Obituary: Gavin Calder, farm manager turned financial planner whose passions were his family and sport

The huge gathering at St Mary’s Parish Church on a balmy Thursday afternoon in mid-August to celebrate the life of Gavin Calder stands testament to the understated but far-reaching contribution he made to east coast Scottish life for 65 happy years, before his sudden death from a heart attack on the 4th tee at Hirsel Golf Club in Coldstream, Berwickshire.

Born to Robin and Betty Calder, Gavin was the eldest of four brothers from one of the great Scottish rugby clans. In their youth, the quartet would play the game they loved in the field in front of the family home from dawn to dusk, laying the foundations for the youngest siblings – twins Jim and Finlay – to become two of the best Scottish back-row forwards of all time.

Gavin would often joke that he had “taught those boys everything they know and they ended up better than me” but in reality he took great pride in their achievements. He was on a family camping holiday in Dumfriesshire when Finlay captained the victorious British and Irish Lions tour to Australia in 1989, and persuaded the couple who owned the site to allow him entry to their farmhouse so that he could slip silently away from the family in the middle of the night to watch every game in the series on TV, then return before his absence had been noted.

Big brother was a handy enough player in his own right, playing tight-head prop for Scottish Schools out of Melville College, and then for North and Midlands, Scottish Universities and British Universities while studying agriculture in Aberdeen. After finishing his degree, he played briefly for Gordonians whilst based in Stonehaven and working for Scottish Agricultural Industries, but his heart – as far as rugby was concerned – belonged elsewhere.

“One night he just sat up in bed and said: ‘I’m going back to Stewart’s Melville’. So from then on he trained with Gordonians during the week and drove down to Edinburgh every Saturday,” said Moira, his wife of 42 years. “We set off at 8am with our eldest son Robin as a baby in the back of the car, and he would drop me at my parents, who by this time lived in South Queensferry, before going to Inverleith to play.Then he would pick me up on the way back up the road.”

Gavin served Stewart’s-Melville RFC as a player, captain, coach, committee member, president, 2nd XV cheerleader, general dogsbody, opposition greeter, match-day announcer and – perhaps most satisfyingly – chief reporter on the club website, right up until his death.

Moira and Gavin’s paths first crossed as 18-year-olds on the 106 bus from Haddington to Edinburgh in the early 1970s, with Gavin making his way to Melville College (where he had been a pupil from age eight) and Moira headed to work at Standard Life. Moira invited Gavin to a friend’s 18th birthday party and the two never looked back.

Moira went on to study teacher training at Moray House before joining Gavin in Aberdeen. The pair married in 1975.

After a period as a procurement officer – buying cattle – for Donald’s of Portlethen, the family returned south in 1979 when Gavin became farm manager for Gilbert Archer in Drumelzier near Peebles, later taking the same role with the Ramsay family on Langrig Farm in Coldstream.

With eldest son Robin joined by Laura, Cheryl and Gavin (“Wee Gav”), family life became the great preoccupation. So much so that in the late 1980s he took a brief break from travelling to and from Stewart’s Melville’s Inverleith base in Edinburgh, during which time he had a couple of highly enjoyable years playing and coaching instead at the closer Berwick rugby club.

The children attended Eccles Leitholm Primary School, and inspired by fond sporting memories from his own schooldays, Gavin struck upon the idea of setting up a Unihoc – floor hockey – team.

“He just thought: ‘What club can I start to get the kids involved?’ And he had the confidence to approach people and say: ‘Can I start this?’ ” recalled Moira.

When the girls got into swimming he was not content with driving them to training and race meets all over Scotland, he took it upon himself to become a timekeeper and then a race starter. Then, in 1993, Duns Swimming Pool came under threat of closure due to lack of council funding, at which point Gavin came up with the idea of making it the first pool in Scotland to go into Trust status, leading to a group of volunteers (BREST – Berwickshire Recreation Education Sports Trust) running the facility ever since.

Cricket was a great passion, for Wee Gav, but local club Manderston did not have a youth section, so “Big Gav” set up both under-13 and under-15 teams: organising indoor nets, entering the local league and even going on tour to Yorkshire.

He was a long-serving elder at Leitholm Church and tried valiantly to set up a Sunday school in order to expand the congregation.

By the turn of the century it was apparent that the days of farm management were numbered. Gavin had a long standing interest in the money markets (setting up the Duns Investors Club in the mid-1990s, which involved monthly meetings in the Black Bull in Duns), so at a time most of his contemporaries were looking to ease slowly into retirement, he took the bold move of pursuing a career in financial planning.

“It was a struggle to get into it because they wanted people with experience and he was in his fifties, having worked on a farm for the last 30 years,” said Moira. “But he somehow got himself onto a distance learning course, passed the exams and persuaded Axa to take him on.”

“The one thing he absolutely detested was cold calling. He’d say to me that he was going to start at 6pm and by 6.30pm he still hadn’t started. He loved people and he loved speaking, he would talk to anybody, but he hated interrupting people’s evening to try and sell them something.”

Eventually, Gavin found his groove with Melville Independent – based a stone’s throw away from his old school. He had clients across the country, from Shetland (where Robin had settled as a teacher) right down to Berwickshire (where he had spent most of his adult life).

Gavin started to wind down his professional career earlier this year and was dividing his time quite happily between family, the rugby club and his latest passion, golf. He had embraced the last of these with the same enthusiasm as he had every other aspect of his life – taking lessons, studying online videos and analysing his swing to the nth degree.

Gavin leaves behind a loving wife, four children and ten grandchildren.

DAVID BARNES