Years ago I was standing on a near deserted platform in Times Square New York, talking to a friend whilst waiting for a train. A young woman standing on her own a short distance away approached us uneasily (as you would in New York). And asked, “are you from Scotland?” We said yes. “Do you know Edinburgh?” Again yes. To which she responded (this bit is true) “do you know Bob Cuddihy?”

It transpired she was a friend of Bob’s daughter Amy from college and knew the family well. Still… Times Square, in the middle of the evening? What are the odds on that?

His full name was Robert Anthony Cuddihy and he was born in New York on the 11th of September 1946 into what historian Stephen Birmingham called ‘one of the great Irish-catholic dynasties of America’.

His high-living father, Robert Cuddihy senior, was a darling of the New York gossip columns, who, according to Mr Birmingham, ‘flashed across the lives of his friends and family like a playful star’. The elder Cuddihy’s fame was such that the arrival of his firstborn was announced on radio stations across America, broadcast by the most celebrated syndicated columnist of them all. Walter Winchell.

When he was growing up, in order to distinguish him from his famous dad, our Bob was known as Robbie. Much of his early childhood was spent moving between glitzy uptown Manhattan and the well-heeled Hamptons. His parents were prominent members of the New York Social Register. The Cuddihys, it seemed, knew everyone who was anyone in the Big Apple. In some cases, like the Vanderbilts, they were related by marriage.

Bob liked to say, if he ever wrote a memoir, he had a ready-made title, “Marlon Brando pushed my pram.”

Everything changed when his divorced parents died in separate road accidents, barely five years apart. In 1962 his father’s brother Tom, their court-appointed guardian, brought Bob and his four siblings to Britain to be educated.

Three of the children - Sean, Christopher and Mikey - were sent to Summerhill where they would be taught by A.S. Neill; Bob and Deedee went to Kilquhanity. Aged 15, Bob set himself the difficult task of keeping the family together, and in touch.

Bob responded positively to the unusual (some might say controversial) methods employed at Kilquhanity by John and Morag Aitkenhead. The life-long debt Bob felt he owed the Aitkenheads was reflected in a 1998 obituary he wrote of John for The Scotsman, describing his old mentor as ‘a wonderfully practical teacher’ and ‘the last of a great generation of Scots’. He followed his years there with a spell at Napier College. Edinburgh University came next.

Bob was never still… and certainly far from quiet during his years as a student in Edinburgh. Persuading the well-known BBC journalist Kenneth Allsop to run – successfully! - for Rector in 1968 was a demonstration of his imagination, as well as his campaigning zeal.

A prominent figure in the students’ anti-Apartheid movement he showed considerable courage; taking part in public demonstrations, talking openly against university investment in South Africa and trying to stop the Springboks rugby team from playing at Murrayfield. That last, was probably the only time in his adult life he showed interest in a major sporting event.

The late 1960s and early 1970s was an eventful period in Bob’s life. He tried going back to America, failed to settle, and returned to Edinburgh in search of a career. As he told me more than once, this was his city. Although we mustn’t forget, he never abandoned his US citizenship, or his deep interest in US politics. This continued until a week or two before his death when, against a shift in the polls, he called the election for Trump.

Growing up, his great hero was R. J. Cuddihy, a major figure in US publishing during the early part of the last century, and Bob’s grand-father. From office boy, aged sixteen in 1878, to head of the company in 1905, was quite a journey.

The Literary Digest, with a circulation across America second only to the Saturday Evening Post, was just one of the titles R.J. Cuddihy controlled. Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary was another. Bob remembered the famous line from the Martin and Lewis Laugh-in, “You can put that in your Funk and Wagnalls.”

Publishing, then, was in Bob’s blood. No-one can say he didn’t try. Which might help to explain The Islander, a radical, fortnightly newspaper based on Arran, aimed at readers living on Scotland’s under-served inner isles.

Never a man to do anything by halves, Bob was publisher and editor of The Islander. In his quest to overtake the great R.J. he also bought a second-hand printing press, much to the amazement of his friends. It’s not difficult to imagine everyone involved having a lot of fun. Hopefully, this softened the heartache when, after about a dozen editions, The Islander was obliged to surrender to the cold winds of economic reality.

I knew Bob for more than 50 years. Others longer. Bob valued friendship and he was good at keeping friends across a long period of time. I recruited him to Scottish Television in 1972 and he stayed for 17 years, working mainly on Ways and Means and Scotland Today, with the odd foray into documentaries and political specials.

The 1970s was a momentous decade in the history of UK politics, including Scotland; the 1980s barely less so. Bob occupied a ringside seat for much of the action. It helped that he enjoyed the company, as well as the trust, of politicians at every level. One thing was glaringly obvious: even as a young man, people, having met him once, remembered him!

Gore Vidal was a product of the high end of American society. If memory serves me right, he was related to JFK and Jackie through marriage. The first time Bob met Vidal, at the Cheltenham Book Festival I recall, he was able to convince the usually sceptic American author they were distant cousins.

When they met again a while later, Vidal said, “Tell me again, was it my great-great uncle and your great-great aunt, or was it my great-great aunt and your great-great uncle who…”

On another occasion, Oswald Mosley was in Glasgow for a programme on which he’d agreed to be interviewed, at some length, by Bob. The evening before we were due to record a few of us joined Mosley for dinner at his hotel, followed by drinks in a private room. Some way into the night Mosley was being verbally battered about the head by Bob, who kept calling the former leader of Britain’s fascists Tom, much to the bemusement of Tony Firth, our Director of Programmes, who had arrived late.

“Who’s he talking to, who’s Tom?” Tony inquired. (Tom was a name Bob had picked up during his research.) To which Tony replied, “Would he call the Pope Fred?”

To which, remembering his deep catholic past, the safe answer is, probably not, although, during the 1982 papal visit to Scotland, as Bob himself liked to recount, he locked horns with Archbishop Marcinkus, the pope’s minder. Bob wanted to know what the tough-talking Marcinkus would do if he tried to doorstep the Holy Father. 

“I’d break your arms,” Marcinkus replied.

I believe Bob’s time at STV was the happiest and most significant period of his working life. His early years on-screen coincided with a period when there were only three television channels. You couldn’t appear regularly on STV without becoming very well known, even famous, within the STV transmission area.

Bob enjoyed his fame, such as it was. He didn’t mind strangers talking to him in pubs. He loved it when taxi drivers called him by his first name.

Of course, as a reporter, on staff, he didn’t just interview big names, or report on great events. He was expected to do his turn on the daily news diary which could mean making a mundane story interesting.

Once, as a punishment, his programme editor assigned him to cover National Sausage Week. Bob retaliated by engaging the services of a cordon bleu chef.

On another occasion Bob was ordered to do a report on the opening of the panto season. He went all Stanley Baxter for this one, dressing in full pantomime dame costume. A sight that was not easily forgotten.

Perhaps my favourite Cuddihy memory from his years at STV involves the so-called Iron Lady, Mrs Thatcher. Late one evening at the Tory party conference in Perth, a group of us were drinking in the lounge bar of the Station Hotel… it was pre-Brighton because we had been able to book rooms in the same hotel as the prime minister. It’s also worth noting that our group included prominent Tory MP Alex Fletcher.

It would have been about midnight when the prime minister appeared, spotted Alex, and made a bee-line towards us. Looking like someone who’d enjoyed a good night out. While we were struggling to stand, the prime minister, rather than sit, perched herself awkwardly on the arm of a vacant chair, which is when Cuddihy’s presence in the group became vital.

Just as the chair cowped and the prime minister looked like crashing to the floor he moved with the speed of light, catching her a moment before she landed in an ungainly heap, with her legs in the air. Bob appeared more ruffled by the experience than Mrs Thatcher who regained her composure with surprising speed before departing with Denis in the direction of the lift.

F Scott Fitzgerald, to whom he might very well have been related, once wrote: ‘there are no second acts in American lives’.

I doubt Bob ever believed this to be true. Or, at the very least, no such restrictions could be applied to him. Long after he left STV Bob continued to find interesting work: a pioneer figure in the direct video market producing important histories on World War Two and Vietnam, he was PR adviser to the National Pharmacy Association and Director of the ‘Channel 5 in Edinburgh’ campaign.

There’s nothing useful I can say about his illness. It was progressively dreadful and lasted a long time. However, it’s also true, for nearly a decade, in his own way, Bob ‘raged against the dying of the light’.

I mentioned earlier how news of his birth was broadcast live, on coast-to-coast radio, across the United States. Well, tonight, at the Teatro Real in Madrid, a performance of Handel’s Theodora, by organist Bernard Robertson, an old friend, will be dedicated to Bob’s memory.

George Frideric Handel? Trust Bob to go out in style… ■