Constance Lindsay Hope was born in Selkirk on 26 July 1922, the elder of two daughters of William and Louisa Hope. Not long after this the family moved to Clackmannanshire, first to Devonside, near Tillicoultry, and then, in 1926, to Alloa, where she would live for the next sixty years until 1986, when she and her husband retired to Stirling.Footnote1
Throughout her life her defining characteristic was an optimism combined with the view that life provides opportunities, and that opportunities should be taken. Prompted and encouraged by inspiring school teachers, first at Alloa Academy, and subsequently at Dollar Academy, in 1940 Connie Hope went on to Edinburgh University to read Scottish history.
Her time at university was interrupted in 1943 when she was called up. She spent the rest of the war in the ATS, deployed at Forest Moor, a wireless intercept station near Harrogate, as a traffic analyst supervising operators listening in to German signals and then passing on these coded messages to what is now known as Bletchley Park. After demobilization and return to university to complete her degree, she joined the staff of the Scottish Record Office, where she worked until her marriage to the Reverend Peter Brodie on 23 July 1949.
Peter Brodie was for almost forty years minister of St. Mungo’s Parish Church, Alloa, and Connie fully embraced all that was involved in being the wife of a Church of Scotland minister, serving on central church committees, and supporting his work as Moderator of the General Assembly in 1978–1979. Earlier, together with her four children, she had accompanied her husband to the United States on a pulpit exchange, in the days when that meant sailing from Greenock.
The Local Government (Scotland) Act, 1973 placed a responsibility on the new councils to make proper arrangements for records in their custody. Following local government reorganization in Scotland in May 1975, Connie Brodie was appointed as the new Central Region’s Archivist, (with responsibility also for the records of the three Districts within the Region, namely Stirling, Clackmannan and Falkirk), a post which she would occupy until her retirement in 1986.
Based in the Old High School near Stirling Castle, she set about building an archive service, collecting in the records of the predecessor authorities to the Central Region, notably the Stirling Burgh records and those of Stirlingshire County Council. She negotiated with the Keeper of the Records of Scotland for the transfer from Edinburgh of the early Royal Burgh of Stirling records, the Presbytery and Kirk Session records (Stirling Council Archives is the custodian of the earliest surviving Presbytery minutes in Scotland), Customs and Excise records for the Upper Forth ports, and the Region’s Justice of the Peace records. In addition to official records, she negotiated with a wide range of private depositors, securing the deposit of, for example, the Murray of Polmaise papers, 1450–1926, and those of the MacGregors of MacGregor, 1320–1921. The photograph accompanying this obituary shows Mrs Brodie accepting the deposit, in c. 1985, of the bound newspaper volumes of the Stirling Observer, dating from its first issue in 1836.
Retirement came in 1986, and Connie and her husband moved to Stirling. Peter Brodie died in 1990 but Connie continued in Stirling, supported by a network of strong and lasting friendships. She was an active member of the Holy Rude Church, and worked as a church recorder, a role that brought together her interests in history, architecture, and matters ecclesiastical. An engaged grandmother, she enjoyed participating in family holidays in Scotland, France and Spain. She maintained a lively interest in the Stirling Council Archives Service, and was pleased to attend the official opening of the new premises when the Council Archives Service relocated to its current premises at Borrowmeadow Road, Stirling in 2005.
Connie Brodie’s final years were spent in Edinburgh, in order to be nearer to her family, but it is in Stirling that her archival legacy lives on, in the service that she established in its pioneering years from 1975.
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George Dixon
Notes
1. We would like to acknowledge the help of Mrs Brodie’s eldest son, Philip, Lord Brodie, (a Senator of the College of Justice), for providing family information, and of Pam McNicol, the present Stirling Council Archivist, for kindly contributing the photograph.