called regularly at Brown’s rectory – or manse – for help. The preacher of the virtues of charity was willing to feed the hungry, give money to those pleading poverty, and tend the sick. Some would smile that John Brown was an unworldly soft touch, giving to the undeserving, but his generosity contrasted favourably with Fife’s local leaders. There was little to commend about the councillors’ failure to build an adequate sea wall to protect the town from the spring tides of 1957 and 1958. During the floods, young Gordon Brown helped his father and his two brothers distribute blankets and food to the victims, proud that his father became renowned as a dedicated, social priest. ‘Father,’ he later said, ‘was a generous person and made us aware of poverty and illness.’ The dozens of regular callers at the house pleading for help persuaded Brown of the virtues of Christian socialism, meaning service to the community and helping people realise their potential. Living in a manse, he related, ‘You find out quickly about life and death and the meaning of poverty, injustice and unemployment.’ The result was a schoolboy bursting to assuage his moral indignation.
Friends and critics of Gordon Brown still seek to explain the brooding, passionate and perplexing politician by the phrase ‘a son of the manse’. To non-believers, unaware of daily life in a Scottish priest’s home, the five words are practically meaningless. Only an eyewitness to the infusion of Scotland’s culture by Presbyterianism’s uncompromising righteousness can understand the mystery of the faith. Life in the manse bequeathed an osmotic understanding of the Bible. Under his father’s aegis, Gordon Brown mastered intellectual discipline and a critique of conventional beliefs. In a Presbyterian household, the term ‘morality’ was dismissed as an English concept, shunned in favour of emphasising ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Even the expression ‘socialism’ was rejected in favour of ‘egalitarianism’. At its purest, Presbyterianism is a questioning tradition, encouraging a lack of certainty, with a consequent insecurity among true believers brought up to believe in perpetual self-improvement. ‘Lord, I believe,’ is the pertinent prayer. ‘Help Thou my unbelief.’ Moulded by his father’s creed, not least because he admired and loved the modest man, the young Gordon Brown was taught to be respectful towards strangers. ‘My father was,’ he recalled, ‘more of a social Christian than a fundamentalist … I was very impressed with my father. First, for speaking without notes in front of so many people in that vast church. But mostly, I have learned a great deal from what my father managed to do for other people. He taught me to treat everyone equally and that is something I have not forgotten.’
In his sermons, quoting not only the scriptures but also poets, politicians and Greek and Latin philosophers, the Reverend John Brown urged ‘the importance of the inner world – what kind of world have we chosen for our inner self? Does it live in the midst of the noblest thoughts and aspirations?’ He cautioned his congregation and sons against ‘those who hasten across the sea to change their sky but not their mind’. Happiness, he preached, is not a matter of miles but of mental attitude, not of distance but of direction. ‘The question which each of us must ask, if we are not as happy as we would wish to be, is this: Are we making the most of the opportunities that are ours?’ The young Gordon Brown was urged to understand the challenge to improve his own destiny. ‘So let us not trifle,’ preached his father, condemning wasted time and opportunities, ‘because we think we have plenty of time ahead of us. We do not know what time we have. We cannot be sure about the length of life … Therefore use your time wisely. Live as those who are answerable for every moment and every hour.’
John Brown’s ancestry was as modest as his lifestyle. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Browns were tenant farmers, first at Inchgall Mill near Dunfermline, and later at Brigghills farm near Lochgelly, in the midst of the Fife coalfields. Ebenezer Brown, Gordon Brown’s grandfather, the fourth of eight children, became a farmer at Peatieshill in New Gilston, and on 26 October 1914 Gordon’s father was born in the farmhouse. Eventually Ebenezer gave up farming and became a shepherd, encouraging his only child to excel at school and to break out of the mould. At eighteen, John Brown’s efforts were rewarded by a place at St Andrews University to read divinity. After graduating in 1935, he studied for an MA in theology until 1938. Unfit for military service, he spent the war as a minister in the Govan area, along the Clyde, living among the slums and destitution of the factory and shipyard workers. Only the heartless could emerge from that poverty without some anger about society’s inequalities.
Soon after the war John Brown met Jessie Elizabeth Souter, the daughter of a builder and ironmonger in Insch, west Aberdeenshire. She was four years younger than him. Until 1940 Jessie had worked for the family business. She then joined the WRAF, working first on the Isle of Man and then in Whitehall. They married in Govan in July 1947. Their first child, John, was born in 1948. James Gordon, their second son, was born in Glasgow on 20 February 1951. Three years later John Brown was appointed the minister at the St Brycedale church. Kirkcaldy was then an unknown backwater, except to historians. In the eighteenth century Adam Smith, arguably one of the world’s greatest economists and the architect of free trade, the foundation of Britain’s prosperity, lived in the town. A monument to the enemy of socialism was erected exactly opposite St Brycedale church. The juxtaposition was pertinent to Gordon Brown’s life. Not until forty years after his birth did he begin to sympathise with his fellow townsman’s philosophy. By then his reputation as an irascible intellectual was frustrating his ambitions. His inner conflict, pitting his quest for power against his scholarship, his mastery of machine politics in conflict with the protection of his privacy, had been infused by the influence of his beloved father.
‘Ill pairted’, the principal doctrine bequeathed by the teetotal father to his sons in the manse, condemned the unfair distribution of wealth in the world and stirred up his family’s obligation to seek greater equality, not least by good works and charity. The collapse of the textile and coal industries, casting hundreds in the town onto the dole, imbued a gut distaste for capitalist society in Gordon Brown, not least because his father taught that work was a moral duty. ‘Being brought up as the son of a minister,’ he recalled, ‘made me aware of community responsibilities that any decent society ought to accept. And strong communities remain the essential bedrock for individual prosperity.’ Unspoken was the Scottish belief in superiority over the English, and the Presbyterian’s sense of pre-eminent differences with Anglicans – both compensations for surviving as a minority.
Helped by Elizabeth Brown’s inheritance of some small legacies, the Browns were middle class. Their financial advantages over the local miners and factory workers spurred the father to encourage his children to conduct their lives with a sense of mission, duty and benign austerity. Any personal ambition was to be concealed, because the individual, in John Brown’s world, was of little interest, and personal glory was, history showed, short-lived. Rather than bask in the prestige accorded to his office, he preached that his children should be more concerned by the legacy they bequeathed to society. The son of the manse was expected to suppress his ego. That exhortation, repeated constantly throughout his childhood (he attended his father’s church twice on Sundays), imposed upon Gordon Brown a lifelong obligation to answer to his father’s ghost.
Any austerity was, however, tempered by love. Elizabeth Brown was not as strong an influence as her husband, but she was a true friend. ‘She was always supportive,’ Brown insisted, ‘even when I made mistakes.’ At the age of thirty-seven, he was to say: ‘I don’t think either of my parents pushed me. It was a very free and open family. There were no huge pressures.’ His comment was either self-delusion or obfuscation. Quite emphatically, from his youngest years, Brown was under exceptional pressure to excel, and infused with an obsession to work hard, to disappoint no one and to win. ‘What is started, must be finished,’ was a constant parental admonition to the Brown brothers. Failure was inconceivable. From the pulpit the Reverend John Brown preached that many of the young ‘are failing to think life through and are living carelessly and irresponsibly’. They forgot, he said, that regardless of any remarkable achievements on earth, ‘after death we must appear before the judgement seat of Christ’. He admonished ‘the multitudes’ who gave ‘little thought of accountability for their conduct and way of life’. Gordon Brown was warned about a day of reckoning: ‘With