Press Coverage

Artistic Homage to Jet Tragedy

by Robert Dawson Scott
WE havc had the inquest, the memorial services, the investigation, the arrest warrant, even Dr Jim Swire's scaled letter from Colonel Gaddafi's government.

But, as the third anniversary of the night that Pan Am flight 103 was blown up in mid-air over Lockerbie approaches this Saturday, there is another kind of response which may prove to be a more lasting legacy of that fateful night.

The disaster sparked off an extraordinary reaction among Scotland's creative community which other tragedies, no less appalling in their way, for some reason, did not.

In the immediate aftermath, many performing groups, from 7:84 to the Royal Scottish Orchestra, made trips to the region to give special performances. But it is the substantial body of new work that impresses: several lengthy poems, a large-scale piece of music, a significant exhibition of paintings and, most recently, a stained glass memorial which was installed last week in Lockerbie Town Hall, in the very room which was first commandeered as a temporary morgue.

John Clark, the stained glass artist, was commissioned and` had to work to a very tight brief. "People wanted a memorial, not a reminder" said David Wilson, a local councilor. Any direct reference to the events of 1988 was ruled out.

Clark emphasizes that the window is therefore not his personal statement. He feels, nevertheless, that the national flags of the victims, arranged randomly in the narrow confines of each window frame, are a telling image of the random arrangement of the people in the aircraft.

He also included the Saltire, for those who were killed on the ground.

Three of the other artists, Douglas Lipton, poet, Keith McIntyre, painter and Karen Wimhurst, composer, who had been reflecting separately on the disaster, pooled their efforts. In particular, Mc Intyre's image of a winged, angel-like head floating above the border landscape became a powerful symbol.

McIntyre had travelled through Lockerbie the afternoon before the disaster, on his way to join friends for Christmas. "I felt driven to do something, a sense of responsibility," he said. Lipton's poems, several of which he had started and then abandoned, ripened into The Song of the Falling Angel; Wimhurst, who had been thinking about writing a large-scale work for chorus, found herself giving voice to the song, drawing in turn on McIntyre's nagging feeling that his winged head was in some mystical way trying to call out.

The resulting Requiem for Lockerbie was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer, Scottish Television filmed the event, plus interviews with the artists and newsreel footage, for network broadcast on ITV next Sunday.

Donny O'Rourke, the programme's producer, who also wrote a fine short poem himself in the immediate aftermath of the crash, was able to persuade his management to put money into the project to enable it to happen at all. Most unusually, for an hour-long programme, it will be broadcast without commercial breaks.

BBC Radio 4's Kaleidoscope will also broadcast a feature on the artistic outpourings next Saturday. The requiem received its third performance in Glasgow last week, and will be performed again at Kelvingrove in the New Year, to accompany the exhibition of McIntyre's paintings there.

All the Scottish artists working on Lockerbie related projects have been anxious to avoid any suggestions that they have been feeding on the misfortunes of the town where sensitivies are still raw. So far, they seem to have succeeded.

The same cannot be said of one American artist. She wanted to scatter 150 life-size sculptures of grieving women throughout the surrounding countryside.

The local council had to persuade her gently that this would not be in line with their objectives of allowing the community to return to as near normal as possible as quickly as possible.

Artists and writers were, not surprisingly, alive to some of the cruel coincidences which surrounded the Lockerbie disaster. It happened at the season of goodwill, but also on the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day when, in pre-Christian times, fires would have been lit to ensure the return of the sun.

William Hershaw, a Fife poet, was already working on a poem about the turning of the year when he heard of the crash. His Elegy for Lockerbie draws parallels between pagan fire sacrifices, which were to propitiate the gods and ensure the return of the sun, with this modern fiery sacrifice, which seemed to be utterly godless. Lipton drew on the Vision of the Holy Rood for one of his songs. Part of the poem is inscribed in runic script on a 7th century stone just a few miles south of Lockerbie; it describes a burning cross, not so different from a burning aeroplane, descending from the sky.

The eerie parallels continue.McIntyre's exhibition , now at Kelvingrove in Glasgow, opened the day Pan Am finally went out of business