The
Two Cousins
Episode
4: Robert as a scholar
Iain
Smith
We saw in Episode 2 Robert MacIver leaving school
and heading to university.
Robert’s narrative about being a student in
Edinburgh in 1898 is interesting.
“I lived in a cheap but quite decently
kept rooming house for students. All meals were included, simple but
respectable meals – and the whole cost ran to about fourteen shillings a week.
Occasionally I would indulge in the luxury of [dinner in] a small hotel near
the Old University, and that never cost me more than a shilling.”
So, in a 30-week
student year, he was spending £21 a year on board and lodgings. He also
described how the university provided lectures, but regarded itself has having
no pastoral or guidance function for students. For 19th century
Scottish universities, this was typical; and somewhat different to 19th
century Oxbridge. The days of halls of residence, of advisors of study, of
university health services and so on lay somewhere far ahead. Of the Professor
of Greek, he says: “Although I stood very high in the class, I do not recall
ever having an interview with him.”
He played golf
(pennies a round), saw Ellen Terry and Henry Irvine in The Merchant of Venice and watched a D’Oyly Carte production of The Mikado.
Interestingly, MacIver
did not work during his summer holiday at home. He played golf with his father
at the course in Melbost (now Stornoway Airport) and he studied in preparation
for the second year at university. So clearly his bursary (and being in the
family home during the long summer vacation) was sufficient to sustain him
financially.
MacIver’s memoir
remind us that university lecture halls in the 19th century could be
rowdy places, a tradition which extended (in abated form) at least into the
1960s; but is I believe now dead. And he also observed the rowdiness that could
attend rectorial elections, a tradition that has survived.
After an
uninspired second year, MacIver in his third year ends up joint first in the
logic class. He records the fate of the student who shared the prize: “He was
killed very early in the hideous folly of the First World War, and of its
uncounted victims no one could have been more grievously miscast for soldiering
than that gentle scholar.”
MacIver won a further
scholarship which he used to take an extra year to ensure a 1st
Class Honours; and he duly succeeded in that ambition. Meanwhile he argues with
classmates on the significance of the recently deceased Queen Victoria: “some
of my pals …shared the general veneration of the queen as a great and wise
ruler. I held she was a great symbol….but not great in her own wisdom as a
policy-maker.” MacIver’s formal studies
at the time may have been classics; but one can see the promise of an ability
that would make him a world-renowned social and political analyst. “I was
developing a stronger interest in social movements and issues. Much as I felt
that I had benefitted from my classical studies, I began to wish that I could
enter the unexplored and still academically slighted social sciences.
Robert acquired
the coveted first class honours in classics and proceeded to Oriel College
Oxford with “a good-sized scholarship masquerading as a Bible clerkship…[and]
the obligation of reciting a Latin grace several days a week after the gong had
sounded for dinner in the college hall.” What his highly religious presbyterian
father back in Stornoway thought of this is not recorded.
MacIver’s
description of Oxford is of a tranquil life, to which he adapted with some
ease. Of the upper class “commoners” (as opposed to those like such as he
holding scholarships) he says “In spite of their greater savoir-faire I thought of them as more big-boyish, less adult, than
our own youth.” His Provost dispensed tea from two teapots, one to provide
water to warm the cups (that water then being discarded) and the other for the
tea itself. But, he says, “The more we
studied the social and political life of ancient times, the more eager I was to
learn about the doings and the troubles of our own tangled society.”
After his Oxford
success, Robert MacIver was appointed a lecturer in the University of Aberdeen.
Today the
University of Aberdeen website celebrates that appointment at length and with
some pride:-
Robert MacIver
Despite its ancient origins, the
University of Aberdeen was one of the first institutions in the UK and further
afield to introduce the subject of sociology. In 1907 Robert MacIver (1882-1970),
a young lecturer of local birth, was appointed as an assistant in Moral
Philosophy but delivered lectures in the new subject. We believe that among his
students at that time was the future father-in-law of the Chinese Communist
leader, Chairman Mao. Whatever influence Aberdonian sociology had on the
subsequent development of Maoism is unrecorded.
MacIver
initially lectured in political science (“traditionally little more than an
account of the doctrines of the well-known figures from Machiavelli to Hegel”).
He planned however to write his first book on “the complicated relationships of
men and groups and of the institutions that had grown up to facilitate control
of these relations”.
Most
significantly, he became in 1911 a lecturer in political science and sociology, the first person to be
so designated in a Scottish university.
Robert went home
for a holiday, probably about 1913. His father had bought a Model T Ford from the 1911-founded Ford factory in
Trafford Park Manchester; and they both
experimented with driving it on the Melbost golf course. Father MacIver
diversified from his Harris Tweed company into car-hiring; and this was the
origin of MacIver’s Garage, a well-known Stornoway company for many decades.
(At some point about 1970, I heard for the first time about Robert M MacIver. I
asked my mother whether she knew of him. “Yes.” she said. “Of course he came
from MacIver’s Garage.” I understood then, and still understand today, that a
rough translation of this was: “If one wants to be a world class sociologist,
coming from the family of MacIver’s Garage naturally gives one a distinct head
start.”)
(to
be continued)
Iain
Smith was formerly Dean of Education in the University of Strathclyde. He
welcomes feedback at i.r.m.smith@strath.ac.uk.
