and not to please others, even God.’ John Brown urged his congregation to look forward to His commendation: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of thy Lord.’
Gordon Brown’s blessing, or possibly misfortune, was his stardom. From his earliest years he was praised as outstanding, destined to outclass his contemporaries. Like all Scots children, he was embraced by the country’s excellent system of state education. At Kirkcaldy West, a primary school close to the linoleum factory, he was taught the three ‘R’s by repetition, writing with pencils on slate boards, with a wet rag to wipe off his daily work. He devoured books and, thanks to an aunt, a music teacher, appreciated classic literature. The teachers instantly recognised his unusual intelligence, reporting that he was a year ahead of other pupils in maths and reading, as was one other boy, Murray Elder, who would remain his friend in Scottish Labour politics and Westminster until the present day. At the age of ten, Brown and Elder were enrolled at Kirkcaldy High School, the town’s grammar school, in an educational experiment to fast-stream the town’s brightest schoolchildren by intensive learning.
The High School was a genuine social mixture. The children of dustmen, miners and millionaires were educated together, ignoring their social differences. But the searing recollections of the parents of the poorer children about the days before the creation of the NHS made a lasting impression on Brown. Their elders spoke of the poor abandoning treatment in hospitals when their money was spent, and asking doctors about the cost of visits and medicine before deciding whether their finances were adequate for them to receive treatment.
Ferociously clever, although not the cleverest in the class, Brown never appeared as a swot. Rather he was known as ‘gregarious and jolly’, and the quickest to provoke laughter with a snappy, funny line. ‘The banter and wisecracking that would go on between the boys was great,’ recalled a former class friend. Brown’s passion was sport. He excelled at tennis, rowing, sprinting, rugby and especially football. Around the time he heard the radio commentary of Scotland’s 9–3 humiliation by England in 1961, he resolved to become a professional footballer. On Saturdays, he was seen at the ground of Raith Rovers, the local football team, selling programmes with John, his elder brother, to earn pocket money before cheering the local side. Combining work and pleasure was his father’s doctrine. The most notable result was the newspaper Gordon produced in his pre-teens with his brother and sold for charity. John was the editor while Gordon wrote the sports reports, and later added commentaries about domestic politics. In successive weeks in 1964 he welcomed Harold Wilson’s election, interviewed an American space pioneer, described the persecution of Jews and supported Israel’s existence, and explained the background to crises in the Middle East and Southern Rhodesia. Justifying the new state of Israel was a particular theme encouraged by his father. Brown revealed himself not as precocious, but as a sensible and informed youth. His love of history and politics was partially influenced by ‘Tammy’ Dunn, the school’s left-wing history teacher, although his historical hero in the fourth form was Robert Peel, the nineteenth-century Tory prime minister praised for placing principle before party. In a competition organised by the Scottish Daily Express to write an essay anticipating Britain in the year 2000, Brown won a £200 prize. He predicted that Scotland’s inequalities would eventually be removed: ‘The inheritance of a respect for every individual’s freedom and identity,’ he wrote, ‘and the age-long quality of caring, both transmitted through our national religion, law and educational system and evident in the lives of countless generations of our people, makes Scotland ideal for pioneering the society which transcends political systems.’ Forty years later he remained faithful to what he called those ‘absolutely basic’ visions and values.
In 1963 Brown witnessed real politics for the first time. Aged eleven, he followed the election campaign in Kinross and Perthshire of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the prime minister. Ill-health had forced Harold Macmillan to resign, and his successor Earl Home had revoked his peerage to lead the Conservatives in the House of Commons. After a day following the politician across the constituency, the impression of a politician making the same speech at every venue, recalled Brown, was ‘awful’. He was particularly struck by Home’s response to a question of whether he would buy a house in the constituency. No, replied Home, he owned too many houses already.
At fourteen Brown took his ‘O’ levels, and under the fast-track experiment was scheduled one year later to take five Highers, a near equivalent of ‘A’ levels. He was a year ahead of his age group. His reputation was of an outstanding student and sportsman, particularly a footballer, whose conversation, magnetising his class friends, made him the centre of attention. Despite his popularity in the mixed school, he stood back from the girls. At the popular dances organised by his older brother in the church hall, Gordon did not bop, and disliked the waltz and quick-step lessons. No one recalled him ever speaking about girls. Even during a hilarious school trip to Gothenburg, his behaviour was impeccable. Some believed that the arrival every week of his father as school chaplain to preach to the children inhibited him. As predicted, at fifteen, he scored top marks in his Highers and qualified for university. He had survived the intensity of the ‘E’ experiment, but was troubled by the casualties among other ‘guinea pigs’ who, having collapsed under the pressure, were depressed by having failed to gain a place at university and being deprived of an opportunity to try again. Sensitive to the raw inequalities of life, uncushioned in Scotland’s bleak heartlands, he sought a philosophy which promised change.
At that age most teenagers rebel against their parents’ values, but Brown, inspired by his close family life, accepted his father’s traditionalist recipe for reform. In their unequivocal judgements of society, the Presbyterians’ solution was to empower the state to castigate the rich and to help the poor. In Kirkcaldy, Adam Smith’s philosophy for curing society’s ills by self-reliance and free enterprise was heresy. The socialist paradise promised by Harold Wilson, embracing the ‘white heat of technology’, redistribution of wealth and economic planning, was Gordon Brown’s ideal.
One irony of Brown’s registration at Edinburgh University in 1967 to read history would have been lost on the sixteen-year-old. The university was a bastion of privilege, isolated from Scotland’s class-ridden society. Dressed in a tweed jacket, grey flannels, white shirt and tie, Brown arrived with Kenn McLeod and other working-class achievers from Kirkcaldy High. While McLeod and the sons of miners and factory workers had neither the money nor the background to become involved in the horseplay of student life, Brown was introduced to the power brokers by his elder brother John.
‘This is my brother Gordon,’ John told Jonathan Wills, the editor of the student newspaper. ‘He’s sixteen and wants to work here. He’s boring but very clever.’ Brown was in heaven. The student newspaper was a cauldron of the university’s political and social activity. Within the editorial rooms he could witness heated debate and crude power-broking. Inspired by the worldwide student revolt then taking place, Jonathan Wills had begun a campaign to become the university’s first student rector. Free of the inhibitions imposed by his small home town, Brown indulged himself amid like-minded social equals. The liberation and the dream were short-lived.
Six months earlier, during a rugby match between the school and the old boys, he had emerged from the bottom of a scrum suffering impaired vision. Instinctively private, he did not complain or visit a doctor. The problem did not disappear. In a football match during the first weeks at university he headed the ball and his sight worsened. This time he consulted a doctor, who identified detached retinas in both eyes. The six-month delay in treatment had increased the damage, and there was a danger of blindness in the right eye. In the first of four operations over two years at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, surgeons sought to reattach the retinas. Brown was ordered to lie immobile for six months in a dark hospital ward, knowing that among the drastic consequences was the certain end of his ambition to become a professional footballer. Whatever the outcome of the operation, playing contact sports would be forbidden. During those months of darkness, with the combination of loneliness and fear described by him as ‘a living torture’, unable to read and hoping that he would not be permanently blind, Brown’s psychology changed. Sensitive to his plight and preoccupied by his ambitions, he became impatient with life’s trivialities, and resolved in future not to waste time