TRIBUTES have been paid to a novelist, historian, school teacher and campaigner for gay rights who won a scholarship to Monmouth School for Girls.

Iona McGregor, who has died at the age of 92, has been described as “a brave and inspirational pioneer” in the fight for LGBT equality, who risked her career as a full-time teacher by pushing back against prejudice.

Fellow novelist Marsaili Cameron wrote in The Guardian: “Hearing of the death of my friend Iona McGregor, aged 92, who was an author and teacher, several gay Scottish friends, not given to cliche, commented: “It’s the end of an era.”

“What they meant, I believe, is that the Scotland of Iona’s youth and middle years was a different universe from the world we live in today – and that living through that time marked someone out.

“It was a harsh, unforgiving environment… and the stain of criminality seeped into the whole of gay life.”

She said Ms McGregor, a keen hillwalker and traveller, was a key figure in the struggle for gay rights that got under way in the 1970s, working with others in the Scottish Minorities Group.

The former MSG pupil helped create “safe spaces” in Edinburgh in which women could meet socially, and developed a befriending service for gay people.

Marsaili Cameron added: “Involvement of this kind was very courageous as she was teaching full-time and would have lost her job if her activities had become public knowledge.”

She was a member of Scottish PEN, and wrote critically acclaimed historical novels for older children, such as The Popinjay, An Edinburgh Reel and The Tree of Liberty.

The National Museums of Scotland also commissioned essays on subjects like childhood in Scotland.

But she admitted: “I felt very restricted, because I wanted to express the gay side of my perception of the world…

“And I also felt that I’d like to go into adult fiction and detective fiction.”

In 1989, she published with The Women’s Press, the adult novel Death Wore a Diadem, described as “a heady combination of a thoroughly researched historical novel, a comedy of manners, a melodrama, a lesbian romance and a cosy crime whodunnit”.

Born in Aldershot to an Army father, she attended a Bury convent high school where she “kept arguing with the nuns about Darwin” before winning a scholarship to Monmouth, and later studied classics at Bristol University before moving to Scotland to take up a job as a sub-editor at the ‘Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue’.

She also went on to to teach at schools in London and Canterbury before returning to Scotland where she became engaged in the fight for gay rights.