James Colquhoun Irvine, 1877-1952

Abstract

During a period of fifty-seven years James Colquhoun Irvine served the University of St Andrews in the successive capacities of student, lecturer, Professor, Dean of the Faculty of Science, and Principal. His services to Scotland’s oldest seat of learning, particularly during his tenure of the highest office for more than thirty years, were such as to entitle him to take rank as little less than its second founder. He was born at Glasgow on 9 May 1877. He had one older brother and two younger sisters. His father, John Irvine, was a native of Maybole, Ayrshire; his mother, Mary Paton Colquhoun, came from Port Glasgow. John Irvine, a manufacturer of light iron castings, was descended from solid but undistinguished yeoman farmers who became associated with the rural weaving industry in Ayrshire until the introduction of steam-driven looms put an end to the cottage industries. In the words of his eminent son, ‘he was an accomplished linguist and musician, a capable mathematician and a discriminative collector of books, mainly general literature. His outlook was that of the Lowland Scot—strongly Calvinistic—and he took pride 'in the fact that a Covenanting ancestor fell in the skirmish at Airdsmoss in 1680 and was buried in Glasgow Cathedral. Such scientific inheritance as I can trace comes from my father.’ On his mother’s side, Irvine’s ancestors were entirely Highland, and her forebears followed the sea, either in the Mercantile Marine or the Royal Navy. Among them was a certain Alexander Golquhoun, master of a clipper in the China trade, and Captain James Colquhoun, R.N., who fell at Mandalay in 1882. This inheritance gave to Irvine, and also to his son, Nigel, an intense love of the sea and of sailing in small boats. Beyond this, as Irvine left on record, his mother ‘was a singularly beautiful character, and I owe to her anything I possess in the way of gentleness and sympathy for others’.