Biography | Catherine Stihler — The Mossland Drive School That Sent a Wishaw Pupil to St Andrews

People treat a Creative Commons chief executive as someone formed in a coastal university town. The secondary school that sent Catherine Stihler there still stands on this Wishaw lot. She was born Catherine Dalling Taylor in Bellshill on 30 July 1973 and grew up in Moodiesburn and Wishaw. Every official biography names Coltness High School as the school she left for university. The campus opened in 1966 on Mossland Drive in Coltness, the largest suburb of Wishaw. North Lanarkshire Council still runs it as a coeducational secondary. A 1973 birth puts a Scottish six-year secondary course through the late 1980s and the start of the 1990s. She entered the University of St Andrews from this catchment and took a joint honours MA in geography and international relations in 1996. Her parents were teachers. She later described a primary teacher who had fled Berlin as the person who taught her German and the stubborn usefulness of hard work. The high school is the documented next rung. From 2010 the ageing 1960s fabric was renovated in stages so the school would stay open. The pin is the public campus on Mossland Drive, postcode ML2 8NA, not a family house. Photo: Coltness High New Building, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: David Iliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons