Compton Mackenzie(1883–1972)

Edward Montague Anthony Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool on 17 January 1883, the eldest son of the actor-manager Edward Compton and the American actress Virginia Bateman, into a touring theatrical family whose home address was the next provincial theatre. His father's family were Highland Mackenzies of the eighteenth-century Glasgow merchant line, settled in London since his grandfather; his mother's were Cleveland-Ohio Bateman, in their generation the great Shakespearean rivals to the Booths. He was schooled at Colet Court preparatory school and at St Paul's School in Hammersmith, then went up to Magdalen College, Oxford in 1901 to read modern history, where he edited the Oxford Point of View and converted to Catholicism the year he graduated.

He published his first novel, The Passionate Elopement, in 1911, then the autobiographical Sinister Street in two volumes (1913 and 1914), a book that fixed the Oxford undergraduate of the long Edwardian summer in English fiction. Henry James, who was sceptical of most younger novelists, read it twice and wrote Mackenzie a long letter of praise. The war found him on Capri, where he had moved for his health and met the writer Norman Douglas. He took a commission in the Royal Marines in September 1914, was sent to the Eastern Mediterranean as an intelligence officer in the spring of 1915, and worked at GHQ on the beaches of Gallipoli through the long summer and the autumn evacuation. He was made director of the Aegean Intelligence Service in 1916 from a base on Syros, running agents into German-occupied Greek territory. He came out of the war with the Légion d'honneur and the chronic insomnia that stayed with him for the next half-century.

After the war he wrote, moved, wrote again, and moved. Capri, the Channel Islands, Herm, Jethou. In 1928 he bought the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides for two thousand pounds and built himself a house at Suidheachan above the cockle-strand of Traigh Mhòr. The Hebrides settled him as the war had not. He learned what Gaelic he could, kept a small farm, and wrote for the next twenty years from the Atlantic edge. In 1947 he published Whisky Galore, the comic novel of the wartime wreck of the SS Politician on the Sound of Eriskay and the islanders' systematic recovery of the cargo of twenty thousand cases of Scotch. The book and the 1949 Ealing film of it became permanent furniture of British comedy.

He had co-founded the National Party of Scotland in 1928 with John MacCormick and others, the party that merged into the Scottish National Party in 1934, and he served as the SNP's first Rector of Glasgow University from 1931. In 1932 he published Greek Memories, a memoir of his Aegean intelligence work, which the British Government prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act 1911 in October 1933. He pleaded guilty, was fined one hundred pounds, and was banned from publishing further intelligence material; the prosecution was a moment of imperial nervousness about its own war records, and Mackenzie satirised the trial in Water on the Brain (1933), a novel that has been read inside the intelligence services as an in-house joke ever since. He chaired the Croft Counties Defence Committee in the Hebrides through the 1930s, defending the small-tenant against the absentee-landowner.

He moved to 31 Drummond Place in Edinburgh's New Town in 1953 and lived the next nineteen years there as one of the visible figures of the literary city. He wrote on through his eighties, completed the ten-volume autobiography My Life and Times between 1963 and 1971, and was made a knight in the 1952 Coronation Honours. He died at Drummond Place on 30 November 1972, aged eighty-nine. By his own request he was buried at Eoligarry on Barra, on the Atlantic shore where Whisky Galore is set, and the pipers played him across the cockle-strand at high tide. The Mackenzie name today carries his memory in three distinct registers: the English-letters novelist of the long Edwardian summer, the Hebridean comic master of the post-war decade, and the founding figure of the modern Scottish national movement.