| Description | Mavor was born in Glasgow on 3 January 1888. Educated at Glasgow Academy, O. H. Mavor took advantage of the solid comfort in which he had grown up to spend nine or ten years at Glasgow University, ostensibly as a medical student, but more remarkably as a source of high spirits, light verse, ingenious ragging, and talkative and persistent friendships. He finally graduated on 9th October 1913.
Mavor joined the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and served in the First World War, returning to the RAMC at the age of fifty-one and also seeing service in the Second World War.
Mavor's medical career was respectable: he was a general practitioner, then a consulting physician to the Victoria Infirmary, and for some time professor of medicine in the Anderson College of Glasgow. However, he is better known as a playwright. He wrote in all some forty plays, under the pseudonym James Bridie, and entered the world of the professional theatre under the auspices of Sir Barry Jackson, who presented The Switchback in Birmingham in 1929 and at the Malvern Festival in 1931. The Anatomist, with Henry Ainley in the leading part, had a London production in the latter year, after its première in Edinburgh in 1930. It was Mavor who took the lead in the establishment of the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre in 1943 and the founding of a College of Drama in the city in 1950. He was chairman of the Scottish committee of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, the precursor of the Arts Council.
Mavor died in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary on 29 January 1951 of a brain haemorrhage.
[Source: Dictionary of National Biography]
Contents: Caricatures of Glasgow doctors and other leading figures, 1914 |