Tessa Ransford believed that being a poet was not enough. She wanted to share the experience of poetry and create a sanctuary for readers and writers of verse. Her legacy was the Scottish Poetry Library, which she founded after realising that Scotland had nothing to rival the poetry library in London that had been created with the help of TS Eliot in 1958. Her collection now sits in a fine, modern building close to the Scottish parliament, and contains nearly 40,000 volumes.
She began in 1984 with only 300 books, two volunteers and a clutch of rooms on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. To drum up support, she helped drive two mobile-library vans around Scotland, lamenting: “I wish people would regard poetry as an art form like any other, like painting or music, then they wouldn’t be so embarrassed about it. Poetry is about feelings, and of course the Scots don’t like to admit publicly to their deeper underworld of feelings.”
Her commitment was tireless, and a generation of Scottish writers benefited from the school of poetry she promoted, the literary magazine she edited and the string of pamphlets for which she and her second husband, Callum MacDonald, a publisher and printer, were responsible. Her library also contains well-thumbed versions of the 18 volumes of her own poetry.
An eloquent supporter of Scottish independence (although she never joined a political party), she believed the arts kept alive “a sense of Scotland”. The line she selected for the inside door of the new library building was the motto of the Scottish biologist Sir Patrick Geddes: “creando pensamus” (by creating we think). In the 1980s, she urged, too, that Scotland ensure its literature was translated into European languages: “There are going to be translation centres all over Europe soon. We need to be on that network, and if we don’t have our own translation centre, we won’t be. There is no future for Scottish literature unless it is translated.’’
A fluent German speaker, she translated the works of Rainer Maria Rilke and shared his view that “if your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches. For the creator, there is no poverty.”
She herself was a philosopher-poet, whose work was spare, thoughtful and often reflected nature or the physical world — especially her childhood in India and married life in Pakistan.
Tessa Ransford was born in Bombay in 1938, the daughter of Sir Alister and Lady Torfrida Ransford. Her father was master of the mint in Bombay and responsible for all the coinage for the British forces east of Suez, and it was there that Tessa spent the first six years of her life.
In 1944, she, her mother, and brother John, sailed to Britain by convoy through the newly reopened Suez canal. Her father followed three years later, after Indian independence, took a course in accountancy and became bursar at Loretto school, while Tessa was sent to St Leonards in Fife, where sport rather than literature predominated. However, she was already beginning to write and recalled discovering the work of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in the school library, which put her in touch with her “Indian self”.
One of her poems, As I Trod those Stairs, described her loneliness at school:
“I was not an orphan, yet for weeks on end
I was, for years in boarding school.
The chill lies thick there in my body still.
How could it? What are stairs, is stone?
For me a sign of fear and being alone.”
She went on to Edinburgh University, where she was faced with a choice between German or philosophy. She chose philosophy, and it was said that when she told her German tutor, he wept. After leaving she worked at the publicity department of the Oxford University Press.
Her life took a very different turn when she married Kay Stiven, a Church of Scotland missionary, and went with him to Pakistan, where they lived for nine years, from 1960, and where three of their four children were born. It was a difficult time, with two of the children developing malaria. “We’re in the midst of a dust storm and hot dry weather,” she wrote, “we still have no air conditioner. Roland and Hilda have had malaria and been ill and very fractious and wan with temps up to 104.” However, she also felt at home with the culture of the country and looked back on her time there with affection.
On returning to Scotland, where Kay, after teaching, had decided to go back to the church, she found life as a minister’s wife too constraining. They were divorced in 1983. By then she had her first volume of poetry published.
The idea of establishing a poetry library took shape during the Edinburgh Festival of 1981, when the poetry society of London put on an exhibition at the Assembly Rooms. She overheard an American poet, Larry Butler, asking where the local poetry library was.
A request to the Scottish Arts Council for a £10,000 grant was turned down, so she set out her ideas in an article. She envisaged a place where “you will be encouraged to ask and talk, to share what you know with others, and feed the library with information about local poets, small presses and unknown talents”.
A steering committee was formed, with help from leading poets such as Edwin Morgan, Iain Crichton Smith, Norman MacCaig, Hamish Henderson and Ian Hamilton Finlay. The backing of the jocular MacCaig was particularly useful. She admitted to spending hours with him in Edinburgh bars trying to convey her ideas while being “audience fodder” to his constant badinage and “trying not to drink too much”. She recalled: “He would get quite cross if you refused a drink.”
A more considered approach to the Arts Council won the necessary funds. Premises were found in Tweeddale Court in Edinburgh; the money was barely enough and she and her first librarian, Tom Hubbard, shared a salary. “We live from day to day,’’ she said. They moved into a new building on the Canongate, designed by the architect Malcolm Fraser, in 1999.
In 1989, Ransford married Callum Macdonald, who published the works of most of Scotland’s leading poets, but also produced the Lines Review, a Scottish literary magazine, which she edited. “She could not hold back if she thought that something was wrong, she would never take ‘no’ for an answer, and she always spoke out if something was right and true,” said a friend. She continued to write volumes of poetry,the most celebrated of which were Shadows from the Greater Hill, A Dancing Innocence, Seven Valleys, and When it Works it Feels Like Play.
Her passionate commitment and steely resolve sometimes took its toll on family life, but she was always careful to write a letter a week to her children when they were away and, in her Who’s Who entries, she listed her recreation as “grandchildren”. Her favourite pastime was dancing. Her eldest daughter Jean trained as a nurse, her son Roland is in forestry management, Hilda, her second daughter, is an NHS administrator, and the youngest, Meg is a part-time midwife. They all survive her.
Although she loved her life in Scotland, the subcontinent haunted and beguiled her to the end. She summed up a lifetime in which she had never felt as if she really belonged to any particular place in the poem The Dhobi’s Dog.
“I like the way I speak, the voice my thoughts make,
yet Scottish folk are quick to think me English.
I’ve lived here (sixty) years (Anderson forebears
and Glasgow Macalisters — that’s buksheesh!)
Still my language finds no place, no ethnic dress or face:
I plead my special case and thus I finish.”
Tessa Ransford, OBE, poet, was born on July 8, 1938. She died of cancer on September 2, 2015, aged 77
