Loraine Maclean

https://www.cocker.id.au/murray/jane.php

Loraine Murray Calvert was born on 26 Jul 1920. Lorraine married Reverend Donald Allan Lachlan Maclean, son of Reverend Alan Macintosh Maclean and Unknown, on 14 Jan 1950.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12215671.loraine-maclean/
Loraine Maclean of Dochgarroch; 1920-1999 Obituary

The words of Harold Macmillan which Loraine Maclean chose to quote in her most significant book, The Indomitable Colonel, sum up her own approach to Highland history: Tradition does not mean the living are dead - it means the dead are alive.

A diminutive dynamo, Loraine Maclean was born Loraine Calvert in London in 1920 and educated at the Royal School in Bath. She gave early warning of her feisty originality by deciding to forego her place to read history at Oxford in favour of a season's horse-racing and fox-hunting, possibly fully aware that war was imminent.

Her war-time service was as an ambulance driver, a choice that caused alarm among some pedestrians as she was so small she was virtually invisible from the pavement. Then it was back to a country-house lifestyle, though with little money to play with.

She married her minister husband, Donald, in 1950. But Loraine had no intention of being a traditional parish minister's wife, as Donald had known, and their homes in Cumberland, Pitlochry, and, latterly, Inverness became delightfully busy and hospitable centres for working historians and other friends.

In 1970 they moved to Inverness and she started an association with a huge number of charities and societies that over the next half-century would make her name legendary and her influence considerable.

A typical example was the Inverness Field Club, a once rather grand historically-biased society that was failing.

Working feverishly, she effectively turned it around bringing in academic colleagues to lecture, lead field trips and latterly to provide material for the nine books she edited. These were important volumes that perhaps rather eclipsed her own three works, the most significant of which was The Indomitable Colonel (1986).

Eventually the Inverness Field Club made her its first ever women president, and it is now seen as being among the foremost of such clubs in Scotland.

Her arrival in Inverness coincided with a call for volunteers for the now-famous Highland Group of Riding for the Disabled at Borlum in Drumnadrochart and her energetic drive and conscientious administration over the next 23 years was influential in making it the massive success that it now is.

Nothing would be more appropriate to her memory than to use her obituary to remind the public that the centre is always looking for new volunteers.

Her husband, Donald, died less than a year ago, but she is survived by their son, The Very Rev Canon Allan Maclean of Dochgarroch, three grandchildren, and a step-grandchild.

Loraine Maclean wrote three books - The Indomitable Colonel, Discovering Inverness-shire, and The Raising of the 79th Highlanders - and edited nine: The Hub of the Highlands, the Moray Firth Geological Studies, Old Inverness in Pictures, The Middle Ages in the Highlands, The Glen Urquhart Story, An Inverness Miscellany (I and II), The Seventeenth-Century in the Highlands and Loch Ness and thereabouts.

https://a2fister2000.tripod.com/id85.htm