It is with great regret that I announce the deaths of two members of the Association, Ian MacNiven and Anders Janson (See seperate entry).

Ian had been a member for over 40 years having joined the Association in 1962. He died at the age of 79 in Western General Hospital in Edinburgh after being admitted with shingles a week before.

Martin Dempster wrote this tribute for the Edinburgh Evening News:

Ian MacNiven, one of the longest-serving golf writers in Britain, was different to many of his press tent colleagues. Unlike them, Ian didn’t get too excited about the Open Championship, the Ryder Cup or any other professional tournament. He lived for amateur events and, in particular, amateur golf in the Lothians. The highlight of Ian’s year was a close-run thing between the Lothians Championship and the Dispatch Trophy, the popular team event held at the Braids.

While he attended the Open Championship almost without fail for 40 years, Ian was much happier when he was camped in a clubhouse in and around Edinburgh. His face was well known wherever he went and it was no surprise that many of Ian’s best friends had connections with the Lothians Golf Association. Until recently, he regularly had lunch – at a golf club, of course – with Ron Brownlee, Ian Graham and Bob Kilgour, all past presidents of the LGA. Such was his standing in Capital golfing circles that Ian was looked upon as an ‘unofficial’ selector and nothing gave him more pleasure than to see the Lothians dominate the Scottish Area Team Championship. Indeed, it was fitting that, just a month before his death, he was not only able to attend a dinner to celebrate title triumph No.11 but also gave a memorable speech at that event, held at Kingsknowe GC.

“Lothians golf has lost a very good friend,” said current LGA president John Wood. “Ian was a staunch supporter of Lothians golf and, when my predecessor, George Henderson, talks about ‘Team Lothians’, Ian was most certainly part of that team.”

Born in April 1925, Ian lived in the same house in Edinburgh’s West End all of his life. His father, George, was a civil servant and Ian went to Edinburgh Academy. After leaving school in 1943, he joined the Navy and trained as a radar mechanic before being involved in the D-Day landings. While based at Fareham, near Portsmouth, Ian played a lot of rugby but it wasn’t long before golf took over as his main sporting love.

After leaving the Navy, he had a spell working for D C Thomson in their Victoria Street office before, in April 1947, he took up the post of general/sports reporter with the Edinburgh Evening News. Three years later, Ian, who initially wrote under the pen name ‘Cockburn’, was making the golf headlines himself, winning the Lothians Championship at Dalmahoy, where, incidentally, he recovered from being six down with eight holes to play to win his semi-final tie.

A member of Mortonhall at the time – he later became members of Gullane and Dalmahoy before being afforded honorary membership of Glencorse – Ian made it to the final again the following year but came up just short on this occasion. A few months later, however, he helped Edinburgh Academicals win the Dispatch Trophy and, in 1952, he was in the Mortonhall team that won the Edinburgh Inter-Club tournament.

In the mid-1950s, Ian, a bachelor, left the News and started to cover golf on a freelance basis for the Evening Dispatch. When the Dispatch and the News merged, it was Renton Laidlaw who got the job as golf reporter but his departure to Grampian TV in 1968 paved the way for Ian’s return to the News, for whom he continued to cover Lothians golf until last year – a connection of nearly 60 years!

“Ian was a terrific lover of golf and also a very genuine person,” said Laidlaw. “When I got the job as golf reporter for the Evening News, he could have become bitter but he never once mentioned it. Indeed, he was nothing but supportive all the way through my career.”

While Ian was a huge Ronnie Shade fan, he also took great delight in watching Bernard Gallacher come through the ranks to not only become a prolific winner in the professional game but also taste victory as a Ryder Cup captain. “Ian was what you’d describe as a ‘real Edinburgh man’ and I am very sorry that he’s passed away,” said Gallacher. “As I was growing up, there was hardly an amateur event I went to that I didn’t come across Ian and he had an encyclopaedic memory of anything that happened in Lothians golf.”

Ian, a big Hearts fan, shared the football reporting duties for the Evening News in the 70s and 80s with the late Stewart Brown, his great friend. As the chief football reporter, Stewart would mainly cover the team playing at home, leaving Ian to do most of the away duties. Not that he minded too much. In fact, he became something of an expert on where to enjoy a good lunch en route to football grounds all over Scotland.

Ian, a real gentle giant, will be sorely missed, particularly when the Lothians Championship and the Dispatch Trophy come around. The ‘Big Man’ will leave a ‘Big Void’.