On this day in 1994

Born in Hamilton in 1935, Mark McManus found fame playing Chief Inspector Jim Taggart, lead character in the STV police drama series, Taggart. However, Taggart was far from his only role in a career that had begun in Australian films and television and continued on his return to the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. A heavy drinker, McManus died of liver failure.

Four days before his death, the Dundee Courier reported that he had “yesterday regained consciousness and been taken off a ventilator in a Glasgow hospital… McManus was rushed to the Victoria Infirmary two weeks ago with pneumonia”. Despite the apparent improvement, an STV spokesperson had said that McManus was still very ill and would be remaining in intensive care.

Filming abandoned

On the evening of his death, the Evening Herald in Dublin revealed that he had died at 2.40 that afternoon and filming had been abandoned for the day as a mark of respect. That same evening, the Liverpool Echo reported that he had never got over the death of his wife the previous October. He had also lost his mother, two sisters and a brother over the previous 12 months, and had himself received hospital treatment for exhaustion and skin cancer in that time.

His obituary in the Independent described how “Taggart became as synonymous with Glasgow as Inspector Morse is with Oxford. The programme is now Scottish Television’s biggest money-earner, playing in 27 countries. ITV is screening an episode tonight as a tribute to a star who said more with his eyes than words ever could.”

 

...and on this day in 2010

Eight passengers were injured when their Glasgow to Oban train derailed at the foot of Ben Cruachan after hitting debris from a landslide. One of the carriages was left hanging over a 50ft drop, and both the line and the road below it were closed for a week as a recovery operation swung into operation. This was complicated somewhat by the need to bring in a 1000 tonne crane by way of roads that weren’t built to support such a weight.