EXCLUSIVE - JIM CLARK, THE FIFE CONNECTION
Dan MacIntosh’s unabridged account of the early days.
MANY PEOPLE over the years thought that Jim Clark was a ‘Borderer’ when he was in fact a ‘Fifer’ and very proud of it. Jim was born on 4 March 1936 at Wester Kilmany Farm in the village of Kilmany Fife where his father James moved to in 1931 taking over the tenancy of the farm on the Anstruther-Gray Estate part of a 1,000-acre hill farm on the southern slopes of the Ochil Hills in Kinross-shire. Wester Kilmany was an arable farm and gave Mr Clark the opportunity to grow cereals as well as being good grazing ground. Mr Clark was a very good farmer and stocksman knowing a good beast, be it sheep or cattle, buying all his cattle from Ireland to fatten off Jim’s grandfather and uncle who also farmed in Kinross-shire so it was a real farming family that Jim was part of. Jim was the youngest of a family of five, having four sisters, Mattie, Susan, Isobel and Betty. Mr Clark and his wife Helen were married in 1924 Mr Clark was an Elder and Session Clerk in the local Kirk this meant that the family was brought up in the Scottish Presbyterian Faith having a good idea of what was right and what was wrong, fair or unfair, where your word was your bond like so many Scottish families whither they were churchgoers or no.
Mr Clark fought in The Great War joining the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry when he was seventeen years old like so many young men who worked around Kinross-shire. Mr Clark was captured near the end of the War and held prisoner at a coal mine in Germany until the end the War. I recall an old friend Mr Duncan Rose telling me that there were eight workers on the farms on a large Estate in Kinross-shire he being one. He also joined the Fife and Yeomanry and went to the War but was the only one to come back. So many young men of that generation paid the ultimate price in a war to end all wars, supposedly.
Jim and Betty, who was three years older, went to the wee village primary school only about five hundred yards from home, with all the other children from the village and surrounding farms. I mind a few years’ ago talking to two men who as boys played with Jim, shoving him everywhere in his wee pedal car they used to shove him to the top of the brae at the farm then he would shoot down across then main Tay Ferry road and along the wee road to the school with his legs going like the clappers. Even at such an early age Jim liked speed and when I suggested that they surely were Jim’s first mechanics they laughed saying, “aye a suppose we were.”
Jim was not the only one in later years destined to become a World Champion because Geordie Wilson would go onto become World Horse Shoeing Champion and another boy David Rollo would go onto play International Rugby as a prop forward for Scotland and I think maybe the British Lions. Aye no bad for a wee village primary school from Fife.
In 1942 when Jim was six years old the Clark Family left Kilmany to start a new life farming in the Scottish Borders at Edington Mains Farm, Chirnside, Berwick-shire.
