Mourners gathered in Hawick to pay their respects to Bill McLaren
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David Ferguson pays one last tribute to the late commentator Bill McLaren following his funeral in The Scotsman.
“The "lamppost of the lineout" Doddie Weir sat still, but towering over his friend and team-mate Gary Armstrong, the one that used to "burrow like a mole". Roy Laidlaw, the scrum-half McLaren likened to a "baggy up a Border burn", in testament to his slippery style, was sat near other favourites, Gavin Hastings and John Jeffrey, while the Gregor from the line "Townsend jouks into the clear" sat with Scotland coach Andy Robinson, Chris Paterson and Mike Blair and more current players and SRU officials. Gregor Lawson, the eldest of Bill's five grandchildren, brought the funeral service to silence and then ignited uproarious laughter in a fine tribute that intermingled memories of the man we all knew with his own private recollections.
“The word-play which he perfected as a commentator was not confined to the broadcast air we discovered. The voice of one of the grandchildren's girlfriends Bill likened to an air raid siren, "and that was early in the relationship too," Lawson added. They were rolling in the aisles in Hawick with that one I can tell you.
“Daughter Linda's soup was "like molten lava", grandchildren Alex, James, Rory, Gregor, and even Lindsay, were viewed by McLaren at tea-time as "a plague of locusts" or even a "tourist attraction", and at other times "the Hitler youth".”
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