Gloag's life again rocked by family tragedy

Published on Thursday 21 May 2009 22:22

AS ANN Gloag sat by the bedside of her adopted son Peter in a Nairobi hospital last night, the Stagecoach founder must have reflected that, despite her family's enormous financial success, its name has become synonymous with tragedy.

For this is not the first time a car crash has impacted on the family, nor the only occasion on which Mrs Gloag, sister of Stagecoach chief executive Brian Souter and Britain's fourth richest woman, has contemplated the loss of a son.

In 1999 her son Jonathan, aged 28 and a married father of three, was found dead in woodland in the Perthshire countryside having hanged himself.

And in December 2007 her former husband Robin, with whom she founded the Stagecoach empire in 1980, was killed when the car he was driving left the road and overturned in a field near Perth.

It is understood that Peter was in Kenya to visit the Nairobi orphanage run by Mrs Gloag's Balcraig Foundation. It is affiliated with the Jonathan Gloag Academy, a primary school Mrs Gloag opened in the city in 2002 in memory of her first son.

The orphanage is likely to be a cause particularly close to Peter's heart. A native of Kenya, he was adopted by Mrs Gloag in 1995 at the age of ten after she found him sleeping in rubbish.

Bringing him back to Scotland, she sent him to Morrison's Academy in Crieff and then the fee-paying Dundee High School before he went on to study at Napier university.

A talented footballer, he had a trial for Rangers at the age of 14.

Mrs Gloag spends a considerable amount of time in Africa, travelling there every six to eight weeks. One of Scotland's biggest charitable donors, she spends around 70 per cent of her time on various charity projects, including her 4 million Mercy ship, which provides medical help in poor parts of Africa.

And yet despite her desire to help others, her own life has been plagued by tragedy.

After the death of her son Jonathan, who is believed to have suffered from depression, she immersed herself in life with her 12 grandchildren, whom she has taken to visit the school in Kenya named after her son.

She once said of family: "To me it is everything. Family life is great. If I thought money would spoil it, I would throw it all away."

Meanwhile, her acrimonious relationship with her ex-husband Robin – whom she divorced in 1983, bought out of the Stagecoach business and then deliberately targeted when he started his own bus company until it went bust – was thrown into the spotlight when he was killed in a car crash in 2007.

In times of distress, Mrs Gloag and the rest of her family find solace in their religion. Raised in the Church of the Nazarene, a strict Wesleyan Methodist sect, she is an active member of her local church.

At Jonathan's funeral service in 1999, her eldest brother David, a minister, told mourners: "There are no easy answers or glib words of explanation that will do."

It is understood a prayer service was held at Mrs Gloag's church, the Trinity Church of the Nazarene in Perth, on Tuesday night for Peter after Sunday's crash.