Page 14 - Microsoft Word - Guiding light final version 0955 1506 big print.doc

The first ever Blue Badge
The classes were held at the University of Edinburgh’s Extra Mural department and they were led by the larger than life Dr Barclay whose public lectures were so popular that upwards of 600 people would come to hear him.
In an article in the 1984 edition of the STGA’s Guidelines magazine Nicholson said he had enlisted the advice and help of Dr John Barclay in organising classes and tests for the creation of a team of qualified guides who could intensify the interest of world visitors to Scotland.
Dr Barclay, who died aged 100 in 2010, was a former RAF Squadron leader whose best-selling book was a history of the city called ‘Edinburgh From The Earliest Times To The Present Day’
In the 1930s he had served as deputy head of the Edinburgh School of Salesmanship, a precursor to Napier University and Telford College, where he pioneered the use of slides as teaching tools, taking many of the photographs himself. During the second world war he served for several years as a squadron leader in East Anglia, where he taught servicemen and women at RAF bases. When he returned to Edinburgh he taught at the Royal High School, before becoming deputy and later acting director of the Department of Adult Education and Extra Mural Studies at Edinburgh University, where he would work from 1953 until he retired in 1975.
In the Scotsman’s obituary of the doctor, his daughter Alison recalled his incredible knowledge of the city.
‘I remember as a girl him taking me up Calton Hill and listing every single spire and rooftop in the city,” she said. ‘He knew what every single one of them was.’
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