David Hume Tribute, 15 August 2025
Comrades, we are here today to think about David. To understand his curiosity, revere his intellect, enjoy his zest for life and spiky humour and remember his glorious idiosyncrasies.
In 1980, David had just completed a Master’s degree at the University of Wales Institute, Swansea. He applied for posts in my team that was responsible for Strategic Planning in the Strathclyde Region. He was one of 70 or so applicants. His application was detailed and meticulous; I short-leeted him without hesitation. At the interview, he was smartly turned out, engagingly polite and articulate, and he was knowledgeable and positive about our work. He was wooing the Depute Director, who was nominally in charge, but also giving me vibes about his commitment to social justice. He was a shoo-in for a post; I felt I had won the jackpot. In a recent email from David reflecting on his appointment, he said, “I was appointed on a Graduate Trainee Grade; I never took much notice of the actual salary. I was just thrilled to bits to be working for Strathclyde, and eventually, I squirmed my way up the greasy pole to higher levels.” On reflection, “these were the most satisfying days of my career.”
He had joined a team of radical baby boomers; we were all in our twenties and had been gifted the responsibility to shape the development policies of Strathclyde Region, then half of Scotland’s population. We were led by some outstanding politicians who had a vision and determination to tackle the industrial and social decline of Glasgow and its region. As a team, we were committed to social justice, an end to paternalistic public services, community engagement and real ale. We challenged hierarchies and departmental silos, and we ignored moribund administrative procedures. In turn, we were regarded as disruptors by the embedded Directors and Depute Directors.
Our unique selling point was that we were also collaborators, and David was one of the best. His confidence acquired at Heriots, his sense of entitlement nurtured at St Andrew’s University, the fieriness inculcated by his student days in Wales, along with his innate intelligence, allowed him to forge relationships with like-minded professionals across all departments as well as politicians. His desire and determination to tackle poverty and health improvement were as hardwired as his support for Hearts.
David had many other qualities: an inner light, an intense curiosity, and a caustic wit that begat a wicked sense of humour. This could be brutal, but it was twinned with an infectious chuckling laugh that made you forgive him. Before David’s arrival, we had given politicians the evidence to abandon new town growth and focus on urban regeneration and to switch transport spending from roads to public transport. We had persuaded education and social work management to allocate resources according to need, not demand. David was passionate that we should now focus on poverty, health and well-being. He was fanatical about analysing and presenting empirical evidence to justify change; he was an influencer, like his famous namesake.
He forged strong links with the Greater Glasgow Health Board to plot the distribution of GPs in relation to population and found there was little correlation. In the 1980s, Primary Care, like Pharmacies, Dentists, and Banks, was largely absent in the most deprived areas. We made a presentation to Greater Glasgow’s Chief Administrative Medical Officer, Sir Kenneth Calman. It resulted in a programme of new health centres that popped up in the housing schemes and inner-city regeneration areas.
David researched variations in life expectancy across the Health Board area and found immense differences that directly correlated to the levels of deprivation. He compared Drumchapel and Bearsden, a mile apart, but with a 13-year gap in life expectancy. His presentation showcased his artistic bent; he created a horizontal bar chart with Drumchapel and Bearsden shown as two cigarettes. The short Drumchapel cigarette (short life) had a long ash to represent many years with a poor quality of life. Bearden was a far longer cigarette with a short ash. Life was good for far longer in Bearsden. David had nuanced the message that ‘adding life to years’ is probably more important than ‘adding years to life’.
Next up, plumbo-solvency, David mapped where lead pipes existed in Glasgow - almost entirely in the areas of deprivation. It can harm mothers and unborn children and affect the mental development of children. We presented the findings to the Depute Director of Water, who was horrified. He immediately reprioritised the Water capital programme to eradicate the lead pipes in these areas. Along with the switch to public transport, this was another brick in the wall of infrastructure justice.
David had adapted to life in Glasgow; he had established a network of colleagues and friends from across the Council and other agencies – community workers, social workers, welfare rights officers, water engineers, accountants, health professionals, police officers and councillors. He had the advantage of coming from Edinburgh, so when asked who he supported, he replied Hearts. The weegies laughed; he was no threat to the old firm supporters. By this time, David had ingested another personality trait, the brutal humour of Glasgow. (David would have chuckled that Hearts were sitting on top of the league above the old firm on the day of his funeral.) He bought a flat in the most deprived part of Glasgow, Bridgeton, handy for Glasgow Green, the Barras and the People's Palace. It gave him kudos with the social workers, teachers and doctors who may have shared his social conscience but lived in the West End and Shawlands.
David’s analysis of public service provision showed the unintended consequences of Scotland’s post-war policies of New Towns and large housing schemes. The failure of the Scottish Office, Councils, Health Boards and other public bodies to shift resources to where they could eradicate poverty, increase opportunities, and improve the quality of life had resulted in the worst urban deprivation in the UK. He took this knowledge and his diagnostic skills to Lothian Regional Council.
I kept in regular touch with David as his career flourished in Lothian, Edinburgh and then as the Chief Executive of Scottish Borders. We both ended up as Chief Executives, and we arranged joint learning sessions between our Management Teams. We would phone each other and discuss wicked issues as they arose. David’s ambition was to make the Borders more Scandinavian. He admired that they had a far lower Gini coefficient (a measure of a country’s inequality) than the UK. He drove a Saab, read Henning Mankell’s novels and fantasised over Borgen and the Bridge; he holidayed in Denmark. I always expected him to erect a mermaid outside the Council Offices at St Boswells.
David was a poly hobbyist, I’m not sure there is such a word, but it would fit. He was a high achiever, a walking thesaurus. His writing skills were exemplary, his reports could move opinions by his deft use of words that had a feeling, freshness, ambiguity and mischievous innuendo. Making a list of David’s eclectic hobbies is a smorgasbord of activities and interests. As well as motor bikes and small- bore rifle shooting, handy if you want to get on the Police Scotland Board, he was also into cycling, archery, jazz, folk music, bubble cars, opera, classical music, art, philosophy, geography, Edinburgh, France, good food, Welsh politics, winnebagos, podcasts, BBC Radio and Scandi everything, particularly that yellow Porsche in the Bridge.
After retiring, David took on work including being on the Board of Police Scotland and a group commissioned by the Welsh Labour Party that produced a report on Radical Federalism published in 2021. He carried out assignments for other councils and performed performance appraisals of chief executives. He was involved in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and an avid follower of politics.
He became an active member of the Mercat Group of former Chief Executives. We bonded during COVID on Friday night Zoom meets. We wrote papers, produced videos of lessons and events from our lived experiences. David can be seen and heard in full flow on the Knowledge Hub. We ranted about the government’s response to Covid, slipped the light fandango and had silly competitions. What was your favourite car? What would make a good national anthem for Scotland? David always liked to win and would submit exquisitely constructed entries. His best car was a Heinkel, a German bubble car that looked like the cockpit of a fighter plane but with three wheels instead of wings. David bought one in his final year at school and told us with the innocence of an ageing boomer that as he cruised past Gillespie’s girls’ school, he received cheers and lustful looks from the girls. This was Tinder for a baby boomer.
Our entries for a new National anthem included “a wee doch and dorit” by Harry Lauder, “Hermless” by Michael Marra, and Gerry Rafferty’s “Get it Right Next Time”. David was incandescent with rage. He sent us an email:
“What a folly it would be to open up the selection of a new National Anthem to the suggestions from the lumpen proletariat. The choice of a new anthem should be made by people of taste and discernment. With that in mind, my proposal is that the concert overture ‘The Land of the Mountain and the Flood’ composed by Hamish McCunn, is adopted as the new National Anthem for Scotland. Gerry Rafferty won. “Get it Right Next Time” is an essential Scottish Idiom!
David’s love of music led him to be invited to join a choir by one of his former Strathclyde colleagues. The choir organised regular singing courses in France and the north of England. He found his singing voice and became a soloist during performances at these events. He became the darling of the women members who enjoyed his talent, his friendliness and wry sense of humour. It was a reprise of his bubble car days.
David helped organise twice-yearly reunions of the Strathclyde team; our last meeting had been the 50th anniversary of the team being formed. Ten of us turned up, nine with bus passes; David came by car and received a parking ticket. Just before he left for France, he phoned to tell me the reunion for June was postponed. As always, our discussion drifted to current affairs, books we had read and podcasts worth a listen. Then on to the disruptions of Trump and how the centralised decision-making of Westminster and Holyrood not only lacked pace. It failed to tackle the wicked issues like taxation, devolving power and social care. They had strangled local democracy, ignored local knowledge and geographies and failed to harness the latent energy and innovation of our communities and businesses.
Councils had been too docile in letting this happen. Our endorphins had kicked in, and we segued into reasons why taxation, benefits, housing and climate action needed some progressive disruption. A step change to eliminate the inordinate delays, short-termism, treasury rules and big corporate lobbying. Far more decisions must be devolved to the local level, where real knowledge, innovation and community energy would drive progress. Centralisation had been the modus operandi of Holyrood as well as Westminster and needed to be reversed. We were coasting along to an epiphany or overdosing on the euphoria of hope. We agreed to produce a paper on ‘disruption for revitalising local democracy’ when David returned. It appealed to our baby boomer instincts; we had been serial disrupters, and the fires of vision were still flickering.
David’s mission in life had been to gather evidence, challenge conventional thinking and collaborate with others to address poverty and achieve a more just and fair society. This required hard evidence, exemplars, collaboration, friendship, and a wee bit of humour. Perhaps we should gather David’s thoughts and draft a treatise that captures his vision for a more locally democratic, innovative and responsive way of delivering public services.
Claire, Katie and Lyndsey, we are celebrating the contribution your dad made to public services. We know he committed a lot of time to this, and we were responsible for exploiting his unfailing desire to improve outcomes for people and places. In our recent conversations, he spoke with emotion, sharing his immense love and pride in you all and what you had achieved. He dearly wished he had been able to spend more time with you.
