How do we know he was the first? It’s impossible to be certain. Somebody else could easily have beaten him to it, surfing, after all, being an activity that leaves no trace. But as far as any of Scotland’s other first generation surfers can tell, Law was there riding waves at Aberdeen beach before anybody else had the idea to try the sport of kings in Scottish waters, and given how few people surfed here in the frigid, pre-wetsuit days of the 1960s, it seems unlikely that another contender will emerge any time soon.

As far as they knew, Edinburgh student Andy Bennetts and his friends Stuart Crichton and Ian Wishart were the only surfers in the country when, in September 1968, they set off for Aberdeen on the train to try out Bennetts’s new board, which he’d purchased on a holiday to Cornwall. When they arrived at Aberdeen, however, and asked a friendly man at the beach pavilion if they could leave the board with him for safekeeping, they were surprised to discover that he already looked after a board for another surfer - local lad George Law, who had been surfing there since 1967. The Edinburgh trio subsequently made friends with Law and went surfing with him every day of their week-long trip.

“He tried to make a board first, but that didn’t work out,” says Bennetts, “so he ordered one from Bilbo [in Cornwall] the year before I got one.

“That was right at the start of things, and there’s no question in my mind that he was definitely the first person in Scotland with a surfboard. Nobody has been able to prove otherwise.”

Bennetts has done an impressive amount of research into the early days. Treasures in his personal archive include pictures of that early trip to Aberdeen, during which the four young surfers would take it in turns to surf (two in the water, two trying to get warm on the beach), and he also has a 1968 copy of Surfer Magazine - the California-based “Bible of the sport” - with an article which references Law. “Scotland???,” it begins, “Whoever heard of any surf in Scotland? Well, Scotsman George Law reports there’s fine surfing off Aberdeen beach in the chilly North Sea.” Even if it is subsequently proved that Law wasn’t the first to surf in Scotland, then, he was undoubtedly the first to draw attention to its surfing potential.

Another first generation Scottish surfer is Dave Killoh. He remembers Law as having a certain mystique about him, describing him as a “soul surfer” who would generally surf by himself, and only rarely hang around at the beach after a session.

“When I knew him I was only 16 or 17 years old,” he says, “and I was the youngest out of our group. We were all into the Beach Boys and we all used to hang out at the beach, although we didn’t surf at first… but then this guy appeared with this ten foot Malibu board and it was George. He kept himself to himself really. He was out a couple of nights we went out, but he didn’t hang about the beach like us lost souls.”

Law’s apparent reserve probably had a lot to do with the job he did. In a short, first-person description of the early days he wrote for Scottish surf historian Neil Munro, he says: “because of my short work hours [as a check weighman at an abattoir], I would be at the beach by noon almost every day.” No wonder the after-work surfers didn’t see much of him - by the time they got to the beach he would have been all surfed-out, having had the waves to himself since lunchtime.

Law emigrated to Canada in 1969, where he joined the Victoria Surf Club. “In 1971 on a trip back to Aberdeen I surfed with some of the guys,” he wrote to Munro, “but after that it was history, and out of my system. That’s all I can remember.”

The thing that Bennetts recalls most about Law was his enthusiasm. “People jump into the sea these days with wetsuits that are as good as you can get,” he says, “but George had been surfing in Aberdeen right through the winter wearing just a wasitcoat made of neoprene and a pair of boardshorts. He managed to maintain enthusiasm for 12 months when nobody else he knew was even interested in surfing.”

Scottish surfing couldn’t have asked for

a better founding father.