only said to have taken down part of Marmion from Scott’s dictation, but had also danced as a girl with the Young Pretender, presumably in Rome towards the end of his life.
Bella’s father, David Robertson, H.E.I.C., was Major David Robertson’s son, and was born in 1811. After having been educated at Haileybury, where he was awarded a gold medal for mathematics, he went to India, and ultimately became a judge at Bareilly, midway between Delhi and Lucknow. In 1838 he married Elizabeth Hickson, who had been born in Dublin, but brought up in Cheltenham; and in 1857 he was hanged by his own servants during the Indian Mutiny.
His daughter Bella was born at Bareilly in 1849 and died at Bournemouth in 1931. Long before the Mutiny she had already been sent home to Scotland. With her brother David, who later returned to India, commanded a battalion of Gurkhas, and became a major-general in the Indian Army, she and her sisters were brought up mainly in Edinburgh, but also resided for some time in Rome, Heidelberg, and some other Continental cities. During their travels she acquired a European rather than a Scottish outlook, and became so proficient in languages that she spoke French, German, and Italian fluently. The Rev. Robert Lorimer, Strathmartine, also spoke Italian; and their lifelong habit of speaking it whenever they did not wish anyone else to understand what they were saying may perhaps have stimulated her three eldest children’s precocious interest in language as such. Unlike her Aunt Betsy, she did not, however, speak Scots, and firmly insisted that in polite society her children must speak correct standard English. In later life most of them spoke it with at least a trace of her peculiarly Anglo-Scottish-Irish intonation, and with much more than a trace of her most un-English intensity. Energetic, excitable, and altruistic, she possessed a vigorous and acquisitive intellect, and despite her somewhat nomadic up-bringing was both well-educated and well-read. Unlike her husband, she was highly ambitious, and not only made life difficult for her five youngest children by encouraging them to emulate the youthful success already achieved by Gordon, Hilda, and Lock, but sometimes also exhorted them to be perfect, even as their Father in heaven was perfect. As a minister’s wife, she set herself the same high standards as she set them, and was long remembered for the good works she had indefatigably done in the slums of Dundee.
When I was five or six years old, my grandparents were staying in furnished lodgings in Inverleith Row. One fine, fresh, sunny summer morning, my grandfather was looking after me while I played in the drawing-room. When my grandmother suddenly returned, she was shocked to find me leaning on the balcony which overlooked the garden, and made so much fuss that I burst into tears. In the midst of all the commotion thus precipitated by my prospective defenestration, my grandfather quietly drew me aside and said, only just loud enough for me to hear, “If only you’d just stop crying for a moment or two, I’d tell you a great secret. . .. Never cry till you’re hurt.” At once I stopped crying; and many years later my father told me that in childhood he had often had similar experiences.
IT WOULD SCARCELY be possible to improve upon Sir Kenneth Dover’s eloquent, informative, and judicious account of my father’s life and works;10 and I shall accordingly confine myself to dealing with those aspects of them which seem most relevant to the history of his translation.
He was educated at Dundee High School, Fettes College, where he was Head of the School for two years, and Trinity College, Oxford.11 At Fettes he won so many college prizes, all magnificently bound in full calf, gilt, that they occupy thirty-four inches of shelf-space. At Oxford he was less successful. In 1906 prolonged ill-health prevented him from sitting his examination for Classical Honour Moderations; and in 1908 he narrowly missed a first in Literae Humaniores. During his breakdown he reluctantly but finally renounced the religious beliefs with which his parents had indoctrinated him in childhood: but in 1906, while staying with his cousins the Crichton Millers12 at San Remo, he was captivated by the charms of one of their domestic servants,13 from whom he received so much encouragement that before he returned home to Strathmartine he had already acquired a fluent command of Italian; and by the time that he went down from Oxford, he had also learnt to read German.
His second in Greats made it difficult for him to find academic employment, but in 1910 he was fortunately appointed Professor Burnet’s Assistant in Greek at St Andrews University. While teaching Greek, he fell in love with St Andrews—that haunted town,
Where o’er the rocks, and up the Bay,
The long sea-rollers surge and sound,
And still the thin and biting spray
Drives down the melancholy street—
and with one of his students, Marion Rose Gordon, whom he married in 1915.
They did not dream, they could not know,
How soon the Fates would sunder them.
In 1914 he was commissioned in the Gordon Highlanders, but renewed ill-health rendered him unfit for active service; and from 1916 to 1919 he served in the Intelligence Directorate of the War Office, while his wife was employed in the War Trade Intelligence Department, and consequently knew how many British merchant ships were being sunk in 1917. While reading and analysing the neutral press, he learnt to read several languages, including Swedish, Dutch, Frisian, Romaunsch, and Roumanian, and became increasingly keenly interested in the difficulties encountered by ethnic minorities and their languages.
In 1919 he returned, with wife and son, to St Andrews, and in 1921 they finally settled down to live at 19 Murray Park, now called Lorimer House. In September 1922 his wife died suddenly, while on holiday at Braemar. The wounds inflicted by her death were at first overwhelming, and never completely healed: but with characteristic sagacity he soon succeeded in finding a housekeeper capable of helping him to bring up his son. Mrs MacGregor (1873/4–1930) was a miner’s daughter from Ayrshire, and her maiden name was Helen Strachan. During the next seven years my father and I both learnt plenty of Scots from her.
In 1925 Burnet’s health broke down, and my father was appointed acting head of his department. When Burnet died, he was succeeded by H. J. Rose; and in 1929 my father reluctantly accepted a Readership in Humanity at University College, Dundee, with permission to remain resident in St Andrews, and Principal Sir James Irvine’s verbal assurance that he would not be obliged to retire until he reached the age of seventy. In 1947 the Principal was finally persuaded to offer him the Chair of Humanity at St Andrews, which he firmly declined; in 1953, when Rose retired, he was not only appointed Professor of Greek, but was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy; and in 1955 he relinquished the chair once occupied by his kinsman Lewis Campbell.14
Except in term-time, when lecturing, he had regularly worked at his desk every day from nine to one, and again from five to eight, but had always made a point of taking plenty of exercise. In childhood he had walked every day three miles down through the Hill Toun to school, and then three steep miles back home.15 When ten years old he had once walked right round Loch Tay in one day. In 1908, when summoned to Oxford to attend a vivâ vocè examination, he had walked from Spean Bridge, climbed Ben Alder, and reached Dalwhinnie in time to catch the night train. During his first two or three years at St Andrews he had played hockey for the University. And in the hot summer of 1911 he had once walked fifty-two miles by road from Stirling to St Andrews in one day. In later life he always, if possible, walked at least three miles every afternoon; and during most of his retirement he enjoyed excellent health. His last illness began in December 1966, when he was eighty-one; and he died in Edinburgh on 25 May the following year, without having completed his own final recension of the Scots translation of the New Testament to which he had devoted the last ten years of his life.
ALTHOUGH HE WAS proud of his mother’s connexions, he had never identified himself so closely with them as with his father’s comparatively plebeian eponymous ancestors, and liked to think that the latter included two of the stone-masons employed in building Drumlanrig.
When he was only nine years old, he responded to his mother’s conflicting requirements that her children must all endeavour to learn as many different languages as possible, but must not themselves speak Scotch, by beginning to keep a notebook in which he wrote down the Scots words and phrases spoken by Mrs Mollison,