Sir Robert Grieve FRSE RTPI RIAS FRSGS LLD DLit (11 December 1910 – 25 October 1995) was a Scottish polymath: engineer, planner, academic, mountaineer, poet, raconteur and visionary.
Grieve played a pivotal part in both the Clyde Valley Regional Plan and the Highlands and Islands Development Board.
Grieve learnt values from his uncle and mother of nature and book loving, and a questioning and critical mind.
[2] At weekends and holidays Grieve continued walking in the nearby countryside in the Campsie Fells, Loch Lomondside, the Trossachs and the west coast.
He used his engineering skills to devise a novel strategy of distributing and locating shelters so that they could be reached from peoples homes in the shortest possible time.
She was a charming and powerful lady who kept Grieve in Scotland when he was offered a position as government Chief Planner in London, not wanting to leave her beloved homeland.
According to a later colleague Alec Kerr: "He was always involved in seminal works, and he was the person to ask the searching question which simulated [sic] reasonable thought and forced people to think in depth about what they were proposing.
[2] The preservation of Eaglesham and the concept of East Kilbride were both examples of Grieve's concern for properly balanced communities.
[4] While the best known name on the Clyde Valley Regional Plan was that of architect Sir Patrick Abercrombie, Grieve and Hugh McCalman did most of the work.
As a result he was sometimes in conflict with his friend, the civil servant James McGuinness, head of the Scottish Economic Planning Department.
An example of Grieve's searching questions was his challenge, in 1962, to Glasgow Corporation's plans to build 650 high-rise blocks of flats within the city.
[1] In 1964 the University of Glasgow invited Grieve to become their first Professor of Town and Regional Planning, a post he held until he retired in 1974.
In his seminars and lectures, Grieve practised breadth in education, following Patrick Geddes, another great Scottish planner, with recitations of Scots poetry, particularly of the modern makars.
[2] When the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB) was established in 1965,[1] the first choice of the then Secretary of State for Scotland, Willie Ross, for the chairmanship was Grieve.
[2][11] Encouraged by international interest, the HIDB in conjunction with the British Council ran an annual seminar for overseas students, especially from the Third World, in Plockton.
[1] In 1967 BBC Scotland invited Grieve to introduce the poems and songs for their Burns' Night programme.
Charles Prosser, secretary of the Royal Fine Arts Commission for Scotland, remembered Grieve as a great chairman, and pointed to a paragraph in the commission's 1982 annual report: "The design for the British National Oil Corporation headquarters in St Vincent Street, Glasgow, was strongly opposed by us and to a greater or lesser extent by all the voluntary amenity bodies who studied it.
[9] In 1988 Grieve chaired the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly committee that drafted the Claim of Right for Scotland,[1] which was published in June 1988.