Margaret M. Dunlop

Margaret was born in Glasgow in 1931 and brought up in Shettleston.
She had a passion for reading and "devoured" books from the age of eight.
Margaret married quite young but sadly her first husband died at an early age. However, there were two daughters to this marriage.
She married Gerald Wiener in 1985, an animal geneticist. Margaret tragically died in 2020 after a long illness.
Throughout her life she felt she needed to work, first to help supplement family income and later for the satisfaction. To that end she undertook teacher training and after some years in different schools in East Kilbride was appointed head-teacher of a 120-pupil primary school in Kirkfieldbank, Lanarkshire. She stayed there for about 17 years before "retiring" but continued teaching for a further few years in a school for gifted children in Peebles.
In addition to her teaching qualifications, she obtained a first-class honours degree in English and Philosophy from the Open University. She was also a member of Mensa.
Margaret was multi-talented. Apart from writing she painted, knitted, quilted - all to a high standard - played the piano, was a member of the theatre workshop in Biggar, a cook of exceptional ability and an enthusiastic world traveller.
On top of her lifelong passion for reading she had hopes of writing but felt her life's circumstances never gave her time or chance. Not until she was already in her seventies when she was encouraged to attend a writer's course.
The result was eleven stories awaiting compilation and three books. The first of these, "Marching in Scotland, Dancing in New York" was praised by Tom Devine, the Scottish Historian, as "the real history of Scotland in its time and full of human interest"
The next book, "Blind Date in Gibraltar" (on Kindle) is an entertaining story set in Spain. It involves the expatriate community, and is given its authentic feel because Margaret had lived in Spain for months at a time over a period of years.
Her third book "Goodbye Berlin - the biography of Gerald Wiener" was published in Edinburgh, by Birlinn Ltd. and is available in hardback and paperback.
"Snakes and Ladders" was found on Margaret's laptop, as a complete novel, after she had sadly passed away in July 2020. Hopefully it will be a fitting memorial to her writing skills.
Margaret was the best wife in the world. She was also a wonderful mother to her two daughters, grandmother to seven children and great-grandmother to eight, all of whom miss her greatly for her love and inveterate story-telling.