The Stage

Scottish playwright McGrath dies aged 68

Published Thursday 30 April 2009 at 11:18 by Thom Dibdin

Tom McGrath, the Scottish playwright and poet who wrote Laurel and Hardy and was a founding editor of hippy counterculture magazine International Times, has died of cancer. He was 68.

McGrath was diagnosed with liver cancer in June 2007 and was still writing right up until his peaceful death at home on Wednesday, April 29.

Born in Rutherglen in 1940, McGrath spent time in London in the 1960s where he worked on Peace News, appeared on stage at the Royal Albert Hall with Allen Ginsberg in 1965 and co-founded International Times in 1966.

After returning to Glasgow in 1969 to study English and Drama he was musical director of Billy Connolly’s the Great Northern Welly Boot Show in 1972 and wrote Laurel and Hardy, which appeared as Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1976. The following year he wrote The Hard Man with Glaswegian gangster-turned-sculptor Jimmy Boyle.

In the 1990s he became the Scottish Arts Council’s associate literary director, a post which he held for a more than a decade.