The Two Cousins: Episode 4

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 19^th century Scottish universities, this was typical; and somewhat different to 19^th 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 19^th 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 1^st 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.