Person Bob Donald 105

Bob Donald has contributed to Scottish Country Dancing as all of the following:

• a historian and archivist of SCD;

• an SCD teacher and member of demonstration teams in the Merseyside area;

• the editor and publisher of numerous dances of Hugh Foss, taken from the notes left after Hugh's death in 1971. These dances formed the book The Rose Collection, published in 1978.

• a devisor of dances, including two published through Scottish Dance Archives (see below) and others in his own booklet The Green Lochan and 11 other Scottish dances, of which perhaps Gavin's Reel (5C) is best known;

• the co-founder and operator of Scottish Dance Archives, jointly with the late Roy Clowes. During its 10 years (mostly the 1970s) this service helped in the testing and publishing of 190 newly devised SCD, on behalf of numerous devisors. More details can be found under the “Extra Info” tab in the separate entry for this;

• the provider over some years in the 1970s, with his wife Mamie (born 1936), of the "Hugh Foss (Formby)" mail-order service for distributing instructions (then all in hardcopy) for SCD outside the RSCDS remit. Bob and Mamie took over the distribution service which Hugh Foss had set up and which Hugh's widow Alison had briefly continued after Hugh's death. (Subsequently another organisation "Scottish National Dance Company" - SNDC - continued this role until the online era began.);

• as the creator, again with Mamie, of the former website www.dancearchives.co.uk, which provided an online catalogue to their extensive archive of SCD instructions and related literature. The hardcopy documents of this archive have been deposited with the Music Department of Edinburgh Central Library as the Donald Collection. For the online website Bob also prepared online-viewable transcripts of some 250 dances. That website is no longer operational because in 2020 the site was placed in the care of RSCDS London Branch; it is now accessible at the link https://www.rscdslondon.org.uk/scottish-dance-archives/.