Para Handy

Para Handy is a character created by the journalist and writer Neil Munro in a series of stories published in the Glasgow Evening News between 1905 and 1923 under the pen name of Hugh Foulis.[1] He is the crafty Gaelic skipper of the Vital Spark, a Clyde puffer (steamboat) of the sort that delivered goods from Glasgow to Loch Fyne, the Hebrides, and the coast of Argyllshire and Inverness-shire in the early 20th century.

The character's proper name is Peter Macfarlane. Para Handy is a nickname from "Pàra Shandaidh", which means "Peter (Pàdraig) son of Sandy" in Gaelic.[2]

The stories partly focus on his pride in his ship, "the smartest boat in the tred" which he considers to be of a class with the Clyde steamers, but mainly tells of the "high jinks" the crew gets up to on their travels. He had at least one crossover with Munro's other popular character, Erchie MacPherson of Erchie, My Droll Friend.

The other principal characters who form the crew of the Vital Spark are:

  • the subtly effete engineer Dan Macphail,
  • the superstitious ship's mate Dougie (one inconsistency in the stories is that Dougie the mate has the choice of two surnames, Cameron or Campbell),
  • the lazy deckhand is known as The Tar (real name Colin Turner) and
  • the young squeezebox-playing deckhand Sunny Jim (real name Davie Green), who is cousin to The Tar and replaces him.

Also featured is Hurricane Jack (real name John Maclachlan), Para Handy's rather outrageous adventurer friend.

Key points of friction among the crew are transporting ministers of the church (bad luck), transporting gravestones (bad luck), and the small boats carrying passengers across the Clyde in Glasgow called the Cluthas (in Para Handy's view, the lowest of the low in Clyde shipping), and Macphail's taste for bodice-ripping women's fiction.

  1. ^ Paterson, Len (1996). The Light in the Glens: The Rise and Fall of the Puffer Trade. House of Lochar. p. 11. ISBN 1899863141.
  2. ^ Lesley Lendrum (2004), Neil Munro: The Biography, p. 151