Yahoo News Dumfries and Galloway photographer Jim McEwan shares more of his story as he retires
Last week, we shared Jim McEwan’s incredible journey from being born in Mufulira in the Northern Rhodesian copperbelt (now Zambia) to Scottish parents – Dumfriesshire-born midwife Violet (nee: Marchbank) and James McEwan, a Kirkcaldy plumber, to growing up in Scotland.
This included family visits to his grandfather’s Burnside Farm at Auldgirth, which eventually led to him becoming a trainee gamekeeper aged 15 at Glenkiln near Shawhead.
It was to her father’s farm that Violet had brought her young sons, Jim and his older brother, Neil, out of the growing unrest and political change of South Africa to Dumfriesshire in late 1958, and where they lived for a spell in a caravan until James could join them. The family then moved for a new life in Kinghorn, Fife, followed by 12 years in Denny, Stirlingshire, where they set up a licensed grocer and sub postmaster business.
Violet and James also kept up their links with Dumfries and Galloway, buying a holiday cottage at Irongray with the region a dream setting for Jim, who has fished since the age of six and has a life-long passion for climbing and the great outdoors.
He eventually moved by himself to live in Dumfries in the 1970s – straight from school – to take on the gamekeeper’s role, which he stuck at for three seasons, working seven days a week, before quitting to become a trainee Press photographer at The Galloway News, after training at the Dumfries and Galloway Standard.
Five years on at the start of the 1980s, he waved goodbye to the region to take on the challenge of being a photographer in the Middle East for the Gulf Times in Doha, and that led to working and covering assignments globe-trotting in 22 different countries.
In his late 20s, he decided to return home to Dumfries in 1987 to use his skills as a freelancer taking commissions, including working with The Dumfries and Galloway Standard and The Galloway News.
Jim recalls: “I’d had enough, and thought there is no reason I can’t do this at home. I’d spent a lot of my time away working as a freelancer and I knew it would be a challenge to do it here. But I’d taken Press pictures since the day I picked up a camera when I was 18 and it was what I knew how to do – a lot of it self-taught and learning as I went.
“When I pick up a camera, I make money. I’d done that working for myself, freelancing for newspapers and various magazines and PR companies across 22 countries and sold my images around the world, including to the likes of the New York Times and International Herald Tribune.
“And I’m happy to say it has paid off. I have bought my house and raised my family off of it, along with my wife, Lynn.
“It hasn’t always been easy. As a freelancer, if I didn’t take pictures I didn’t get paid. My diary for the year would be totally blank, so it was up to me to get the shots that would pay the bills.
“Based in Dumfries, I took commissions from every national daily newspaper, the regionals and magazines and have always done PR work for companies too and the Press Association. I worked quite a lot for many years with a well-known Dumfries reporter, the late Frank Ryan, who was ‘the Record’s man’ here.
“Together we covered every kind of story you can imagine. Frank was a hard taskman with a wealth of newspaper knowledge and acumen.
“There is one occasion that I’ll never forget working alongside him at – and no-one else who was in Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, will either – and that is the Lockerbie bombing.
“First photographer on the scene was the Standard’s Robin Bryden and I was the second. Frank was there and we thought it was a military aeroplane crash at first – how wrong we were.
“We quickly realised it was something big but didn’t know the scale of it. We didn’t realise that it extended out beyond the town, or what the body count would be. It was horrific but we had a job to do and Frank, as ever, realising some of the implications very early on, rang the Daily Record newsroom and told them to hold the front page.
“We didn’t have digital cameras in those days so it meant I had to drive up to Glasgow with the rolls of films and I only had 20 minutes to take whatever pictures I could, and it was raining diesel fuel.
“With adrenaline flowing and not really taking in all I was seeing – it beggared belief – I did what I could in the town and was just about heading for my car when a bloke said we should go up to Tundergarth because a nose cone from an aeroplane was in a field there.
“I was about to head there when Frank told me to get on the motorway and up to Glasgow because the Record needed the pictures straight away.
“Of course, even today, the most iconic photograph of the Lockerbie Air Disaster is that nose cone image I missed because of Frank!
“It was the one that got away in my career.
“However, my other Lockerbie images went around the globe and still show up today, 35 years on.
“Disasters, murders and grim things like that are part and parcel of journalism and I’ve seen it all – and photographed it all – during the past 50 years. You never forget. It stays with you.
“And Lockerbie has stayed on. I covered all aspects of it over the years since, from the local inquiry day after day to the aftermath and all the anniversaries since.”
Jim’s killer instinct with a camera also helped him bag a rare triple for a freelance Press photographer in the 1990s.
He said: “There was a big, big snowfall in Dumfries and it crippled much of the region. I thought I might get some shots to sell to the nationals and went out into the town through the snow.
“I saw Burns Statue and it was the perfect picture. The snow had fallen on the marble so heavily that it looked as if Burns had a Russian hat on and it enhanced his shoulders. Set against the darkness of Greyfriars Church in the background, it was an incredible image to sum up the weather.
“I was thrilled when the Daily Telegraph bought it and used it on their front page.
“The next day I had bagged a lift to go up in a helicopter to take pictures of supplies being dropped off for stranded people but when I got to the big field at what used to be Cresswell Maternity Hospital in Dumfries, there was a fire engine readied and I realised there must be a helicopter coming in with a pregnant lady. Using my instinct, I put on a wide lens to get everything and, as the helicopter landed, all the snow bellowed up and a junior doctor got out and was trying to usher a heavily pregnant woman out.
“That one picture with the woman, the doctor, the firemen, the helicopter and the snow told it all. The story of how bad the weather was in Dumfries for the rest of the word to see. I am not surprised that The Daily Telegraph used it on their front page.
“The picture editor called me the next day and said ‘give me one more Jim’, and I thought: ‘what am I gonna do? – I’m running out of ideas here.’ Things had started to get back to normal and the snow was melting and then I saw it in Queen Street.
“People had been forced into the middle of the road to get about with these high walls of snow either side where the pavements were. There was just this thin gap down the middle of the road with a trail of about 20 people walking one by one down it.
“For all the world it looked like a Lowry painting. I took it and sent it off and got the call to say The Telegraph was running it on the front page. I’d done it. Three days on the trot. I am proud of that.”
It is not the first time Jim’s photographs from the region have landed on the front pages of national newspapers.
Another one – which was hard-earned – involved a crash in the hills above Moffat when a female driver came off the Edinburgh to Moffat road and ended up at the bottom of the Devil’s Beeftub ... and walked away with minor injuries.
He said: “Her van had plunged 500ft down the hill in darkness and she managed to climb up the Beeftub to safety with just a few bruises. She was long gone when I got there but the smashed up van was still there at the bottom of the valley. I climbed down into the Beeftub myself and got these incredible photographs of the tyremarks going all the way down. The Daily Mirror used it on their front page.”
For more than a decade, Jim has been contracted to work for The Standard and Galloway News covering all aspects of life and events across the region and is a weel-kent face, with not a town or a village that has not come under his radar.
From Riding of the Marches, cattle shows and Guid Nychburris, to diamond weddings and awards, and from festivals to Burns suppers, Jim has been the man behind the lens. And his photographs are forever recorded as a social and local history record at the Ewart Library – not least the foot and mouth epidemic and the Covid-19 pandemic. It is an amazing legacy.
And one that could well have given one of his daughters, Kirstin, ideas of setting up her own successful photography business in Dumfries, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
One of his grandchildren, teenager Muirinn White – a pupil at Wallace Hall Academy – is preparing to go to Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen in September to study for a BA Hons degree in journalism.
Jim said: “Despite all attempts I have made to put them off, they are determined to forge a career in the Press industry. I am proud of them both and wish them good luck.
“Last year I underwent a triple heart bypass and that has been my wake-up call. The doctors told me I’d had at least three heart attacks in one month. I think the first one was when I felt a twinge climbing to the top of the Cairngorms – but I’d carried on climbing for three days after that. I’ve always loved climbing and sports and I’ve done 100 Munros, so I’m planning to climb the other 284. I record them all in a journal with routes, maps and photographs.
“The specialists at the Golden Jubilee promised me they’d have me fit for climbing again and when I did my first climb back – at Loch Lomond – after the operation, I sent a photograph to the hospital to say thank you.”
Jim said he is also grateful to everyone who has been in touch to wish him well in his retirement.
“It has been quite a journey and I have so many memories. I am going to miss it and everyone I have worked with. The people of this region are incredible and it has been a privilege to capture so many aspects of people’s lives with my photographs. I’ve been verbally abused at times but, on the whole, I’ve been made more than welcome and if I had taken every drink of tea and biscuits offered, I’d be 20 stone today.
