Kenneth Roy
It is possible
that the first minister
just needs a holiday
Kenyon Wright
Let’s not cut the number of MSPs
Andrew Hook
Could Scotland
have its own
Ivy League?
Angus Skinner
Are we ready not to have government?
Christopher Harvie
Whit thochts
anent oor
ain time?
Alan Fisher
The riot in Greece
Alison Prince
Tough oil is with us.
There is no way back
to the time of plenty
Catherine Czerkawska
The problem with euthanasia
Tessa Ransford
Works of art are not good
for anything. They are
an end in themselves
Rear Window
Springburn diary
14.06.11
No. 416
Rear Window
In my last year at the BBC, I got a message that George [MacLeod] was willing to be filmed. This was during the Assembly and I went to his Edinburgh home the day before filming to discuss what he’d like to say. He was now in his nineties and frail. Making and pouring the tea was a painful effort but what he had to say was more so.
Two nights before, he’d had a dream. In his loneliness he had turned to Lorna, his much younger wife, whose early death he was still grieving over. In the dream she had given him the most tremendous scolding. ‘Oh George, stop all this self-pity. You’ve a lot to do. Just get on with it’.
He said in the 48 hours since he’d felt released. He no longer needed Lorna’s physical presence. The morning after that encounter he’d been walking up the Mound to the General Assembly service of holy communion, and was suddenly stopped in his tracks by a devastating thought.
‘Why am I going to this so-called communion? Am I really saying that Christ’s presence is more real in bread and wine than in the whole of life? We don’t touch God in dedicated bread. We touch reality everywhere. We should just get on with it.’
I said: ‘Do you want to say that on film tomorrow, you who have made holy communion central again in presbyterianism?’.
‘If I have made communion central,’ he said, ‘then I have failed. I only wanted to make love central’.
The next morning he sent a message saying he would rather not do the filming. I guess he had decided he had to cross that No-Man’s-Land alone.
Ian Mackenzie
SR 2007
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Today’s banner
The shore at Berneray
by Islay McLeod
The war hero who fell
to his knees and
surrendered to Christ
Barbara Millar’s person of the week
George MacLeod
by Joyce Gunn Cairns
Maxwell, Mary and Neil MacLeod had a standing joke in the family. ‘We were the only people – other than Hamlet – who often had to meet with their father, even though he was dead.’
They went on to explain, in an obituary in the Herald last year: ‘We are the three grown children of a once well-known and pretty scary minister called George MacLeod. And the actor, Tom Fleming, who died last week, used to do a two-hour monologue in which he would pretend to be our dead dad and scare us half to pieces. Did it all over the world for years, to packed houses. Bizarre’.
George Fielden MacLeod, Baron MacLeod of Fuinary, was born in June 1895 in Glasgow, at Park Circus, on the hill overlooking Glasgow University. His father, Sir John MacLeod, had been a successful businessman before entering politics as a Unionist MP, first for Glasgow Central, then Glasgow Kelvingrove. His mother – Edith Fielden – was from a wealthy cotton mill-owning Lancastrian family. His grandfather was the highly respected Rev Norman MacLeod of Glasgow’s Barony Church, a moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, chaplain to Queen Victoria and social reformer.
George MacLeod was educated at Winchester College and Oriel College, Oxford. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he joined the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, rising to the rank of captain. His war service was formidable. Initially posted to Greece, he became ill with dysentery and was sent back to Scotland to recuperate. Once fit, he was sent to Flanders and saw action as a front-line fighter in the trenches at Ypres and Passchendaele – he was awarded the Military Cross and the French Croix de Guerre for his bravery.
When the war was over, MacLeod went to Edinburgh University to study divinity and train for the ministry, following this with a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York between 1921-22. When he returned to Scotland he was invited to become assistant at St Giles High Kirk and, in 1924, he was ordained as a Church of Scotland minister. He also accepted the non-parochial position of padre of Toc H in Scotland.
Toc H (otherwise known as Talbot House), an international Christian movement, was founded in 1915 at Poperinghe in Belgium. Named in honour of Edward Talbot, then Bishop of Winchester, who was killed in World War I, and initially intended to be an ‘everyman’s club’, where all soldiers were welcome, regardless of rank, it developed into an inter-denominational association for Christian and social service.
But, in 1926, after a disagreement, MacLeod resigned and accepted the invitation to become associate minister at the fashionable St Cuthbert’s Church in Edinburgh’s west end, where he stayed for four years. According to MacLeod’s biographer, Ron Ferguson, perhaps MacLeod’s greatest preaching took place while he was at St Cuthbert’s, a church he would pack out whenever he preached.
‘Every phrase, every pause, every gesture was rehearsed, leading to the moment of worship when the held-back emotion and torrent of well-chosen phrases poured out in a Celtic kaleidoscope of words and images.’
A senior BBC producer – Stanley Pritchard – who had had 30 years of experience of religious broadcasting, put MacLeod top of his list of effective communicators and noted: ‘Everything he said on air was prepared and written down, then in rehearsal he would underline words for emphasis, note pauses and hesitations, mark inflections, until the pages became almost unreadable. Yet the final delivery suggested the spontaneous urgency of one who spoke without notes. His was an art that hid art’.
He was gambling and going through half a bottle of whisky and 50
cigarettes a day – ‘going to hell in a hurry’ was how he put it. One day, in
a railway carriage returning to the front from leave, he fell to his knees
and surrendered his life to Christ.
But Ferguson also points out that, contrary to popular belief, MacLeod had not been so sickened by the carnage of WWI that he emerged as a crusading pacifist. Nor was it true that he had been so affected by the plight of the men under his command that he became a crusading socialist.
‘These theses, though attractive, are untrue,’ Ferguson argues. ‘But repeated in books and articles over the years, they have become the bedrock of the received interpretation of his life.’ But he did have a conversion experience towards the end of the war. He was gambling and going through half a bottle of whisky and 50 cigarettes a day – ‘going to hell in a hurry’ was how he put it. One day, in a railway carriage returning to the front from leave, he fell to his knees and surrendered his life to Christ.
In 1930, MacLeod decided to take up the post of minister at Govan Old Parish Church, in one of the poorest and most deprived areas of Glasgow. But the pace of work there took its toll and, in 1932, he suffered a breakdown, spending some time recuperating in Jerusalem in early 1933. While worshipping in an Eastern Orthodox church on Easter Day, he underwent a profound spiritual experience which would strongly influence the rest of his life.
In the late 1930s he resigned from Govan Old Parish Church and decided to dedicate himself to a project which, he hoped, would close the gap he perceived between the church and working people. He took a group of young trainee clergy and unemployed skilled working men (the original community was all male) to Iona, a tiny Inner Hebridean island, to rebuild the ruined monastic quarters of the medieval abbey – they worked and lived there together. Subsequently this has grown into the international ecumenical Iona Community, which has a strong commitment to peace and justice issues, and some 270 full members, 1,800 associate members and 1,600 friends.
During World War II MacLeod served as locum minister at the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, a parish also then afflicted by poverty. In 1948, when he was 53, he married and he and his wife, Lorna, travelled together to Australia on a preaching tour. He was then invited to return to Govan Old Parish Church but the Presbytery of Glasgow refused to approve his appointment, given his wish to continue his active leadership of the Iona Community. The ‘Govan Case’, as it was known, was referred to the General Assembly, but he was refused permission to combine the two posts.
MacLeod, however, remained a very high profile figure in the Church of Scotland and was elected moderator of the General Assembly in 1957, although one commissioner apparently asked whether it was appropriate that a man who had been described as ‘half-way to Rome and half-way to Moscow’ should become moderator.
According to Ron Ferguson, himself a former leader of the Iona Community, his closing address as moderator was ‘not for the faint-hearted’. ‘It was not a diplomatic chairman’s summing up of the current ecclesiastical consensus, sending the faithful out into the warm glow of an Edinburgh evening, but the dividing word of the passionate, obsessive prophet, who was convinced that the word swelling up inside him was nothing other than a word from the Lord.’
In 1967 he was awarded a peerage, the only Church of Scotland minister to have been so honoured and he later became the first peer to represent the Green Party. He took the title Lord MacLeod of Fuinary (in Morvern, where 17 of his ancestors had been buried).
George MacLeod died in June 1991 – 20 years ago. In the year before his death a series of contributions about him were put together in the Herald. Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, born and brought up in Govan, recalled: ‘As a small boy, though I could not really understand what he was saying, I was impressed that here was this minister, reaching out beyond the church and his pulpit, reaching out to the people. The man was a great campaigner. And he had a huge impact on Govan’.
Barbara Millar is a journalist and charity trustee
14.06.11
No. 416
Rear WindowTwo nights before, he’d had a dream. In his loneliness he had turned to Lorna, his much younger wife, whose early death he was still grieving over. In the dream she had given him the most tremendous scolding. ‘Oh George, stop all this self-pity. You’ve a lot to do. Just get on with it’.
He said in the 48 hours since he’d felt released. He no longer needed Lorna’s physical presence. The morning after that encounter he’d been walking up the Mound to the General Assembly service of holy communion, and was suddenly stopped in his tracks by a devastating thought.
‘Why am I going to this so-called communion? Am I really saying that Christ’s presence is more real in bread and wine than in the whole of life? We don’t touch God in dedicated bread. We touch reality everywhere. We should just get on with it.’
I said: ‘Do you want to say that on film tomorrow, you who have made holy communion central again in presbyterianism?’.
‘If I have made communion central,’ he said, ‘then I have failed. I only wanted to make love central’.
The next morning he sent a message saying he would rather not do the filming. I guess he had decided he had to cross that No-Man’s-Land alone.
SR 2007
The shore at Berneray
by Islay McLeod
Barbara Millar’s person of the week
by Joyce Gunn Cairns
They went on to explain, in an obituary in the Herald last year: ‘We are the three grown children of a once well-known and pretty scary minister called George MacLeod. And the actor, Tom Fleming, who died last week, used to do a two-hour monologue in which he would pretend to be our dead dad and scare us half to pieces. Did it all over the world for years, to packed houses. Bizarre’.
George Fielden MacLeod, Baron MacLeod of Fuinary, was born in June 1895 in Glasgow, at Park Circus, on the hill overlooking Glasgow University. His father, Sir John MacLeod, had been a successful businessman before entering politics as a Unionist MP, first for Glasgow Central, then Glasgow Kelvingrove. His mother – Edith Fielden – was from a wealthy cotton mill-owning Lancastrian family. His grandfather was the highly respected Rev Norman MacLeod of Glasgow’s Barony Church, a moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, chaplain to Queen Victoria and social reformer.
George MacLeod was educated at Winchester College and Oriel College, Oxford. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he joined the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, rising to the rank of captain. His war service was formidable. Initially posted to Greece, he became ill with dysentery and was sent back to Scotland to recuperate. Once fit, he was sent to Flanders and saw action as a front-line fighter in the trenches at Ypres and Passchendaele – he was awarded the Military Cross and the French Croix de Guerre for his bravery.
When the war was over, MacLeod went to Edinburgh University to study divinity and train for the ministry, following this with a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York between 1921-22. When he returned to Scotland he was invited to become assistant at St Giles High Kirk and, in 1924, he was ordained as a Church of Scotland minister. He also accepted the non-parochial position of padre of Toc H in Scotland.
Toc H (otherwise known as Talbot House), an international Christian movement, was founded in 1915 at Poperinghe in Belgium. Named in honour of Edward Talbot, then Bishop of Winchester, who was killed in World War I, and initially intended to be an ‘everyman’s club’, where all soldiers were welcome, regardless of rank, it developed into an inter-denominational association for Christian and social service.
But, in 1926, after a disagreement, MacLeod resigned and accepted the invitation to become associate minister at the fashionable St Cuthbert’s Church in Edinburgh’s west end, where he stayed for four years. According to MacLeod’s biographer, Ron Ferguson, perhaps MacLeod’s greatest preaching took place while he was at St Cuthbert’s, a church he would pack out whenever he preached.
‘Every phrase, every pause, every gesture was rehearsed, leading to the moment of worship when the held-back emotion and torrent of well-chosen phrases poured out in a Celtic kaleidoscope of words and images.’
A senior BBC producer – Stanley Pritchard – who had had 30 years of experience of religious broadcasting, put MacLeod top of his list of effective communicators and noted: ‘Everything he said on air was prepared and written down, then in rehearsal he would underline words for emphasis, note pauses and hesitations, mark inflections, until the pages became almost unreadable. Yet the final delivery suggested the spontaneous urgency of one who spoke without notes. His was an art that hid art’.
cigarettes a day – ‘going to hell in a hurry’ was how he put it. One day, in
a railway carriage returning to the front from leave, he fell to his knees
and surrendered his life to Christ.
‘These theses, though attractive, are untrue,’ Ferguson argues. ‘But repeated in books and articles over the years, they have become the bedrock of the received interpretation of his life.’ But he did have a conversion experience towards the end of the war. He was gambling and going through half a bottle of whisky and 50 cigarettes a day – ‘going to hell in a hurry’ was how he put it. One day, in a railway carriage returning to the front from leave, he fell to his knees and surrendered his life to Christ.
In 1930, MacLeod decided to take up the post of minister at Govan Old Parish Church, in one of the poorest and most deprived areas of Glasgow. But the pace of work there took its toll and, in 1932, he suffered a breakdown, spending some time recuperating in Jerusalem in early 1933. While worshipping in an Eastern Orthodox church on Easter Day, he underwent a profound spiritual experience which would strongly influence the rest of his life.
In the late 1930s he resigned from Govan Old Parish Church and decided to dedicate himself to a project which, he hoped, would close the gap he perceived between the church and working people. He took a group of young trainee clergy and unemployed skilled working men (the original community was all male) to Iona, a tiny Inner Hebridean island, to rebuild the ruined monastic quarters of the medieval abbey – they worked and lived there together. Subsequently this has grown into the international ecumenical Iona Community, which has a strong commitment to peace and justice issues, and some 270 full members, 1,800 associate members and 1,600 friends.
During World War II MacLeod served as locum minister at the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, a parish also then afflicted by poverty. In 1948, when he was 53, he married and he and his wife, Lorna, travelled together to Australia on a preaching tour. He was then invited to return to Govan Old Parish Church but the Presbytery of Glasgow refused to approve his appointment, given his wish to continue his active leadership of the Iona Community. The ‘Govan Case’, as it was known, was referred to the General Assembly, but he was refused permission to combine the two posts.
MacLeod, however, remained a very high profile figure in the Church of Scotland and was elected moderator of the General Assembly in 1957, although one commissioner apparently asked whether it was appropriate that a man who had been described as ‘half-way to Rome and half-way to Moscow’ should become moderator.
According to Ron Ferguson, himself a former leader of the Iona Community, his closing address as moderator was ‘not for the faint-hearted’. ‘It was not a diplomatic chairman’s summing up of the current ecclesiastical consensus, sending the faithful out into the warm glow of an Edinburgh evening, but the dividing word of the passionate, obsessive prophet, who was convinced that the word swelling up inside him was nothing other than a word from the Lord.’
In 1967 he was awarded a peerage, the only Church of Scotland minister to have been so honoured and he later became the first peer to represent the Green Party. He took the title Lord MacLeod of Fuinary (in Morvern, where 17 of his ancestors had been buried).
George MacLeod died in June 1991 – 20 years ago. In the year before his death a series of contributions about him were put together in the Herald. Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, born and brought up in Govan, recalled: ‘As a small boy, though I could not really understand what he was saying, I was impressed that here was this minister, reaching out beyond the church and his pulpit, reaching out to the people. The man was a great campaigner. And he had a huge impact on Govan’.
