Stewart McAllister

Biography

Stewart McAllister was born in Wishaw, Lanarkshire, Scotland, the only son and second surviving child of Hugh and Jeanie McAllister. He and his three sisters had a comfortable childhood. Stewart and his father were members of the local photographic club, which sowed the seeds of his interest in experimenting with film. (Stewart liked to experiment: later in life he decided to build a television from scratch. After the explosion, he was found unconscious on the floor.) He attended Wishaw High School before going on to study painting at Glasgow School of Art. Stewart graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1936, the winner of that year's Dame Laura Knight travelling scholarship for his portrait painting. Though the political situation was becoming difficult, he toured all the major capitals, going as far east as Hungary, with letters of introduction for each country. Because he had a photographic memory, these visits were the reason why he was later used by MI6 as an interpreter of aerial spy photographs during WW2. While at Glasgow Art School, he and Norman McLaren experimented with hand drawn sound tracks on film animation - matching abstract sound to shape and colour - a technique which Mclaren later used in some of his early work in Canada. Stewart was recruited by John Grierson and went to work with him in London, where he worked with the Crown and the GPO film units as director, producer and - his preferred role - editor. A shy and modest man,his perfectionism and commitment left little time for a personal life, although he was more than generous with both his time and his money. Then, in what was to be the last year of his life, he became close to a colleague, Eireanne Sturdie, and it seemed likely they might have married, but when he became ill he returned to Scotland and was nursed first in the family home, then in the 'Sick Bay' of the local hospital where he died at the end of 1962.