Maurice Lindsay, who has died aged 90, was one of the most prolific poets and cultural proponents of the 20th century. He was energetically devoted to the regeneration of Scottish literature and the arts for more than half a century, emerging from the second world war with a deep commitment to making Scotland's cultural distinctiveness more widely enjoyed and appreciated. As a poet, his achievement is centred on a modest attitude of genteel urbanity comparable to Philip Larkin, yet it is consistently warm, good-humoured, open-minded and affirming.
Lindsay instinctively retreated from dogma, engaging in discussion across the arts through his writing, broadcasting and his promotion of the work of others. He worked tirelessly in a variety of positions: in the War Office, as a journalist, a BBC broadcaster, programme controller at Border Television, director of the Scottish Civic Trust, president of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies and honorary secretary general of the international heritage body Europa Nostra.
Characteristically he would be seen in flamboyant bow-tie, and latterly in tartan trousers and mustard cord jacket, with a great mane of white hair, a cherubic aspect and an air of curiosity. At the launch of The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (2005), which he co-edited with Lesley Duncan, his sense of achievement in a long life was palpable and justified. That anthology, at 420 pages, had evolved through numerous revised and expanded editions from his first major contribution to making modern Scottish poetry more widely known, in 1946.
After the war, Lindsay had discovered an anthology of modern Irish poetry and decided that an equally impressive book could be made of Scottish material. The publisher was Faber & Faber; the director TS Eliot. Lindsay's persuasive encounter with Eliot was effective and helped open to an international postwar readership the work of Hugh Mac- Diarmid, Sorley Maclean, WS Graham, Norman MacCaig and a range of major Scottish poets whose national context demands full consideration. Modern Scottish Poetry: An Anthology of the Scottish Renaissance, 1920-1945 was a revelation and has a significant place in 20th-century literary history.
Educated at Glasgow academy and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music, Lindsay volunteered for service with the Cameronians in the second world war. He was seconded to the War Office after a wrist injury precluded both active service and an early ambition to be a violinist. One job was to brief Winston Churchill on Asian intelligence and, when Lindsay delivered an inaccurate account of the city of Mandalay, he incurred Churchill's wrath.
He might have followed a career in broadcasting based in London but decided to return to Scotland and work as a newspaper music critic, expanding his remit with work for BBC radio and television throughout the 1950s in news and cultural affairs programmes. He co-edited the monthly arts television programme Counterpoint and the radio series Scottish Life and Letters, in an era when the arts were generally better served by the mass media than they are in the 21st century.
His own poetry was encouraged at first by MacDiarmid, who saw Lindsay's youthful energy as an enormous asset to the cultural regeneration required in Scotland. Lindsay began writing poems in the Scots language and MacDiarmid wrote an introduction to his early book Hurlygush (1948) which extolled its virtues. But Lindsay recognised that the Scots voice and hard-edged modernism of MacDiarmid's emotionally taxing energies and intransigent politics were not compatible with his own character. He went on to write lucidly and with increasing fluency in an urbane, Scots-inflected English. Many of his finest poems are domestic, gentle, unobtrusively humorous, anecdotal, unpretentious and deft, perhaps best exemplified in the collections Snow Warning (1962) and This Business of Living (1969).
They have much in common with Larkin's work yet they are infused with a broad sense of cultural connection between all the arts and an affirmation of human decency. There is nothing of despair or hopelessness about them. A full critical appraisal has yet to be made. They include memorable portraits of local characters, such as Any Night in the Village Pub, or vivid landscape in poems such as A View of Loch Lomond and there are whimsical, deliberately minor poems with their own delight, such as Hamster or Brevities, but there are also poems that tackle larger visions, as in Speaking of Scotland with its famous last line:
Scotland's a sense of change, an endless
becoming for which there never was a kind
of wholeness or ultimate category.
Scotland's an attitude of mind.
Lindsay spent six years in Carlisle as programme controller for Border Television (1961-67) but returned north of the border when he accepted the post of director of the Scottish Civic Trust (1967-83). When Stranraer Castle was about to be demolished, Lindsay was again persuasive in preventing the proposed vandalism. Never simply an establishment man, he was a cultural conservator, a preserver and an eloquent advocate of what the word "heritage" really means. His work in this capacity was extensive, including the development of New Lanark as a World Heritage Site.
Moreover, Lindsay was incredibly active on other fronts. Among many books, his labours of love included editing one of the best all-round collections of prose and verse, Scotland: An Anthology (1974), and producing The Burns Encyclopedia (1959), still a valuable reference book, Robert Burns: The Man, His Work, the Legend (1954), a History of Scottish Literature (1977), a monograph on the artist Robin Philipson (1976), an autobiography, Thank You for Having Me (1983), and two remarkably detailed and reader-friendly guide books to the lowlands of Scotland, one on Glasgow and the North (1953), the other on Edinburgh and the South (1945).
These last two books have the distinctive virtue of drawing on oral and familiar tales associated with the places they describe at a time when people were still able to recollect them, and remain uniquely valuable for that. His judgment of the significance of one of modern Scotland's most important composers, in his book Francis George Scott and the Scottish Renaissance (1980) was confirmed with the release of the CD Moonstruck: Songs of FG Scott in 2007.
Lindsay's legacy extends far beyond the vulnerable, civilised ego at the centre of his poems. An excellent collection of essays edited by Lester Borley and published for his 80th birthday, Dear Maurice: Culture and Identity in Late 20th-Century Scotland (1998), surveyed his biography, careers, engagement with Scotland's culture, poetry, architectural and artistic heritage. He was appointed CBE in 1979 and awarded a doctorate of letters by Glasgow University in 1982.
He is survived by Joyce, his wife of over 60 years, a son and two daughters; another daughter died in 2006.
John Maurice Lindsay, poet, broadcaster and cultural historian, born 21 July 1918; died 30 April 2009
