WOLFE MURRAY, Angus Malcom (1937-2023)
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Obituary: Angus Wolfe Murray, publisher of Lanark
Founder of Canongate books who spotted the classic Alasdair Gray novel and held myriad jobs from roadie to removals
……One friend called him a Peter Pan figure who never entirely grew up. That may have stemmed from the early tragedy of his life, when his mother, Lady Grizel Wolfe Murray — née Boyle — died at sea after the ship in which she was returning to Britain from South Africa in September 1942 was torpedoed by a German U-boat. She had been among the 2,500 passengers, including Italian prisoners of war, who took to lifeboats after the SS Laconia was attacked. The German submarine had surfaced and attempted to rescue as many of the survivors as it could. Despite flying a Red Cross flag and broadcasting its position, it came under attack from a US plane and was forced to dive, leaving passengers to their fate. Grizel, who was pregnant, survived in a lifeboat for 27 days but died of exposure. As a result of the Laconia affair, Hitler forbade his commanders from then on to rescue the survivors of U-boat attacks.
Wolfe Murray was only five at the time, his brother James two years older. Their father, Malcolm, a bristle-moustached colonel in the Black Watch, was absent for much of his childhood and the boys were brought up by their two grandmothers, one at Kelburn Castle near Largs, seat of the Earls of Glasgow, whose family name was Boyle, the other at Traquair in Peeblesshire…….
…….But what he wanted to do was write and his Polish stepmother — Chouquette, his father’s second wife and mother of Wolfe Murray’s younger half-sister Tessa — sent some of his writing to Daphne du Maurier and approached her brother-in-law Rowland St Oswald, who found him a job as a gossip columnist on The Yorkshire Post…..
In 1961 he married the beautiful Stephanie Todd…..They had four sons — Kim, formerly a Buddhist monk, now a plasterer and builder; Rupert, a travel writer; Gavin, a photographer; and Magnus, known as Moona, an international aid consultant; Wolfe Murray had another son, Calum, from a separate relationship…..
He and Stephanie came together again late in life and after her death in 2017 he lived alone with his animals. A bad motor accident set him back and he ended his days in a cottage on the Kelburn estate in Ayrshire, where he had grown up. He is survived by his five children…..
Angus Wolfe Murray, novelist, film critic and co-founder of Canongate publishers, was born May 20, 1937. He died on January 15, 2023, aged 85.
