Elizabeth Girling

MANY at home and abroad were saddened by the passing of Elizabeth Girling at her home in Edinburgh’s New Town on 24 March. Aged 92, this quietly distinguished woman will be publicly remembered as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and a doughty political activist and peace campaigner.

Born Elizabeth Jean St Clair Aytoun, she was a daughter of the manse. Her father, Rev Robert Aytoun, was professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at the Selly Oak colleges in Birmingham. She claimed direct descendancy from the ancient St Clair of Orkney and Caithness, and was heir in line of the family of Aytoun of Inchdairnie and Ayton. The poet of the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, William Edmondstoune Aytoun, was an ancestor.

After her father’s untimely death in 1920, Edward Cadbury of Bournville, a family friend and leading member of the Society of Friends, became her guardian, and funded the education of Elizabeth and her two sisters. Elizabeth attended St Leonard’s School, St Andrews, from where she progressed to Oxford University to read English literature. Her tutor in Anglo-Saxon was JRR Tolkien, whom Elizabeth remembered with gratitude for his inspired teaching of a "heavy" subject.

In common with many of her contemporaries she became a principled Communist: Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian, was a particular friend.

After Oxford, she worked for the League of Nations Association and the Transport and General Workers’ Union in London, in a voluntary and secretarial capacity.

The year 1937 proved to be a pivotal one. Like so many left-wing idealists then, Elizabeth felt it natural to volunteer for the forces resisting General Franco’s uprising in Spain, despite considerable risks. Her principal role during the civil war lay in harbouring and caring for refugee children in the Pyrenees, for which she is remembered with reverence and affection.

During this fraught period she met her future husband, Dr Frank Girling, a fellow Oxbridge volunteer. Both had a narrow escape from one of Mussolini’s bombs near Barcelona. They brought back a petrified shard of that bomb, which "memento" is still held in their home in Drummond Place.

At the end of 1937, Elizabeth inherited, with her two sisters, Ashintully Castle, near Glenshee. She and Frank married in 1939, and during the Second World War this was the family home.

The castle also played open house to many visitors, including refugees from eastern Europe and London’s East End, as well as soldiers on leave. Another memorable guest was W Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, on his way south from Balmoral.

Inevitably, Elizabeth’s life was bound up with Frank’s work as a distinguished social anthropologist, academic and international socialist in Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds, Sheffield and Edinburgh. In 1951, Elizabeth and Frank set up house in Drummond Place. They leased part of the house to tenants, including the writer Allan Massie, and welcomed many international composers and artists during the Edinburgh Festival. Neighbours included two literary knights, Iain Goodsir Smith and Compton Mackenzie, with whom Elizabeth took tea and conversed on their mutual interest in poultry.

In 1959 Elizabeth established the legendary Partisan caf in Edinburgh’s Victoria Street. This charming vegetarian coffee house, which pre-dated her friend Janet Henderson’s Salad Table by three years, immediately attracted a host of students, radical thinkers, poets, and everyone and anyone, including Hamish Henderson and Paul Foot, who were personal friends. The original Corries group also played and sang there. It was a halcyon time, and the Partisan is enshrined in that ramshackle 1960s pantheon which included the new Traverse Theatre, Jim Haynes’s paperback bookshop and MacDiarmid and Co’s Milne’s Bar.

Throughout her long life, Elizabeth remained a passionate socialist and a staunch representative and supporter of the "authentic" Labour party. This was allied with a deeply caring, essentially Christian zeal, which was reflected in many campaigning commitments.

Of these, perhaps her tireless work on allergies is recognised as one of her special legacies. Elizabeth was a founder of the Lothian Allergy Support Group, the national significance of which is acknowledged by enlightened members of the Holyrood Parliament.

Elizabeth Girling was a peculiarly Scottish gentlewoman who eschewed her class and perceived privilege in favour of building bridges between the advantaged and grossly disadvantaged, believing with her beloved Frank, who predeceased her last spring, that "true" Labour was a cause worth fighting for.

She devoted her remarkable life to that cause, and, as her loving family testified, did so to the end with great fortitude and grace. She was, in many senses, a renaissance woman, with a passion for learning, culture and the arts, allied to a profound commitment to social justice, family and friends. She will be fondly remembered

She is survived by her children, Robert, Joanna and Andrew, and her grand-daughter, Anna.