university of edinburgh journal - volume 47, number 1 - june 2015

UNIVERSITYOF EDINBURGH

JOURNAL

Volume 47, Number One June 2015

University of Edinburgh Journal

Volum

e 47, Num

ber One

XLIV: No. 3 JUNE 2010 £14.00

Published byTHE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

GRADUATES’ ASSOCIATION

Universityof Edinburgh

Journal

Volume 46: Number 3 June 2014XLIV: No. 3 JUNE 2010 £14.00




Journal

Volume 46: Number 3 June 2014

University of Edinburgh Graduates’ AssociationPatron

HRH The Princess RoyalHonorary Presidents

Cecily E Giles CBE Iain F MacLarenPresident

David A LambVice-President: S Michael Langdon

Honorary Secretary: Joyce E RichardsonHonorary Treasurer: Jennifer DochertyHonorary Editor: Peter B Freshwater

Immediate Past President: Ritchie Walker Honorary Accounts Examiner: To Be Announced

Assistant Secretary: Joan H MeikleExecutive Committee Members 2014-2015

Andrew M BellMargaret D Cochran

Jane DenholmOonagh Gray

Lucinda L MackayHelena P Shanks

Sam TrettIan Urquhart

Student RepresentativesPresident Edinburgh University Students’ Association

President Edinburgh University Sports UnionVice-President (Services) Edinburgh University Students’ Association

Editorial CommitteeIan Campbell (Reviews Editor and Convener)

Peter B Freshwater (Honorary Editor)Sallie K R Gray (Obituaries Editor)

Barbara LaingLucinda L Mackay

Iain F MacLarenJack McLaren

Patricia J SparkJ R SutherlandRitchie Walker

Ian WotherspoonMalcolm M Wylie

The Association acknowledges permission to use the drawing of the Old College by Lady Lucinda L Mackay

XLIV: No. 3 JUNE 2010 £14.00




Journal

Volume 46: Number 3 June 2014XLIV: No. 3 JUNE 2010 £14.00




Journal


UK ISSN 0041-95671

University of Edinburgh JournalVolume 47: Number 1 June 2015

ContentsOffice Bearers and Committee Members IFCFrom the Editor 3 Graduates’ Association News and Alumni News

New General Council Assessors to the University Court 4New Members, Donations and Branches & Clubs 5New Executive Committee Members 6Lady Lucinda at the Torrance Gallery and

the National Library of Scotland 7New Year Honours List 8Graduate Theatre Group 9

ArticlesCurious and Curiouser by Emma Smith 10A Dream by George Shepperson 14Pioneering Poet, Librarian, Editor and Abolitionist

by George Shepperson & Peter Freshwater 15The Origins of Edinvar Housing Association

by Hans Wirz 19James Clerk Maxwell by Francis Toolis 25From Macedonia to the Sea of Japan by David Munro 33A Memoir of Half a Century by Ivor Guild 38Alexander Monteith Currie and John Davidson

by Owen Dudley Edwards 42Scottish Universities’ International Summer School

by Directors Elsa Bouet and Tara Thomson 49New Writings from SUISS 50

Reviews 55Obituaries 64

Geoffrey Carnall 75 Inserts 76Notes for Contributors IBCJournals Received IBCWelcome to the Graduates’ Association OBCThe University of Edinburgh Journal is published twice a year and is sent to all members of the Edinburgh University Graduates’ Association. Tel. 0131 650 4292/3; Website: www.uega.co.uk; Email: [email protected]. The price to others is £14.00 each number, payable in sterling.

www.uega.co.uk

mailto:[email protected]


2 University of Edinburgh Journal 47: 1 (June 2015) 2

Roll of Honour 1939-1945An Appeal for More Names and Information

The University’s Roll of Honour 1939-1945, which we published with the Commemorative Issue of the Journal in December, has been warmly welcomed. We have given copies of the printed booklet and of the digital database to the University Archivist, and he and his Project Director are interested in mounting a version of the Roll on the University Archives website as part of a planned development of online resources on the history of the University.

However, our suspicion has been confirmed that the Roll of Honour is far from complete. Most of the names on the Roll already are Edinburgh graduates, but already a few alumni have written or emailed me with additional names and information to be added to the database for a future edition. I invite all our members and other readers who know of relatives, friends and families who lost members to enemy action during the Second World War but who are not included, or are misrepresented, in the printed Roll of Honour, to send me as much information about them as they can. In particular, I believe that three categories of University people are under-represented. They are:

University teaching, academic-related and non-teaching staff•

Matriculated students•

Edinburgh University graduates and alumni who fought or were • interned on both sides and who died as a result of enemy action

Please contact:Peter B Freshwater

Editor, University of Edinburgh JournalUniversity of Edinburgh Graduates’ Association

18 Buccleuch Place, EdinburghEH12 5QQ

Email: [email protected] Website: www.uega.co.uk


www.uega.co.uk

University of Edinburgh Journal 47: 1 (June 2015) 33

From the Editor

Following the December 2014 Commemorative Issue and World War II Roll of Honour for the University,

and the enthusiasm with which they have been received, we are giving the Journal a new look with this, the first issue of Volume 47. We are adopting a slightly longer and wider page size and shape, which are very close to the Journal’s original attractive size and shape. This can now be done at no additional cost, and will give us more usable space to fill for the same outlay – ‘more bangs for our bucks’, as someone was overheard to mutter at an Editorial meeting. And for a very little extra cost we are now able to include colour illustrations throughout the Journal instead of having to gather them into a special section on heavily-coated paper. The Journal will, however, continue to be a text-based publication, with good type and layout on white or antique-white paper, comfortable to hold and to read, and which will readily reproduce in a digital format for those readers who choose to receive it online.

We shall continue to commemorate both World Wars throughout the new volume, and the December issue will focus on the ending of the World War II in Japan, since the 70th anniversary of VJ Day falls in August 2014. Many of the University’s alumni and staff saw war service in Asia and, while we already have a number of articles on the War in Burma and Hong Kong sought and promised, I would be very pleased to hear from more alumni who have memories of their own or of their families and friends who experienced active service or internment on either side and ‘east of Suez’. As a foretaste of that, we are proud to include in this issue a hitherto unpublished poem by Professsor Emeritus George Shepperson, who saw active service in Burma with the King’s African Rifles.

Other articles in this issue derive from talks given to Association lunches by Professor David Munro on the politics of place-names across the world, and by Mr Francis Toolis on James Clerk Maxwell. Mr Owen Dudley Edwards has written an account of Alex Currie, sometime Secretary to the University and his inspiration, the poet John Davidson (who studied at Edinburgh for a year in the 1870s). Dr Hans Wirz has written on the early years of the Edinvar Housing Association. Ms Emma Smith has written on the University’s collections as a vast cabinet of curiosities. In memory of the late Ivor Guild we have been kindly permitted to reprint a chapter that he contributed to the latest history of the New Club, Edinburgh. Professor George Shepperson and Peter Freshwater have written briefly on the poet, editor and Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society Thomas Pringle, as the first of a planned series


of articles on Edinburgh alumni who collided with authority and popular opinion with the courage of their convictions. We are also very pleased to have the opportunity of publishing examples of new writing by students on the Creative Writing course of the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School, and hope that this too will become a regular feature.

With sorrow we learn that the last of our sister alumni magazines from the ancient Scottish universities, The Aberdeen Review (Aberdeen), is to cease publication this year. The Alumnus Chronicle (St Andrews) and College Courant (Glasgow) both died some years ago. This leaves The University of Edinburgh Journal as ‘the last man standing’ of the four Ancient Universities’ graduates’ associations. I am very pleased that we can commemorate The Aberdeen Review in the form of an article on it in our next issue, penned (or keyed) by its last Editor, Professor Emeritus David Hewitt, himself an Edinburgh graduate.

Peter B Freshwater

New General Council Assessors on the University Court

The General Council of the University (the statutory presence of the University’s graduates in the management of the University) has this

year elected two new Assessors on the University Court. We congratulate them warmly on their election and wish them well in their new role.Ritchie Walker (MA 1968, BSc 1968) is a past President of the Graduates’ Association and now a member of the Editorial Committee of the University of Edinburgh Journal. He has recently completed a term as a member of the General Council Business Committee, with experience of the Public Affairs and Academic Standing Committees. He had the opportunity to engage with graduates both at home and abroad and reflect some of their concerns to the University. His career as a guidance teacher uniquely involved him with student aspirations and the concerted effort which goes into encouraging the ablest students to apply successfully to higher education. A charities’ trustee, he intends to contribute effectively to the working of the Court and the governance of the University.Alan David Gillespie Brown (MBChB 1963) completed eight years on the Business Committee of the General Council and four as Convener. He has extensive experience of working constructively with the University, and this has given him a detailed understanding of the opportunities and challenges it faces. He was appointed a Regent in 2012. Since retiring from a medical consultant post in obstetrics and gynaecology, he continued GMC examining and medico-legal/consultancy work, and is a Board member of the Pleasance Theatre Trust. He has a strong commitment to the University intends to use his knowledge and insight by serving it further.


New MembersFrom 1 November 2014 to 31 March 2015We are delighted to welcome the undernoted new members and invite them to send us news of themselves or other graduates from time to time. We would urge those living near an existing branch to join it. Others, who wish to start a new branch, should contact 18 Buccleuch Place for help in contacting other graduates.

DonationsFrom 1 November 2014 to 31 March 2015The undernoted members have responded to our appeals for voluntary contributions and we wish to thank them most warmly for their generosity. Several anonymous contributions have also been received.

Branches and ClubsEdinburgh University Club of BristolMrs Diana S Wyatt, Little Manor, 1 Stoke Pddock Road, Bristol BS9 2DJ Tel. 01179681291, Email. [email protected] University Graduates’ Association (Liverpool Branch)Mr Graham R Arnold, 13 Sefton Drive, Sefton Park, Liverpool L8 3SD Tel. 01517339357, Email. [email protected] University Club of LondonMr John Poynton, 146 Elizabeth Avenue, Amersham, Bucks HP6 6RGEmail. [email protected] Graduate Theatre GroupMr David Grimes, 15a South Gillsland Road, Edinburgh EH10 5DEEmail. [email protected]

George Buckle, Kelowna, CanadaPeter B Freshwater, EdinburghA F Garvie, GlasgowThomas V James, Warwick, BermudaDavid A Lamb, EdinburghJack McLaren, EdinburghMary MacLean, EdinburghC P MacNaughton, EdinburghJeffrey Mead, Newton Stewart

Iain M Middlemass, EdinburghAlastair M Mowat, EdinburghA Alan Robertson, EdinburghValerie Robertson, EdinburghGerald F Storey, NairnCharles R Tregaskes, UruguayIan Stanley Walters, NorwichRobert Young, Bowral, Australia

David Rae GilmourJean Elizabeth Gilmour (née MacLean)Susan Elaine Haisman (née Thorne-Baker)Alan Douglas MackaySylvia Dulcie Mackay (née Burdett)Carolyn PithieIain Charles Lindsay PooleHazel Ruby Richardson (née Alexander)

BSc 1970BSc 1970 DipEd 1971BSc 1958LLB 1965MA 1967LLB 1983 Dip 1994BSc 1979MA 1970






New Executive Committee MembersThe University of Edinburgh Graduates’ Association welcomes the following new members to the Association’s Executive Committee.

Sheriff Andrew M Bell BL

Worked as an Advocate Sheriff for 24 years, Bell also served is Former President of the Old Edinburgh

Club and a member of the Edinburgh Presbytery and Legal Questions committees, Church of Scotland. He maintains special interest in literature, history and music, and regularly attends University General Council meetings.Ms Jennifer Agnes Docherty MA CA

Docherty studied at Heriot Watt, and later worked for Happysmile Ltd, Edinburgh. In 2010, she joined

Scott-Moncrieff Chartered Accountants as an ICAS trainee. Docherty was accepted as a qualified member into the Institute of Chartered Accountants in March 2014. She then spent six months in Australia working for Moore Stephens, later returning to Scott-Moncrieff. As of February 2015, she is now working as a Management Accountant for Norbord Europe Ltd. Docherty enjoys

travelling and fine dining. Dr S Michael Langdon BSc DPhil CEng MIET

Langdon joined what became Ferranti International PLC, remaining there until 1991. He then joined the

National Engineering Laboratory, East Kilbride, and maintained his position until taking early retirement in 2001. He is an Elder in St Cuthbert’s Church, Edinburgh, and is currently voluntary Finance Manager. He stood as Conservative candidate at the 1979 and 1987 elections and has also served as an Election Agent.Lady Lucinda L Mackay MA

Raised in Europe, Lady Mackay studied under Prof David Talbot Rice and Sir William Gillies. She

later taught art and ceramics in schools and colleges, and held exhibitions of her own work; notably, in the Geffrye Museum, Shoreditch, in 1974, and with the Torrance Gallery, Edinburgh, in 2015. Her work is in many collections, including that of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The National Library of Scotland holds an archive documenting Lady Mackay’s career. Her recent

portrait of Prof Sir Timothy O’Shea is now in the University Collection.


Lady Lucinda Mackay at the Torrance Gallery and in the National Library of Scotland

Lady Lucinda Mackay was one of sixty artists to exhibit in the Torrance Gallery, Edinburgh’s Spring Exhibition in March and April. Space was

at a premium and did not allow for more than four or five paintings by any artist. Lady Lucinda’s paintings were drawings-in-paint. Three were of seagulls (‘Flying Start’, ‘High Flying’ and ‘In Good Standing’) and were re-workings, of drawings of seagulls made while she occupied a flat in the New Town of Edinburgh, and which capture the noise that seagulls make on Edinburgh rooftops. The fourth was a rural French landscape, ‘Memory of Ferrandou’. Readers of the Journal will have seen and read Lady Lucinda’s work in the last two issues, just as those living in Edinburgh will be aware of her paintings and in exhibitions and Edinburgh collections.

Lady Lucinda has recently and generously donated her personal archive of papers and drawings to the National Library of Scotland, where they can be consulted on application to the Department of Manuscripts.

Photography by Peter B Freshwater


Knights BachelorKnighthoodSir Thomas Philip WinsorLLB 1979HM Chief Inspector of ConstabularyOrder of the British EmpireDames CommanderDame Professor Carol Ann DuffyHon DLetts 2013Poet LaureateCommandersMs Sandra Dawe CBEMA 1977Lately Chief Executive, VisitBritainMs Anne Helen Richards CVO, CBEBSc 1985Chief Investment Officer, Aberdeen Asset Management plcProfessor Fiona Mary Ross CBEBSc 1973Professor of Primary Care Nursing, Kingston University and St George’s and Director of Research, Leadership Foundation for Higher EducationProfessor William Whyte CBEMA 1976Professor of Social Work Studies in Criminal and Youth Justice, the University of EdinburghOfficersMr Adam Michael Bacher Boys OBEMA 1989Chief Operating Officer, International Commission for Missing PersonsMrs Susan Jean Stewart Brimelow OBEMSc 1995Chief Inspector, Healthcare Environment InspectorateProfessor Stephen Gilbert Hillier OBEDSc 1992Vice-Principal International, the University of EdinburghDr Roshan Maini OBEBSc 1972

Dr Ruth Louise Mallors-Ray OBEPhD 1995Lately Director of Aerospace, Aviation and Defence, Knowledge Transfer NetworksProfessor Robert Hamilton Millar OBEPhD 1973 Dip 1974Emeritus Professor, Centre for Innovation and Research in Science Education, University of YorkMr Bruce Minto OBELLB 1979Chairman, Board of Trustees, National Museums ScotlandDr David Alasdair Hamley Rae OBE PhD 1996Lately Director of Horticulture and Learning, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Mr Paul Joseph Gordon Rennie OBE MA 1999Head of Political and Bilateral Affairs, British High Commission, New Delhi, IndiaMembersMr Derek Andrew Bearhop MBEMA 1983Head, Games Delivery Team, Scottish Government. Dr Kate Miriam Granger MBEBSc 2002 MBChB 2005Trainee Doctor in Elderly Care Medicine, Health Education Yorkshire and the Humber. Ms Carol Betsy Lees Dickson Main MBEBA 1979Director, Live Music Now Scotland.Professor Nanette Mutrie MBEChair, Physical Activity for Health, the University of Edinburgh. MedallistsMrs Alison Margaret Purkins BEMMA 1969Guide Leader

New Year Honours List


Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group

Our theatre group is no stranger to the Fringe. I directed my first Fringe show for the group almost ten years ago in 2006. I appeared in my

first Fringe show, also with the group, some number of years before that. And the group has been producing plays as part of Edinburgh Fringe for many more years than I’ve been involved. This year, we’re delighted to be working again with the Royal Scots Club to present a double bill.

The Witch of Edmonton is a lesser-known Jacobean supernatural tragedy by Thomas Decker and John Ford. After a fantastically light-hearted, funny, almost farcical beginning, a sudden twist takes us to a darker place.

Mother Sawyer has turned to the devil to revenge herself on the village that called her, what else but, a witch. Well-loved Frank, on the other hand, has secretly become a bigamist in order to protect his family’s fortunes. As Sawyer’s familiar, a black dog, torments the villagers and an elopement ends in murder, the people of Edmonton must decide what merits forgiveness when everyone is to blame.

The themes of guilt, blame and responsibility are continued in our second Fringe production, Death and the Maiden, written by Ariel Dorfman. Heavily inspired by Dorfman’s early life in Chile under Pinochet’s regime, this play also explores whether some crimes should never be forgiven.

As a university student, Paulina Salas was abducted by representatives of the right wing government. For more than two months, she became one of Latin America’s many “disappeared”; she was interrogated, tortured, and raped in an attempt to elicit the name of a leader of the leftist opposition: Gerardo, then her lover, later her husband.

The play takes place fifteen years later, just hours after Gerardo has been appointed head of the new, democratically elected government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission is charged with investigating human rights abuses by the previous government that resulted in death.

An unfamiliar car pulls up to the couple’s isolated beach house after midnight. The driver, Roberto Miranda, has returned to the couple’s house having earlier given Gerardo a lift home after his car got a puncture. Paulina is gripped with fear, convinced that the unexpected visitor is her kidnapper. Gerardo convinces Roberto to stay the night and Paulina pounces, tying him up while he sleeps and then embarking on her own interrogation.

Living in a liberal society, where freedom of speech is seen as a right rather than a benefit but where certain crimes still elicit public vilification, these plays are topical, thought-provoking and above all, thrilling theatre.

Both shows run from Monday 10 to Saturday 15 August 2015 at the Royal Scots Club on Abercromby Place, Venue 241.

Tickets are all £10 and available from www.edfringe.com More information at www.egtg.co.uk

The Witch of Edmonton 6:30 to 8:15pm

Death and the Maiden 9:00 to 10:45pm

www.edfringe.com

www.egtg.co.uk


Curious and Curiouser: the Rare and Remarkable from the University’s Collections by Emma SmithEmma Smith begun volunteering for the University of Edinburgh Library and Special Collections in March 2013. In June that year she completed an eight-week Employ.ed on Campus internship, which resulted in the exhibition Collect.ed: Curiosities from the University’s Collections. Emma continued to work for the L&UC during the final year of her degree programme, the Fine Art MA (Hons), which combines the History of Art with Fine Art practice at Edinburgh College of Art. Emma took up the post of CRC Exhibitions Officer in June last year; here she discusses the path that led to mounting a cabinet of curiosities in the Main Library Exhibition Gallery.

I have always been fascinated with objects. Objects of great age, great beauty or exquisite craftsmanship. Objects that tell the story of a time gone by. My degree allowed me to combine my historical interest in

objects with the creation of my own. When the opportunity arose to do an exhibitions internship for the Library and University Collections, I was excited at the prospect of delving into the archives of a University founded over 430 years ago. Books! I knew there would be plenty of books, and various portraits of important professors, gazing discerningly out from their magnificent gilt frames. What I didn’t, and probably couldn’t, anticipate was the enormous variety of objects I would discover; from fossilised raindrops to Ancient Egyptian funerary figurines.

And so to task: the project for my internship was to create a proposal for an exhibition to be held in the Main Library Exhibition Gallery during the winter months. I had a £1500 budget and my only stipulation was that the exhibits be suited to the slightly cooler environmental conditions of the time of year. Knowing where to start was my first real problem. Paper based objects were too vulnerable, no books, manuscripts, photographs, letters, prints, drawings… I had to delve beyond the book. I spent a lot of time on site with collections staff to try to garner a sense of what was available. A catalogue entry can only tell you so much about the character of an item; I needed to see items to build a picture of what was possible.

I needed a theme for my exhibition in order to begin the selection process, as the sheer number of treasures I uncovered was beginning to pose a problem. I started to think about how these items would have come into the possession of the University. Although collecting objects of value and interest was nothing particularly new, during the sixteenth and seventeenth


Figure 2: Endocrinal Cast of William Burke

Figure 3: Gastropod Shells


centuries, the momentum for collecting as a means of scientific inquiry began to gather pace as the human quest for knowledge and understanding of the world accelerated. Natural specimens were bottled, pressed and preserved and sent home for further study. The popularity of the Grand Tour extended this remit to include articles of antiquity and relics of ancient and far flung cultures. These are the collections that founded the concept of the ‘museum’ as we know it today. The most notable of which are those of the John Tradescants, father (died ca 1637) and son (1608-1662), later acquired by Elias Ashmole (1617-1692), and Hans Sloane (1660-1753), whose collections founded the Ashmolean and British Museums respectively. The collections of their Scottish contemporaries Andrew Balfour (1630-1694) and Robert Sibbald (1641-1722) were acquired by Edinburgh University from whence, eventually and after much doctoring by Professors John Walker and Robert Jameson, they became one of the foundation collections of the Royal Museum of Scotland.

It occurred to me that a similar premise must apply to other historic collections held by the University only here, items would have been sourced and sent back to Edinburgh by a multitude of staff, students and associates, primarily for the purpose of teaching. Many such items still make up parts of teaching collections today, most notably in the schools of Biological and Geosciences. I also encountered items from around the world that have been gifted to the University throughout the decades in the interest of international relations. Most notable of which was an extremely intricate Makonde carving from the President of Tanzania.

I decided to adopt the aesthetic of the cabinet of curiosity, synonymous with early collecting, in order to showcase the variety of the University’s collections and give me the scope to include a large number of objects. The exhibits I chose came from the fine art, anatomical, geological, musical instrument and old Moray House teaching collections, the University vault at Old College and the object collection in New College Library. I also included items from the Lothian Health Service Archive and the Towards Dolly and Godfrey Thompson Wellcome Trust projects, all based with the Library and University Collections; my aim was to promote the variety of the collections as well as the projects and research that takes place within the Centre for Research Collections.

As I created my list of exhibits, the objects themselves began to tell their own stories; if a picture paints a thousand words, an object paints a thousand more. Whilst undertaking some cataloguing with Dr Gillian McCay, the assistant curator at the Cockburn Geological Museum, we discovered some gastropod shells in the Charles Lyell collection (Figure 3) that were documented as having been collected by Charles Darwin. As Lyell was a close friend of Darwin’s and the specimens were from St Helena, which Darwin visited on HMS Beagle, it seems to be within reasonable belief, and adds a new facet to the story of Charles Darwin at the University of Edinburgh. A selection of more of their stories gives a flavour of what I found.


A clay brick fragment dating from the Neo-Babylonian period (ca 626-539 BC) of Mesopotamian history. In Greek, ‘Mesopotamia’ means ‘land between the rivers’ and refers to the Tigris and Euphrates which flow from eastern Turkey through present-day Iraq. The stamped inscription reads ‘Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, provider of the Esagil (Temple of the God Marduk) and of Ezida (Temple of the God Nabo), (foremost) son of Napolassar, King of Babylon.’ Nebuchadnezzar II, perhaps the most famous king of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty, ruled from 605 to 562 BC. Despite the lack of definite proof, he is generally credited with the construction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The endocranial cast of William Burke, the infamous body-snatcher (Figure 2). It displays the configuration of the coverings of the brain with their associated blood vessels. This was made at the time of the public dissection carried out early in February 1829. His brain capacity was measured at 340 cubic centimetres.

A chatelaine worn at a nurse’s waist. Beautiful and practical at the same time, it ensured that useful tools were close to hand. The equivalent to a Swiss Army knife is just one example of the rich resources collected by the Lothian Health Services Archive to illustrate nursing life.

A piece of a meteorite which fell in Namibia in prehistoric times (Figure 1) and was subsequently named after the nearest town, Gibeon. It is believed that when the Gibeon passed through the atmosphere, it broke up and crashed to earth over a 275km long and 100km wide area. The Gibeon meteorite is prized for its patterned cross-section which occurred after landing and cooling on the Earth’s surface. In the nineteenth century enormous specimens were recovered by European settlers, which led to speculation that many of the smaller fragments had been collected by native people and made into tools. Radiometric dating places the age of crystallisation of the iron-nickel metal in the Gibeon at 4 billion years.

A First World War incendiary bomb is ‘[…] a singular object of curious which might have made unhappy history for the College. It consists of a primitive incendiary bomb dropped by a raiding Zeppelin in the First World War on the pavement in front of the statue of the Highland soldier just outside the College, which was promptly seized by the janitor as soon as it had fizzled out and deposited among our collection of grim curiosities.’ (History of New College. ‘Contents of Library’.)

The Pigs’ Cup. This trophy, affectionately known as ‘The Pigs’ Cup’ was awarded to Edinburgh’s Institute of Animal Genetics in 1933 by the Scottish National Fat Stock Club for ‘the best pen of pigs in Classes 44-47’. In later years the Cup was used as the annual prize in cricket matches between Genetics staff and students. The trophy forms part of the archival and printed collections being catalogued under the Wellcome Trust-funded ‘Towards Dolly’ project relating to the story animal Genetics in Edinburgh.


A Dreamby George SheppersonDuring the end of the Burma Campaign in 1944, Lieutenant George Shepperson, commanding a platoon of King’s African Rifles, experienced what he describes as a ‘Kubla Khan moment’. Asleep on his own in a two-man weapon pit, he dreamed that he awoke to find a Japanese soldier standing over him with a bayonet poised to strike, and asking him ‘Who will be with you in your loneliness, when you are rotting in the grassy grave?’ Terrified, Shepperson then really did wake up, to find no Japanese soldier there; but he remembered the words of the dream-soldier, and wrote this poem there and then. Several of his other poems have appeared in WW2 anthologies. After the War, Shepperson completed his MA degree and PGCE at Cambridge and was appointed Lecturer in Imperial and American History at Edinburgh University in 1948, eventually becoming William Robertson Professor in Commonwealth and American History. He retired in 1986.

‘Who will be with you in your loneliness, When you are rotting in the grassy grave?’

He leered, his face a mask of malevolence,So near to mine, murderous and depraved.

Then I awoke. It was a dream, stupidBut natural dream of the enemy

At war; figure of death, vicious, vapid,Phantasms of mind, for death unready.

But this one was so real. He seemed to beThe figure of Time himself, pitiless.

I, asleep in a trench, felt I lay inThe grave, bound by Death, he is so merciless.

Down, dreams forgotten, life and happiness,But through my mind his words relentless save:

‘Who will be with you in your loneliness, When you are rotting in the grassy grave?’

30 November 1944Mile 1½ [from Kalewa, Burma]


Pioneering Poet, Librarian, Editor and Abolitionist: Thomas Pringle (1789-1834)(The Courage of their Convictions Part 1)by George Shepperson and Peter Freshwater

After completing his MA degree and PGCE at the University of Cambridge (they had been interrupted by his war service) George Shepperson joined the University of Edinburgh staff in 1948 as Lecturer in Imperial and American History. He retired as William Robertson Professor of Commonwealth and American History in 1986. Peter Freshwater (MA 1964) was one of his undergraduate students, and is now Editor of the University of Edinburgh Journal.

For most of his life Thomas Pringle found himself battling disadvantage in himself and on behalf of others, and confronting what he believed to be wrong. Early parental deprivation (his mother died when he was

six years old) and physical disability were followed by poverty, emigration to a strange land, and eventual administration of the fight for the abolition of Afro-Caribbean slavery. Until recently his achievements have remained unsung but he has left his ‘footprints on the sands of time’.

Like many another Scottish Borderer, Pringle began his education at the village school in Moorbattle near Kelso, completing his school years at Kelso Academy where he learned enough Latin to enable him to matriculate at Edinburgh University in 1805 at the age of 16, which was late in life for the time when most students matriculated at 12-14 years old. Like his older Borders contemporary and friend Sir Walter Scott, Pringle was lame as a child, as a result of the accidental dislocation of his right leg as a baby, and this may have affected the progress of his school education.

The study of classics at University did not appeal to Pringle, but English literature certainly did. He was one of the early students of Dr Andrew Brown, who had been appointed to the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in 1801. Brown has had a bad press down the years, which is only now being refuted. It is attributable largely to the evidence given by unsympathetic colleagues to the Royal Commission on Universities in 1826, and his greater interest in researching the history of Nova Scotia, where he spent his professional formative years as the pastor of the Dissenting congregation in Halifax, than in developing, examining, and recruiting students for the core course in Rhetoric that most students were expected to attend. He nevertheless delivered competent lectures, and seems to have inspired at least some of his students to greater things. One

Thomas Pringle


of these was Thomas Pringle who, one cannot help surmising, may have been encouraged by Brown’s North American experience to seek his own life in another colony overseas, Southern Africa.

Whether driven by his love of literature or, more likely, by his desire to confront injustice, Pringle was involved in one incident that has been recorded by Leitch Ritchie and William Hay. An Edinburgh theatre announced the production of A Family Legend by Joanna Baillie, probably the first performance on a Scottish stage of a play by a woman. Rumour (the social medium of the day and probably as unfounded as many of today’s threads on Twitter and Facebook) had it that the critics intended to pan the production by violent disruption of the performance. Pringle (who, even on crutches, apparently could present a formidable appearance) organised a group of fellow students armed with cudgels to take over the well of the theatre, applauding the play vociferously and threatening to eject any unwonted opposition. The play itself has not stood the test of time. Leitch Ritchie opines that it was not worthy of Joanna Baillie and, but for this incident, might – and indeed, should – have slid into oblivion sooner than it did.

Graduating in 1808 Pringle became a clerk in the General Register House, Edinburgh, spending his days copying old records (much as Andrew Brown had done during his pastorate in Nova Scotia) and, in his own time, writing and contributing poetry to Edinburgh magazines. Some of his writing was admired by Walter Scott, who befriended the young Pringle and would be of help to him in later years. By 1817 Pringle was well-enough thought of in the Edinburgh literary world to be invited, with James Cleghorn, to co-edit William Blackwood’s new Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, later to become Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. This he did for six months but without much enthusiasm, and he and Cleghorn were dismissed in favour of a more dynamic editorial team. Pringle moved to become editor of Constable’s liberal rival Edinburgh Magazine, which was more to his taste and which he did for two years. During this time, in July 1817, he married Margaret Brown (no relation of his former professor) in St Cuthbert’s Church, Edinburgh, and returned to his clerical post in General Register House to provide income to support his growing family.

Supported by the influence and friendship of Sir Walter Scott, in 1820 Thomas Pringle led a party of Scots, the Albany Settlers, to settle in Grahamstown, South Africa, taking with him his wife and children, and his widowed father and brothers. He became Librarian of the recently-opened Government Library (which later would become Cape Town Public Library), but the salary for this post was insufficient for him to support his extended family, and the work was not onerous; so he increased his income by providing private tuition for settlers’ children. Three years later he was joined by one of his Edinburgh University friends, John Fairbairn, with whom he founded an Academy for the education of settlers’ children, and the bi-monthly South African Journal, and took over the management of the weekly newspaper, the South African Commercial Advertiser. His independent journalism brought him into opposition with the Governor


of the colony, Lord Charles Somerset, and the Government establishment of the colony at large, especially over the matters of slavery and slave ownership, and reporting judicial proceedings for public consumption. Again, his becrutched figure in the Governor’s office presented him as a formidable adversary, but could not prevent the Governor killing dead Pringle’s and Fairbairn’s proposal to establish a Literary and Scientific Society, on the grounds that it smacked of Jacobinism and sedition, and employing a Government spy to search Pringle’s private papers. Pringle had no alternative but to resign his Governmental posts.

He came to love the beauty of the African countryside, but always felt the tug of his Scottish borders homeland. His best-known poem ‘Afar in the Desert’ which often appeared in English as well as South African anthologies, exemplifies this:

Afar in the Desert I love to ride,With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side:When the sorrows of life the soul o’ercast,And, sick of the Present, I cling to the Past;When the eye is suffused with regretful tears,From the fond recollections of former years;And shadows of things that have long since fledFlit over the brain, like the ghosts of the dead:Bright visions of glory – that vanish too soon;Day dreams – that depart ere manhood’s noon;Attachment – by fate or by falsehood reft;Companions of early days – lost or left;And my native Land – whose magical nameThrills to the heart like electric flame;The home of my childhood; the haunts of my p[rime;All the passions and scenes of that rapturous timeWhen the feelings were young and the world was new,Like the fresh bowers of Eden unfolding to view…

He was also sadly and angrily aware of the social separation of the European expatriate and local Bantu communities. These tensions appear in his correspondence and many of his published poems, notably two of his Later Sonnets ‘Slavery’, and ‘To Oppression’ which he wrote in 1825 shortly before embarking for England, and which sums up much of his personal philosophy:

Oppression! I have seen thee, face to face,And met thy cruel eye and cloudy brow:But thy soul-withering glance I fear not now;For dread to prouder feelings doth give placeOf deep abhorrence. Scorning the disgraceOf slavish knees that near thy footstool bow,I also kneel – but with far other VowDo hail thee and thy herd of hirelings base.I swear, while life-blood warms my throbbing veins,Still to oppose and thwart with heart and handThy brutalising sway – till Afric’s chains


Are burst, and Freedom rules the rescued land, - Trampling Oppression and his iron rod.Such is the Vow I take – So help me God!

After only six years in South Africa, Pringle and his family returned to Britain in 1826 and settled in London where, his reputation having preceded him through his publication of an article in the New Monthly Magazine, he became Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, at the centre of the Abolitionist movement. He worked closely, first with Thomas Fowell Buxton and Zachary Macaulay, and later with William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other leaders of the Movement. On 27 June 1834 he signed and published a document endorsing the Act of Abolition, which was due to come into force on 1 August; but he had burnt himself out. The following day he bled from his lungs and was diagnosed with consumption. He died on 5 December 1834, aged 45, and was lamented by abolitionists in all parts of the English-speaking world. His pioneering spirit deserves to be remembered alongside the leaders of the Abolitionist Movement.

References:1. Sara Beanlands, ‘The Reverend Professor Andrew Brown – an academic reassessment.’ University of Edinburgh Journal, 45(4), December 2012, 216-220.2. David Finkelstein, Pringle, Thomas (1789-1834). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: OUP, 2004; online edition May 2009 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22807, 9 Aug 2012)3. William Hay, ed. Thomas Pringle: his life, times and poems. Cape Town: J C Juta and Co., 19124. Leitch Ritchie, ed. The Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle, with a sketch of his life. London: Edward Moxon, 18395. The South African letters of Thomas Pringle; edited and introduced by Randolph Vigne. Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2011. (Van Riebeeck Society for the Publication of Southern African Historical Documents, second series no. 42).Image: Contemporary engraving of Pringle, origin unknown.

Monthly Coffee MorningThe Association meets for coffee at the

National Museum of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1JF

We meet in the Balcony Café on Level 3 from10.30am - 12.00pm

on the following Saturdays in 2015:4 July, 1 August, 5 September, 3 October,

7 November, 5 DecemberGuests are most welcome. Do join us!

Tel. 0131 650 4292Email: [email protected]

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22807, 9 Aug 2012

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22807, 9 Aug 2012



The Origins of Edinvar Housing Association – a Personal View by Hans WirzHans Wirz is a graduate of Edinburgh University (PhD, MA, Dip. Eng. Stud.), and former Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Associate Dean. He is the actual founder of Edinvar. When he left the University in 1984 he returned to his native Basel to become a senior civil servant and, subsequently, Principal of the University of Applied Science in Basel. A more detailed résumé can be found in the June 2014 issue of this Journal.

Edinvar Housing Association is 43 years old. It began as an idea in 1972 and was started ‘for real’ in 1973. In 2005 it merged

with Castle Rock Association to become Castle Rock Edinvar Housing Association, and today is one of the leading housing associations in the land. As the following article shows I had the privilege of being part of it since its inception, but in 1984 I accepted an invitation to take up a post in Basel in my native Switzerland. In the early nineties I formally withdrew from Edinvar simply on the grounds that it had become difficult to make a constructive contribution to the work in Edinburgh as an absentee. This also means that I have not personally experienced the whole history at close quarters; so I decided to confine myself in this article to a relatively detailed description of the very start and the early days, not least because I am not aware of this having been done before, and in the expectation that this will be of interest to anyone who might want to know about the minutiae of an organisational start-up of an organisation of this kind. The Early Days

During my time as Lecturer in the then Department of Social Administration (1966-2014) one of my duties was to contribute a series of lectures on

housing policy to the course on Social Policy. I used to tell the students that there were basically three prevailing forms of tenure: private, public and housing associations. I must have sounded particularly enthusiastic about housing associations and all the advantages of that form of tenure in terms of co-ownership, tenants’ participation and financing, etc. so it was not surprising that one day a student held up his hand in the middle of the lecture and asked to be shown an example of the kind of housing association I had described in Edinburgh. ‘Touché!’, I thought. I could not at that time answer that question, but an idea was planted in my mind, ‘a small acorn out of which in due course a strong oak would grow’.


The second move towards the establishment of Edinvar occurred after a conference on The Problems of Housing Students in the Edinburgh Region in February 1972, when I took part in a group chaired by Lord Cameron. He suggested that I should write down my thoughts on the formation of a housing association. In doing so, I sought the advice of a number of experts. First and foremost was Ken Newis, then Under Secretary at the Scottish Development Department, who incidentally had shown his interest by responding encouragingly to an article, which I had written for The Scotsman on the merits of housing associations. He promised every support he could give, a promise, which he kept generously while still working at SDD and, after his retirement, as a member of the Board of Edinvar. Similarly, Robin Cook, then an Edinburgh Town Councillor and member of the Housing Committee, who later became Chairman of the Corporation’s Housing Committee and, later still, a distinguished Foreign Secretary, was approached and offered his support.

Subsequently at the end of February 1972 I submitted a paper ‘Is a Housing Association a possible way of providing more student accommodation’ to the University Accommodation Committee to which I was appointed around that time, which was being chaired by my late colleague Susan Sinclair.

At the end of 1972 the Director of the Student Accommodation Service, Willie Roe, presented a further paper on the matter, listing the students’ needs by providing appropriate facts and figures. Thereafter the Accommodation Committee decided to give the go-ahead. Much to the fledgling association’s good fortune, Willie Roe was allowed by the Accommodation Committee to act as Honorary Secretary of the Association , a function which he fulfilled with great energy and vision for the first three years.

Thus the theoretical ground to start a housing association was prepared. After the approval by the Accommodation Committee, the most crucial part of the preparatory work began . It was essential to find the best possible people to serve on the Board. They did not only have to be ‘good men and true‘, but be prepared to give of their time unstintingly, be agreeable to work with, and make their skills and expertise freely available for this new enterprise. We had already been fortunate in finding two very strong supporters in the persons of Lord Cameron, who agreed in due course to become Honorary President, and of course the above-mentioned Ken Newis, whose support and advice was important from the very start.

In early reports or annual reviews, the group of founderwas usually referred to very briefly thus: ‘Edinvar was formed by a group of people determined to do something practical to alleviate the housing needs of young single people and students in the capital’. This general reference to the founders is, of course, perfectly correct, and it would have gone too far to list them every time. All the more do I find it appropriate to name them now, since I am dealing with the origins of Edinvar and can put on record in this way the substantial part they played, in getting the association off to a good start.

The Minutes of the First Meeting of the Founder Members held in the Reid Room, Old College, University of Edinburgh, at 3.30 pm on Thursday May


3rd 1973, lists the founder-members: Noel B Anderson, Buildings Officer of the University, who knew the South Side like the back of his hand. After the blight of a possible ring road was removed, the South Side became one of the first areas of our activities; K Black, Students’ Representative Council. We were keen to have student representatives on our Board, but the Housing Corporation at the time had reservations on the grounds of their lack of ‘permanency’; Reverend Professor James C Blackie, a very experienced University Committee man, who enjoyed the confidence of the University authorities; Dr J C Campbell, University lecturer, Labour Town Councillor and member of the Corporation Housing Committee; T Drysdale, Legal advisor; lawyer in a leading practice, expert in building legislation and conveyancing; Andrew Gilmour, Senior Lecturer in the University Department of Architecture ; Councillor John Lawrie, Finance expert and Treasurer of the Liberal Party of Scotland; D McLetchie, Students’ Representative Council; Willie Roe, Director, Student Accommodation Service; Dr Hans Wirz, Lecturer, Department of Social Administration; Apologies were sent by Mrs Susan Sinclair, Senior Lecturer, Department of Social Administration and Chair of the University Accommodation Committee ; In attendance was Mr W Law, National Federation of Housing Societies.

The Agenda of that meeting consisted of some sixteen items, of a largely administrative kind. Hans Wirz was asked to be interim chairman until the election of a chairman at the first meeting of the association after registration. The aims and objects of the association were adopted. On the advice of Mr. Law it was agreed to add a phrase which would enable the Association to apply for charitable status. (This concern, to have and to keep charitable status, was a recurring subject of discussion and led later to the formation of various subsidiaries.)

It was then decided that ‘The objects of the Association shall be to carry on the business of providing housing and any associated amenities for young people in necessitous circumstances upon terms appropriate to their means and primarily for students of the University of Edinburgh; for students attending courses of further or higher education in the Edinburgh district; for young people in particular housing need’. In the course of time these aims and objects would be widened and adapted to new regulations and circumstances.

An interesting item on the agenda was the name of the association. Mr Law, the advisor from the National Federation of Housing Societies, suggested ‘Edinvar’, an amalgam of Edin[burgh] and Var[sity], a name which has lasted for 43 years, although within the first few years there was a move to change it to something less closely associated with the University; but a majority of the board rejected this.

At this first meeting too the first item of business was tackled. The Accommodation Committee, through the Development Committee, had recommended ‘that a feasibility study be instituted for the alteration of the derelict property at 2 Buccleuch Street to provide student accommodation’. It was agreed that Mr Gilmour, Mr Anderson and Mr Roe would make an


inspection of the property and report back to the next meeting. Furthermore, Mr. Anderson agreed to ask the Master of Works to give a structural report on the building. Work on this tenement began in 1975. This was the first, and a very good, example of the Association’s being able to start the examination of a project through its own personnel resources.

At the next meeting, Professor James Blackie was elected Chairman, an excellent choice, but alas, he was only able to fulfil this office for some four years before his untimely death. I was elected as his successor on August 30th 1976.Edinvar vs. the District Council : 31/37 Marshall Street

Although Edinvar actively sought to - and did - co-operate constructively with the District Council on housing matters, in one case we got involved

in a dispute which required the decision of a court of law. In July 1975 the District Council closed the building of 31/37 Marshall Street and took steps towards its demolition on the grounds that it was unsafe. The South Side Association, which was anxious that the building should be saved in view of its architectural importance, approached Edinvar for help. Edinvar obtained expert advice that the building could be saved, but was unable to satisfy the Council that this was so. Edinvar then obtained an interdict against demolition. In court the representative of the Council claimed that this building was so unsafe to the passing public that the demolition could not be delayed, and they would not accept any responsibility, if an accident were to happen. In court, to the opponents’ complete surprise, the legal representative of Edinvar produced an insurance policy which provided generous cover for Edinvar against any liability which might occur on the grounds of that building’s instability. The remark of the judge, upon examining the policy, I remember to this day: ‘Insurance companies are not in the business of saving buildings. Their job is to assess risks and insure them. Interdict granted’.

So Edinvar could save Marshall Street 31/37 and the twin building opposite, bought and rehabilitated the flats in both buildings, which still stand today, as a symbolic monument to part of Edinvar’s activities, i.e. responding to local associations such as the South Side Association , regenerating properties and bringing them back into use. These tenements were built in 1765 and now house 14 families.First Full-Time Director

On May 1st 1976 Robin Burley was appointed as the Association’s first full-time Director, after Willie Roe, who had done a splendid job during

the first three years, left his post as Director of the Accommodation Service and thus the Secretaryship of Edinvar. The new Director’s report of October 1976 gives evidence of the dynamism that Robin Burley was able to instill into the Association. New properties were being acquired or offers made, housing management and finance were reorganised and a new committee structure established, and above all, a feature which was to become typical of Edinvar, was the provision of management services for other housing associations. In this report alone, there were seven of them, seeking co-operation and


31-37 Marshall Street, Edinburgh. Photography by Peter B Freshwater.


the services of Edinvar. Under his aegis the organisation grew, not only building more and more homes, but also establishing social services under the name of community care, for those with special needs, in collaboration with institutions such as Gogarburn and others. Some Local authorities have followed this lead, by merging Housing and Social Work Committees.After 25 Years

After twenty-five years Edinvar had 1500 properties, 200 staff and 250 service users. Properties were valued at £52 million. Unfortunately, but

understandably after twenty-two years of excellent invaluable service, Robin Burley decided to move on and seek a new challenge. His place as Director was taken by the very able and competent Helen Forsyth, who proved to be a most worthy successor.Merger with Castle Rock Housing Association

In 2005 a further significant development took place. Edinvar merged with Castle Rock Housing Association to become known as Castle Rock Edinvar,

in order to pool resources and achieve economies of scale. Castle Rock was established by the Scottish Episcopal Church to tackle homelessness in the city. (The influence of the Reverend Richard Holloway and Shelter seems obvious here.) Together they now have 7,000 properties and operate in many different parts of Scotland, offering a variety of services to tenants in need through a series of different subsidiaries. Castle Rock Edinvar’s Director since the merger is Alister Steele, who recently was awarded an MBE for his services to housing. More information is available on www.castlerockedinvar.co.ukPostscript

I am very much aware that I have been trying to pour a pint into a half-pint glass. I apologise for that. My view since leaving Edinburgh in 1984

and then Edinvar in the 1990s has become a ‘Frog’s eye view’. As I wrote earlier, the complete history of Edinvar and Castle Rock Edinvar would need to be written as a book. Some housing historian might wish to take up that idea, perhaps for the 50-year jubilee in 2023. Maybe my article might help as the basis of a chapter on the origins. I particularly wish to apologise to the many staff, chairmen, committee members and officials who deserve an ‘honourable mention’ for the enormous amount of work that they have done, and which is being done, for the good of the community. I ask them to forgive my omissions or commissions. To them I say, with Puck at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and with apologies to William Shakespeare:

‘If we shadows have offended,Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear. Gentles, do not reprehend, If you pardon we will mend.Give me your hands, if we be friends,And Robin (Burley?) shall restore amends.’

www.castlerockedinvar.co.uk


James Clerk Maxwell: the Man Who Changed Everything and was then Forgotten.by Francis ToolisDr Francis Toolis was born in Glasgow, brought up in Edinburgh, and went away to school in Aberdeen. Completing his petit tour of Scotland’s cities by attending Dundee University had a certain neatness, but he opted instead to return to Edinburgh to study Medicine, graduating MBChB in 1972. After training in Haematology and Blood Transfusion, principally at Edinburgh but with short spells at Law Hospital, Stevenage, Saskatoon and Riyadh, he was appointed Consultant Haematologist at Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary in 1981, retiring after 25 fulfilling and enjoyable years in 2006. Since then, he has been free to pursue other interests such as Medical Bloodletting, James Clerk Maxwell, Byzantine Icons and the Hanseatic League.

James Clerk Maxwell? Congratulations if you recognise the name: you are in a small minority. James Clerk Maxwell, a god to physicists, is ranked by them up alongside Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Indeed, his

equations are place first in importance by physicists, well ahead of Einstein’s E = mc2. Einstein himself considered that one scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell, attributing the origins of the Special Theory of Relativity to Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field. Indeed, with reference to the phrase ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, when British journalists tried to imply that Einstein had achieved his success because he stood on the shoulders of Newton, the great man corrected them; ‘No, my giant was Maxwell.’ Maxwell’s other revolutionary contribution to Physics, his Distribution of Molecular Velocities in the field of gas kinetics, the first ever statistical law in Physics, paved the way for Planck’s Theory of Quantum Mechanics. And these two achievements, each of which would undoubtedly have earned him a Nobel Prize if the award had existed during his lifetime, were accompanied by a host of successes in fields as diverse as the nature of Saturn’s Rings, confirmation of the three-component hypothesis of colour vision (as well as discovering Red-Green colour blindness and producing the first ever colour photograph), the topography of the Earth, mathematics of the fish-eye lens, and major contributions to Civil Engineering and telegraphy.

Yet Maxwell a Scot, a graduate of our own University, perhaps the greatest mind we have ever produced, has inexplicably undergone a damnatio memoriae and is virtually unknown outside his own field of Physics. Why that should be is almost as great a mystery as the comprehension by non-physicists of his Equations. And that perhaps is the reason: Maxwell is a true physicist’s physicist – his Equations demand great knowledge to understand and evoke no easy image for the layperson, no Galileo dropping cannonballs from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, no apple falling on Newton’s head, no Darwinian Survival of the Fittest, no Time slowing in Einstein’s speeding spacecraft.


At least three other countries have honoured Maxwell’s by featuring him on their postage stamps, but Britain has never done so, even though many other scientists such as Newton, Lister, Faraday and Babbage have appeared. The University has a building named in his honour, but the city of his birth did not erect a statue of him until 130 years after his birth. Incidentally, should you visit the statue, at the east end of George Street, it would be helpful to bring a copy of an article about the statue written by Professor Duncan McMillan at the time of its unveiling (see: www.clerkmaxwellfoundation.org/html/further_documents.html), so as not to miss the complex symbolism, right down to the broken shoelace on the right shoe.

Who was James Clerk Maxwell? He was a member of the Clerks of Penicuik, a noble family at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment – one built the first Palladian mansion in Scotland: others were friends of James

Hutton, Father of Geology, and of Sir Walter Scott (who portrayed one in Guy Mannering): the same Clerk wrote a textbook of naval tactics, quoted by Nelson before Trafalgar; another was Deacon Brodie’s defence lawyer. So if he was a Clerk, nephew of the 6th Baronet, why James Clerk Maxwell? His great-great-grandmother, Agnes Maxwell of Middlebie, a descendant of the Lords Maxwell and Earls of Morton, married into the Clerk family, conditional on her husband and descendants adopting her family name: hence Clerk Maxwell.

James’s father, John, was an unenthusiastic Edinburgh lawyer; his mother, France Cay, was from an originally Northumbrian family that counted distinguished mathematicians and artists among their number. The newlyweds moved from Edinburgh to their Glenlair Estate at Parton, near Castle Douglas, but returned to Edinburgh for medical and family support when Frances became pregnant with James (their first child, Elizabeth, had died in infancy). James was born on the 13th June at 14 India Street, the family thereafter soon returning to Glenlair, which would remain the one constant throughout his life and to which he would return time and time again.

James was intensely curious as a child, ‘show me how it doos’ a constant question in his mouth according to an 1834 letter by his mother, his principal teacher throughout his early years. His was a happy and stimulating childhood. But that came to an end when he was eight, his mother developing abdominal cancer and dying in December 1839. His father disastrously employed as tutor a sixteen-year-old lad soon to go up to University. His method of teaching employed rote learning and physical chastisement, prompting James to eventually rebel by taking refuge in the middle of the duck pond! Thereafter, at the prompting of his mother’s sister, he was sent up to Edinburgh to stay in term-time with his father’s sister, Isabella Wedderburn, and was enrolled at nearby Edinburgh Academy. Out of the frying pan... The rote learning continued but much worse was the bullying

Dr Francis Toolis

www.clerkmaxwellfoundation.org/html/further_documents.html



by his classmates, who mocked him for his country clothes and Galloway accent (which he never lost throughout his life) and called him Dafty.

Home life at his aunt’s home at 31 Heriot Row was much happier and he got on well with his older cousin, Jemima Wedderburn, in later life a famous book illustrator and leading bird painter of the day (her drawing of a blind, naked cuckoo hatchling ejecting Meadow Pipit nestlings, the first scientifically accepted recording of this phenomenon, earned her a mention in Darwin’s Origin of Species). She and James sometimes combined their respective artistic and mechanical skills to make zoetropes, drums which, when spun, imparted the illusion of motion to a painted interior viewed through slits.

Life in the Academy improved in James’s second year there when Mathematics was introduced, ‘Dafty’ astonishing his classmates by his mastery of the subject and giving him confidence to shine in other subjects, too, especially English where he showed a flair for writing poetry, a talent he would use throughout his life to amuse his friends but also to reveal some of his innermost feelings to his closest friends. He was lucky also with the move to Heriot Row of Lewis Campbell, the golden boy of his year. The two often walked home together and became life-long friends (Campbell would write a biography of James three years after his death).

School life was now much happier. He also wrote his first scientific paper while still at the Academy, a paper on the mathematics of ovals, a paper of such worth and originality as to merit being read on the 14-year-old James’s behalf at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. At the age of 16, James entered Edinburgh University and was lucky to fall under the influence of Sir William Hamilton, the philosopher, and James Forbes, Professor of Natural Philosophy, whose research on colour perception fired James’s later return to the subject. In the summer holidays back at Glenlair, James conducted many experiments, using equipment he made himself. A particular interest was polarised light. He studied the strain patterns in annealed glass (molten glass cooled rapidly to freeze internal strains in its structure), using polarisers he made himself, then using a camera lucida he also made himself to project the images onto paper where he copied them in watercolour (the same technique almost certainly used by Jan van Eyck in his Arnolfini Betrothal). James went on to publish the results of his study of strain patterns in distorted gelatine rings, On the Equilibrium of Elastic Solids. This was the birth of the photo-elastic method, used by engineers today to study strain patterns under various loads.

His three years at Edinburgh gave James knowledge, a training in thinking, Statue of James Clerk Maxwell


a discipline in his experimental work, and a pleasing and distinctive style of writing – the latter mainly through James Forbes’ ‘tough love’ after one particularly badly written paper. His father now thought to have James enter the legal profession but was persuaded by James Forbes and Hugh Blackburn (Jemima Wedderburn’s husband and Professor of Mathematics at Glasgow) to send his son to Cambridge for training as a mathematician. After one unstimulating term at Peterhouse, James transferred to the more socially congenial Trinity College. While there, he wrote a paper on the surprising complex way scraps of paper fall to the ground, and another on his discovery of the fish-eye lens and its mathematics (inspired seemingly by a kipper he had for breakfast). He readily kept up with his work, continued to read widely, composed poems, humorous as well as translations of Greek and Latin odes, and joined the by-invitation-only Apostles, a crème-de-la-crème student discussion group that included at one time or another Tennyson, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes ... and Guy Burgess.

To succeed in the final feared Mathematical Tripos – an examination demanding a battery of tricks and shortcuts to solve problems at speed, a kind of quickfire quiz, with questions rarely relevant to real life – students of necessity hired private tutors, James reluctantly hiring a famous ‘wrangler-maker’, William Hopkins (wranglers were those achieving 1st Class Honours). In the event, James came second (Second Wrangler) to Edward John Routh, in later life a noted mathematician, going on to share with Routh the prestigious Smith Prize which few students attempted and very few won (it would not be awarded again for another six years).

With the award of a Trinity scholarship in 1854, James returned now to the perception of colour. His mentor, James Forbes, had earlier constructed a disc with coloured sections like a pie-chart and spun it quickly to get a single colour. The English scientist and physician, Thomas Young (partly trained at Edinburgh Medical School), noted that artists had long mixed the primary colours, red, blue and yellow, to obtain other colours, and proposed that the human eye had three different types of receptor for colour vision. But when Forbes used these colours on his spinning disc, he did not obtain the white that Newton’s work on prisms predicted. When Forbes tried just blue and yellow, he obtained a dull pink, not the green obtained by artists. James Clerk Maxwell returned now to this problem, first by constructing his own ophthalmoscope (invented just three years earlier by Helmholtz), studying first the retinae of dog ‘volunteers’ before moving on to humans. Realising that the colour of an object is the result of a subtractive process (in reality, green leaves are every colour except green) but that the eye perceives colour by an additive one, he experimented with different colour combinations on his spinning discs, discovering that red, blue and green yielded white. He went to develop his mathematically derived Maxwell’s Triangle, the forerunner of the modern-day Chromaticity Diagram. Next time you watch (colour) television, you are watching James Clerk Maxwell in action.

While still at Edinburgh, James had in the Glenlair holidays constructed a colour box, which reassembled selected colours obtained by splitting white


light through prism. He would use this colour box to conduct the first ever survey of colour perception, one surprising consequence of his studies being his discovery of Red-Green colour blindness, present in 8% of men but rare in women. In 1861, James now the Professor of Natural Philosophy at King’s College London, was invited by the Royal Institution to give a lecture on colour perception. His colour box being strictly one-person-at-a-time (even the coffin-sized one he was now using), he sought instead to project a coloured image, obtained by using red, green and blue filters to take successive photographs of the same image. Given that photographic plates of the time were insensitive to light at the red end of the spectrum, he sought the help of a photography colleague, Thomas Hutton. In the event, Hutton’s plates and filters were still insensitive to red light but not to the then unknown ultraviolet light, and they succeeded in taking the first ever colour photograph.

In 1855, while still a Cambridge postgraduate, James published his work on colour perception, but also pursued his other interest, electricity and magnetism. Over the next nine years, his three great papers on the subject would revolutionise the very way scientists think about the entire physical world. The four Knowns about electricity and magnetism were: like electrical charges repel, unlike attract; magnetic poles attract and repel in the same way and always come in North-South poles; an electrical current in a wire creates a magnetic field around the wire; a magnetic moving to and from a wire creates an electric current in it. Given that the force of magnetic attraction and repulsion varies inversely with the square of the distance, the same relationship as Gravity, the then dominant theory was that electrical charges and magnetic poles acted at a distance, with nothing in the space between them. Michael Faraday, by contrast, after a careful series of experiments, held that electrical charges and magnets infuse the space around them with what he imagined as lines of force, attractive along their length and repulsive sideways. His ideas were largely rejected by the gentlemanly scientific establishment (Faraday was a largely self-taught man of lowly birth who was later to be twice offered and twice refuse a Knighthood). Maxwell, far from rejecting Faraday’s ideas, came to respect him above all other scientists and set out to give mathematical expression to his experimental results, imagining not lines of force but rather a liquid-like flux, culminating in his first great paper in 1855/6, On Faraday’s Lines of Force.

Tragedy was to follow in James’s personal life, his father dying in 1855, but also success with his appointment, at the age of 25, as Professor of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen. While there, he wrote his paper on the nature of Saturn’s Rings, proving in a sequence of mathematics that astounded his contemporaries that the Rings were neither solid nor liquid and must therefore be particulate. A greater paper followed, however: Illustrations of the Dynamical Theory of Gases, solving in a single equation a puzzle faced by physicists – gas molecules must be moving very quickly to maintain atmospheric pressure, yet perfume in ‘still’ air diffuses very slowly. His achievement, Maxwell’s Distribution of Molecular Velocities, the first ever statistical law in physics, still excites physicists today. Perfume mundanely


spreading in a room led to a discovery of first magnitude, deeply influencing the subsequent development of statistical mechanics, thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. If the Nobel Prize had been established at that time, James would undoubtedly been a Nobel Laureate for this achievement.

Again in his time at Aberdeen, there would be happiness and disappointment. James grew close to Katherine Dewar, daughter of the University’s Principal, proposing (typically) by verse in 1858. They married later that year and, though Maxwell historians tended to view Katherine as a shadowy, ‘difficult’ figure, theirs seems to have been a happy marriage right to the end. But pressure was growing to merge the two Aberdeen universities, Marischal and King’s Colleges, driven particularly by James’s King’s counterpart, David ‘Crafty’ Thomson, a consummate politician. Inevitably, when the two Colleges merged, Crafty triumphed and Aberdeen failed: 1860 and James was redundant. Worse followed when Edinburgh rejected James for the then vacant Chair of his old mentor, James Forbes.

But luckily, King’s College London thought better and appointed James as Professor of Natural Philosophy. He and Katherine settled happily close to Kensington Park, handy for them to ride their horses. James returned now to electricity and magnetism, producing in 1861/2 his second ‘great’ paper, imagining now not a ‘flux’ but rather a mechanical model of a universe saturated by tiny invisible spinning spheres ‘lubricated’ by even smaller ball-bearing-like spheres, particles of electricity. His imaginary model would mechanically mimic the properties of electromagnetism, allowing him to derive the mathematics of electromagnetism from those of his model. A critical insight came to him while on holiday at Glenlair – to introduce elasticity into his hitherto rigid imaginary spheres. By doing so, he had made his spheres a medium capable of transmitting waves. And astonishingly, these waves, both electrical and magnetic, this electromagnetic radiation, radiated out from their source at the speed of light. Which meant light, electricity and magnetism were all manifestations of a single phenomenon: he had united all three in a single theory. Even greater was to follow in his third ‘great’ paper in 1864 when, dispensing entirely with models, he derived what would become a quartet of four immensely rich equations capable of being applied in so many ways, equations that were written in Newtonian 3-dimensional physics but were there waiting for Einstein when he broke into 4-dimensional relativistic space. Among the more readily understood (to the non-physicist) implications of Maxwell’s equations are the impossibility of mono-poles (magnets always come in North-South pairs) and the existence of electromagnetic waves of higher and lower frequencies than visible light:

14 India Street, Edinburgh


what we now know as gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, infra-red, microwaves and radio waves. Another Nobel Prize but for the accident of History.

If that was not enough for one man, he also conducted with Katherine the first ever survey of variation in colour perception, designed a portable resistance meter for the growing telegraph industry, greatly simplified the previously laborious calculations for stresses on the likes of bridges and led the team that replaced the mishmash of measurements for electricity and magnetism with the first internationally accepted systems of units, known as the Gaussian system (although Gauss’s contribution seems to have been much less than his). But it all eventually became too much for him, distracting him from the work he felt needed doing on the colour vision data he had accumulated with Katherine. He saw, too, a need to publish a substantive book on electromagnetism and to make improvements to his estate at Glenlair. He resigned his Chair in 1865, but would remain busy over the next six years, immersing himself in local life but also writing his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, after Newton’s Principia perhaps the most renowned book in the history of Physics. He also wrote a textbook, The Theory of Heat, in which the world was introduced to the legendary Maxwell’s Demon (a name coined by his friend, Lord Kelvin).

In 1869, a reluctant James was persuaded to apply for the Principal’s post at St Andrews University. St Andrews duly joined Aberdeen and Edinburgh in the Hall of Shame by appointing to the post its own Professor of Humanity, who among his undoubtedly numerous talents had a close friendship with the University’s Chancellor.

But in 1871, Cambridge invited James to be its first Professor of Experimental Physics, tasked with setting up a new laboratory, the Cavendish Laboratory, endowed by the 7th Duke of Devonshire, Chancellor of the University. It was a monumental task, building the laboratory and attracting talented researchers in the face of considerable opposition to the whole idea of a research laboratory, Nature sneering that with luck the laboratory might in 10 years reach the standard of a German provincial university. But it did succeed under James’s leadership. Although it seems a pity to us that he did not direct others to continue his own work, he chose instead to suggest topics only if asked but otherwise to encourage researchers to pursue their own ideas, a model that would lead in later years to discovery by Cavendish researchers of the electron, the proton, nuclear fission The world’s first colour photograph


and DNA’s double helix, and earning it 29 Noble Prizes to date. There were other distractions, too, such as being landed with organising for publication a huge body of unpublished work by the Duke’s great-uncle, Henry Cavendish, a brilliant but eccentric misanthrope who famously weighed the earth from a garden shed on Clapham Common. But James seemed content, his motto being ‘There’s no use thinking the chap you might have been.’

In the Spring of 1877, he began to suffer heartburn, bicarbonate giving only temporary ease. The Maxwells still went back to Glenlair for the holidays but, worried now that he might have the same abdominal cancer that had killed his mother, he summoned from Edinburgh a Professor Saunders who confirmed abdominal cancer, giving him a month to live and advising return to Cambridge for better pain control. James was so weak on his return that he could barely walk from the train. Under the management of his Cambridge doctor, his pain improved for a time but he died on 5th November 1877, Katherine and his cousin, Colin Mackenzie, being with him.

After a memorial service in Cambridge, his body was brought back to Parton Church where he was buried alongside his parents under a painfully simple gravestone. Katherine would join him 7 years later. Glenlair passed to his cousin, Andrew Wedderburn – Andrew Wedderburn Maxwell – but a disastrous fire in 1929 severed the family link. The study where James Clerk Maxwell did so much great work is an empty shell open to the sky, and there are no plans for restoration.

The late Sam Callendar sought to address the oblivion of James Clerk Maxwell and had a plaque commemorating him erected outside the church in 1989. In 2006, on the 175th Anniversary of James’s birth, The Royal Society of Edinburgh (of which he was a Fellow) initiated plans for the statue that would two years later be unveiled in George Street.

James Clerk Maxwell’s Equations were the chief inspiration for Einstein’s Relativity Theory and, in combination with his Kinetic Theory of Gases, played a part in Planck’s discovery of quantum energy. It is no exaggeration to say that every line of modern physics research leads back to James Clerk Maxwell. Listen to the radio, watch television, switch on a microwave, undergo an x-ray, God forbid use a sunbed! To borrow from Sir Christopher Wren, si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Whether we realise it or not, the technological world we live in is the Age of Maxwell.

Suggested Further Reading:1. Lewis Campbell & William Garnett: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell2. Basil Mahon: The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell3. www.clerkmaxwellfoundation.org/html/further_documents.htmlImages:P. 27. Statue of James Clerk Maxwell, George Street, Edinburgh, by Alexander Stoddart. P. 30. 14 India Street, Edinburgh: Birthplace of James Clerk Maxwell, photography by Dr Francis Toolis.P. 31. Taken by James Clerk Maxwell and Thomas Hutton in 1861.



From Macedonia to the Sea of Japan: the Geopolitics of Place-namesby David M MunroProfessor David M Munro MBE, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh in 1973 and 1983, compiled Chambers World Gazetteer (1988) and the Oxford Dictionary of the World (1995). He was Chairman of the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use (PCGN) from 1999 to 2009 and during that period led UK delegations to sessions and conferences of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN). He is currently a place-name consultant to HarperCollins, publishers of the Times Atlas of the World. Professor Munro gave this talk to a Graduates’ Association lunch in the Playfair Library in 2012.

What’s in a Name?

Most of us seldom, if ever, give geographical names a second thought. What’s in a name, you might ask? Yes, the origin of a name can often be interesting, but as we read the daily newspaper or glance

at a map, how often do we stop to think about the political significance of the names we see? While we may not spend much time worrying about the difference between names in travel brochures and the names that we encounter on road signs once we reach our holiday destination overseas, governments around the world take place-names very seriously. Getting it wrong can get you into all sorts of political trouble.

If you were to stop people in the street and ask them the question ‘what is the name of this country?’ you might get several different answers. Britain, Great Britain, the UK, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Scotland, Alba are just a few of the names you might be given, each depending on the outlook and origin of the person and their understanding of what constitutes a country. How many will appreciate that there are both official short-form conventional names and long-form state titles for countries of the world, or that the United Kingdom comprises two countries (Scotland and England), a principality (Wales) and a province (Northern Ireland).

Onomastics is the name given to the study of names of all kinds. The study of place-names is the particular preserve of the toponymist who looks at geographical names from many different angles. While a place-name is an essential reference label, it can be written and pronounced in many different ways. In a country like Finland, where Finnish, Swedish and minority languages such as Saami are spoken, which name form should you use? How do you render into readable English a foreign script written in Chinese characters or using the Russian Cyrillic alphabet? For the capital of China do you use Peking or Beijing? Which name should I choose from the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Gulf, or simply the Gulf? When is it appropriate to use the English conventional name Venice as opposed to the official Italian name Venezia?


Can you still use the name Bombay for the place in India now referred to as Mumbai? These are just a fraction of the issues that toponymists the world over are addressing in order to help improve international communication in a world where some 80 per cent of information in databases is geographically referenced to a name.

But names are more than just a reference label on a map or signpost to help you find your way to your destination. Names touch on all aspects of life and have a socio-political context that expresses how we see ourselves as well as the world around us. Names can also have a deep historical context that may be severely tested when political boundaries change or one ethnic group seeks to compete with or dominate another. Most people have a sense of place that is often communicated through geographical names. Look at South Africa, for example, a country with eleven official languages. Since

the end of apartheid, the South African Geographical Names Council has been carrying forward a programme of place-name change in an attempt to eliminate ‘derogatory, racist and outmoded’ names imposed on the country during the colonial period. The town of Edinburgh in Mpumalanga Province (formerly Eastern Transvaal) has, for example, had its name changed to Akani. There has even been a movement to change the name of New Zealand to a Maori form – Aotearoa, which means ‘Land of Long White Cloud’, a name that would perhaps conveniently move that country to a place at the head of the alphabet.Macedonia – a Name Seldom Used Beyond the Frontier

In diplomatic terms country names can be something of a minefield. Take, for example, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), a

name form used by the United Nations for a country the people themselves would simply wish to call Macedonia. The name dates back to a great empire created by Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great. Later, it became a province of Rome, Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire before being divided piecemeal between Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria after the First World War. In 1944 the People’s Republic of Macedonia became one of the six republics of the Federation of Yugoslavia, later renamed the Socialist Republic of Macedonia. Following a referendum, the republic broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991, but on becoming a member state of the United Nations in 1993, Greece insisted that the country be officially known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), not Macedonia. Greece feared territorial expansion into its neighbouring province of Macedonia where people call themselves Macedonians. In addition to this, Greece also objected to the use by FYROM of symbols such as the Vergina sun which is associated with Philip of Macedon, an historic figure claimed by Greece. At

Prof David M Munro


UN meetings, anyone careless enough to use the name Macedonia instead of FYROM, faces not only a lengthy lecture from the Greek representative but also the possibility of economic or political sanctions being imposed. This does not, however, stop the FYROM delegate slipping a piece of paper over the four letters FYRO on his country’s name plaque when he arrives.Burma; or, should that be Myanmar?

Another country name that puzzles many people is what we in the United Kingdom officially call Burma and most other countries now

call Myanmar. Which is correct? The answer to this takes you deep into the heart of political life since independence from Britain as the Union of Burma was achieved in January 1948. This is a country with eight principal ethnic groups, the largest of which is Burman, a group that speaks Burmese, the official language of Burma. Although 242 languages and dialects have been identified, Burmese serves as a medium of communication throughout the country. It is a language with two forms, literary and colloquial known respectively as myanma and bama in Burmese.

Myanama is used by those in authority while bama is understood by all ethnic groups. With the overthrow of the government in a military coup in 1962, the protection of minority languages, customs and cultures became dependent upon their not being used, in the eyes of the authorities, to subvert national unity. At the same time, the military junta attempted to increase its popularity by portraying itself as the only true defenders of Burma’s independence from the “foreign” influences that they claimed governed the policies and thinking of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi. In an attempt to counter these foreign influences, the government established a Commission of Inquiry into the True Naming of Myanmar. The real purpose of this committee was not to change Burmese or minority language place names but to re-write the Roman script versions of predominantly English language forms of indigenous place-names so that spellings would reflect modern Burmese pronunciations.

In 1989 the government adopted Law 15/89 which stated that “the expression Union of Burma and the expression Burma,


Burman or Burmese contained in existing laws enacted in the English language shall be substituted by the expression Union of Myanmar and Myanmar respectively.” By claiming that the word Burma could only properly relate to the Burman ethnic group, the government were suggesting that the name Myanmar would properly encompass the entire spectrum of ethnic groups within the country. It was with the enactment of this law that many countries responded to what seemed to be a change of name by adopting Myanmar instead of Burma.

While the UK government did change the official long-form state title from Union of Burma to Union of Myanmar, it continues to use Burma, not Myanmar, as the conventional name for the country. In maintaining the use of the name Burma, the UK delivered a political judgement on the authorities in that country. It recognised that the 1989 law in reality disadvantaged non-Burman ethnic groups to whom myanma and its derivatives were totally alien words from the language of the dominant ethnic group. The military government considered colloquial Burmese, and hence bama, to be subversive.

The National League for Democracy has steadfastly refused to make any reference to Myanmar and have continued to use the name Burma. The NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi exposed the seductive argument of inclusiveness employed by the authorities to promote the use of Myanmar at the expense of Burma when she said:

‘No-one should be allowed to change the name of the country without referring to the will of the people. They [the military authorities] say that Myanmar refers to all the Burmese ethnic groups, whereas Burma only refers to the Burmese ethnic group, but that is not true. Myanmar is a literary word for Burma and it refers only to the Burmese ethnic group. Of course I prefer the word Burma.’

Troubled waters - The Sea of Japan/East Sea

Anyone who publishes an atlas of the world will be aware of the politics of place-names on sea as well as land. Most publishing houses, like

governments will have policy guidelines that inform them on the most appropriate name to use. If you want to sell a map or atlas in Korea, North or South, do not use the name Sea of Japan for the body of water separating the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. While Sea of Japan is the name customarily used to denote the sea bordered by North and South Korea, Japan and Russia, the Koreans have a strong dislike of this name, which dates back to the Japanese occupation of Korea in the first half of the twentieth century. They see the name as denoting Japanese ownership and offer East Sea as a politically neutral alternative.

There is no problem with littoral states having their own names for a sea such as this but the two Koreas have taken this issue a step further by lobbying the international community in an attempt to have the name Sea of Japan wiped from all maps forever. South Korea in particular has spent a good deal of money in the pursuit of this goal and there is even an


organization entitled The Society for the East Sea, which periodically hosts seminars to which international experts are invited.

This dispute has loomed large at meetings of the United Nations, International Hydrographic Organization and countless geographical conferences worldwide. Not only that, trade embargos have been imposed, diplomats have been withdrawn, war has been threatened and confrontations have taken place at sea in the neighbourhood of the disputed Liancourt Rocks which are called Take-shima by the Japanese and Dokdo by the Koreans. While Japan and the two Koreas have been urged to hold bilateral meetings to resolve this dispute, this issue rumbles on with more and more map producers beginning to put both Sea of Japan and East Sea on their products.

Hardly a week goes by without place-names appearing in the media at the heart of political disputes. The presence of oil, gas and other resources in the South China Sea, for example, has encouraged claims of sovereignty over hundreds of islands, reefs, rocks and sand banks by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines. Each country has its own set of names for geographical features and where names do not exist, they are soon created.

In order to avoid being caught in a web of geopolitical wrangling associated with one form of a name or another, the UK government draws on policy guidelines developed by an interdepartmental advisory group created in 1919 with the title Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use (PCGN). Similarly, many countries of the world have geographical names authorities which advise on the application of foreign names as well as the designation of official new domestic names. The United Nations also takes place-names extremely seriously in its endeavour to promote world peace. This has been achieved through the work of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN), which was created in the 1960s to demonstrate the national and international benefits to be derived from the development of guidelines for handling place-names. What’s in a name? On the basis of the handful of examples outlined above, much more than you might think.

Lady Lucinda L Mackay, Autumn Exhibition

FRINGE BENEFITSStudies of Festival Street Performers

The Torrance Gallery, 36 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6JN

Saturday 29 August to Saturday 12 September.For details of opening times, etc. visit: www.torrancegallery.co.uk

www.torrancegallery.co.uk


A Memoir of Half a Centuryby Ivor GuildIvor Guild, who died suddenly on 3 January 2015 while on holiday in Berlin, left instructions that he should not be commemorated by a public funeral or memorial service. He had been a very supportive member of many University and alumni events and associations, especially the Friends of Edinburgh University Library, whom he served for ten years as Honorary Treasurer and longer as a Committee member. In his memory, the Graduates’ Association is honoured to be permitted by the New Club, Edinburgh where he lived for over fifty years, to reprint here the chapter that he contributed to The New Club: a history, edited by Morrice McCrae (The New Club, 2004). A short obituary of Mr Guild appears on p. 69 of this Journal.

In the 1940s a new member was excused the entry fee if under 26. As a result I joined the Club just before attaining that age but, for a number of years, was too shy to use a Club whose members were nearer to the

age of my father or grandfather. It was primarily a lunching club – a gin and tonic followed by a three-course meal and possibly a glass of port afterwards – and no ladies were allowed to cross the threshold under any circumstances. At lunchtime the Secretary, Charles Ballantyne, stood by the fire in the entrance hall ready to deal with complaints or exchange gossip, and little of the scandals of Edinburgh society escaped his ear. He himself did not lunch till after 2.00 p.m.

Apart from those sleeping off a heavy lunch the Club was dead in the afternoon until the evening drinking session started around 5.00 p.m. A number of members drifted in around then and lingered till after 7.00 p.m, when they made their way home for dinner. In the upstairs sitting room Jas Peterson, one of the resident members, held court at the fireplace at the far end of the room. Three or four members regularly joined him for a succession of G and Ts. Latterly, despite persuasion by the staff, this constituted for Jas his dinner, though he changed chairs when he considered he was at the after-dinner stage. Maisie, who had been with the Club for many years, knew and understood his ways.

Downstairs, the dining room, a large L-shaped room, would be occupied by three or four members, each sitting as far as possible from each other. A table by the fire was reserved for the Secretary and some of the resident members. I felt honoured when asked to join them. The regulars were Sir James Fergusson (who lived in the Club from Monday to Friday when he returned to Kilkerran), Lord Patrick (by then retired as a Court of Session judge after his stint in Japan on the Court set up to try Japanese war criminals) and myself. James always changed to a dinner jacket but the rest of us were more informally dressed. One or two members might book in for dinner but, in the main, it was used by those staying overnight.

Before I came to live in the Club my main use of it was to look in to have a cup of coffee on my way back to the office after my evening meal. On


occasion it could be embarrassing. Major Hume Sleigh, the only member to oppose the amalgamation with the University Club, would be there from his digs in Charles Street, to check up on the racing results. He had served in the Hussars and had been ADC to Haig in the First War. He claimed to have been under the table at the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging after the Boer War. On several occasions he told me that he had gone to the Great War with the aim of being killed as his fiancée, Dolly, had been killed by a horse-drawn tram in 1913. He always wore his cap in the Club as he said that had been the custom in his father’s day and he felt the custom should be maintained. He would often sit down beside me and embarrass me by saying in a loud voice as a member came into the room, ‘You would not have that man in your house; he is not a gentleman.’ Desperately one tried to hide behind one’s paper. On one occasion he extolled the ability of a surgeon who had operated on him for a double hernia. Standing by the fireplace he pulled open his trousers and encouraged me to admire the neatness of the wounds. He was in constant war with the Secretary who accused him of pinching the Club letter-paper, and on his death the Secretary did in fact recover much paper from his flat. Nor was he the only source of embarrassment; members would engage me in conversation about events such as the Boer War, on the assumption that I had known old so-and-so who had left the legal profession to enlist in the mounted infantry and fight for the country.

In 1957, the Secretary suggested that I rent one of the two flats owned by the Club. The former occupant had been Hugh Blair who had lived one half of the year at Brighton and the other partly in Edinburgh and partly in North Berwick. The flat was entered through the Club but could also be accessed by the common stair. The ground floor was owned by Gordon Small who dealt in antiques, and the first two floors were owned by the Club and let to C. W. Ingram, estate agents. The top flat was occupied by the Club members. The common stair was the fire escape for the residents and a locked glass door prevented access by unauthorised persons. A key in a glass case enabled the occupants to escape in the event of fire (or, indeed, to admit visitors who could not properly enter the Club). The flats were looked after by Club staff but had outside doors that ensured privacy. On one occasion I unfortunately locked my flat with the key inside and could only obtain entry by a hazardous scramble along the roof and a drop onto the narrow balcony at the front of the flat – not a feat that I was eager to repeat.

Before the flat was ready for my occupation I stayed for several weeks in a Club bedroom. In those days none of the bedrooms had running water.

Dinner at the New Club


Twice a day a valet delivered a brass container of hot water to the ewer in the room; this indicated when one was expected to get up and shave and in the evening, if one wanted to wash in hot water, one had to return at the appropriate time. Along the corridor were common bathrooms and lavatories. Water was laid on to the rooms shortly after I went to live in the Club, with unfortunate results. One resident, a former Auditor General of India, turned on the tap and went to look out of the window, allowing the basin to overflow and causing the ceiling below to collapse. He went to live in a ‘home’ in consequence. Jas Paterson had a bathroom cut out of the large bed-sit which he occupied. Half-yearly he altered the focus of the room, moving the furniture to face the window in summer and inwards in the winter.

The managers had for some time been looking at other sites for the Club when their hands were suddenly forced by the introduction of capital gains tax and development charge. The existing building, built by Burn and extended by Bryce, was proving unsatisfactory. It could not easily be modernised; the kitchen was some distance from the dining room and the premises for the staff were like a dungeon, and such that staff were unwilling to tolerate. The house on the north side of Charlotte Square was contemplated when the Marquess of Bute died and death duties required that it be sold. Heriot Row was also considered. But nothing suitable had been found. Now something had to be done urgently as, after the new taxes came into force, any development or sale would become financially impossible. A brave step was taken. A deal was done with developers and demolition was begun before planning permission had been obtained for a new building.

There was now a pressing need to find some temporary premises which members could use and where the existing staff could be maintained. The family owners of the St Andrew Hotel could not agree on what to do with it, whether to sell or upgrade what was in effect a commercial hotel, or to do nothing. In these circumstances a lease of two or three years to the Club gave a breathing space and was not unattractive. For the Club managers it was a providential solution to their problem. The site was central and if the rooms were small this could be lived with. Several were joined together to form a reasonable sitting room; a bar, without which no club can exist, was formed and the reception area on the ground floor was expanded to create a morning room. The bedrooms were not en suite and for the period of lease I could not relax in my bath as the ventilator fan in the internal bathroom directed the cold blast directly onto the back of the bather. I was allocated two small rooms but all my furniture had to be stored.

In these temporary premises ladies were admitted for dinner, but for dinner only. In the planning for the new building Charles Ballantyne decided that bedrooms should be of a size that would admit of members’ wives being at some stage allowed to spend the night with their husbands. A ladies’ annexe and dining room were included in the plans. Thought was given to some provision for younger members but agreement could not be reached on whether this should be a squash court or a swimming pool.


Opinion was divided and eventually it was the developer who decided. On the basis that a decision could no longer be delayed, he arranged for the builder to strengthen the floor on the third floor for a swimming pool to be introduced.

One glad summer’s day the developers invited the managers and the residents to lunch in what is now the morning room. The room was unglazed and only polythene protected the diners from the elements. To everyone’s surprise little noise penetrated the sheeting from the Princes Street traffic and the building, so far as completed, was viewed with approval. Shortly afterwards it was ready for occupation. The Club furniture was taken out of store, the panelling from the old dining room proved more than enough for the lower-ceiled new dining room and the old familiar objects such as the gas cigar-lighter were once more in place. With relief, the members and the loyal staff left their temporary quarters for their new home.

Sadly for me, the old flats had been sold to the developers who converted the whole block, at all levels except for the ground floor (now a restaurant), into luxury flats. My fellow flatmate, General Arnott, had died. I came down in the world by being reduced to two small rooms with fitted cupboards and a bathroom. Only some of my old furniture could still be around me. The old staff, adapting to the new set-up, resumed their duties. Isa, who had joined the University Club as a kitchen maid during the First World War, served once more in the dining room and Maisie again satisfied the orders of the drinkers in the new sitting room with her unpredictable, somewhat resentful, moods. But the awesome cherry-waistcoated head hall porter no longer dominated the foyer. Wonderment at the sophistication of the new clubhouse mingled with nostalgia for the old familiar things. After three years in the wilderness a new and exciting era had begun.

Image:

Painting titled Dinner at the New Club, unknown artist. Featured in The New Club: a history, edited by Morrice McCrae (The New Club, 2004).

Increase in SubscriptionsIt was agreed at the Graduates’ Association’s Annual

General Meeting that membership subscriptions should be increased in October 2015 to:

£35 (Annual), £290 (Ten Year) and £400 (Life)The Honorary Treasurer regrets the necessity of the

increase but, as a result of continuing annual deficits, these subscription increases have become essential.

Members with Standing Orders are asked to notify their banks of the increase.


Alexander Monteith Currie (1926-2014) and John Davidson (1857-1909): a University Secretary and His Inspiration

by Owen Dudley EdwardsReader in American History until he retired, Owen Dudley Edwards is a Honorary Fellow in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and an acknowledged expert on the history and historians of America, Ireland and Scotland, and of the University, notably on figures including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Burke and Hare and Robert Knox.

I remember one death in my boyhoodThat next to my father’s, and darker, endures;Not Queen Victoria’s, but Davidson, yours,And something in me has always stoodSince then looking down the sandslopeOn your small black shape by the edge of the sea,--- A bullet-hole through a great scene’s beauty,God through the wrong end of a telescope.

Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Of John Davidson’

Early in 1953 Alex Currie concluded his Oxford BLitt dissertation A Biographical and Critical Study of John Davidson with the final focus ‘it is the courage of John Davidson that one remembers after he has sung

his own epitaph’:My feet are heavy now, but on I go,My head erect beneath the tragic years. The way is steep, but I would have it so;And dusty, but I lay the dust with tears,Though none can see me weep: alone I climbThe rugged path that leads me out of time ---

Out of time and out of all,Singing yet in sun and rain,‘Heel and toe from dawn to dusk,Round the world and home again’.

And in the end it is courage that radiates from memories of Alex Currie, a big, strong man, usually smiling with a generous, infectious confidence, welcoming friend and stranger, facing the next task with realism and with courage.

It must have taken courage for the 14-year-old North Ayrshire boy to face new schoolmates when his father was transferred to Wales and he was enrolled in Portmadoc Grammar, similar in pride of identity, contrasting in the mysteries of those identities. It took courage serving in the Navy in the


Second World War, never actually seeing combat and never knowing when combat would thrust its torpedoes through the sea. And in the courage of so many different kinds needed at all levels of a university, he faced the many challenges as a Bangor undergraduate, an Oxford research student, and an administrator in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Edinburgh. Wiser than many contemporaries, and wiser than the academic fashion of the times, he held firmly to his Scots and Welsh identities. The farther Scotland receded, the closer he kept it at heart, whether as a lion in Burns celebrations throughout his life, or in his research choice of the Renfrewshire-born John Davidson (1857-1909).

For Davidson was his opposite as well as his occasional likeness. Davidson’s last journey into the sea in Cornwall left behind a bewildered poverty-stricken wife, waiting six months to know for sure that she was a widow, and two sons desperately struggling in their isolated youth. In contrast, in his years after Oxford, Alex Currie’s happiness in his wife and two sons was his glory. Davidson seems to have sacrificed his life (and his family) at his failure to retain fame and even livelihood; Alex Currie worked for the triumphs of others and forever advanced them, whether vice-chancellors, colleagues, students, or friends. The choice of Davidson as a research subject opened up perils that must have seemed formidably unique. Characteristically, Alex Currie chose to pursue a poet of great quality but very few friends - and those few were giants almost out of reach. Nobody might seem to have remembered Davidson in 1949, except Bernard Shaw his fellow-Nietzschean correspondent, Max Beerbohm still bitterly protesting against anthologists’ neglect of Davidson, T S Eliot who declared that Davidson’s ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ ‘is to me a great poem for ever’ and MacDiarmid including in his Golden Age of Scottish Poetry (1940, 1948) ‘The Last Journey’ (to be quoted as we have seen by Alex concluding his thesis), and ‘In Romney Marsh’ (to be read by Alex’s widow Pamela at his funeral). MacDiarmid also chose ‘A Runnable Stag’ whose readers are swept up in a stag-hunt only to rejoice in the stag’s defiance and demoralisation of his pursuers by his suicidal leap - into the sea. Davidson however harshly - and sardonically - critical of the decadence of the 1890s stood aside from elegant doomwatch ranging from the cult of Keats to the martyrdom of Beardsley, yet his very hardness made his embrace of death the more ruthlessly rational. Davidson’s admirers of genius had also including Virginia Woolf (Times Literary Supplement, 16 August 1917), who also would drown herself. Alex Currie controverted that by 88 years of affirmation in Carlyle’s ‘Everlasting Yea’.

In the event Alex proved himself a fine historian of Davidson, returning to their native Scotland in time as well as place, discovering Davidson’s origins to the permanent advancement of scholarly knowledge. His conclusions have held firm under later scrutiny although never published beyond the thesis to which subsequent scholars have gratefully helped themselves. Alex’s courage remained when faced with the Waterloo so often awaiting research: when a rival apparently conquers the field under elite publisher auspices. By then a busy university administrator, he could hardly fight a


corner when wiseacres would wrongly assume the topic was saturated. But apart (probably) from accentuating his own positive embrace and enjoyment of the world’s intellectual promise, the thesis ensured he would always fight to keep his universities animated by culture, aesthetics and ideas.

Some effects cast their shadow before. John Davidson tried his ‘prentice hand with plays which required judicious appraisal rooted in love of theatre; so in his younger days as a university administrator, Alex Currie was an unexpected but welcome addition to student and staff stagecraft before and behind the scenes. At Edinburgh University he reversed the snobbish indifference to the Edinburgh Festival, all too widespread in the Oxbridge-obsessed decades preceding him, and ultimately enabled Yukio Ninagawa and the Toho Theatre from Japan to play Euripides’ Medea in the Old College Quadrangle with the heroine’s getaway dragon flying over its peripheral buildings. Alex’s judgements on Davidson and his writings foretold the professional he became: integrity personified most visible in sheer fair-mindedness. He may have been assisted by Davidson’s extraordinary changes in creeds, mode and style with consequent undervaluing of his earlier achievements. He had to defend younger Davidson from older self-contempt. And he began with his reversal of interwar literary dismissal of biographical and critical subjects’ parents, birthplace and boyhood, itself ruthlessly replacing the Victorians’ massive literary tombstones bulging with seemingly irrelevant ancestors. Alex’s thesis sought to understand and explain Davidson initially by discovery and dissection of his father’s life and struggles. The early twentieth century mocked the anguished quests for theophany among its ancestors: if a father’s pursuit of God obtruded in the early lives of subjects from Matthew Arnold to Edmund Gosse, it won merely sophisticated witticisms and smug sneers in satisfaction at emancipation. What Alex found and wrote, was that Davidson’s father’s ordeals merited description and divination in their own right.

John Davidson was a boy from Renfrew, but his father Alexander Davidson had been from South Ayrshire, and Alexander Currie at Oxford indeed followed his subject ‘Round the world and home again’. Far in advance of modern historical scholarship he contextualised the impact of nineteenth-century Protestantism on its votaries, illuminating the spirit of the times through the yearnings and convictions of the elder Davidson, and measuring the nature and force of John Davidson’s rebellion against his father by appreciation of that father in his own right, showing how Alexander Davidson’s ‘youthful, serious eagerness moulded into a character not likely to be very tolerant of human frailties’. He capped his findings with the clues in Davidson’s poems, notably the autobiographical:

His father, woman-hearted, great of soul,Wilful and proud, save for one little shrine

John Davidson


That held a pinch-back cross, had closed and barredThe many mansions of his intellect.

Alex Currie would start his university administration a few months later at Manchester University where he met Marcus Cunliffe pioneer integrationist of American studies, but he himself at Oxford had begun such mutual reinforcement of History and Literature as each other’s ally in the study of their secrets.

Professor Mary O’Connor of the University of Toronto would write in her ‘John Davidson. An Annotated Bibliography of Writings about him’ (English Literature in Transition XX. no. 3 (1977)) that the ‘major biographical study by J Benjamin Townsend, which Alex felt had pre-empted his own publication hopes, merely ‘sketched’ Davidson’s youth:

A M Currie’s unpublished thesis documents these years with reference to church, school, and university records. His dates ... often differ from those in Townsend. Some I have verified with General Register House, Edinburgh, and found to be correct: Davidson’s marriage (23 Oct. 1885); the birth of his sons Alexander (19 Dec. 1896), and Menzies (29 Mar. 1889). Currie also points to an important publication, hitherto unnoticed by Davidson biographers, Fergus Ferguson ed., Sermons by the late Reverend Alexander Davidson, with a Biographical Sketch (1893), which adds to our knowledge of Davidson’s father and the poet’s youth.

Alex’s modesty was charming to his acquaintances and invaluable to his diplomacy: this was an instance in which it had served him badly. He had been better than what he thought the best. But his diplomacy would play such important roles in furthering higher education links between the UK and a globe of lands from American to Africa, and Sweden hailed his achievements with its supreme Order of the Polar Star First Class bestowed by King Carl Gustav XVI himself.

We might fairly deduce that diplomacy had been aided in evolution by the necessity to draw together and judge the mutual impact of two individuals as undiplomatic as Alexander Davidson and John Davidson.

Diplomacy is one thing: judgement is another. They may be allies or enemies. Davidson’s early career as a schoolteacher Alex charters from various surviving accounts by pupils, and Alex’s evaluations of them are pointers to a future life where his judgements of university staff would be vital while seldom requiring them to be official. But his belief in good teaching stemmed from respect for students. The crucial role he played in Edinburgh and elsewhere in the democratization of universities was rooted in conviction that the needs of the student must come first including (where possible) the choice of place. Oxford may have shown him painful cases of academic appointments where the ability to lecture or even teach tutorially was the last requirement to have been considered. But his ideals of good teaching harmonised with those of academic freedom. His thesis saw that the background of religious controversy, as Scottish Protestantism argues incessantly within its multi-composite self, ‘may well be the origin


of [Davidson’s] love for philosophical disputation evident in many of his works, and of his combative nature where affairs of the mind were concerned. From this early age, he seems constantly to have been made to think and, for Davidson, to think came rapidly to mean rebel’. Alex’s wisdom in judging teaching is clear in his assessment of Davidson on the evidence of his pupils:

It is the picture of someone who seems to have a sincere, idealistic view of teaching, without the harsher quality of compromise which is necessary in a teacher who is going to be judged by ‘results’.

Alex also saw the limits of conventional judgement:It is, of course, not unlikely that someone who loved coaching boys in dramatics or elocution, who, in fact, only found response from the more intelligent members of his class, might prove to be, in the long and utilitarian run, a poor teacher to the majority of his class.

That is judicious: but its author had had stars in his eyes, having seen Shaw’s original St Joan, Sybil Thorndike, touring Welsh mining towns.

But in his judgements on Davidson, Alex was unusually keyed for the music of environment, giving due recognition to his conditioning by locale until he finally became part of it. So it would be with Alex himself, wherever he was.

Pamela made his a very happy life as he made his way through the administrations of Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield, and at Sheffield University the gentle idealist met his ideal collaborator. He became its Secretary in 1965, and Hugh Norwood Robson became its Vice-Chancellor in 1966. Both were exiled Scots, Robson a native of Langholm like (but not too much like) Hugh MacDiarmid. In an age of thrusting, abrasive public men all too ready to mistake courtesy for weakness, Norrie Robson and Alex Currie were gracious by nature, though Robson’s patience was strained by agonising arthritis and Alex’s diplomacy was sometimes urgently needed. Genuine friendship or mutual regard was also unusual between vice-chancellors and university secretaries, however solid might be their tactical and even strategic unity. Snobbery added to it: vice-chancellors thought themselves a social cut above their secretaries, secretaries believed they were the Richelieus serving empty Bourbons. The Robson-Currie partnership was light-years away from such posturing. It lasted until 1974 when the sudden resignation of Principal Sir Michael Swann brought the offer to Sir Hugh Robson to lead his Alma Mater (whence he had graduated in Medicine in 1941 and where he had later been a Lecturer in quieter times). Robson found Edinburgh still licking its wounds after the civil wars where Principal Alexander Monteith Currie


Swann had battled all the unfruitful way up to the law courts against Rector Gordon Brown, with the Secretary, Charles H Stewart, grimly awaiting retirement in 1978. Stewart had more or less run the University from 1948 to 1965 during the Principalship of the Merovingian Sir Edward Appleton; under Swann he was firmly restored to second place, but suffered more than Swann during student demonstrations against University ownership of shares in Apartheid South Africa, &c. Robson wisely concluded that what was needed was his wise and loveable collaborator from Sheffield, and Alex prepared to return to his own Scotland. And then came disaster. Pain finally took its toll on Robson’s heart and Alex’s first formal Edinburgh appearance would be at his funeral, where the Currie children gave what comfort they could to their old friends the young Robsons.

For Alex himself, instead of the resumption of the happy partnership, he would have to train up four successive Principals. The easiest would be Acting Principal the Very Reverend Professor John McIntyre in 1979 who had previously acted on Swann’s departure so effectively that Robson found the worst bitterness partly dispelled. So would Robson’s immediate replacement the great economic historian Berrick Saul, both of them happily in tune with Alex Currie’s love of learning and conviction in academic democratisation. Edinburgh would have done well to have made permanent appointments of either acting Principal, but Swann had been such a promotion under good auspices, and the memory was toxic. Saul went to York before permanent status was offered, McIntyre came back, and the Secretary was the man remaining at the wheel. The illustrated history of the University by Professors Robert Anderson, Michael Lynch and Nicholas Phillipson wrote its last sentences: ‘Ever since its foundation, the university has balanced its obligation to the city, the nation, the Empire, the international academic community. But when fewer than half of its students come from Scotland, and the once close links with the local schools have all but dissolved, the community base is perhaps the part of the balance most in need of attention.’ The judgement is wise, all the more in preaching a sermon to resonate in academic ears as the twenty-first century advances. But Alex Currie had already seen this, and had turned the dangerous corner. Edinburgh scorned by its own university gave way to Edinburgh integrating with its university once more. Many individual academics played a vital part here, but the quiet spirit of Alex Currie in a thousand ways, many small and some great, made the University think its immediate civic identity once more. Left-wing Scottish Socialist revolt following Gordon Brown was in danger of being replaced by rekindled Anglophobia set alight by Margaret Thatcher. Alex Currie upheld love of all the British countries, fostering goodwill and dampening anger by celebration of all identities. And it was necessary. When in 1979 the new Principal, Dr (later Sir) John Harrison Burnet, first entertained the leading professoriate his wife asked Professor Neil MacCormick, the leading SNP intellectual of the day, why on earth Scots kept up their ridiculous separate legal system instead of conforming to England. She was lucky in her choice of victim, but even that benign soul


was unable to conceal his anger. Edinburgh was facing the common British fate of reduction to a colonial testing-ground, whence favoured Oxbridge exiles might retrieve their return tickets. Or, as it turned out, it had faced it. Alex’s work in democratisation was matched by repatriation.

He played his part in many local institutions, all the more when they had international as well as immediate significance. He could be strong and even hard when the university’s good name was threatened by some malign or foolish utterance. Of the four Principals he served (he retired under the kindly Sir David Smith) he may have been closest to the only Scot among them, McIntyre, in humour, in courtesy, in modesty, and in common sense. And as it happened the two of them would be key figures in the University’s foremost symbolic revolutionary moment when McIntyre now as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and Alex as University Secretary had to mastermind the arrival of Pope John Paul II at New College, threatening disruption by anything from fanatical bigots to intoxicated assassins. Alex was ideal for any challenge in his calm, and in his geniality, with a smile that could melt icebergs and soften tempests.

When he died, I opened his eulogy by honouring his love for his fellow-Ayrshireman Robert Burns with the lines from ‘To Mr John Kennedy’:

... if as I’m informed weelYe hate as ill’s the very de’ilThe flinty heart that canna feel --- Come Sir, here’s tae you:Hae there’s my haun’, I wiss you weel And Gude be wi’ you.

Alex would modestly demur, but would ultimately accept that. But I can see him suggesting the real end was one he gave to his ‘John Davidson’, the end of Davidson’s own epitaph:

Farewell the hope that mocked, farewell despair That went before me still and made the pace. The earth is full of graves, and mine was there Before my life began, my resting-place;And I shall find it out and with the deadLie down for ever, and my sayings said --- Deeds all done and songs all sung, While others chant in sun and rain, ‘Heel and toe from dawn to dusk, Round the world and home again.’

Notes:1. The poem ‘Of John Davidson’, Scots Unbound (1932) is reproduced by kind permission of Hugh MacDiarmid’s estate.2. John Davidson was a student at Edinburgh University for one year, 1876-1877.Images:P. 44. John Davidson, photographer unknown.P. 46. Alexander Currie, photography by Digital Imaging Unit, U of Edinburgh Library.


Scottish Universities’ International Summer School (SUISS)by Elsa Bouet and Tara Thomson, Directors The Scottish Universities’ International Summer School was founded as a non-profit organisation by Professor David Daiches in 1947. In the spirit of the Edinburgh International Festival, SUISS brings together students and academics who, irrespective of their national, religious, cultural or gender differences, share a love of literature. SUISS is affiliated with seven prestigious universities: The University of Aberdeen, The University of Dundee, The University of Edinburgh, The University of Glasgow, The Open University in Scotland, The University of St Andrews, and The University of Strathclyde.

Each summer we offer three courses in Text and Context: British and Irish Literature from 1900 to the Present, one course in Creative Writing, and one course in Contemporary British and Irish Theatre and Performance. Our literature courses offer extensive examination of theoretical approaches to Modernism, Scottish Literature, and Contemporary Literature. Our Creative Writing course allows students to develop their personal writing portfolios, and our Contemporary British and Irish Theatre and Performance course offers students a supportive environment in which to further their skills in analysing drama and performance. SUISS welcomes undergraduates, postgraduates, teachers, and lecturers from around the world and, in 2014, hosted students from 40 different countries.

Throughout its 68 years, SUISS has achieved a high academic standing and has welcomed many distinguished literary scholars, critics, and writers. Lecturers for the Text and Context course have included such eminent figures as Tom Devine, Terry Eagleton, Laura Marcus, Toril Moi, Alan Riach, Elaine Showalter, Randall Stevenson, Laurence Rainey, Angela Smith, Robert Crawford, John Drakakis, and Patricia Waugh. Writers who have contributed to the Creative Writing course have included Douglas Maxwell, Michael Rosen, Neil Gaiman, Liz Lochhead, A L Kennedy, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Anne Fine, who are among Great Britain and Ireland’s foremost contemporary literary figures.

SUISS is based at The University of Edinburgh, which offers our students excellent educational and accommodation facilities, the opportunity to enjoy the beautiful environment of the capital city, and to explore the cultural and historical sites across Scotland.

To learn more about the summer school, please visit our website at www.suiss.ed.ac.uk or email Lauren Pope, the Administrator, at [email protected].

www.suiss.ed.ac.uk

www.suiss.ed.ac.uk



New Writing from SUISSEvery alternate year SUISS compiles and publishes a collection of new writing from its students on its Creative Writing courses. There is never enough space in each volume to include all the submissions worthy of inclusion. The University of Edinburgh Journal is delighted to have the opportunity to publish a few of the pieces that had to be left out. This year all these pieces are poems by students from France, Pakistan and Germany, but we hope to able to repeat this section in future issues, and to include other forms of new writing from next year’s students.

Asylum Seeker’s NightmareNightly, He forces himself to wipeFrom his mindThe suffocating baby, Footstep for escaping massesSeeking air

The fearful, angry facesTossing his sister overboardBefore the boat dippedTaking hundreds, sliding, slipping,Clenching falling bodiesYelling until open mouths Drowned in salty tears

And he, clawing, grasping, Seized the tiny board,Clung to survivalShoving the gasping old manInto the mass of bodiesEngulfed by rolling waves,Sad eyes on himForeverAccusing

Eleonore Blaurock-Busch


Journey to Another LandIn Memory of Bernd W. Busch who died April 29, 2014

I held your hand and walked you down the aisleaway from graffiti, sharp memories,away from agonies of yesteryear.Provided soul food, crutches, escorted you

away from graffiti, sharp memories.For yet another blink, stayed in the now,provided soul food, crutches, escorted youtoward sunshine and the rainbow land beyond.

For yet another blink, stayed in the now,wrapped comfort all around these fragile bones, stirred youtoward sunshine and the rainbow land beyond.Let Morpheus lift you into April clouds,

wrapped comfort all around these fragile bones, stirred youaway from agonies of yesteryear,let Morpheus lift you into April clouds.I held your hand and walked you down the aisle.

Eleonore Blaurock-Busch

SnapshotsIn December morning light,your body lies on crumpled sheets,your bright skin wrinkled, your cheek creasedon the pillow.

Against the wind on the seasideyou stand laughing, shutting your eyes,sand in your hair, salt in your mouth,your locks tangled.

Flooded in electric lightyour body lies under a sheet,your pale skin smooth, your eyelids closed,‘Sir, can you identify your wife?’

In the backyard of a tearoom,your grin mischievous, cup in hand,you sit cross-legged in a green chair,winking at me.

Margot Mazzia


Edinburgh CallsOn granite structureswooden walls creak as words escape

outside rain sneaks silencelike language it has pauses

cinching vows in smattering soundshooded plodding I mount city’s hills

imagining holes in windowscovering my splaying gait

like a sentence needing extra supportafter living mistily on pages of history

and a full stop to stare and look aroundfor a map everywhere alleys creep

on kidney stones a cobbled-pinchruns through legs

there is some charm in getting tirednursing crackling bones on benches

alone with a wet pigeonshouldering luggage the unpaid postman

of dark evenings emergingfrom the hazy basin of Forth’s estuary

over Queensferry Bridgequivering on cables

stroking winds anti-clockwisea metallic North Sea

spooks primitive musicbuses plow through wet spaces

you miss one and wait for the nextout of geographic love.

Rizwan Akhtar


Ghazal: MemoryKisi ka Intizar aina-i-khyal tha (Mirza Ghalib) I wait for you as a mirror waits for a face.

The expression that comes with absence is a memory it is a home I found willingly, you built with my memory

I do not have the courage to say that you will forget me In this way I become a culprit of words erasing memory

why you mentioned peripheral things in and out ours is a narrative supposed to be around our memory

In the distance I see an image holding a red rose for me What was not a garden, in the end a desert of memory?

electricity poles spread over colonial bridges rattling what ties them is my metaphor, your echoes of memory

the moon edging past tinted glass cabins staggers I see your face rubbing its disc for a paling memory

In front of each other time constitutes a chapter while rest is an open-e nded book like your memory

I tumbled over your mound of body ravaging inside you clearly huffed and spilled a long caged memory

Lahore can take some clues from your roaming eyes its streets are reviving you like ghazals hedging memory

on footsteps of mosque I saw you taking off sandals was the ritual of ablution for a prayer in my memory?

how many times the Call of Prayer took you on the rug how much you bent to God to bind me with your memory

every map promises the possibility of arriving destination the poet waits and waits before a page becomes a memory.

Rizwan Akhtar


Some Rains Have StoriesThe raindrops patter like words long held clouds are monolingual and battering

down in black puddles reflections writefaces pen the watery mirror for references

passage in which rain is an interpreter is translated from pouring to hailing

skins long covered are souls shut as bookswait for a pelt and we manage readings

in the frantic middle the story is vaguer wet haze coroners, dry patches haunt

we can make our way out of this plotonly if this silence concludes, before rain.

Rizwan Akhtar

Authors:Rizwan Akhtar teaches at the Dept of English, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan. His published in Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry NZ, Wasafiri, Postcolonial Text (Canada), decanto, Poesia (US), Exiled Ink, Pakistaniat: A Journal of Pakistani Studies (US), Solidarity International, Orbis, The Other Poetry, Planet; The Welsh International, Wolf, South Asian Review, Gutter: New Scottish writings, Open Road Review, ScottishPen, tinfoildresses (US), and in the Bloodaxe anthology Out of Bounds (2011).Eleonore Blaurock-Busch is a medical researcher and lyricist who appreciates the diversity of it all. She has written a number of medical books and just published her first children’s book. She studied poetry at Colorado University, Exeter College, Oxford and Edinburgh University. She lives in Germany, facing the struggle to write in a foreign language, no longer foreign to her heart. Margot Mazzia is a French-born writer who studied Philosophy and Literature in Paris before continuing as a postgraduate at the University of Oxford in the MSc in Creative Writing. She has also studied film making and has an interest in screenwriting as well as in fiction and poetry


ReviewsJean Grier and Mary Bownes. Private Giving, Public Good: The Impact of Philanthropy on the University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Pp.vi, 218. Hardback. ISBN 97807486 99576. £30.00.

A handsome book worthy of an important topic. For the bewildering range of research that has been carried out over hundreds of years

in the University, and which now expands to cover a multitude of fields, is sustained by more than good will. The public good that the University achieves through education and research is underpinned, as these chapters make clear, by a very large amount of private generosity. All Universities benefit in this way, but Edinburgh’s good fortune (and good management of donation and support) is the subject of Private Giving, and the University Press has made a handsome hardback of the story.

An abbreviated history of the University precedes a run-through of some of the schools, colleges, institutes, sections that constitute today’s enormous – enormously expensive, enormously successful – University of Edinburgh. As the Principal notes it has had over 400 years of success in educating tens of thousands of students, and this is an achievement to set beside the explosion of new fields he lists – epigenetics, Bayesian statistics, regenerative medicine – while the University and its city build this activity on a substantial bedrock of private philanthropy. That it continues is evident, and that it must continue is one reason for this book which will persuasively underline the excellence of what is done and the value of contributing to a University in full vigour. Beautifully produced and illustrated, the book would be a persuasive gift to anyone who thought of helping future public good through private giving.

Ian Campbell

David Goldblatt. The Game of our Lives: the Meaning and Making of English Football. London: Penguin/Viking, 2014. Pp xxv, 374. ISBN 9780670920587. £20.00.

This is an exceptional book. English football has changed slowly but completely over the decades to the extraordinary beast it is now, the

top layer awash with money (even more so after the announcement, days before this is written, of £5 billion from the latest TV rights auction) and the lower reaches struggling. Scottish football, with its many problems, exhibits a similar if much smaller-scale gulf between the haves and have-nots. But the phenomenon of change has been steady, gradual, perhaps not appreciated through the weekly familiar rituals of game, television, press coverage – and now, of course, internet coverage. But the change has been extraordinary, and it has taken an author like Goldblatt years (and a lot of research) to amass the evidence. His homework done, he has presented it in an exceptionally clear and concisely written form,


one which the reader who may not have a close interest in football can still follow while seeing the ways in which social, political, ethnic and other pressures have combined with the lure of money to produce the current position in England. Goldblatt writes of the “moments of grace, the collective drama and invented rituals and solidarities from which a different kind of nation might be imagined” from the indebted, money-driven, often cynical manipulation of the top layers of the English game. He charts with clarity the steps by which the first half of the twentieth century was transformed by changes in employment patterns, leisure possibilities, transport opportunities, disposable income – and above all, television and now the internet which shape the fan base, the viewer base, and the governance of English football.

All of this we might think we know to a greater or lesser extent through casual interest, but Goldblatt possess an incisive style of marshalling fact, condensing historical process and above all dismissing sham and incompetence which makes the book a pleasure to read. To describe the operation of the Football Association, faced with the EU, the European Parliament, European Council and European Court of Justice as “a hybrid of the punctilious provincial town hall and the clannish rotary club” is only one gem. In Scotland “the antics of the Old Firm mirrored some of the problems of the Scottish economy, with its peripheral location and small domestic market. However, the enmeshment of both clubs with Scotland’s sectarian division was not merely a symbolic contribution, but an active and often malign participant in its formation”.

Any reader who has lived through the decades of change this book captures so neatly will find much to enjoy in the clarity of its description of those decades, and in the concise way in which it despatches the ignorant, the devious and the criminal who crop up in the story. Money talks loud in this account, and the clarity of the writing makes clear to anyone the pressures shaping the current game. This book will give pleasure to any reader, even one who never glances at football.

Ian Campbell

John Chalmers. Duel Personalities: James Stuart versus Sir Alexander Boswell. Edinburgh: Newbattle Publishing, 2014. 174 pp, 34 illustrations. Paperback. ISBN 9780992867607. £8.00.

On 26 March 1822 a duel (the last, but two, in Scotland) was fought between James Stuart, an Edinburgh lawyer with many financial and

business interests, a great deal of property, estates in Fife and elsewhere and distinguished collections of books and pictures, and Sir Alexander Boswell, Bt., son of the great biographer James Boswell, and himself something of a man of letters and a former Member of Parliament. Boswell received a mortal wound. The episode became notorious. In the hands of John Chalmers, a meticulous researcher with the skill of his former profession of surgeon, and sifter of vast quantities of evidence, much of


it complex and sometimes pretty indigestible, the duel is put well, and very thoroughly, into its political and social context. It becomes a ‘peg’ on which to hang a fascinating and intriguing story of bitter political feuding, discreditable legal shenanigans and gutter-press journalism; of reputations gravely compromised, lives wrecked (and one - Boswell’s - lost) and fortunes dissipated; of smug society shaken, and long-overdue Parliamentary reform advanced. The duel itself was merely the central episode of a series of legal events which were really remarkable. In Parliament, Sir James Mackintosh gave it as his opinion that the trial of William Borthwick, a ‘supporting character’ and a pawn in the Stuart story and in Stuart’s original trial for the murder of Boswell – Stuart was unsurprisingly found not guilty - was itself extremely important: it had, he thought, excited a greater sensation in Scotland than anything which had occurred since the ending of the last Jacobite rebellion.

Stuart was a keen Whig, Boswell a staunch Tory. Both were landowners. Both were pillars of county and city society. Both were officers of the Yeomanry. Both were, in their different ways, well respected. Boswell died, and so retained some at least of his reputation. Stuart was acquitted at his trial, but subsequently lost his money and his good name in bankruptcy and shady dealings with the WS Society’s widows’ fund. The very fact that Stuart was brought to trial at all is fascinating. To kill a man in a duel was to risk the almost certain charge of murder. But no-one had ever been found guilty of such a charge, yet the offence remained upon the statute book. There is a dreadful irony in the fact that Boswell, while in Parliament, had argued for the repeal of legislation which was pointless, as unused; others argued that as long as men knew that they would never hang for killing another in a duel, resort to such a primitive method of seeking redress, or settling a score, would continue to be common.

Stuart had been subjected to a barrage of extremely unpleasant personal attacks in the Tory press and discovered that some scurrilous writings in the Sentinel came from the clever but relatively innocuous pen of Boswell. Worse had been said and written. Their duel was only one of several that might have arisen from this unfortunate journalism. Behind this crisis lay the disagreeable story of the Tory Beacon newspaper, which had among its financial backers none other than the Lord Advocate himself, Sir William Rae. It would be Rae who prosecuted Stuart at his trial for the murder of Boswell. This was an astonishing piece of misjudgement in his part, not to say improper conduct.

Rae comes out of the story with a reputation totally compromised. Sir Walter Scott emerges with his reputation a little tarnished. Henry Cockburn and Francis Jeffrey, Stuart’s counsel, are the white knights in a black saga of highly questionable legal proceedings. There is a host of subsidiary characters, from printers, editors and publishers, to advocates, law officers of the Crown and judges, and not a few politicians. There is high drama in this book, and the underlying (or is it overarching?) political and legal framework is so telling exposed by John Chalmers that one’s view of early


nineteenth-century Scotland and its institutions can never be quite the same again.

John Chalmers, like Stuart and Boswell a product of the University of Edinburgh, has found a topic worthy of his forensic and surgical skills. His scientific and analytical mind make him the ideal author of a study of this kind, and he is to be congratulated on having made a significant contribution to Edinburgh’s political, legal, social and literary history and to have done it in such a clear and (mostly) readable way. All interested in the period, and in these subjects, will benefit immensely from reading this stimulating, but at the same time sobering, book. Just occasionally the story becomes a little too over-detailed and convoluted to hold the attention, especially if one imagined, at the outset, that it was to be all blood-and-guts duelling, and such derring-do. But no professional lawyer or legal historian, surely, could have handled the evidence better or which greater understanding of the peculiar complexities of the Scottish legal system of the day. The illustrations are well chosen and the index is admirable. The most remarkable single feature is the table (page 84) showing the timings and the various stages in the preparations by the antagonists for arranging, literally within a few night-time hours, a duel which would end the life of one of two basically decent men who were both victims of a broken political and legal system.

Iain Gordon Brown

Charles Handy, The Hungry Spirit. New York: Broadway Books, Random House, 1999. 267pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0099227724. $19.00.

The Hungry Spirit is a thought-provoking book by one of Britain’s leading thinkers. Handy challenges accepted orthodoxies of the time and life

as it can be lived, placing stress on the role of self-interest and self-esteem for leading a purposeful life. The virtue of selfishness, self-responsibility, and personal integrity are vital. Handy explores the role of obstacles to ‘proper selfishness’ in society and the search for our real identity, and for some purpose in our life. There will always be opportunities to be taken or overlooked.

Charles Handy is author of six acclaimed business books including The Age of Unreason, The Age of Paradox, and Beyond Certainty. Educated at Oxford and MIT, he has been an executive of the Shell Oil Company and a professor at the London Business School, where he was a member of faculty.

The central theme of the book is life beyond capitalism: a quest for spiritual enlightenment, hope and purpose in the modern world. Handy makes a plea for a new educational system that meets the demands and needs of 21st century economy and society. ‘A young person should always have something to aim at, but something attainable, something retakeable, something which he or she can hold up as a mark of achievement, irrespective of age,’ a quotation from Dr (later Sir) Timothy Brighouse, Director of Education for the City of Birmingham.


Handy has foresight. He views the corporation as a citizen. Corporations not only have citizens, they are citizens; they also have responsibilities, which law and custom impose on them. We increasingly expect our corporate citizens to be accountable and act decently. Where there is no commitment there can be no trust. At the very least corporations need an informal licence to operate. Handy preaches accountability, which serves as the cornerstone for corporate success. For him, it is necessary to reinvent democracy through referenda. ‘Those countries with extensive experience of referenda find that the necessity for a referendum forces politicians to explain the issues. At the same time the populace is encouraged to focus their minds on the question before them … Referenda have worked well in Switzerland for 130 years, with citizens able to challenge government decisions at each level of government, and even to put forward their own proposals if they can collect enough supporting signatures’.

Hungry Spirit is a ground-breaking book, well-written and readable. In it there is much to consider.

Carey B SingletonEditorial note: Dr Singleton has submitted this review as a notice of a book still of interest to Edinburgh alumni and other Journal readers.

David Hume. My Own Life. Ed Iain Gordon Brown. Edinburgh: the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2014. 95 pp. ISBN 9780902198371. £20.00

On 18 April 1776, four months before his death, David Hume composed a brief account of his “literary pursuits and occupations”. Anticipating

“a speedy dissolution” after learning that he had been struck with terminal illness, Hume needed no more than thirteen pages to narrate his life from his birth in 1711 to his affliction with terminal disease in 1775. In twenty-one paragraphs, Hume reminisces how his Treatise “fell dead-born from the press” in 1739, and how three years later his Essays were received more favourably. He recounts how in 1748 the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding also suffered critical neglect, but how the following years brought more positive responses and new editions of his works. Yet this success was still uneven: although his Political Discourses were “well received abroad and at home”, his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (which Hume designates as “incomparably the best” of all works) went “unnoticed and unobserved”. And while the publication of his History of England in 1754 (and of the subsequent volumes in 1756, 1759 and 1761) sold enough copies to secure his financial independence and wealth, the work nevertheless evoked “one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation”. After serving a few years as secretary to the British Embassy in Paris, Hume returned to Edinburgh in 1769, where he was diagnosed with a “mortal and incurable” condition. The memoir ends in a most memorable concluding gesture when it suddenly switches to the past tense, as if Hume enacts his own death and speaks to his reader from beyond the grave. But only as if, since the memoir stubbornly resists any


temptation or promise of an afterlife of any kind --much to the indignation of James Boswell, who dismissed the memoir as a “daring effrontery”.

Despite Hume’s express wish to include the memoir as the preface to the posthumous edition of his History of England and the Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, it was published as a separate pamphlet under the title The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself in March 1777, accompanied by an extensive encomium by Adam Smith. Since then, the text has been reprinted, adapted and translated on many occasions and has found its way to online editions and even to the theatre stage. With this elegantly designed new edition, the Royal Society of Edinburgh for the first time makes available a scholarly edition based on the original manuscript, which has been in its possession as part of the David Hume Collection since 1838.

Dr Iain Gordon Brown, former Principal Curator in the Manuscript Division of the National Library of Scotland and authority on the Hume manuscripts, has edited Hume’s memoir with exemplary care and erudition. In an extensive introduction, Dr Brown provides a rich and highly readable account of the publication history of the text and the many critical commentaries it has evoked, addressing intricate questions such as the generic classification of the text and the ambivalent appeals to vanity in its opening and concluding paragraphs.

Striking a delicate balance between scholarly expertise and general accessibility, this edition appeals to a broad readership. Adding to this broad appeal is the inclusion of three different versions of the memoir: a facsimile of the manuscript and two edited transcripts, both supplemented with extensive notes and commentary. The first transcript presents a “clear, modern reading version” with a modernized spelling and is aimed at a general readership. The second, “scholarly” version retains the original spelling and makes visible the genesis of the text by clearly stipulating all of Hume’s deletions, excisions, substitutions, and omissions.

As the introduction makes clear, the brevity and apparent simplicity of Hume’s memoir should not be taken at face value. Critics have alternatively interpreted the text as a preemptive rebuttal of conservative critics’ anticipated speculations about the final fears of the skeptical atheist, or as balancing between genuine modesty and the narcissistic desire for control over his own biography. In its very simplicity, then, “My Own Life” stands as a complex record of Hume the man and the philosopher. If, as Dr Brown claims, “[i]n the Dialogues we see the skeptical philosopher at work, but in ‘My Own Life’ we meet the individual himself”, then the individual that emerges from this text is at once very human and very determined, facing impeding death with a stoic resignation and a relentless secularism. The fact that the famed author and neurologist Oliver Sacks borrowed the title of Hume’s memoir for his own moving announcement of his terminal illness in The New York Times earlier this year, attests to the continued importance and appeal of this most fascinating memoir. Thanks to the generosity of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the meticulous editorial labour of Dr


Iain Gordon Brown, it can now be enjoyed in a scholarly edition by a broad readership including everyone who happens to find his or her way to this most remarkable life.

Tom Toremans

Kenneth Scott. Lords of Dalkeith: A History of Dalkeith Palace and its Inhabitants. Argyll Publishing, 2014. 176 pp. Hardback. ISBN 9781908931740. £25.00.

This is a particularly tactile book, with colour illustrations on the dust jacket of Dalkeith Palace when it was newly re-built around 1705 and portraits

from an early period to much more modern, which are immediately of interest. The pages are laid out in a narrow columnar style with the footnotes unusually being placed at the side, which makes them very readable.

I have known of the existence of this property for years, having grown up nearby, but it was only last year that I ventured beyond the imposing entrance gates – The King’s Gates - illustrated on page 134, to discover this wonderful building and the extensive grounds beyond. I too was only “vaguely aware of the Palace itself”. A walk in the parkland revealed the beautiful bridge pictured on page 115 together with the amazing Conservatory, or orangery, pictured on page 133 which I had not known about until making this visit. It is easy to imagine the area surrounding the house laid out in formal style and this is illustrated in the 1624 plan on page 62. Nowadays it is more easily maintained as grassland.

Chapter 1 looks at Scotland’s turbulent history during the 12th and 13th centuries when there was first a castle at Dalkeith and possibly a fort before that. The 14th and 15th centuries, covered in chapter 2, were a time of much unrest and complicated intrigue in Scottish history. Thereafter the book charts the development of the castle into a fine Palace and details those who lived and visited there.

Almost predictably, Mary Queen of Scots stayed there, on a visit in 1565, and also Queen Victoria and Prince Albert while making their first visit to Scotland in 1842. As there had been an outbreak of scarlet fever among the residents of Holyrood, they stayed for 6 days at Dalkeith Palace instead while they carried out official engagements in Edinburgh. In 1745 ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ arrived, uninvited, stayed for two nights and freely enjoyed the reluctant hospitality, as the Duke of Buccleuch was not in residence, before setting off to march south with his army of 5,500 troops.

Through the 4th Duke of Buccleuch’s lifelong friendship with the future Sir Walter Scott, King George IV was persuaded to visit Scotland in 1822. At that time the Palace of Holyroodhouse was in a state of dilapidation and Sir Walter offered Dalkeith Palace as a home for the King in Scotland. The offer was accepted and there were frantic preparations for the King’s arrival, with just two months’ notice. The historic visit lasted from 15th to 29th August and the King stayed at Dalkeith Palace throughout.

Many improvements to the house were made at the instigation of the Duchess of Buccleuch, who, having spent much of her life at Court,


returned to the Palace in 1701 determined to convert it into a suitably royal residence, employing the architect James Smith to redesign the east front. The interior of the Palace was grand, being described by a visitor in 1732 as ‘furnished with the most costly elegance’. It was Duchess Anna who installed the black and white marble entrance hall, with rich oak panelling, a grand marble staircase and several marble chimney-pieces carved by Grinling Gibbons.

Through the years a number of Dukes of Buccleuch have spent time and energy on the development of the estate. The Episcopal church of St Mary was built just inside the entrance gate in 1843 with an impressive interior and with one of the only two water-powered organs in Scotland. A walled garden was established on the south-facing slope across the North Esk covering twenty acres, which became famous throughout Britain. From 1831 onwards a number of projects were carried out including the construction of the twelve-sided conservatory, which was intended as the centerpiece of a new formal garden, but which was never completed.

The final chapter of the book looks at more recent history. The Palace was unoccupied during the First World War but the army had a base in the stables and conservatory and dug trenches in the grounds. At the beginning of the Second World War the house was requisitioned and occupied by Polish troops. The 8th and 9th Dukes made little impression on the Palace allowing it to be used as offices and, since 1986, it is now rented to a consortium of University of Wisconsin campuses. The present 10th Duke has plans to redevelop the Park with a new visitor centre, restaurant and adventure playground near the stables and conservatory. This is yet to happen.

I immensely enjoyed reading this book and finding out the history of this very large house and the complex lives of its occupants. I know of no opportunities to view the interior of the Palace but the exterior remains unchanged and can be enjoyed at close quarters. I will certainly enjoy revisiting the area again soon, accompanied by my new knowledge of the Palace and its inhabitants.

Joan H Meikle

Ian Simpson, Murder in Court Three. Kibworth Beauchamp: Matador, 2015. 273 pp. Paperback. ISBN 9781784622138. £7.99

Another series of competent roman policiers ecossais is moving steadily forward with the publication of Ian Simpson’s third novel featuring

Detective Inspector Flick Fortune and her Sergeant Bagawath (‘Baggo’) Chandavarker, Murder in Court Three. It is a worthy and welcome successor to Murder on Page One and Murder on the Second Tee. Ian Simpson is a retired High Court judge, and the legal background to his novels is impeccable, accompanied this time by the Royal Company of Archers, a delight for those who enjoy the settings of the traditional Edinburgh establishment. Simpson’s use of local topography is also accurate. The reader of Murder


in Court Three, however, is clearly expected to have read Murder on the Second Tee, since the murder with which it dramatically opens interrupts the fraud trial in Edinburgh which closes the earlier book; readers who have not done so find themselves at something of a disadvantage in the opening chapters. This is a good way of encouraging further sales of the previous titles in the series.

Simpson weaves a good plot, the denouement providing a suitable twist at the end, and his characters are wholly credible and well-developed. The reappearance of Flick Fortune’s former guvnor, ex-Inspector Noel Osborne (‘Inspector No’) as an obstructive journalist adds spice to the plot. A series that features an Asian detective working with, and reporting to, a female guvnor ticks two serious boxes for the reading public. If Lewis can get his own series after the death of his guvnor Inspector Morse, perhaps Baggo Chandavarkar can too. After all, the novel ends with the arrival of Flick’s first baby who has spent the whole volume in utero. We await the fourth title of this engaging series with avid interest.

Peter Freshwater

Reviewers:Iain Gordon Brown recently retired from the National Library of Scotland,

where he was in charge of extensive collections of Scottish literary manuscripts. He has published widely in the field.

Ian Campbell is Professor Emeritus of Scottish and Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh and Reviews Editor of the Journal.

Peter B Freshwater is former Deputy Librarian at the University of Edinburgh and Editor of the Journal.

Joan H Meikle is Assistant Secretary for the University of Edinburgh Graduates’ Association.

Carey B Singleton, writer, poet, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Geography at the University of Maryland. He is author of Reflections, a book of poetry.

Tom Toremans is Professor of English literature at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and former Nominated Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University of Edinburgh.


ObituariesThe following deaths of members of the University have been intimated to the Association. Further details, in some cases, may be found in The Scotsman, The B.M.J., The Veterinary Record and other newspapers and journals. If no date of death is recorded, no exact date has been passed to us by the Development Office.

The annual list of deceased graduates is issued by the General Council in their Annex to the February Billet. This can be consulted online on the Council’s website at www.general-council.ed.ac.uk/publications.htm or by writing to the Secretary of the General Council, University of Edinburgh, Charles Stewart House, 9-16 Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1HT.John William Stephen Adams BD 1995: in Kirkcaldy, 8 November 2014, aged 70. Born in

Cowdenbeath on 29 June 1944, Adams was educated at Cowdenbeath Primary and High School. In 1960, he joined the Royal Air force and served in England, Germany and Borneo. Adams reached the rank of Corporal, working as Chef responsible for the Sergeant and Officer’s Mess. He also received several City and Guild certificates before his service ended in 1971. From 1971 to 1974, Adams worked as Chef for the Fife Health Board Lynebank Hospital and, from 1974 to 1977, trained at Glasgow’s Bible Training Institute. In 1977, he began work as a Storeman for Woolworths in Dunfermline and, in 1980, joined the London City Mission. In 1987, Adams returned to Cowdenbeath and worked as a self-employed window-cleaner whilst studying for entry into the University. After graduation, he worked as Chef at Todd & Duncan Mill, Kinross, until being made redundant in 2005. Adams spent the next 14 years as Elder and Reader in his local church.

Brian Devlin Baigrie BSc 1970 PhD 1974: in Crowthorne, 15 December 2014, aged 67. Born 20 February 1947, worked in flavour and trace analysis and, in 2004, he became Principal Scientist with Reading Scientist Services. An accomplished sportsman, Baigrie has been honoured by the JustGiving charity.

Robert ‘Robin’ Alexander Stewart Barbour KCVO MC: 18 October 2014, aged 93. Born on 11 May 1921, he was educated at Cargilfield School, Rugby. His studies at Oxford University were interrupted by distinguished war service from 1940 to 1945 with the Scottish Horse. Barbour wrote a history of the Scottish Horse and continued to serve in the Territorial Army for ten years after the war ended. He studied for the ministry at the University of St Andrews and undertook postgraduate work at Yale. In 1953, Barbour began work as the Secretary of the Edinburgh Council for Overseas Students and, a year later, as the University’s Chaplain to the same demographic. He remained at the University for nearly 20 years, being appointed Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Divinity. In 1970, Barbour became Secretary of the prestigious Studiorum Novum Testamenti Societas. The following year he was appointed to a professorship in the University of Aberdeen, retiring from the post in 1986. Barbour chaired a special committee into the mission and membership of the Church, known as the Committee of Forty; serving not only as the committee’s Convener, but it’s driving force from 1974 to 1978. A year later, Barbour was elected the youngest Moderator of the General Assembly in living memory. Since 1976, Barbour has been a Chaplain to HRH the Queen in Scotland, a post he held for over ten years. He was also Prelate of the Priory of Scotland, Order of St John.

David George Dryburgh Barr MBChB 1959 FRCPEd DCH RCPSGlas 1962: in Edinburgh, 23 December 2014, aged 78. Born on 14 February 1936, he was Consultant Medical Paediatrician at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh, and Simpson Memorial Maternity Hospital, Edinburgh. Barr was


also Senior Lecturer in the Department of Child Life and Health at the University from 1997 to 2008.

Francis Roger MacTaggart Brewis MA 1972: in Dumfries and Galloway, 18 February 2014, aged 64, studied Economics with the University and worked for the Scottish Government from 2003 to 2014.

Richard Trevor Broadhurst MBA 1986: 18 September 2014, aged 64. Born in Devon on 24 February 1952, from 1997 to 2008, he worked as a Policy Officer at the Forestry Commission. Broadhurst also worked as a Countryside Officer for Tayside Regional Council and, from 2008 until 2013, he became a Recreation Officer for the Forestry Commission.

Michael Eccles Macklin Brooke LLB 1965: October 2014, aged 72. Born in 1942, he was educated at Lycée Français de Londres. Brooke was called to the Bar in 1968 and remained in practice until 2004. He was admitted to avocat à la Cour d’Appel de Paris in 1987, and acted as a Circuit Judge from 2004 until his retirement in 2010. Brooke enjoyed boating and was a member of the Traveller’s club.

George Buckle MA 1951: in Kelowna, Canada, 7 December 2014, aged 85. Born in Edinburgh on 17 May 1929, he studied Education with the University and, in 1958, emigrated to Alberta, Canada, and taught at the Iron River School. He moved to Edson in 1965 and spent the remainder of his career there as a teacher and school principal, retiring to Edmonton in 1995. Buckle moved to Kelowna in 2004, where he spent ten happy years volunteering at the Museum and HAM Radio Club, and enjoying the Okanagan.

Fiona Helen Buxton (née Shaw) MA 1986: 17 June 2014. Buxton was elected to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council in 2002, and was elevated to the Cabinet after only three years. She carefully dealt with sensitive issues during her dual spells as Cabinet member, including adult social care and housing.

Geoffrey Douglas Carnall MA BLitt (staff); in Edinburgh, 20 February 2015, aged 88. Former Reader in English Literature and Honorary Fellow. A leading member of the Society of Friends (Quakers) and, with his wife Elizabeth, a tireless worker for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and for the Peace and Justice Centre, Edinburgh. A personal appreciation appears on p. 75.

Norman Douglas Paton Cathcart LLB 1971: in Kilmacolm, 30 November 2014, aged 65. Born in Dundee on 9 October 1949, he was educated at Dundee High School. Cathcart was a Partner in the firm Campbell Cathcart from 1997 to 2014.

Francis Ronald Clark MBChB 1951 FRCSEd 1964 FRCOG 1971: 30 April 2014, late Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist at the Royal Infirmary and Western General Hospitals, Edinburgh. Clark was also an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University.

Charlotte Elizabeth Coursier (née Marklew) MA 2011: in Oxford, June 2013, aged 25. Born on 11 May 1988, Coursier graduated with a first-class degree in Philosophy from the University. In 2012, she left Edinburgh to undertake postgraduate study in Philosophy at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

John McKenzie Grant Cowie BSc 1955 PhD 1958 DSc HonDSc CChem FRSC FRSE 1977: 18 March 2014, aged 80. Born in Edinburgh on 31 May 1933, he was educated at Moray House School and, during the war years, at Portgordon, Banffshire. His family returned to Edinburgh in 1948, at which point he enrolled in the Royal High School. Cowie went on to study at the University and, after graduation, remained with the Chemistry department to pursue research. He was appointed to an Assistant Lectureship in 1956. Cowie later moved to Ottawa


to undertake a two-year post-doctoral fellowship with the National Research Council of Canada. In 1960, Cowie joined the permanent staff of the NRC in Ottawa as Associate Professor, a position he held until 1967. He then returned to the UK to lecture in Physical Chemistry at the University of Essex. In 1969, Cowie returned to Scotland to undertake a Senior Lectureship at the University of Stirling. Cowie succeeded to the Chair of Chemistry at Stirling in 1973 and subsequently became head of the Chemistry Department for the next 14 years. He published Polymers: Chemistry and Physics of Modern Materials in 1973, a book which has seen several editions as a valued reference text. In 1988, Cowie transferred to Herriot Watt University where he was eventually made Professor Emeritus. He went on to edit Polymer and, in 2001, received the Macro Group UK Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry in recognition of his work.

Fiona Mary Cowles (née Fletcher) MA 1960: in Newmarket, Ontario, 2 October 2014, aged 74. Born in West Kirby on 18 May 1939, she studied Geography at the University. Cowles settled in Toronto, Canada, in 1969, later moving to King Township.

Gordon Younger Craig PhD 1951: 3 October 2014, aged 89. Born in Milngavie on 17 January 1925, Craig was educated at Hillhead High School and attended Bearsden Academy before enrolled in Glasgow University. His studies were interrupted by war-time naval service. Craig was a keen fundraiser for Glasgow’s University Geological Society and was made Demonstrator in the Glasgow department from 1946 to 1947. In 1947, he took up a lectureship at the University and went on to become Senior Lecturer and Reader in 1960. Craig became the first James Hutton Professor of Geology at the University in 1967 and, from 1981 to 1984, he headed the Department of Geology. His Geology of Scotland has run through four editions and remains an important reference text. His Presidential address to the Edinburgh Geological Society in 1969 was published in the Scottish Journal of Geology. Craig served as President of the International Commission on the History of Geological Sciences from 1984 to 1989. In 1990, he received the Mary C Rabbitt History of Geology Award from the Geological Society of America’s History of Geology Division. Craig served as founding trustee of Our Dynamic Earth from 1995 to 2001, and his A Geological Miscellany remains a hugely successful publication.

John Corsar Cumming MA 1954: 28 August 2014, aged 80. He grew up in Dunblane and was educated at Hurst Grange Prep School and Trinity College, Glenalmond. Cumming was an accomplished linguist and played rugby for his school’s first XV. In 1949, he began National Service as a subaltern in the Royal Army Service Corps, achieving the maroon beret as a parachutist. Whilst studying German at the University, he enjoyed skiing and fishing, and was active with the University’s training corps under Sir Alick Buchanan Smith. Upon graduation, Cumming pursued a career with ICI Fibers as a Sales Manager in the Artificial Fibers Division, Harrogate. He travelled extensively behind the Iron Curtain and lived in Sweden for three years. Cumming served in the Territorial Army, achieving the rank of Captain with the 12th Yorkshire Parachute Battalion. He retired in 1984 and moved to Edinburgh. His main interest was angling and travelled the Borders extensively to do so until incapacity made it impossible. Nevertheless, at the age of 77, he landed a Tweed salmon estimated to weigh 25 pounds.

James Mitchell Davidson MBChB 1954 MFOM RCPLond 1981 MRCGP 1972 DIH Eng 1981: 26 May 2014, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, a member of the Society of Occupational Medicine and Honorary Secretary of the Eastbourne division of the British Medical Association.


Davidson worked as Occupational Health Advisor for Eastbourne and Hastings, and as Employment Medical Advisor to Egham Rehabilitation Centre. He also held the post of Chief Medical Officer for Brunei Shell Petroleum in Borneo and Shell BP, Nigeria.

Ann Mary Dresser (née Beckitt) BSc 1958 PhD 1962: 3 May 2014, aged 78. Born on 21 August 1935, she studied Zoology and Immunology at the University before undertaking post doctorate study at Cal Tech from 1961 until 1963. Dresser held a position in the Department of Immunology at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School from 1963 to 1965. She then went on to the Mount School, Mill Hill, London, from 1971 to 2000.

Denis Macdonald Duncan BD 1940 MA 1943: 7 January 2014, aged 93. He was brought up in Slamannan, Falkrik, and helped to mastermind the success of the Lin Berwick Trust by editing its monthly newsletter and regularly writing about its work. Duncan was Deputy Director of the Westminster Pastoral Foundation in London and was minister for the Church of Scotland parishes of Trinity Duke Street, Glasgow, and St Margaret’s Church, Juniper Green, Edinburgh. He worked as a documentary writer for Scottish television, published hundreds of articles and 15 books. At one time, Duncan owned the publishing house Arthur James Ltd.

William Falconer Duncan BSc 1950: 20 January 2015, aged 86. Born in Dunfermline on 12 June 1928, he went on to study Physics at the University before undertaking further study in Metallurgy at Glasgow Technical College. He received a Mono-Nickel Fellowship in the mid-50s and travelled extensively investigating rolling mills. In 1957, Duncan emigrated to the United States with his family and began work for Revere Copper and Brass in Baltimore, Maryland. He went on to work for Reynolds Metals Company in Richmond, Virginia, before moving to Massachusetts in 1966 to work for Morgan Construction Company, where he spent the remainder of his career. An accomplished athlete and a veteran of the British Army, Duncan was also a Fellow of the Institute of Materials.

Kazimierz Piotr Durkacz MBChB 1943 MD 1946 LDS 1951: 14 July 2014. Durkacz received his medical training from Edinburgh’s preeminent Polish School of Medicine, established during the events of the Second World War.

Robert Garth Dyson BSc 1977 MBChB 1980 MRCGP 1984 DCCH RCPEd 1984 DRCOG 1983: 4 May 2014, served as Secretary for the South East Scottish faculty of the Royal College of General Practitioners, and was a member of the Scottish Council for the Royal College of General Practitioners. Dyson worked as Clinical Assistant in the Northern General Hospital, Edinburgh.

Hugh McCuish Ferrier MA 1951: 5 December 2013, aged 88. Born in Greenock on 11 June 1925, he was called up in 1943 and served as a Wireless Telegraphist in the Royal Navy for three years. After military service, he began studies for the Christian ministry, first of all in Skerray’s College, Glasgow, as he had left school early. He then went on to study at the University and the Free Church College. Ferrier was ordained and inducted in 1952 in Golspie Free Church, and thereafter he served in Free Churches in Knockbain (Ross-shire), Patrick and Inverness North. He was moderator of the Free Church Assembly in 1978. Ferrier retired in 1990, but continued to be very active in preaching and serving the Church. He wrote a book in his retirement on Church history entitled Echoes from Scotland’s Heritage of Grace.

Alan Fergus Finlayson OBE MA 1958 LLB 1960: in Edinburgh, 16 January 2014, aged 70. Born on 19 December 1934, he was a partner of Rankin and Reid. Finlayson was the first reporter to the Children’s Panel, City of Edinburgh, and thereafter


consulted with the Scottish Office. He spent 13 years as an Honorary Sheriff of Edinburgh Sheriff Court. Finlayson was also a stalwart supporter of Queen of the South Football Club.

Albert Fleming BSc 1967: in Hockenheim, Germany, 11 April 2014, aged 69. Born in Liverpool on 21 June 1944, he moved to Scotland to study Civil Engineering at the University. Fleming went on to work at Henry Balfour’s in Leven whilst undertaking a PhD level study in Chemical Engineering. In the mid 1970s, along with his wife Val, he founded Alval Engineering. In later years, the company was sold to make way for consultant engineering firm Scott Process Technology, for which Fleming worked as Managing Director from 1997 to 2014. He was a gifted motor sport competitor and devotee, participating in rallies, events organisation and with various motor sport governing bodies. He had also served as President for the Rotary Club of Leven.

Jenny Ross Fookes (née Elder) MBChB 1958: 15 September 2014. Born in Fife in 1935, Fookes began her studies at the University in 1952, fondly remembering her days ‘starving in a frozen garret’. Upon graduation, she undertook her early medical training at Kings Lynn General Hospital in 1956, and went on to further training in General Medicine in Norfolk and Guildford before her marriage in 1959. Fookes moved to Newcastle and then Birmingham to raise a family. She took up her own career again at the earliest opportunity, initially working in General Practice and Family Planning before qualifying as a Psychiatrist in 1980. She went on to pioneer children’s mental health services in Staffordshire as the first Consultant in this speciality for the county, retiring in 1991. Aside from her personal and professional achievements, she is most fondly remembered for her good humour and enduring optimism.

Hugh Alistair Forshaw BVMS 1976: in St Martin, Jersey, 5 January 2015, aged 61. Born 26 April 1953, was a Partner in Jersey’s New Era Veterinary Hospital from 1997 until his death in 2015. Forshaw gained wide experience with species both large and small, cultivating special interest in cardiopulmonary and thoracic medicine and surgery. Forshaw was very keen to care for exotic species, and spent much of his time after work caring for the injured and orphaned animals of Jersey’s rich countryside.

John Charles Foster MBChB 1945 FRCSEd 1953: 22 September 2014, was a Fellow of the British Orthopedic Association, and a member and former President of the North East Orthopedic Association. Foster held a position as Registrar in Orthopedics at Bradford Hospital, was Resident Surgical Officer at North Lonsdale Hospital, Barrow-in-Furness, and acted as House Surgeon at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

William Michael Garraway MBChB 1966 MD 1980 DObst RCOGEd 1968 DCH RCPGlas 1970 MFCM 1974 FFCM RCP 1981 FRCGP 1983 FRCPEd 1988: 31 May 2014, was Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at the University. Garraway was a Fellow of the Stroke Council for the American Heart Association, and a Fellow of the American Epidemiology Society. He held the post of Consultant Epidemiologist at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, and was also Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. Garraway published widely on the subjects of the epidemiology of strokes, benign prostatic hyperplasia and medical education.

John Godfrey PhD 1957: 20 August 2014, aged 83. Born on 13 June 1931, he received a PhD from the University’s College of Science and Engineering. Godfrey worked as a self-employed Science Policy Consultant from 1997 to 2013.


Irwin Stuart Goldstein PhD 1979: in Davidson, North Carolina, 20 August 2014, aged 67. Born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, on 12 July 1947, Goldstein was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and went on to study Philosophy at the University. He travelled extensively before teaching position at Davidson College, North Carolina.

Ivor Reginald Guild CBE LLB 1948: in Berlin, Germany, 3 January 2015, aged 90. Born in Dundee on 2 April 1924, Guild was educated at Cargilfield School, Rugby, and attended Oxford and Edinburgh Universities. He recorded his personal arms in 1957 with the motto ‘Be Just and Fear Not’, and was made Procurator Fiscal by Lord Lyon Sir Thomas Innes of Learney in 1960. His duties included regulating the use of heraldry in Scotland and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for his work. A partner in the longstanding firm Shepherd & Wedderburn for over 45 years, Guild was also Registrar to the Synod of the Episcopal Church in Scotland from 1967 onwards. He was Chairman of the Edinburgh Investment Trust for twenty years and held a number of directorships in various companies. Guild was Clerk to the Abbey Court of Holyroodhouse and Chairman of the Natural Museum of Antiquities of Scotland. He held the honour of Writer to the Signet and was a prominent member of Edinburgh’s New Club. A detailed account of his time there can be found on pp. 38-41.

Michael Douglas Gwynne BSc 1955: in Nairobi, Kenya, 9 February 2012. Born in 1932, Gwynne was raised in the US and returned to Edinburgh in 1948 to complete his education. He undertook postgraduate study at Oriel and Balliol Colleges, Oxford. Gwynne travelled to Kenya in 1959 as a Nuffield Research Fellow in Tropical Ecology, and joined the Plant Physiology Division of the East African Agriculture and Forestry Research Organisation. From 1967 to 1970, he led a 40-strong research team, sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society, which came to be known as the South Turkana Expedition. His participation during these years led to his receipt of the 1972 Patron’s Medal of the RGS. In 1973, Gwynne was appointed Project Manager of a Habitat Utilisation Project funded, in part, by the UN Development Programme. With the help of the Canadian International Development Agency, his unit developed into the Kenya Rangeland and Ecological Monitoring Unit. From 1978, he served in UNEP and, in 1985, Gwynne launched the Global Resource Information Database. In 1989, he became Director of GEMS and Assistant Executive Director of UNEP. Gwynne was a Fellow of Balliol College and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Developmental Studies in the University of Sussex. He was a Fellow of the RGS from 1959 and, from 1989 to 1991, served on its council. He was also a Fellow of the Linnaean Society and served on the editorial board of the East African Wildlife Journal and the International Journal of Monitoring and Assessment.

George Kenneth Hargreaves MBChB 1951 M 1969 FRCPEd 1971: 15 May 2014, was a member of the British Association of Dermatologists. Hargreaves held the position of Consultant Dermatologist at the Skin Hospital of the University of Manchester, Stockport, and Macclesfield and Buxton Hospital. He was also Consultant Dermatologist at Leighton Hospital, Crewe, and Registrar in Dermatology at the General Infirmary, Leeds.

Abdel Ghani Hassan MBChB 1940: 3 September 2014, was a member of the British Medical Association and held the post of Clinical Assistant in Orthopedics at Rochdale Infirmary. He also held the position of House Surgeon at Kilmarnock Infirmary.

John Donald Henderson MA 1950 BD 1953: in Blairgowrie, 1 March 2015. Born in Kirkcaldy, Henderson attended Kirkcaldy High before studying at the University for entry into the Church of Scotland. His studies were interrupted by post-war


army service with the Intelligence Corps and the Royal Army Education Service. Henderson was ordained on 12 July 1953 as Assistant Minister at Dunfermline Abbey. He later moved to Mastrick in Aberdeen, where he was inducted in August 1954 to the Beechgrove Church. Henderson then moved to Buckie North for four years, followed by eight years ministering at Thornhill, Dumfriesshire. He then went on to undertake a six-year ministry in the Church of Cupar Old and St Michael of Tarvit, Fife. Henderson returned to the borders before taking up his final post in Aberdeen at Cluny Monymusk. He retired in 1992. Henderson was Vice-Chairman of the League of Friends of the Cottage Hospital.

Fintan Ward Hillyard MA 2008: 15 December 2014, aged 28, was educated at Methodist College, Belfast, before studying Politics and Sociology at the University. During his school days, Hillyard played rugby for the Methodist junior team that won the 2001 Medallion Shield. After graduation from the University, Hillyard played junior rugby at Deramore and, in February 2013, was selected to play for the Belfast Harlequins 1st XV. It was during the scoring of a try that Hillyard became first aware of an aggressive melanoma tumour in his abdomen. In his final days, he was supported well by the Belfast Harlequins, even participating in several fundraisers with the team.

Constance Catherine Mary Howie MBChB 1952 FFA RCGEng 1964 DAEng 1957: 13 April 2014, held the position of Consultant Anaesthetist at St John’s Hospital, Livingstone, and was Consultant Anaesthetist at Bangour General Hospital, Broxburn.

George Bell Hutchison MBChB 1954: 16 October 2013, held the position of Police Surgeon in the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary. Hutchison was a member and former President of the Dumfries and Stewartry Division of the British Medical Association. He held the rank of Surgeon Lieutenant in the Royal Navy Reserve, and was Honorary Surgeon in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Western General Hospital, Edinburgh. Hutchison also served as Chairman of the Area Medical Committee for Dumfries and Galloway Health Board.

Douglas Telfer Kay MBChB 1944 MRCPEd 1952: 2 December 2014, was Honorary Chest Physician for the Grampian Health Board. Kay was Olim Praeses and a Fellow of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh. A life Member of the British Medical Association, Kay held the position of Chest Physician and Clinical Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. He was a Research Fellow for the Royal Victorian Tuberculosis Trust and Registrar at City Hospital, Edinburgh. Kay was also Registrar at the Cameron Hospital for Infectious Diseases, Fife. He published widely on tuberculosis, pneumo peritoneum, and cavity closure on chemotherapy.

David Norman Kiernan BSc 1969: 18 November 2014. Born in Inverkeithing in 1947, he went on to study at the University before becoming a commissioned officer at the rank of Lieutenant in 1968. Kiernan began his teaching career at Donaldson’s School for the Deaf in Edinburgh. He later moved to Hawick to undertake a position at Hobkirk Primary School. Kiernan’s next post was as Head-teacher at Philiphaugh Primary in Selkirk, where he introduced community involvement. His final position was as Head-teacher at Langlee Primary in Galashiels, where he started a popular breakfast club. Kiernan spent five years on the Yarrowfield Village Hall committee. He was awarded the Lothian and Borders Meritorious Award for Bravery after saving the lives of two young boys in St Mary’s Loch. Kiernan was also a member of Selkirk Rugby Club and Selkirk Riding Company.

Ian Howard Lawrence MBChB 1950 MRCPLond 1955 DMRDEng 1958: 24 January 2014, was Consultant in Radiology at East Birmingham Hospital, Senior Registrar in Diagnostic Radiology at United Birmingham Hospital, and Registrar


in Diagnostic Radiology at United Sheffield Hospice. Published extensively on gastroenterology and radiology.

Charles David Letts MBA 1997: in Dunn, Berwickshire, 15 June 2014, aged 49. Born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 21 February 1965, he was brought up in College Valley in the Borders, and attended Rickerby Preparatory School in Ecclefechan, near Lockerbie. After leaving Fettes College, Edinburgh, Letts spent a brief period of time in the Merchant Navy before, in 1985, he joined the army. Trained at Sandhurst, he was commissioned into the Queen’s Own Hussars in 1986, seeing service in Germany, Canada and Northern Ireland. After studying at evening college, Letts eventually graduated from the University, whereupon, in 1990, he entered the historic Letts family run dairy-producing firm, based in Dalkeith (now FLB Group). Letts was a keen hunter and an enthusiastic member of the Border Reivers Polo Club in Greenlaw.

Norman George Robertson Mair BL 1960: in Edinburgh, 7 December 2014, aged 86. Born in Edinburgh on 7 October 1928, Mair was educated at the Edinburgh Academy and Merchiston Castle School. During his studies at the University, he played rugby for Edinburgh’s 1st XV. At the age of 22, he was called upon to play for Scotland from January to March 1951. He also played cricket for the University’s 1st XI, and again was called upon to represent his country in 1952. Mair held a number of teaching posts, including positions as George Heriot’s School, Edinburgh, and St Mary’s School, Melrose. His first experiences with journalism were in the form of football orientated material for STV’s Scotsport. They were successful and lead to him writing for the Sunday Telegraph and eventually, as rugby correspondent, for the Scotsman. Mair expertly reported on every Scotland game for over 20 years and, in a period bereft of instant replay, his observations were well-respected. He left the Scotsman in 1982 to join the Sunday Standard, and later wrote for the Observer as well as contributing to innumerable articles and publishing several books, including a history of Murrayfield.

John Milne Mallalieu BSc 1952: 22 December 2013, aged 88. Born in Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire, on 14 December 1924, Mallalieu spent four years in the Royal Air Force before he began study at the Royal Dick School of Veterinary Medicine. He then spent four years at Masham in the North Riding of Yorkshire to Wensleydale. During his time here, Mallalieu unfortunately contracted Brucellosis. In 1957, he purchased his own surgery at Newark and was on duty for four years, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, eventually finding a partner to ease the workload. Mallalieu was chief and only Veterinarian at the Newark County Show for 33 years. He partially retired in 1977, dropping large animals but continuing to see smaller species at the surgery for many years.

David Frederick Marr MA 1952: in Salisbury, 25 November 2014, aged 87. After graduating from the University, Marr undertook a Diploma of Education at Southampton University. In his first post at Newport Grammar School, Isle of Wight, he introduced German to the curriculum and taught French and rugby. In 1970, he became Head of Year at Cowes High, but returned later to his preferred teaching position of Head of Modern Languages at Heathfield Comprehensive in Sussex. Marr took numerous school groups on exchanges and skiing trips, encouraging and cultivating contacts all across Europe. He was a stalwart of the Isle of Wight Rugby Club and captained the team for several seasons. Marr maintained interests in gardening, woodwork and travel - particularly in India and Iraq where he underwent his National Service. In his later years, he moved to Wiltshire, where he continued to teach part time and help private students excel.


Keith James Marshall LLB 1969 MA 1971: in Edinburgh, 26 October 2014. After completing his training as a solicitor, Marshall served for many years at the Scottish Legal Aid Board, where he eventually held the post of Director of Policy. He left the board in 1997 to run his own business as KJM Consultancy until he retired in 2014.

Errol Wilson Mauchlan MA 1950: in Berkeley, California, 18 September 2014, aged 92. Born on 17 April 1921, Mauchlan served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War before studying at the University. He went on to work at the University of California, where he remained for 35 years. Mauchlan was an Assistant Chancellor for Budget and Planning at UC Berkeley and, after retirement, was Associate Chancellor at UC Santa Cruz.

Jean Ruth Williamina McAllister (née Ross) BSc 1946 MBChB 1947: in Blackheath, 26 December 2014, aged 91. Born and raised in the Borders, she was educated at Esdaile School for the daughters of Ministers and, after qualifying in medicine, studied under Sir James Learmonth with a view to a career in obstetrics. After demonstrating in anatomy at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, and having achieved primary fellowship, she was appointed Lecturer in Anatomy as the first female medical students were admitted there. Throughout her professional life she taught anatomy to the Charing Cross students as Senior Lecturer, and much enjoyed being made fun of in the Christmas student revues. She co-authored a standard text on anatomy and physiology for nurses, which ran to three editions and, with the Professor of Pathology, had a lively interest in forensic anatomy and osteology, contributing to at least one famous murder case and, in association with this interest, to television. In retirement she was an active supporter of the Anatomical Society and the Association of Clinical Anatomists.

James Samuel Gordon McCulloch BSc 1949: 14 September 2014, aged 86. Born in Auldearn on 11 September 1928, McCulloch worked for the East African Agricultural and Forestry Organisation in Kenya before becoming head of the Hydrology Research Unit of the Hydraulics Research Station, Wallingford. One of his most significant achievements was to nurture and encourage the Hyrology Research Unit into becoming the much larger and more sophisticated Institute of Hydrology, and eventually the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. He was a very keen racing car devotee and drove in a number of rallies when working in Kenya.

David Fairweather McFarlane MRCVS 1949: 31 October 2014. Born in Nether Drumgley in Angus, McFarlane represented the University at cricket whilst studying at the Royal Dick Veterinary School of Medicine. He later travelled to Durham to join the practice of John Peele, becoming a partner in 1954, when the firm Peele & McFarlane was founded. The practice provided official veterinary support to the long defunct Lambton Lion Park. He retired in 1988. McFarlane was heavily involved with local agricultural organizations such as the Durham Young Farmers Club and the Agricultural Discussion Society. He was also, for many years, a lecturer at Houghall Agricultural College and acted as trainer and advisor for the Agricultural Training Board. McFarlane was an active member of the North of England Veterinary Association, serving for many years on its ruling council and a full term as President. He was also a long-time member of Durham Rotary Club, for which he also served as President.

David Faulds Millar BSc 1945: 4 March 2014, aged 90. Following teacher training at Moray House in 1948, Millar taught Mathematics and Science at Bathgate Academy and Wishaw High School. He was Assistant and then Deputy Head at East Calder Junior Secondary between 1954 and 1963. He was then Head Teacher


at Nether Currie Primary School from 1963 to 1966. From 1966 until 1978, Millar was a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at Callendar Park College of Education in Falkirk. Upon retirement from teaching, he bought a hotel in Edinburgh, which he ran from 1978 until 1984. During that time and after leaving the hotel trade, he was able to fully indulge his passion for travel. Latterly, he lived in West Calder, enjoying gardening, gold and genealogy. He was a member of the Livingston Probus Club and served as President in 1995.

Lyndon Rees Morgan MBChB 1960: 15 January 2015, was Police Surgeon for Port Talbot. He also served as Clinical Assistant in Cymla Hospita, Neath, and as Part-time Medical Officer for British Steelworks in Port Talbot. Late House Surgeon for Swansea Hospital, Morgan also held the position of House Surgeon and House Physician at Neath Hospital.

Elizabeth Morrison Nichols (née King) BSc 1941: 21 December 2014, aged 94 years, studied Chemistry at the University, but also Radio Physics in her final year with a view to working on radar during World War Two. Commissioned as an officer in 1942, Nichols joined the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, working on radar fault finding in Norfolk. Following the war, she worked for British Drug Houses and in the Scottish Factory Inspectorate.

Isabella Bethune Oakenfull (née Heath) MBChB 1951: 19 January 2015, was late Clinical Assistant in Dermatology at the General Hospital, Scunthorpe, spent time as a General Practitioner there and held the position of Registrar at Lincoln County Hospital.

Abraham Bert Osborne MBChB 1945: 1 October 2014, was late Medical Assistant in Psychiatry of Drug Addiction at Guy’s Hospital, and House Surgeon for the Royal Victoria and West Hants Hospital, Bournemouth.

Iain Walter Percy-Robb MBChB 1959 PhD FRCPE FRCPath DObstRCOG: 11 February 2014. Professor in the Department of Pathological Biochemistry, Western Infirmary, Glasgow.

Thomas Alexander Potter BSc 1985: 14 November 2014, aged 59. Born on 9 January 1955, he was educated at Woodmill High School, Dunfermline. Potter’s first job was as a telephone engineer. After a serious motorcycle accident in 1978, he changed direction and entered Napier College in 1980, studying Economic History and Politics at the University thereafter. Never fully recovering from the accident, Potter set about becoming a self-taught computer maintenance expert. He was a distant relative of Sir Patrick Geddes and a member of the Sir Patrick Geddes Memorial Trust and the Ballater-based Sir Patrick Geddes Group, utilising his computer skills to widely publish Geddes’ philosophy. Potter was largely responsible for a permanent exhibition about Geddes’ life and work, first displayed for the Scottish Government at Holyrood and now on show in Ballater Library. He also organised the installation of a commemorative plaque on the site of Geddes’ birth.

Nigel Stuart Purcell BCom 1975: 4 July 2013, aged 59, became a solicitor and later joined the British Transport Police. Purcell maintained interests in travelling, astronomy and music. He enjoyed walking through his local countryside, taking several accomplished photographs of flora and fauna. Purcell was a long-term supporter of the Dog’s Trust, and contributed to their work on a regular basis.

John Roberts MBChB 1958: 21 December 2014, was a member of the British Medical Association. Roberts was late House Physician of the Cumbernauld Infirmary, Carlisle, worked as House Surgeon at Falkirk Royal Infirmary, and held the position of House Officer in Obstetrics at City Maternity Hospital, Carlisle.


George John Romanes BA PhD MBChB 1944 DSc: in Skye, 9 April 2014, aged 97. Born in Edinburgh on 2 December 1916, he was educated at the Edinburgh Academy and the University of Cambridge. Romanes was accepted to the Marmaduke Shield Scholarship in Human Anatomy from 1938 to 1940, and was appointed to a Demonstratorship in Anatomy in 1939. He returned to Edinburgh to complete his medical training at the University. After graduation, he returned to Cambridge for two years as Beit Memorial Fellow for Medical Research. In 1946, Romanes was appointed Lecturer in Neuroanatomy at the University. From 1949 to 1950, he worked in the Department of Neurology in Columbia University, New York, funded by a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship. In 1954, he succeeded J C Brash as Professor of Anatomy at the University. One of his most significant achievements was the restructuring of the Anatomical Museum, which, in 1958, allowed the installation of the first electron microscope in the UK. In 1959, Romanes was appointed Chairman of the Board of Management of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh and Associated Hospitals. He held this position for 15 years. From 1979 to 1983, he was Dean of Medicine at the University. For 21 years he edited the Journal of Anatomy and Cunningham’s Textbook of Anatomy and the associated Manuals of Dissection. He was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1955 and to the Aesculapian Society of Edinburgh in 1962.

Roland Franklin Schlueter PhD 1955: in Seattle, 4 December 2014, aged 94. Born in Iron River, Wisconsin, on 12 November 1919, Schlueter received a Bachelor Degree from Yale in 1940 and a Master of Divinity Degree from Union Seminary in 1943 before undertaking PhD level study at the University. He served in the US Army as a Chaplain, stationed in Manila, Philippines, from 1945 to 1946. Schlueter was an ordained minister in the Congregational United Church of Christ for 71 years, serving seven churches in the Washington – North Idaho Conference between 1943 and 1984. He also spent four years as Director of Continuing Education at Lancaster Theological Seminary, Pennsylvania. Following retirement, Schlueter served as guest pastor for numerous congregations and was an active member of Plymouth Congregational Church, Seattle, for over 30 years. A skilled musician and vocalist, he was a long-time member of the Seattle Symphony Chorale and often provided pre-symphony concert lectures. Schlueter was also a member of the Seattle Recorder Society and sang in the Seattle Bach Choir until age 90.

Anne Dollar Gillespie Schofield (née Davies) MBChB 1945: in Edinburgh, 9 January 2015, aged 93. A physician based in the west of Scotland, Schofield served many years as Chair of the Glasgow Branch of the Graduates’ Association before her election as the Association’s second lady President, from 1985 to 1986. Schofield was late Resident Medical Officer for Elsie Inglis Maternity Hospital, Edinburgh. She also held the position of House Physician at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children, and the post of Senior House Physician at St James’ Hospital, Balham.

David Grant Strachan MBChB 1957 DObst RCOG 1961 FRCGP: 12 January 2012, was a member of the British Medical Association. Strachan was late House Surgeon at the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, and held the position of House Surgeon at Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion, Edinburgh. He was also House Physician at the Eastern General Hospital, Edinburgh.

Spencer Wong PhD 1975: in Kowloon, 10 August 2013, aged 76. Born in Hong Kong on 24 October 1936, he was educated at Diocesan Boys’ School in Hong Kong and later attended university in both the United States and Canada. After attaining his Masters in Education, Wong returned to Hong Kong to work for the Government’s Education Department. He subsequently moved to the Chinese


University of Hong Kong to focus on continuing education for adults. In 1970, Wong chose to embark on PhD level study at the University. After his retirement from the CUHK, Wong was active on the board of trustees for various schools sun by the Methodist Church in Hong Kong. He was a tennis fanatic, playing regularly and, even after being diagnosed with lymphoma of the blood in 2007, attended at least one Open a year.

Geoffrey D Carnall MA BLitt: in Edinburgh, 20 February 2015, aged 88, former Reader in English Literature and Honorary Fellow. Wendy Jones Nakanishi writes:

I first met Geoffrey Carnall in the autumn of 1980. An American, I had just arrived in Edinburgh to begin a doctorate on eighteenth-century English

literature, having been awarded a postgraduate studentship.I was originally assigned a different professor as my thesis advisor, but

circumstances threw Geoffrey and me together. Within months of my arrival, I began visiting his office on the eighth floor of the David Hume Tower on a regular basis for advice on how to shape my paper on Alexander Pope’s letters. Geoffrey’s office was packed from ceiling to floor with books, and there were always stacks of papers on his worktable. Geoffrey was inevitably at work on a research project or preparing materials for his classes. When I knocked at his door, I would be greeted by that thin, inimitably English voice with its accent of scholarly endeavour. Geoffrey was the most reliable of individuals. I could count on him to be available at the appointed time and to have prepared for our meeting.

Geoffrey offered invaluable suggestions on my paper. What most impressed me was the academic rigour he expected, that he demanded. He was a man of impeccable integrity. Quotations, footnotes and citations needed to be verified and checked again and again. Geoffrey told me of his pride in having detected an error in published research on an author he admired, Robert Southey, that had gone unnoticed and unquestioned for years. When he found mistakes of any kind in my work, Geoffrey would pounce on them with a look of disappointment and disbelief.

It was thanks to Geoffrey’s excellent supervision that I managed to get my doctorate within three and a half years of arriving at Edinburgh. It was because of his kindness and humanity that we became friends, on relinquishing our former relationship of advisor and advisee. After I found a position at a small private Japanese university on getting my doctorate, Geoffrey and I remained in touch. I have lived in Japan for the past thirty years. I used to visit Geoffrey or arrange a meeting with him and his charming wife Elizabeth at a cafe whenever I was able to return to the college town where I had spent such a happy – and challenging and life-changing – period in my younger years.

I was pleased and privileged at being given the opportunity to know him on a personal level. I liked him and admired and respected his Quaker faith, his involvement with CND, and his work with Edinburgh’s Peace and Justice Centre. I enjoyed, and was enlightened by, reading his book about the remarkable Horace Alexander, who had acted as Gandhi’s interpreter. Geoffrey was that rare individual: a man of principle, a person who held convictions and acted upon them. I will feel always feel respect and admiration, gratitude and affection for the mentor who facilitated my getting my Ph.D., for the man who became my friend: dear Geoffrey Carnall.

The Journal cannot be held responsible for information received by other sources as we only publish data received and to our knowledge correct.


Programme of EventsAutumn 2015Tuesday 22nd SeptemberA visit to Napier University, Craiglockhart Campus Library, for a guided tour of their War Poets Exhibition. Napier University established the War Poets Collection in 1988 as a tribute and commemoration to Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and other poets of the First World War. Our visit will provide an insight into the personal and social experiences of war through the words, memories, voices and objects that the military officers, medical staff and relatives left behind following its decommissioning as a hospital for the treatment of shell-shocked officers. Meet at 2.00 pm for the start of the tour, which will take about 30 minutes and will be followed by tea. (£5)

Thursday 22nd OctoberMembers’ Lunch to be held in the Playfair Library Hall, Old College, Edinburgh, at 12.15 pm. Our speaker will be Dr Yvonne McEwen, Honorary Fellow at the School of Classics and Archaeology, Project Director of Edinburgh’s War, a social history project which documents the role of the city and its people between 1914 and 1918. A national initiative titled ‘Scotland’s War’ was launched in February 2015 and Dr McEwen will talk on this subject. (£22)

Monday 2nd NovemberMembers’ Lunch to be held in the Playfair Library Hall, Old College, Edinburgh, at 12.15 pm. Our speaker will be Mairi Rosko, Director of Supporter Engagement at Development and Alumni, who will speak about their volunteer mentoring plan, which was launched this summer at the University. (£22)

Saturday 28th NovemberSt Andrew’s Night Dinner to be held in the St Leonard’s Hall at Pollock Halls, Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh, from 6.15 pm to 11.00 pm. Meet for drinks and canapes in the St Leonard’s Foyer at 6.15 pm and then enjoy dinner from 7.00 pm in the St Trinnean’s Room. Appropriate Scottish musical entertainment will be provided during the evening. Our invited after-dinner speaker will be the Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart who, since 2008, has been Her Majesty’s Sculptor in Ordinary in Scotland. Dress code: Black Tie or Highland Dress. (£50, which includes wine at reception and with meal.)

Members are reminded that they must apply for tickets no later than one week before the date of the event.

Members are also encouraged to bring guests to our events.


Application for TicketsPlease complete this form in block capitals and return with your cheque, made payable to The University of Edinburgh Graduates’ Association:

The Honorary SecretaryUniversity of Edinburgh Graduates’ Association

18 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LNTickets will be sent by email wherever possible, otherwise please enclose a stamped addressed envelope. Members are reminded that they must apply for tickets no later than one week before the date of any event. Full details of events can be found at www.euga.co.uk/events.html

Autumn 2015 Events:Visit to Napier University (Tuesday 22nd September at 2.00 pm)

tickets @ £5.00 £

Members’ Lunch (Thursday 22nd October at 12.15 pm)

tickets @ £22.00 £

Members’ Lunch (Monday 2nd November at 12.15 pm)

tickets @ £22.00 £

St Andrew’s Night Dinner (Saturday 28th November at 6.15 pm)

tickets @ £50.00 £

Total Amount enclosed : £

Name(s):

Address:

Postcode:

Telephone:

Email:

www.euga.co.uk/events.html


2 April – 27 June 2015Edinburgh University Main Library,

Exhibition GalleryAdmission free

Blue has delighted and captivated humanity for thousands of years. It is used to describe immeasurable concepts, such as the depth of the sea or the colour of the sky. Despite this, it occurs in nature only very rarely

and is the most difficult natural pigment to obtain.

This exhibition in the Main Library Exhibition Gallery presents an exploration of the University’s Collections on the colour and conceptof blue. From blue stockings and opals to lullabies and rhapsodies, this exhibition offers new opportunities for academic

and abstract associations.

“The blue colour is everlastingly appointed by the Deity to be a source of delight; and whether seen perpetually over your head, or crystallised once in a thousand years into a single and incomparable stone, your acknowledgment of its beauty is

equally natural, simple, and instantaneous.”

John Ruskin (1819-1900)


Donation FormDonations are extremely welcome and we are most grateful for them. It is hoped that Life Members, who joined at previous rates, will decide to make a donation to bring their original Life Membership subscription up to the current level. Please complete the form using block capitals and return with remitance to:

The Honorary Secretary,University of Edinburgh Graduates’ Association

18 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LN

Names of members responding to this appeal will be published in the Journal subject to any alternative instructions. Amounts contributed will not be specified. Donations exceeding £15 will be acknowledged in writing. If you require a receipt please enclose a stamped addressed envelope.

Name(s):

Name(s) at Graduation (if different):

Degrees and Dates of Graduation:

Email:

Current Occupation:

Address:

Postcode:

Amount of Donation: £

Signed:

Date:


Change of Address and/or News FormReaders are encouraged to send information about themselves and/or other graduates for inclusion in the ‘News’ section of the Journal. Please complete the form using block capitals and return to:

The Honorary Secretary,University of Edinburgh Graduates’ Association

18 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LN

Name(s):

Name(s) at Graduation (if different):

Degrees and Dates of Graduation:

Email:

Current Occupation:

Previous Address:

Postcode:

New Address:

Postcode:

News Item:

Signed:

Date:

XLIV: No. 3 JUNE 2010 £14.00




Journal


NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORSArticles, book, CD and DVD reviews, and notes for obituaries are 1. invited from Edinburgh University alumni and from present members of the University. Serious articles on aspects of Edinburgh University are invited from other authors.Articles should be 2,500 words maximum in length, but longer 2. submissions will be discussed with authors. Short notes of up to 500 words will also be considered. Reviews should be no more than 250 words. Notes for obituaries should be no more than 150 words. Authors are asked to include autobiographical notes of not more than 75 words.Contributions should conform to the current Modern Humanities 3. Research Association Style Book, and should preferably be submitted in digital form as emails or as .doc or .docx attachments. Exceptionally, typescripts or manuscripts will be considered. The editorial email address is [email protected] images to accompany any article are welcome. Please ensure that 4. each image is high resolution, and of a quality no less than 300 dpi. Books, CDs and DVDs for review should be sent to the 5. Journal Office.Copy for the June issue of the 6. Journal should be sent to the Editor by 31 March, and for the December issue, by 30 September.Copyright © in the 7. Journal is held jointly by The University of Edinburgh Graduates’ Association and by individual contributors.Authors are sent one free copy of the issue that includes their work.8.

The Editor of the University of Edinburgh JournalUniversity of Edinburgh Graduates’ Association

18 Buccleuch PlaceEdinburgh, EH8 9LN

Telephone: +44 (0)131 650 4292/3Email: [email protected]: www.uega.co.uk

Journals ReceivedThe Editor greatly acknowledges the receipt of the following Journals:

Aberdeen University ReviewBulletin, The University of Edinburgh Staff MagazineEdit, The University of Edinburgh Alumni MagazineJournal of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh

Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of EdinburghThe above may be consulted at the Association offices by arrangement.

Published by the University of Edinburgh Graduates’ Association, 18 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LN.

Printed by Cambrian Printers Ltd, Llanbadarn Road, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3TN.

Welcome to theUniversity of Edinburgh Graduates’ Association

The University of Edinburgh Graduates’ Association was founded in 1924 as The University of Edinburgh Alumnus Association, changing to its present name after a very few years. It is made up

of former students (not only graduates) of the University of Edinburgh, members and former members of the University academic and related staff. Relatives of members, and others with an interest in the University of Edinburgh, are also welcome to join.

The Graduates’ Association:enables its members to maintain contact with each other and with their • alma mater.organises social events throughout the year.• publishes the • University of Edinburgh Journal which is sent to all members as part of their subscription. helps promote the welfare of the University and of its students and • maintains contact with a number of branches and affiliated clubs.

The Graduates’ Association is quite distinct and separate from the General Council of the University, and from Development and Alumni Services. Although not involved in fund-raising activities for the University, it works closely with the other two organisations in providing facilities and social events for its members and their guests. The Executive Committee meets in the Association’s rooms at 18 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh twice a year to manage the Association’s affairs, and the office is staffed by the Assistant Secretary and the Assistant Editor of the Journal.

If you are already a member of the Graduates’ Association:Introduce new members and invite them to renew old friendships and • acquaintances. Search your memory for names of fellow alumni. We can help you • discover whether they are members already.If you are in a position to do so, advertise your business in the • Journal and encourage other businesses to do the same.Send us news items about yourself and other alumni, especially if you • can do so by email.

If you are not a member, and have enjoyed reading this Journal, subscribe to it by joining the Association. We can then send you future issues automatically. And you can join us in our regular meetings and social events.

Visit the Association’s website at: www.uega.co.uk

XLIV: No. 3 JUNE 2010 £14.00




Journal
