Fragments of University Reminiscence (1922–1972)

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Notes

1 The Rectorship at Glasgow University is an elected office. The Rector is voted in by the students and serves a three-year term. John MacCormick (1904–1961), a Scottish lawyer, Scottish nationalist politician and advocate of Home Rule in Scotland, was elected Rector in 1950. It was in that same year, to the fury of the University’s Principal, Sir Hector Hetherington, that nationalist students from Glasgow removed the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey and returned it to Scotland. MacCormick had become involved in politics while a student at Glasgow University, where in 1927 he established the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association (GUSNA). This organization, designed to promote Scottish nationalism and self-government, helped bring together various nationalist organizations, to form, in 1928, the National Party of Scotland (NPS). A talented speaker and organizer, MacCormick served as its national secretary. MacCormick was often known by his nickname ‘King John’, which came about during a debate in which he was participating. A question was asked whether a devolved Scotland would retain the monarchy, or would be a republic, and someone said: ‘No, it will be a kingdom and John MacCormick will be our king’.

2 There was traditionally student misconduct not only at the actual Rectorial installation—such as described here—but also before the poll took place, when supporters of rival candidates would indulge in a supposedly ‘mock’ ‘Rectorial Fight’. For a photograph of the students’ ‘Rectorial Fight’ in 1950, just before MacCormick was elected—an election which led to the Rectorial installation the following January to which Atkinson refers here with so much disapproval—, see A. L. Brown & Michael Moss, The University of Glasgow: 1451–1996 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1996), 45.

3 The students’ misconduct in 1958 while celebrating another Rectorial installation, left Atkinson even more outraged; so much so that he published an article about it, titled ‘La Trahison des Clercs’, The College Courant (The Journal of the Glasgow University Graduates Association) (Whitsun, 1958), 105–09. His article begins: ‘One more Rectorial has come and gone. Once again the good name of the University has been dragged in the mire’.

4 José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was in Glasgow to receive from the University, in the year it celebrated its five hundredth anniversary, the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws. The letter from the University extending the invitation to Ortega, dated 17 March 1950, and his reply, dated Madrid, 3 May 1950, accepting the degree, addressed to Christian Fordyce, then Clerk of Senate of the University, are in Glasgow University’s Archives. It may be assumed that Atkinson had proposed Ortega for this honour.

5 History As a System [original title: Historia como sistema (1935)], trans. William C. Atkinson, in José Ortega y Gasset, Toward a Philosophy of History, trans. Helene Weyl, William C. Atkinson & Eleanor Clark (New York: W. W. Norton, 1941), 165–233. Atkinson had a high opinion of Ortega’s work: ‘Ortega y Gasset (1882–1955) brought the most acute Spanish mind of his day, nurtured on German philosophers, to bear on the contemporary social and political scene […]. He was, too, in the narrow sense, a great writer, an artist in words as well as in ideas’ (see ‘Literature and the Arts—III’, in Atkinson, A History of Spain and Portugal, Chapter 15, 343—52 [p. 346]).

6 A reference to the cruise on the River Clyde, with which the University ended its celebrations of its quincentenary.

7 At this distance in time, it has proved impossible to identify the graduate Atkinson refers to here.

8 It appears, from what Atkinson implies here, that Spain’s Head of State, Francisco Franco (1892–1975) sent (military?) planes to transport the foreign representatives of their universities from the celebrations at Salamanca to Madrid. Salamanca University was founded in 1252. So presumably its celebrations which Atkinson describes, though he indicates that these were held several years after Glasgow University’s, would, in fact, have taken place in 1952.

9 Atkinson means that at the time of the University’s move in 1870 from the Old College on the High Street in Glasgow city centre to the new building on Gilmorehill designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811–1878), the professors holding the University’s originally established chairs numbered twelve. Fortunately, the University’s plans for the location of the new library changed, and the houses in the Professors’ Quadrangle at Nos 1–8 were spared from demolition.

10 The new library was indeed built at the top of Hillhead Street, in due course. It was a tall building, too, though not exactly a USA-style ‘skyscraper’. It was built in three phases, the first of which was not opened until 1968, ‘designed to balance visually the University tower’, across from it in University Avenue; the Library’s second phase was completed in 1982–83; and a third phase in 1986 (see Brown & Moss, The University of Glasgow: 1451–1996, 44).

11 The Department of Hispanic Studies in the 1950s was still located at the start of University Gardens, in one of the grey-stone Victorian buildings (see, in this Festschrift, the article by McIntyre, ‘Professor William C. Atkinson [WCA] As Remembered by Some Former Students’).

12 For more on the then ‘new’ Modern Languages Building (opened in 1960), and for a clearer idea of Atkinson’s part in bringing it about, see William C. Atkinson, ‘The Groves of Academe. Modern Languages in University Gardens’, The College Courant (Journal of the Glasgow University Graduates Association) (Whitsun, 1960), 125–29.

13 Atkinson played a key part in ensuring that the Modern Languages Building was equipped with this theatre on the ground floor, and was especially proud of it. The first play to be performed in it was Anouilh’s L’Alouette, put on by students of the French Department on the occasion of the formal opening of the building by the French Ambassador on 11 February 1960 (see Atkinson, ‘The Groves of Academe’, 127–28).

14 A reference to the additional Modern Languages Building, called the Hetherington Building, after Sir Hector Hetherington, in Bute Gardens, which was opened in 1983. The fact that Atkinson mentions the Hetherington Building here shows that, though he almost certainly first wrote these memoirs in the early 1970s, he did go back to them in the years which followed, and made certain insertions and revisions.

15 A reference to the narrow pass at the village of Balmaha, Scotland, on the eastern shore of Loch Lomond. Balmaha, a popular tourist destination, sits at the westerly foot of Conic Hill, and is roughly twenty miles along the West Highland Way, if coming from Milngavie.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the editor.