GORDON LEMAN 18 FEBRUARY 1945 – 19 DECEMBER 2012
In the last days of 2012, the Department of English at the University of Tartu lost a highly valued colleague and dear friend Gordon Allan Leman. Gordon was born in the small town of Cumnock in Ayrshire, Southwestern Scotland, as the youngest of the four children in the family. Ayrshire with its rugged coastline and rolling hills is the birthplace and youthful home of the celebrated Scottish poet Robert Burns. This may be one of the reasons why Gordon, as he writes himself, was interested in poetry, particularly that of Burns, since the last year in his school career. The school he attended from the beginning to the end was Cumnock Academy, which he departed after his Sixth Year of secondary education. He graduated with an MA in History from Glasgow University and did a post-graduate teacher training course at Jordanhill a year later. For nearly twenty years he worked as a teacher in Shawlands Academy and became a Head of Guidance. After his mother died in 1988, he left Scotland for the Eastern African country of Malawi for a short time, and then for Finland where he taught English to engineers and did proofreading jobs for four years. He came to Estonia in 1993 with Voluntary Service Overseas and stayed here until death took him from us. VSO is a charitable organisation, which, in that period, greatly contributed to teaching of English in post-communist countries. He arrived in Estonia in the early days after the Republic of Estonia had regained its independence. Thus, he was among the first foreign lecturers at the Department of English at the University of Tartu. He was one of the founders of the Centre for British and Overseas Studies at the University of Tartu. With his courses of Scottish history and literature, he instilled interest in and love for Scotland in a great number of our students. Later he also worked at the Estonian Aviation Academy where he taught pilots and air traffic controllers. Teaching was a passion for him and his eyes always lit up when he spoke about his students. The obituary in Cumnock Chronicle, the newspaper of his hometown, describes Gordon as a ‘great bloke and a terrific rugby player’ to whom all sports came naturally, although his favourites were rugby and golf. At one point, Cumnock even unsuccessfully tried to recruit him as a coach. Gordon was married twice – in Scotland and in Estonia – and had two children from both marriages. He fought bravely against the accidents and illnesses that hit him in the final years of his life. His colleagues and students remember him as always smiling and optimistic, having a good word for everyone next to him. Colleagues from the Department of English, University of Tartu
35