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Alice Atkinson, 18th December 1925 - 27th November 2008 |
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I first met Alice only a few years ago when I joined the Glasgow group of the Humanist Society of Scotland. I turned up at my first meeting, feeling out of place and at 50, too young. Then this glamorous lady came in; she lit up the room, came straight over and sat down with me saying “You’re new. What’s your name? I’m Alice.” She made me welcome as she did everyone who crossed her path, whether a middle aged man at her local humanist group or a teenage boy on her stained glass window course at Glasgow North College. She was a lady with charisma.
She was born Alice Wright Campbell in Glasgow’s East End; at number eleven Muslin Street to be precise, not a stone’s throw from Bridgeton Cross, the youngest of a family of five. Her family’s strong working class background anchored her lifelong left-wing, atheist, republican, principled life stance. But this working class girl was destined for the glamour of the international jet set, before the term had been invented.
In the forties Alice became an air hostess with BOAC on the Sunderland Flying Boats to South Africa via Cairo; Nairobi to Cape Town and then the run to South America stopping over at Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Rio. There are photographs of Alice with her forage cap set at a rakish angle welcoming the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps, onto her flight. At the RAAF Club at Prestwick she mixed with the local RAF pilots and one in particular caught her eye, Bill Atkinson. In 1950, they wed, set up home in Troon and Alice concentrated her talents on being a housewife and mother.
After the children flew the nest, Alice and Bill moved to Glasgow, and Alice took to “retirement” like a duck to water. Her interests blossomed: The Glasgow Philosophical Society, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and the then Glasgow Humanist Group. But it was with the humanists she made her biggest mark, as membership secretary of the newly formed Humanist Society of Scotland. She took the membership from around 300 to over 2000 when she finally retired from the post in 2006. Throughout that period her strength and quiet charm were effectively used to lead the humanists with steadily but ever increasing numbers to a position where their influence on Scottish society was being felt.
She had other interests and in particular “Decorative Stained Glass”; an interest that took her to Glasgow North College where she happily learned alongside the teenage students, and thought nothing of clambering up scaffolding to be find out how to fix broken stained glass.
She liked to live by Dame Thora Hird’s mantra ‘It’s not being old that stops you doing things, rather it is not doing things that makes you old’. She was the busiest and most glamorous 82 year old I’ve ever met. She is survived by three children and five grandchildren.
Gordon Ross Be the first to comment on this article
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