Fred MacAulay - University Research Work

Fred MacAulay was born in Sollas, North Uist, in 1925. Educated at Inverness Academy and Edinburgh University, he went on to become Senior Gaelic Producer of BBC Scotland in 1964, and Manager of BBC Highland in 1979. An active campaigner for the continuation of the Gaelic language, he was one of the most distinguished Gaels of his generation and made a lasting contribution to Gaelic culture. He died in Inverness in 2003, aged 78. In this audio extract, originally recorded for 'Moray Firth People' in 1983, Fred talks to Sam Marshall about his research work at university. <br /> <br /> Interviewer: You went off to university and you studied Gaelic. Was it there that you began to realise things were going to be difficult for Gaelic?<br /> <br /> Not really, no. Having done my university course I then did a diploma in phonetics; went on to a thing called 'The Linguistic Survey of Scotland', which was a department of Edinburgh University, and had the tremendous joy of studying the dialects - the Gaelic dialects - of the whole of the Highlands. And that's when it hit me because there I met the most marvellous people in their 70s and 80s because I was working the peripheral areas, you know, the areas just about to be extinct and I met the most superb people imaginable, all with this tremendous will for Gaelic to survive, although they themselves were on their way out. And Gaelic, as a matter of interest, was still being spoken just outside Braemar; I've actually got recordings of Gaelic speakers in Inverey, just outside Braemar. So you can imagine how spread it was at one time. The thing that got me was how marvellous these people were, and at that point I decided, quite definitely, that university was not the place to be; that one must really begin to start interfering in this, one way or another, but it was very difficult to see how, and, as luck would have it, there were two Gaelic jobs in the BBC at that time, and only two, and one of them became vacant - the junior one - and I was lucky enough to get that in 1954, and that was my life work