One foot in the grave

Dear readers — we'll keep it short because we want to get you straight to today's members-only piece, a wonderful profile of Gorbals resident Colin Mackie and the Southern Necropolis, the cemetery he has stewarded for 36 years. It's penned by Grace McBride, a University of Strathclyde student who tentatively contacted us after encouragement from her professor. We're always open for pitches and are particularly interested in thoughtful, personality driven features or news lines that haven't had an huge amount of airtime. Get in touch here.

Related: a reminder that we're hiring for a news reporter! For more details, head here. If you'd like to help fund the role, and long-form local journalism, you can sign up as a regular supporter of The Bell for less than £8 a month.

Grace McBride heads to Gorbals to root around the oft-overlooked but never lesser, Southern Necropolis.

It’s a bitterly cold, overcast afternoon in late October when I first meet the Happy Reaper in the flesh. 

He’s standing to the left of the small, albeit imposing, sandstone gatehouse that welcomes visitors to Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis, in Gorbals. The gatehouse —located just off the A730 — is a portal of sorts, transporting visitors to a ‘dark oasis’ — or at least that’s how author Iain Alexander describes it to me. 

Alexander is one of my group of 15, gathered here to explore the oasis in question, a Victorian cemetery spanning 21 sprawling acres of grass and stone. On the day of my visit, the Southern Necropolis is cloaked in autumn leaves, the spines of the graves backed by greying industrial estates and decaying high-rise buildings built in the social housing heyday of the 1960s. 

An excited Glaswegian brogue pierces the distant hum of cars: “Hello! It’s great that you made it today!” The Happy Reaper is not a ghoulish creature clad in a black cloak and clutching a scythe but an animated, bespectacled man of 60, named Colin Mackie. 

Laughter in a graveyard feels almost sacrilegious. But to Mackie, it’s a hallmark of his weekly Sunday tours of the Necropolis and how he got his nickname. 

“Everyone has a different style of doing tours for history stuff,” he explains. “Personally, I like to inject a little bit of humour into it because I find that it just works better.” During one such humour-laden guiding excursion, a group member told Mackie: “you’re not the Grim Reaper, you’re like the Happy Reaper!”. The sobriquet stuck. “I’m quite fond of [it]!”, he confesses. 

On our tour, the group follows Mackie obediently over uneven soil, sidestepping overturned stone slabs. We’re listening intently to the tales of those entombed beneath our feet. Their delivery is well-practiced; Mackie is chairperson of the Friends of Southern Necropolis (FoSN), a local volunteer organisation whose work centres around the preservation and promotion of the “educational, environmental, ecological, health/wellbeing and historical assets” of the site. This also gives him head tour guiding duties.

Prior to this tour, I’ve already made Mackie’s acquaintance in the digital realm. Two weeks earlier, his thick Glaswegian accent was crackling out of my laptop as we exchanged Zoom-era pleasantries: “Hi, thanks for joining me! You alright? Wait — I think you’re on mute.” 

Born and raised in Oatlands, Mackie grew up wandering past the graveyard on his morning route to school. It was as a student at Adelphi Terrace Secondary School, he crossed paths with teacher Charlotte Hutt, a longtime champion of the Southern Necropolis and Gorbals area, who would go on to found the volunteer group overseeing the cemetery. She got the young Mackie involved with the Necropolis from early on. 

“Hutt felt that the Southern Necropolis and the Gorbals were overshadowed by the popularity of the larger Necropolis in Dennistoun,” says Mackie. “She wanted to start a Who’s Who style project for the people buried there, so she came up with the funding for the Southern Necropolis Research Project.”

At 24, Mackie got his “first posh job”, as research officer for the project. Today, he juggles commitments to the dead with shepherding the living: Mackie spends his weekdays as a full-time nursery teacher for under-fives. But Saturdays are physically devoted to the Necropolis, along with the various evening meetings required by his FoSN role. 

His interest in the Southern Necropolis is a way to make sense of Glasgow. “What really drew me to it was the social history aspect of it, and the appreciation of just how much you can learn from a cemetery,” he says. “They’re great records of social history. You can see how a city, and its population evolved over time, and understand why things are the way that they are today.”