Ian Morrison’s expertise ranged from respected chemistry teacher and textbook author to accomplished cricketer and hockey player, distinguished soldier and chairman of Great Britain’s Men’s Hockey Board.
The son of a civil servant, he was born in Stirling but moved to Aberdeen when he was three. It was at Aberdeen Grammar School that he became enthused about hockey by a teacher who was a hockey buff.
Mr Morrison, also known to friends as Tim, graduated with a BSc in 1951 and was immediately conscripted to do his national service in England and Germany.
On being demobbed, he took a post in the chemistry department of Stirling High where he formed a productive working relationship, as well as friendship, with Alex H. Johnstone, who later became a professor and founder of the Centre for Science Education at the University of Glasgow’s science faculty.
Together they wrote a series of textbooks, Chemistry Takes. A new chemistry curriculum was being introduced and the pair were asked to run workshops. It entailed giving up a great number of Saturdays and eventually they hit upon the idea of writing a book so that they could get their weekends back and teachers could then pass on their knowledge.
The first book was written from Stirling High; over the next five years, they used their summer holidays to produce the rest of the series, for Heinemann Educational Publishers. They later co-authored its modern successor Chemistry About Us.
Mr Morrison remained at Stirling High until 1963 when he became a lecturer in the science department at Jordanhill College of Education in Glasgow. There he met his wife, Isabel, a lecturer in social work.
In 1971 he moved to Brechin High as assistant rector, where he was universally known as TI. Despite being headhunted for a headteacher’s post, he opted to become an adviser in secondary education for Angus County Council.
Following local government reorganisation, he moved to a similar post with Tayside Regional Council in 1975. He also made several trips abroad, during the 1970s, to East and West Malaysia and Brunei where he helped to modernise their science education offering by running in-service courses for teachers.
He chaired the Great Britain Men’s Hockey Board in 1984 and served as its representative of Scottish Hockey for eight years, a period which encompassed his tenure as chef de mission for both the 1988 Seoul Olympics and the 1992 Games in Barcelona.
He had also been an elder at Brechin Cathedral and was a long-standing elder of Dunnichen, Letham and Kirkden linked churches - he was delivering church newsletters for them when he was killed at the age of 82 in a road accident last month.
