who inhabited the cottar-houses behind his father’s manse. As a girl Mrs Hodge had been summoned (but not called) to give evidence at the trial of the Wife of Denside. Mrs Mollison had seen Strathmore illuminated from end to end by the flames of the bonfires lit to celebrate the passage of the Reform Bill. Mrs Haggart was bedridden. Once, when the Laird’s daughter attempted to persuade her to lift her lines and join the Episcopal Church, she listened in stony silence until her young visitor ran out of arguments, and then replied, “Na, na, Miss Ogilbie: at the Lest Juidgement, Christ’ll no speir fat Kirk we belanged tae.” On another occasion, when someone persisted in trying to persuade her to perform some Victorian equivalent of telling white lies to the Social Security Inspector, she drew herself up in bed and indignantly retorted, “I ken brawlie richt bi wrang!” And although my father subsequently lost the notebook in which he recorded her idiomatic Scots, he never forgot how much it differed from English spoken with a Scots accent.
From 1910 to 1914, and from 1919 to 1955, he was mainly engaged in teaching Greek and Latin, and although he thus incidentally became an experienced, resourceful, and versatile translator, did not have much spare time to devote to studying Scots. Before the New Testament can be translated into Scots, or any other language, it must first, however, be translated out of Greek; and during these years he not only acquired an incomparable knowledge of ancient Greek lexis, grammar, usage, and syntax from 800 B.C. to A.D. 400 or so but also kept abreast of all the latest developments in New Testament studies.
As already mentioned, it was while reading the neutral press in 1916–19 that he had first become keenly interested in the problems encountered by linguistic minorities in reviving or developing their languages. Before the beginning of the Second World War further study had convinced him that, if Scots was ever to be resuscitated and rehabilitated, two great works must first be produced: a good modern Scots dictionary, and a good modern Scots translation of the New Testament, with which (it might be assumed) all well-educated general readers, and many others, were already familiar. In September 1945, soon after I returned home from the War, he told me that he had recently been considering what to do when he retired, and had tentatively decided to undertake the task of making his own Scots translation of the New Testament.
He was well aware that in doing so he would also be setting out to resuscitate and recreate Scots prose; and early in 1946 he wrote to William Grant, then editor of The Scottish National Dictionary, drawing his attention to some omission in one of the fascicules already published. In reply, Grant generously invited him to contribute such further information as he thought fit; and he soon became one of the Dictionary’s chief external contributors. In 1947 he was elected a member of the Scottish National Dictionary Association’s Executive Council; in the same year, Mr David Murison succeeded William Grant as Editor; and from 1953 until his death in 1967 my father also officiated as Chairman of the Executive Council. He had already contributed to the revised edition of Liddell & Scott’s Greek Lexicon published before the Second World War, and in assessment of his contribution to The Scottish National Dictionary Murison says:
For twenty years Lorimer continued this work with his wonted prodigious thoroughness and accuracy, applying to it the same exacting standards of scholarship he had brought to bear in his work for the revision of Liddell & Scott, seeking out new sources, supplying better examples of usage, and noting errors and omissions, so that there can be hardly a page that does not contain some contribution from him. He began to hunt . . . for obscure authors, and in a few years had amassed a large collection of out-of-the-way texts. . . . These he excerpted with great care, and little escaped him; he noted not merely words but constructions, phrases and idioms, rhymes, . . . odd spellings, and so on. His particular interest in the Greek particles alerted him to similar usages in Scots, and one thinks in this connexion of his acute and invaluable study of the quasi-enclitic na, by which the relevant articles in the S.N.D. are so much the richer. He was in fact compiling a lexicon of his own, almost a thesaurus, from which he generously supplied the Dictionary where it was necessary; and it is now clear that this intense study of Scots was at the same time serving his other purpose, the translation of the New Testament.16
Murison’s statement confirms that long before my father began work on his translation, he was already engaged in ransacking all available linguistic sources; and two brief examples will suffice to show that, when finally commenced, the work that he did on his translation went hand in hand with that which he still went on doing for the Dictionary.
My father’s housekeeper, Mrs Barclay, once happened to say, “I’m gey forfauchelt.”
“What was that word you used?” he incautiously interrupted. “Forfauchelt?”
“Na, na,” she replied, “I juist said I wis gey forfochen”, and, when pressed, obstinately denied that she had ever heard any such word as “forfauchelt”. After further investigation, my father, however, communicated it to the Dictionary, in which it is now supported by several other references; and in due course he also introduced it into his translation. Similarly, when, in reading Paterson’s History of the Counties of Ayr & Wigton, he came across the statement that c. 1740 “The wet seasons threw up a bad weed in the crop, called the doite”, he duly reported it to the Dictionary; and in translating the Parable of the Tares and the Wheat he subsequently made good use of this discovery.17
In December 1946 he asked the National Bible Society of Scotland to provide him with copies of several modern translations of the New Testament, including one Frisian, two Flemish, one Afrikaans, and three Roumanian. During the next ten years he scrutinised a great many translations of the New Testament in many different languages;18 and he also found time to make some experimental Scots translations of Galatians, Hebrews (11.32–7), James, I Peter, and Jude. Until 1955 he was still teaching; and even when he retired, he did not finally become free to begin making his definitive translation until towards the end of 1957. Many of his ancestors had, however, been very long-lived; and he had often assured me in the past that we both possessed excellent prospects of living to be at least eighty years old.
One of his notebooks contains preliminary drafts, begun in 1957, and all finally completed between 27 December the same year and 8 June 1958, of Galatians, Philemon, Hebrews (11.32–7), James, I Peter, and Jude. (It was not only because these works were so short, but also because they presented such a wide variety of styles, that he chose to begin with them.) Before going any further he entirely revised these preliminary drafts. But during the last seven months of 1959 he also completed his first drafts of Philippians, I–II Thessalonians, II–III John, Titus, and II Timothy; and in 1960 he completed those of I Timothy, Colossians, Ephesians, I John, and II Peter.
Early in 1961 he began work on the Gospels; and it took him two years and three months to complete the first drafts of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. On 23 June 1963 he began work on Acts; and by 19 February 1964 he had also completed his first draft of Revelation. Since the beginning of 1961, when he had first set out to translate the Gospels, his progress had thus been surprisingly rapid. But much the most difficult part of his daunting task still lay ahead of him; and it was not until towards the end of the following year that he finally completed the first drafts of II Corinthians, I Corinthians, Romans, and Hebrews, the last of which was finished on 10 October 1965, at “9.3 p.m.” Thus it had taken him approximately eight years to translate the whole of the New Testament into Scots; and all that he had so far produced was only a first draft. He was now eighty years old, and no longer possessed sufficiently good eyesight to read small print.
Early in 1966 he began to make what he called a revised edition of his first drafts, and had soon completed revised final transcripts of James, Mark, and Jude. Then he embarked on a hasty revision of the first drafts of Matthew, Luke, and Acts: but at the end of April 1966, he resumed the labour of transcription; and during the summer months he completed his revised final transcripts of I Peter, I-II Timothy, Titus, I-III John, II Peter, Philemon, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and Ephesians (completed 28 September 1966). Thus it had already cost him eight or nine laborious months to transcribe only one fourth of his first drafts. Even if he had succeeded in maintaining the same rate of progress, it would have taken him at least two more years to complete the task of revising and transcribing the other three-fourths; and, probably because he was beginning to feel that he was