IN this week in 1910, a woman was born in Renton in West Dunbartonshire who went on to have a fine career as an author, despite only starting when she was 48.

Writing under the name Jane Duncan, Elizabeth Jane Cameron was the publishing sensation of 1959 after Macmillan Publishers announced that they had bought her first seven novels – a virtually unheard of achievement by a writer in those days. Eventually she would write more than 32 novels, most of them semi-autobiographical.

To save confusion I will refer to her as Jane Duncan, the name under which she wrote the once famous but now sadly neglected series known as the Reachfar novels.

She was born in Renton because her father, Duncan Cameron, one of many Highlanders to come south and join police forces, was then currently on the beat covering much of the Vale of Leven. He was a native of the Black Isle and Duncan spent a great deal of her childhood at her grandparents’ croft, The Colony, near the village of Jemimaville which overlooks the Cromarty Firth. Jemimaville is famous for only two reasons – Duncan’s life there and the so-called Battle of Jemimaville in 1914 when the Royal Navy accidentally shelled the village during an attack on German U-boats which turned out to be dolphins.

Duncan suffered immense tragedy before she was 10. Her sister Catherine died in infancy when Duncan was just four, and then her mother Janet née Sandison died of influenza, leaving Duncan and her brother John to be brought up separately – John being sent to be raised by her grandparents. Her father was grief stricken but stayed in the police and rose to become a sergeant. He eventually remarried a Christina Maitland, known as Kirsty. Jane Duncan did not get on with her.

With her father being posted to several police stations – constables tended to live “above the shop” in those days – she was able to attend Lenzie Academy. It is thought that Cairnton in her novels is based on Renton, and Lochfoot on Balloch in West Dunbartonshire, but she also wrote thinly disguised accounts of other areas where her father served and Reachfar itself is very much based on The Colony.

Duncan studied at Glasgow University from where she graduated with an MA in Literature at the age of 20 in 1930. While at University, as well as English literature, she studied French, Moral Philosophy and Scottish History.

As the Great Depression arrived, there were precious few jobs, even for talented graduates as Duncan, and she made ends meet as a nursemaid and companion and secretary. Tall and slim with striking looks, she was also employed as a model during the 1930s, but when war arrived in 1939 she was one of the first to enlist in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, being assigned firstly to the Operations Room where her talents were spotted. Promoted to officer status, Duncan transferred to Photographic Intelligence and was officially recorded as being sent to RAF Medenham, though some accounts say this assignment was actually a cover for her becoming part of the top secret Bletchley Park codebreaking team.

After the war, she went to work as a secretary at James Cuthbert’s innovative engineering works at Biggar in South Lanarkshire. There Duncan met and fell in love with Sandy Clapperton, the works manager who returned her love, the only problem being that he was married.

His marriage had failed when, in 1949, Sandy and Jane both left for a new life in Jamaica. Divorce was frowned upon in those days, but to show her status, Jane officially changed her name to add Clapperton.

Sandy became Chief Engineer at Hampden Estates, then the largest sugar plantation in Jamaica. Able to afford servants, Duncan was free to get back to her original ambition of being a writer. She had written several novels in her 20s, but by her own admission she did not think much of them and mostly burned them. By 1957 she was writing seriously again, and the memories of her time at The Colony with her grandparents were turned into the Reachfar novels in which the heroine was named Janet Sandison, using her mother’s maiden name.

Clapperton was by then suffering from heart disease and realising that he was unlikely to survive, Duncan sent her first novel, My Friend Muriel, to a literary agent. She added the fact that she had other novels already written, and Macmillan accepted all seven of them, with the contract signed on Duncan’s 48th birthday. Sandy Clapperton died a few months later.

Duncan returned to Scotland to live at Jemimaville, and continued her novels, including some under the pseudonym of Janet Sandison. She was brave in her writing – in her five-book Camerons series of children’s books, Duncan was one of the first novelists to include a main character, Iain, who had Down Syndrome.

Her niece Seonaid told The Scotsman in a feature in 2010 about her aunt: “I remember being quite close to her. If I ever had a fight with my mother, she would be a very even influence, and very wise. She was one of those people you could confide in. I don’t remember being frightened of her but I was a bit in awe of her. She used to have quite well-known writers like Ian Grimble and Eric Linklater come to visit and I realised she was a bit special.”

Completing her final novel shortly before her death of a heart attack, Duncan was buried in Kirkmichael cemetery where her plain gravestone states “In memory of Jane Duncan (Elizabeth Jane Cameron). Author. Died October 1976, aged 66 years”.