Roderick Chalmers "Roddy" Lumsden (28 May 1966 – 10 January 2020) was a Scottish poet, writing mentor and quizzer. He was born in St Andrews and educated at Madras College and the University of Edinburgh. He published seven collections of poetry, a number of pamphlets and a collection of trivia. He also edited a generational anthology of British and Irish poets of the 1990s and 2000s, Identity Parade (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), and The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt Publishing, 2011). His collections The Book of Love (Bloodaxe Books, 2000) and So Glad I'm Me (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
St Andrews - Early Life and Schooling (1966-1984) Lumsden was born in St Andrews on the 28th of May 1966, the youngest child of three, after brothers Jimmy and Eric. His father James (known as Hamish) was an electrician and played the drums in a touring dance band; his mother Elizabeth (known as Betty, née Lumsden, but not related, as he was fond of pointing out) worked in the accommodation service of the university.
The Lumsdens lived on Lamond Drive, one of the arterial roads that cross the length of St Andrews. The area is what passes for working class in St Andrews, but would count as lower middle class in most other Scottish small towns.
He shared a childhood bedroom with his elder brother Eric, who would from an early age read novels to him and would let him play his records: artists such as Roxy Music, Supertramp, David Bowie, Steve Harley, early Genesis, and Monty Python.
Lumsden attended Langlands primary school where, due to recurring outbreaks of warts on his fingers, his friends nicknamed him Werty. He went on to attend Madras College, a comprehensive school in St Andrews that is often mistaken for a private school, due to its architecture and the remains of a fifteenth-century chapel in its grounds. As Lumsden himself said in an interview when talking about his childhood influences, “Another significant factor was my high school, Madras College, a comprehensive which has the sort of teaching standards expected of top private schools".
Having secured the necessary Highers to get into the University of Edinburgh, Lumsden decided to leave school halfway through his final year.
Edinburgh - University and Finding His Voice (1984-1997) In September 1984 he began a three-year MA General Arts degree at the University of Edinburgh. Modules included those delivered by the School of Scottish Studies in George Square, while Hamish Henderson was still teaching there. For those three years he lived in Pollock Halls of Residence, on the ground floor of Lee House (room G07).
At the start of his second year in 1985 he made the acquaintance of A.B. Jackson, then in his third year of an English Literature degree. Together they decided to start an undergraduate poetry magazine, titled Fox, which also featured new work from Liz Lochhead, Norman MacCaig, Ron Butlin, Brian McCabe, and Edwin Morgan. They went on to edit three issues between 1986 and 1987 before handing over the editorship to others. As for Lumsden’s own work, he received feedback and encouragement from Liz Lochhead, writer-in-residence at the University from 1985 to 1987, and Anne Stevenson, writer-in-residence from 1987 to 1989.
Of his early influences, Lumsden has said: “definitely Prufrock. The whole of George MacBeth's Longman British Poetry 1900-65, which was the staple schoolbook and introduced me to Larkin (especially), Gunn, Eliot and Plath. Ondaatje and Bukowski and Alden Nowlan and Paul Durcan while a student. Scottish writers, of course – particularly W.S. Graham, whose ‘Malcolm Mooney's Land’ I had found in the Penguin post-war poetry book [British Poetry Since 1945, edited by Edward Lucie-Smith] – and then the ones I saw reading – MacCaig, Morgan, Dunn, Lochhead. Also, Cooper Clarke and Cutler on John Peel and song lyrics. This was the post-punk era, when lyrics were quite literate – The Monochrome Set, The Passage, Microdisney, The Smiths [...].”
In his first year, Lumsden was the singer in a student band called 'A Walk Through H', named after the Peter Greenaway film, playing post-punk original songs. His interest was more in the words than the music, however, and he soon abandoned his singing duties.
Lumsden was president of the University of Edinburgh Poetry Society from 1986 to 1987. Along with A.B. Jackson (vice president) he was responsible for booking various poets to read at the university, and these included Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Andrew Greig, Kathleen Jamie, Craig Raine, and Hugo Williams.