Simon Scott obituary

My friend Simon Scott, who has died aged 65, was one of the most accomplished advertising copywriters of his generation. “You can’t get better than a Kwik Fit fitter” was Simon’s. If he overdid it with “Bank of Scotland, a Friend for Life”, his campaign for the Scottish Labour party in 1998-99 under the tag “Divorce is an expensive business” is still considered the reason for the SNP’s poor showing in those first elections to the Scottish parliament.

Simon was born in Harare, Zimbabwe (then known as Salisbury, in Rhodesia), to Lora (nee Miller), an interior designer, and John Scott, a major in the Cameronians regiment who later became a stockbroker. In his father’s eyes, Simon was destined for the army, and after attending Fettes college in Edinburgh, where he and I were contemporaries, he went to Sandhurst.

However, his time there was not a success, and a subsequent law degree from Sussex University also failed to bring forth his vocation. He followed his father into stockbroking, but that did not fit either.

Already writing in snatches and snaps, Simon joined MacLean Dubois, writers and agents, in Edinburgh. From there he moved to Collett Dickenson & Pearce, where clients included Heineken, Benson & Hedges and Dewars, and then to Saatchi & Saatchi, working for Tennents and the Scottish government. Next he took his brio to Faulds, a new agency, as creative director before, in 1996, he co-founded, in Edinburgh, the Union, which has since become as successful an agency as any outside London.

With his wife Jane (nee Starrett), a graphic designer whom he married in 1984, Simon restored and furnished a number of fine Georgian houses, where they raised their sons, Tom and Jack, and entertained friends and family with great generosity and flair. They bought – and sold – a farm in South Africa, before settling finally in East Lothian.

There they seemed very happy. Simon loved his family and many friends; parties, poetry and laughter, wine and whisky and song. He also loved buying and selling antiques, reading, and, of course, writing.

But in the end, the vagaries of his mind overcame him. Simon decided, in Yeats’s words, which he quoted often, that he “must lie down where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”; and he took his own life.

He is survived by Jane, Tom and Jack, and his sister Sarah.