On this day in 1936

Marion Chesney was born in Glasgow and made a name for herself after the publication of her first novel in 1979. Besides Marion Chesney, she was also published as Ann Fairfax, Sarah Chester, Charlotte Ward and, most notably, MC Beaton, among others. When she married in 1969, she took her husband’s name, Gibbons, in a personal capacity.

Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth

As MC Beaton, she created two notable characters: Agatha Raisin, who appeared in 31 novels and several short stories, and Hamish Macbeth, who first appeared in Death of a Gossip in 1985, and 35 other books. The Hamish Macbeth series, set in a fictional town in the Highlands, was made into a television series by BBC Scotland, with Robert Carlyle in the title role.

Beaton moved to the United States and, upon her return, settled in England, where she died in December 2019, aged 83. In her obituary, published on 6 January 2020, the Guardian noted that “at a crime-writing festival in Reading in 2010 Chesney Gibbons told a shocked but amused audience in no uncertain terms that Carlyle had been miscast [as Hamish Macbeth] – as he was a Lowland Scot whereas Macbeth was a Highlander.”

 

...and on this day in 1858

Botanist Robert Brown was born in Montrose in 1773 and studied at the University of Edinburgh. He was posted to Ireland on military service and, in his early 40s, travelled on an expedition to South Africa and Australia where he stayed for several years collecting and cataloguing specimens.

Much of what he collected had never been seen by Europeans before. Upon his return, he wrote several scientific papers, in one of which he named the core of cells the nucleus. We have used that term ever since.