Mary Syme Boyd

1910 - 1997

Research by Andrea Schwedler

The woman who preferred mice to men . the reclusive life of Mary Syme Boyd

Who was Mary Syme Boyd?

Text to be submitted Well, I am not quite sure if Mary S. Boyd would have liked mice more than men but from the little we know about her, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had.

What she did like were her Labradors, but she was equally keen on donkeys, birds, cats… She kept two Labradors and used to roam with them over Rannoch moor where she chose to have her ashes scattered after her death. A fitting image for a woman who shunned the company of people.

Mary S. Boyd loved to make animal sculptures, but it is difficult to find out where they are all kept or if they have been collected at all. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has a bronze cat and a wood carving of a kestrel and we can suspect that much of her work is held privately. Some of her work remains in churches – two angels carved in oak can be seen in St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh.

She caught my attention when I spotted her carved dog on a man’s grave in the Dean Cemetery. The dog is slightly ill proportioned (its front legs are a bit too long) which made me smile. The caption for the dead man reads rather quirkily – “a large and lovable personality” (Tom Ranken), not unlike the dog who towers on top of the gravestone!

Born in Edinburgh, Mary went to Edinburgh College of Art and travelled to Paris, Denmark, Norway and Germany to visit the art collections there, before returning to Edinburgh in 1934, settling down in a little studio flat in 14 Belford Mews which was given to her by her uncle.

Today this is a vintage car shop but if one peeps through the window one can still see parts of the old stable.

I am not sure how Mary would have felt about this but it is said she loved driving, especially in the Highlands, so she may not have been put out too much having seen her beloved animal sculptures substituted by vintage cars. She may even have enjoyed it!

Neither she nor her sister Lesbia to whom she was said to be very close, ever married. It is said that Mary “carved her own name on the family memorial stone at the Dean Cemetery, leaving others the task only of filling in the year of her death” (1).

A no-nonsense, down to earth woman, it seemed. I was intrigued to know more about her and emailed the RCAMS and the National Gallery of Scotland in August 2011, asking if I could access her notebooks and other papers. Sadly, I never got a reply.

A member of the Dean Cemetery Association told me during the WEA launch that Mary’s date of death was only added to the gravestone three years ago ie sometime in 2008!

Forgotten in life and, almost, forgotten in death? What a strange “oversight”! Did her kin (and there must be kin somewhere whether in Scotland or further afield) care so little for her that no one even bothered to add her date of death to the gravestone? And that 11 odd years lapsed before it was done?

Mary Syme Boyd certainly is the stuff that novels are written about – tough-minded spinsters, eccentric artists, reclusive women who do not fit the normal categories of wife and mother. Or muse to some man’s “genius” …

Bibliography:

• “The sculptor’s house that is frozen in time – 1934 Mary Boyd moved into a mews home and its history is only now being unlocked” (Scotsman, 02.01.1998)
• Mary Syme Boyd – Obituary (Scotsman? date?)