MANY gifted men and women have experienced hard times before their achievements have been recognised.

One such individual was Dr Edwin Muir, who was appointed Warden of Newbattle Abbey College in Dalkeith, Midlothian, more than 60 years ago.

At that time a Peebles conference on adult education referred to the re-opening of the college and its new head was described as ‘a Scotsman of international distinction’.

Muir, who was a poet, novelist and critic, was a farmer’s son from the Orkney Islands but I will explain his Greenock connection — one he likely did not consider a happy experience — later in this article.

Before taking up his appointment at Newbattle Abbey College, Muir had lived, lectured and written in Rome for 18 months.

Previously, he spent a period in Prague and ultimately became an authority on modern European literature. Muir was made Director of the British Institute in Prague and Visiting Professor of English at the city’s university.

Muir’s earlier life had seen him employed in a beer-bottling plant, a boilermaking factory, as a chauffeur and I will now explain how another job brought him to Greenock.

In 1950, former Greenock Academy teacher Edward Scouller told the Telegraph about his first meeting with Muir.

He said: “It took place nearly 40 years ago. Muir was both a sick and unhappy man at the time and I never realised how sick and unhappy until I read his autobiography long afterwards.

“He is not a man who opens out easily to new acquaintances.

“At that time Muir was totting up figures in a loathsome Greenock factory where the main business seemed to be wagonloads of maggotty bones that stank abominably when raw, and polluted the atmosphere of the whole east end when they were being burned, boiled or whatever happened to them.” After advising of Muir’s workplace, which was possibly the now-closed Dellingburn Street factory that turned bones into charcoal for the sugar industry, Scouller went on to describe a visit to his Greenock lodgings.

The former teacher said: “He was in the tiny bedroom, coughing and spluttering heart-renderingly over a book he was reading. He was almost invisible behind clouds of coal smoke. The fire, he confessed, was not drawing well and he had tried everything.

“When I pushed back the closed damper he was gratified to see the flames leap up and the air clear rapidly.

“Why should a man have to clutter up his brain with complicated, difficult things like dampers and induced draught and so forth when someone is sure to come along who knows about them?” After being appointed Warden of Newbattle Abbey College Dr Edwin Muir, who died in 1959, must have appreciated coming back to Scotland and not having to breathe in the loathsome smells from when he worked in a Greenock bone factory.