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DAVID BETTERIDGE  is a retired teacher and teacher-trainer. As teacher, he ended up as Head of Pollokshields Primary School in Glasgow. As teacher-trainer, he served on the staff of Craigie College of Education in Ayr, and Jordanhill College of Education, twice, in Glasgow.

His writing of poetry began early, but its publishing had to wait forty years, when Raymond Ross accepted his six Glasgow Poems for Cencrastus in 2002. Since then, poems of his have appeared in a variety of magazines, including Agenda, Acumen and Chapman, as well as in anthologies, including The Dynamics of Balsa (New Writing Scotland), Scotia Nova (Luath Press) and A Kist of Thistles (Culture Matters).

With the graphic designer Tom Malone, David Betteridge has produced more than a dozen poetry pamphlets under their Rhizome Press banner. The first, Phoenix-Forms, about creation and creativity, was published in 2007, while the most recent, In a Close Parallel, on the same theme, was published in 2020. Countervailing, an elegy for the crew of the lost trawler The Solway Harvester, published in 2010, was short-listed for the Callum Macdonald Poetry Pamphlet Award.

Selections of his poems, mainly political, but not exclusively so, have appeared over the years, starting with Granny Albyn’s Complaint (Smokestack Books, 2008), followed by Slave-Songs and Symphonies, with drawings by the cartoonist Bob Starrett (Manifesto Press, 2016). A third selection, looking at the world in an interlinked kind of way, from the vantage point of Scotland, appeared in 2022. It is Notes from an Infinite Land (Rhizome Press).

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Prose writings by David Betteridge on cultural and political topics can be found on the Culture Matters website, and, on the topic of Hamish Henderson, jointly with contributions by a score of singers, scholars, poets, archivists and artists, can also be found in a bumper book about Henderson edited by Charles Nasmyth, and inspired by this painter’s remarkable portrait of the man: Hamish Henderson: A Portrait in Six Conversations (Fife Global Press, 2022).