My wife, Alison McCleery, who has died aged 69 of breast cancer, was a professor of economic and cultural geography who specialised in research on the economic, social and cultural development of the North Atlantic periphery.
Born and brought up in Edinburgh, Alison was the daughter of Margaret (nee Shillinglaw) and George Bruce. Her father, a teacher of French and German, was also a keen amateur singer and musician, enthusiasms he passed on to his daughter. As a schoolgirl at Mary Erskine school, Alison played the french horn in an orchestra conducted by Donald Runnicles (then a pupil at George Watson’s college) and when she moved to St Andrews University in 1972, she played in the university orchestra while also singing in the chapel choir. It was at St Andrews that she and I met, and two years after Alison graduated with a first class degree in geography, we were married in 1978.
