that with his creed that no distance was too far to drive for a party, and you got some cross country journeys where to drop off the back of the convoy was to be irretrievably lost.

Party games for all ages would be to the fore, including everything from Freda, a huge variety of word or pencil and paper ones, to Grandmother’s Footsteps and Up Jenkins.

No conversation ever flagged in his presence.  He drew from a bottomless well of good stories, told with understated humour.    He was also expert and thoughtful however at drawing out the less confident, and gratifyingly appreciative of the jokes of others, however often heard, crumpling with laughter and thumping the table with a force which could make hostesses wince.

Does he live in that great house all alone? Newcomers would ask.   I remember myself, the day he was swapping houses with his father, looking at Blairquhan’s empty spaces and faded paint, and unimaginatively, I didn’t envy him moving as a bachelor from Milton, which had seen so many good times, and was capacious enough by most standards. 

He restored modernised and transformed, and his enhancement of the house, and the estate, was something which never stopped.  You seldom visited Blairquhan without finding a new project under way: the Colourists rehung, new pools created on the river, a major forestry exercise, new planting in the garden, a new holiday cottage, the introduction of a museum in the basement devoted to William Burn, or to an ancestor. Most recently he turned his attention to the shoot: like everything else he did it beautifully, as recognised by the Purdey Conservation Award.

Jamie loved girls of all ages, perhaps particularly younger ages.  I think his friends were sad that one so devoted to the female sex shouldn’t have married, and had a wife and children with whom to share his life, but if he had such regrets he put them behind him.  His close family was really the wonderful team he built up, and who played such a vital part, in the house, on the estate, and in the estate office. Certainly though, no house of 70 rooms could have been used and enjoyed more fully.

He knew that he had in Blairquhan something special, and he quite simply wanted to share it with as many people as he could possibly manage.   

Private entertaining:   He was enormously kind, and along with, or in between, the happily undeserving majority of us, he made a point of inviting those whose lives were going through a bad time.  I can think of three people who've said to me in different ways “Without the visits to Blairquhan during that period I really don’t know what I / we / the children and I, would have done. They were life savers.”

Charitable causes:  invariably made welcome to the house;

and finally of course the very successful corporate entertaining, some aspects of which he pioneered in Scotland.    

His approach in each case was the same: they were his guests. Indeed I think he got particular pleasure from giving the experience of a weekend or a party in a country house to those who probably wouldn’t otherwise encounter it.     The same went for the estate: Maria’s walk and the Spring Walk were created quite as much for those he didn’t know as for his friends.

However arbitrary the use of his favourite word might appear, I don’t think his choice of it was altogether an accident.

Jamie had all the loyalties one might expect: to his family and its history, school, the Scots Guards, Oxford and to all the friends who dated from those periods; to Blairquhan built by his great great grandfather and with all the furniture commissioned for it at the time, to the estate, to Ayrshire and to Scotland.   Of all those things he was very proud, but his attachments went wider.

They included, broadly, the human race.  Wherever you had come from and however unpromising you might appear, you were loyal until you had proved otherwise, and that would be a difficult burden of proof to shift.  Certainly there were very few girls who achieved it. 

He could discern loyalty in some unlikely places: you could have a LandRover with a loyally useless lock, a lady with a loyally pre-war voice, a loyally tepid bath, even a loyally bad party.    To me that was just evidence of his overall delight in the world he found himself in: such baths and such parties were part of the thing, old friends whom it was rather fun to meet again occasionally.  

His energy was legendary.   The first time he came to stay with us was I think in 1959.   He'd been at a dance in Ayrshire the night before and spent the day on SLF business in Aberdeenshire.  We went to the Argyll Ball in Stirling Castle, and he had  just over an hour’s sleep before driving back for the Straiton Show on the Saturday, returning for another I hope respectably late party in Stirlingshire that evening.     

Very little changed: his last visit, only 4 months before he died, again involved the Straiton Show, a lunch he was giving for 40 here, and sandwiched between them, a reunion dinner at Ardvorlich, a 240 mile round trip, and not all that much more sleep.  

He was an optimist.   A possibly less optimistic friend tells of when they were both working in the estate office at Langholm, and were returning from a dance together in a car which, having made a number of disconcerting noises on the way home, finally expired just inside the lodge gates.  “Wow” said Jamie, “Can't get luckier than that.”   There was an opposing school of thought however, which said that you could theoretically have got even luckier if the car had kept going long enough to spare them a mile and a half’s walk on estate roads in their dinner jackets in the rain.

He was tireless in campaigning to save important buildings and in opposing badly thought out and needlessly ugly developments.    But his optimism dictated a very positive approach to good new buildings, as indeed to the people, the things, and the ideas of today generally. 

He believed that individuals could make a difference.    He was a patron of innumerable performances, exhibitions, buildings or gardens which were open.     Usually you were invited to “go and mob up” something.  Anything from a cathedral down could be a candidate for mobbing up, which needless to say actually meant a respectful and in his case usually well informed visit, but it was his way of stating firmly that there was no element of duty in the expedition – it was going to be fun.

He believed that everything must be fun.  If he planned a Historic Houses Association study day it must, along with valuable lessons, include an excellent lunch.  There were no meetings, on however important a topic, which wouldn’t jolly well be the better of a few jokes.

“So and So” he would sometimes say, “has got his serious side”, gently implying that So and So’s lighter side didn’t really get too many outings.  His own serious side he could be almost too good at concealing.   The first appraisal of most of his parents’ generation, “grownups” as they continued to be known, would be that he was a party man, but with nothing serious to contribute.   He was rightly determined not to appear pretentious, but it had almost something of the school tradition of not being seen to be a swot.  To the end of his life, I think there were those who would have welcomed the chance to talk seriously to him slightly more often.  To get that you might have to wait until you were alone with him for quite a long time.

The serious side, if you were allowed to see it of course included:
an excellent brain, the ability to read and absorb very quickly, decisiveness, a deep knowledge of architecture, music, painting, history, and indeed of much of Scottish culture, not least Burns.

He was a countryman, a forester, a gardener, an amateur actor, an angler, a shot and a curler, and played the piano beautifully, provided he was quite certain no one was around to hear him.

Jane Austen, trains, Saki….. I've skated across his interests and accomplishments.   He may have worn his learning lightly, but there were nevertheless many, young and old, who learned from him, were introduced to opera, had their eyes opened to architecture, or were simply infected with some of his many enthusiasms.

Jamie had a good financial brain, was a genius with people, and he built an excellent business round the house and the estate.   But I suspect that he too often allowed his natural generosity to those he was dealing with to override his business judgement, and of course the scale of his generosity to friends, and the ambit of those he welcomed as friends, were such as few businesses could have sustained.   

But if he sometimes burnt the financial candle at both ends, it gave a blaze of light such as I doubt Blairquhan had ever seen.

More than that, I think that few who experienced his example of kindness, tolerance, humour, warmth, generosity and courage, won't have been the better for having known him, and the happier.

This is a celebration.     He was a giant and leaves a gigantic hole, and someone like Jamie will always have more to give; but he was not young; and he died, after only a short acknowledged illness, earlier symptoms shrugged contemptuously off, in Blairquhan, very much at the helm of the ship, and only a week after entertaining his final large house-party of friends.

It’s right that we should be here today, because I believe Blairquhan is the epitome of his achievement: a working house and estate, preserved and enhanced as a thing of beauty; but also a vital centre in Ayrshire and in Scotland, a force for good, and the source for many many people of just so much fun.

Nigel Buchanan

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