A Life in Time and Space - The Biography of David Tennant. Nigel Goodall
she’s playing this character who is quite dark and a bit of a loony. Yet she carries it off so assuredly you’d sell your children to get to spend some time with Holly Golightly, even though you’re aware she’d be a high maintenance nightmare.
‘If nothing else,’ he continues, ‘Hepburn makes her utterly alluring and fascinating. It’s one of the great things about movies that we’re allowed to indulge little fantasies about people that in life we would steer away from. She was a proper movie star in a way we’re not really allowed to have these days because they have to be so exposed, and we have to know everything about them. And she was probably the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, which always helps.’
Like most of us, David probably has a mix of good and bad memories of his school years. Almost certainly, the worst times for him were the days spent at Paisley Grammar: ‘I hated school, and I hated my teenage years.’ The only anecdote he offers up from this period, without detailed explanation, is the night when he was beaten up. His attackers decided he was a Goth and pounced. The bullies left him to make his own way home after he was assaulted. In fact, his only fashion crime was wearing a bootlace tie in the style of Bono: ‘I was spotty with greasy hair and pretty pissed-off; I couldn’t wait to get to drama college so that my life could get going.’
Situated on Glasgow Road, Paisley Grammar was a non-denominational state school, which had also earned itself a bit of notoriety in 1986, the year before David left. The school was threatened with imminent closure by Strathclyde Regional Council until Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, personally intervened to ensure its survival and subsequently changed the law so that local councils could no longer close schools which were more than 80 per cent full without the approval of the Secretary of State for Scotland. Naturally, the council had to abandon its plans.
Not that David had much of an interest in anything to do with politics at the time, nor with Scotland. For him, his birthplace was pretty much on an abstract concept: ‘I’m very aware that Scotland is where I’m from,’ he once noted. ‘But I had no relationship with Scotland when I lived there. I had no interest in nationalism, no interest in Scotland’s nationhood or legacy, or any of that stuff until I moved down to London, which is a terribly crass, idiotic thing to say, but it’s true. My family are mostly still in Scotland, so it will always be part of who I am and what I go back to.’
But there was more to his roots than just Scotland as he would discover when he took part in September 2006 in Who Do You Think You Are? – the BBC’s ancestry series that looks at family histories of the famous. As Sarah Williams, editor of the accompanying magazine, pointed out, the episode featuring David Tennant was fascinating because it opened up a colourful and sometimes disturbing Irish heritage.
Indeed when David started filming the programme, not only did he want to untangle his Scottish roots, but also to find out about his family in Ireland and what lay behind his grandmother’s strident Protestantism. ‘I guess as you get older and you look forward to the ultimate grave, you begin to become a bit more aware of your place in the scheme of things,’ he conceded.
The first surprise for him came when researchers uncovered the details of the Scottish side of his family. For a start, he was no native Glaswegian. His great grandfather Donald McLeod was an immigrant to the city from the Isle of Mull. ‘I’ve always thought of myself as a lowland Scot. The Highlands was something that I knew was there, but I’d always felt a bit of a fraud, claiming to be part of them so that was interesting to learn,’ he said. ‘I was keen to find out why Donald left Mull when he did, and what life was like for him – whether he left because country life was untenable or whether he came to Glasgow because he thought the streets would be paved with gold.’
The truth about Donald’s motives, when it emerged at the end of one of Mull’s winding country roads, was more tragic than he could ever have imagined. His family roots lay in a series of small, ruined cottages on a wind-washed hillside overlooking the sea, where Donald was one of ten children forced from their homes during the Highland Clearances in the early nineteenth century. This was the burgeoning industrial age, with wool and meat becoming valuable commodities in the new mill towns, when many highland landowners realised sheep were more profitable than tenant farmers. So they suddenly increased the rents and when tenants such as Donald’s parents couldn’t afford to pay, they forced them off their land and often burnt their homes to prevent them returning.
‘It’s the inhumanity of it that’s quite bewildering,’ David concluded. ‘That people could do that to one another. There’s also something about going and standing where it happened that brings it all home in a way that the history books just don’t. There’s something about seeing your mother’s maiden name connected to it at such close quarters – it’s quite grim, really.’
The most positive thing to come out of the trip was that when Gregory Doran, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s chief associate director, watched the programme and saw David hold up and contemplate a skull exposed by renovations in the church where Donald was baptised. He was so impressed that he offered him the role of Hamlet. ‘It was like an audition,’ admits Doran, who immediately sent him a text asking him outright if he had ever thought about playing Hamlet. ‘He said that the two roles he really wanted to do were Hamlet and Berowne in Love’s Labours Lost. [And as] I had already decided that I would be directing Love’s Labours Lost, I thought it was an extraordinary coincidence.’
David’s Irish connection began when his grandfather Archie, former captain of the Scottish youth football team, was signed up to play for Derry City soon after he arrived in Londonderry in 1932. By all accounts, he was a stellar success, scoring 57 goals in one season – a record that still stands today – and marrying a local beauty queen.
‘Archie,’ he continues, ‘must have had a whale of a time. He must have thought he was in God’s own country: he was a superstar and was dating a beauty queen. I’d never been to Londonderry before. I just grew up with all the reports of violence, but it seemed like such a beautiful spot, you can’t quite imagine it’s also a violent place.’ But a violent place it was, and his family was at the centre of the sectarian struggle that has, in many ways, sadly come to define religion.
Fiercely proud Protestants, his great, great grandfather James Blair was an Orangeman and Unionist councillor. His great grandfather William was also an Orangeman and many of his family were among the 500,000 who signed the Ulster Covenant in 1912, a thinly veiled threat of insurrection if the British Government consented to Home Rule in Ireland.
Despite there being almost twice as many Protestants as Catholics in Northern Ireland due to their historical allegiance to Britain, the Protestant Irish had most of the land, money and good jobs; they also used vote-rigging – or ‘gerrymandering’ – to maintain the status quo. David’s own family was a proud supporter of that system: ‘My knee-jerk reaction was one of horror,’ he said. ‘I know that I’m not really qualified to judge but it doesn’t really sit with my Guardian-reading liberalism. To me [the Orange Order] is a symbol of aggression, and certainly not of outreach and peace among men. It’s quite difficult to reconcile that with the lovely people I met in Londonderry, even with my Grandad and Grandma.’
Despite his political affiliations, David’s ancestor James Blair was considered something of a radical and dubbed ‘a Guardian of the Poor’ in a local paper. He was dedicated to social justice, fighting for better homes and wages for workers. His daughter Maisie married a Catholic, Francis McLoughlin, and their son Barry was an instrumental figure in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, taking part in many marches, including those of Bloody Sunday, and helping to challenge discrimination against Catholics. He also stood for election for the non-sectarian Labour party and was committed to the peaceful resolution of Ulster’s problems.
‘You want your family to be people you admire,’ says David. ‘Looking at James Blair, the whole dichotomy is there. Some things he did were admirable, yet he was mired in sectarianism. But I want to believe in what Barry believes in. I was proud to hear him talk about his ideas and his principles and [to] hear how he stood firm against becoming involved in violence, and it was good to leave a city that finally – despite everything – feels full of hope.’