Old Photograph King Edward Terrace Portknockie Scotland

Old photograph of buildings on King Edward Terrace in Portknockie, Moray Firth, Scotland. Alexander Mair was born in Portknockie in northern Scotland on 9 September 1912, the son of local herring fisherman, Alexander Mair, born 1881, died 1941, and his wife, Jessie Slater. His father worked on the Zulu class trawler " Evangeline ". He was educated locally and left school at the then normal UK age of 14. He worked in the fishing industry, the mainstay of the local community, but was an on-shore clerk overseeing catches in Buckie rather than being a fisherman. Not until the onset of the Second World War was he inspired to study Medicine, joining Aberdeen University as a mature student in 1939 and graduating MB ChB in 1942. He then joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and was stationed first in Normandy in the aftermath of the D-Day landings and later in Brussels, rising to the rank of captain. After the war he returned to academia gaining a Diploma in Public Health at Aberdeen then beginning lecturing in Public Health 1948. In 1952 he became Senior Lecturer in Public Health at St Andrews University in Fife and was given his Professorship in 1954. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1980. His proposers were John McQueen Johnston, Anthony Elliot Ritchie, John Cameron, Lord Cameron, R. M. S. Smellie. He retired in 1982 and died of a cardiac arrest in Broughty Ferry on 6 August 1995. He is buried with his parents at Portknockie. Portknockie village was founded in 1677 and became a significant herring fishing port during the nineteenth century, although today only a handful of commercial inshore boats remain.



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