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Jo Grimond - Towards the Sound of Gunfire
 | Price: £20.00 Supplier: Birlinn Ltd |
The title of this book comes from Jo Grimond's famous quote, 'I intend to march my troops towards the sound of gunfire'. His troops were, of course, the Liberal party, which he led from 1956 to 1967 and he is widely recognised as their greatest post-war leader. However, it is as a hard-working and immensely popular constituency MP that he is remembered with such affection in Orkney.
He was born in St Andrews in Fife, in 1913 and gained a first at Oxford, became a major in the army and married Herbert Asquith's daughter, Laura Bonham-Carter. None of this makes him sound an obvious parliamentary candidate for Orkney and Shetland but he came so surprisingly close to winning the seat in 1945 that he was persuaded to stand again in 1950.He won by a comfortable majority and remained MP for the northern isles until his retirement in 1983. As Michael McManus says in this book, it was one of the more remarkable political marriages of the century. When he joined the House of Lords he took as his title Lord Grimond of Firth, the parish in which he and Laura had made their home.
This book by Michael McManus is a detailed and very readable account of the life of a charismatic couple.
ISBN 1843410060
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Closer to home, Grimond struggled with his gardening, to which his approach seemed very similar to that he had adopted towards cultivating the Liberal Party in earlier years: he continued to sow and to dig with all the outward appurtenances of the optimist, though in fact he was doing so in conscious defiance both of the odds and of his own more realistic expectations. By his own admission, as a gardener he was relentless rather than inspired. Year after year, he bemoaned, he was caught out by the capricious Orcadian seasons, as he notched up more white Easters than white Christmases. He also found himself constantly ambushed by plants that he had forgotten, plants that he had not expected - and plants that he had not even planted, including an importunate blackcurrant bush that made an incursion into what was supposed to be a herbaceous border.
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