COLIN CAMPBELL: 50 years on, Highland Council trailblazers still deserve to be remembered
It's now exactly 50 years since the creation of Highland Council, or the Highland Regional Council, as it was called back then.
The first elections took place in the summer of 1974. Not long into his tenure in office, the first leader of the new organisation, the Rev Murdo Nicolson, invited me for afternoon tea and an interview at his manse in Muir of Ord. He was a very kindly, soft-spoken gentleman.
What he'd have made of the 24-hour-a-day tumult across the political spectrum all year round now we'll never know. I suspect he'd have taken one look at it and politely said "not for me, thank you very much," and stuck to quietly tending his flock.
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Back then the new councillors from across the Highlands gathered at Glenurquhart Road HQ in a large room which looked like an extended school classroom, with flat wooden desks to match. The absence of frills was total, as was the array of fancy titles for officials, who were then generally considered a cluster of clerks, with modest salaries aligned to their modest status.
These initial councillors had a lot on their plate. It was the era of the oil boom, which saw huge construction sites employing thousands of workers at Nigg, Kishorn and Ardersier. As a result, money flooded into towns and villages across the north.
Overseeing this and much more were people who have stuck in my memory as having big personalities. Some arrived a bit later, some were there from the start, but they all made their mark.
Isobel Rhind from Invergordon, Roland Mardon from Alness, Val MacIver from Evanton, John Robertson from Nigg, Duncan Macpherson and Hamish Stuart from the Black Isle were just some of those who sometimes raised their voices and banged on their wooden desks when things got heated. And with multimillion-pound oil-related decisions to make, they often did.
In Inverness at the time we had councillors like Dan Corbett, Allan Sellar, Sheila Mackay, Alistair Milne, Ian Fraser, Tom Mackenzie, and Jimmy Cameron, again, to name but a few. Some also served on the regional council. Peter Peacock later became its convener, and a very good one he was.
Inverness was only half the size it is now and huge swathes of land now covered by housing were wasteland or open fields. But these people and others like them at least helped lay the foundations for the rapid and massive expansion that was to come. There were big personalities among their number too, people like Dan Corbett, who was the hard-as-nails councillor for South Kessock.
The area is still classified as being deprived. But back in the ‘70s with decayed housing, a grim reputation for indiscriminate violence and a disproportionate number of problem families who had been put there under a foolish settlement policy, it was at such a tipping point that behind the scenes in the council there were despairing calls for widespread demolition of the crumbling estate. Dan Corbett resisted that and persuaded his colleagues to invest £12 million - then a huge sum - in a housing upgrade and rebuilding programme.
The area still has its problems but its appearance now couldn't be further removed from the slum-like squalor of parts of that area 50 years ago. Dan Corbett played a very big role in that and the Corbett Centre in the Merkinch is named after him.
With equal justification in tribute to the good they brought to their communities and to Inverness as a whole, the Mackenzie centre was named after Tom Mackenzie and the Cameron Centre in Dalneigh after Jimmy Cameron.
The good old days, eh? Well I may be partly looking at them through rose-tinted spectacles, but it's questionable how many of today's incumbents, in a system where highly paid officials seem to hold much more sway than they used to, will be remembered 50 years from now, or even remembered much at all.
But I may be doing them a disservice. In any case, half a century on from a huge change in local government that affects us all in one way or another, I think it's appropriate to remember that councillors, despite the flak so often hurled in their direction, are generally good people who serve with the best of intentions.
