Stirling County Rugby Football Club Memories Meeting
October 2024
Last week Bill McLaren’s daughter Linda and her husband former internationalist Alan Lawson joined us at Stirling County RFC memories group. The topic was the Bill McLaren archive which has been taken on by Stirling University.
Linda is photographed here with Professor Richard Heynes from the University and Derek Young from the Stirling County Rugby Memories group.
Linda gave us many personal memories of her father. She also explained how a Foundation has been formed in his memory to promote the values of rugby and sport, to provide support to young people in their sporting endeavours, and to operate as an education centre. Examples of support so far were in providing rugby strips for a newly formed Under 14 team and to a gymnast who then went on to win a Commonwealth Silver Medal.
Professor Richard Heynes and Karl Magee Archivist described the extensive materials that they have received about Bill’s life as a BBC sports commentator. Alongside this is a lot of documentary evidence of communication with sports characters and celebrities, as well as notes from his famous crib sheets used for internationals. These materials must first be catalogued with a view to their eventual digitization. Several members of our Memories group are volunteering to help with this first stage.
Bill met with many of the early sports commentators in the BBC including Richard Dimbleby. Many helped him but he developed his own unique style backed up with incredibly detailed preparation. Bill was in the crowd as a young boy at the first televised rugby match England v Scotland in 1938, at which Scotland won the triple Crown. Neither he nor others could have known that he was to become a world-renowned rugby commentator feted across the globe.