Obituary: William Ferguson, respected Scottish historian and author

William (Bill) Ferguson was born in 1924 in Muirkirk, at that time a considerably larger settlement than it is today. His father Samuel was a railwaymen on the Muirkirk to Lanark line that linked Muirkirk to Glasgow. In the 1930s Samuel was promoted to a job at the yard at Springburn in Glasgow. Bill had clear memories of his schooling, and recalled that his classmates included children from the Basque country in Spain, Germany and Poland, torn loose from their countries as the political situation in Europe deteriorated.

Their fathers were employed in local collieries and foundries which used the local deposits of black band ironstone and coal. The world came to Muirkirk by the early 20th century, and in turn those born in Muirkirk travelled and settled around the world in some numbers, including Bill’s brothers Hugh and Jim. Bill, in contrast, never left Scotland, except for part of his wartime naval service in England and the Mediterranean, and two years’ postgraduate study at Balliol College Oxford.

This had come about after he was awarded one of the Snell fellowships that made it possible for students from Glasgow to continue their education as postgraduates at Oxford. At the time of Bill’s admission to Balliol in 1950, Oxford (and Cambridge) required students from Scottish universities to complete an Oxford undergraduate degree before going on to doctoral studies. After completing his second undergraduate degree, Bill chose to return to Glasgow to do his doctorate, given that his interests were in Scottish History.

He was awarded his Glasgow PhD in History for his ambitious thesis on “Electoral Law and Procedure” in Scotland after the 1707 union with England. His work was rooted in his lifelong commitment to rebut those who dismissed Scottish politics after the union as a cesspit of aristocratic greed, bribery and corruption, in comparison with the glories of the English unwritten constitution. This remained a lifelong subject of interest for Bill, who published “The Electoral System in the Scottish Counties before 1832” in the Stair Society’s (the legal history society in Scotland) Miscellany 2 volume of 1984, and “Record Sources for the Electoral History of Scotland, 1702-1832” in the journal Scottish Archives in 1998.

An important part of the background to Bill’s academic career was his service in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. Called up at the end of his first year as a medical student aged 19, he was registered as a sick berth attendant on the corvettes and minesweepers on which he worked as part of coastal defence for most of the war, with a posting to the Mediterranean just before it ended.

After his doctoral studies he found work as an Assistant Lecturer in History, moving from Glasgow to Edinburgh in 1954 when William Croft Dickinson was Professor of Scottish History, later winning promotion to Lecturer and Senior Lecturer.

At Edinburgh Bill played an important role in creating a second year lecture course in modern Scottish History, implicit in which was the idea that Scottish History had not ended with the union of 1707. In 1963, Gordon Donaldson was promoted from a Readership to the chair of Scottish History. Donaldson had negotiated a contract with the Edinburgh publishing house Oliver and Boyd for the publication of a four-volume Edinburgh History of Scotland, with himself as General Editor, and he persuaded Bill to write the modern volume in the series, published as Scotland: 1689 to the Present in 1968. It was reissued in paperback in 1978 and reprinted on a regular basis into the 21st century.

Bill was promoted to a Readership in the 1970s. By then he had signed a contract with a London publisher to write a book on Scotland’s relations with England since the union, as there was considerable public discussion over the possible introduction of devolved government in Scotland.

Bill, however, decided that to understand Scotland’s relations with England after the union of 1707 it was necessary to write a history of Scotland’s relations with England from earliest times. He argued that there had been two separate kingdoms on the island of Great Britain for centuries and that the integration of two kingdoms into one had not been fully achieved in 1707, particularly in "law, politics and administration”. Bill’s publisher refused to accept his manuscript, but an enterprising Edinburgh publisher persuaded Bill to allow them to publish his book in 1977 as Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707, reprinted by the Saltire Society in 1994. Wonderfully written, it was a controversial book, but there were many who respected Bill’s determination to speak truth, as he saw it, to those in power at a time of lively political debate in Scotland.

Bill retired in 1989 at the age of 65. He was able to continue his research after retiring, publishing The Identity of the Scottish Nation: An Historic Quest in 1998. It was awarded the Saltire Society’s prize for Scottish History, and Arnold Kemp published an article on the book in the Observer that celebrated Bill’s achievement. In 2007, former students and colleagues published a collection of essays in his honour.

He was a profound scholar who took immense pains with his research. He could be abrupt in his judgements, but there was much genuine kindness in a man whose family loved and cared for him when he became frail. Right up to the beginning of this year he remained trenchant and alert in his conversation and interested in the future of his country and the cause of its independence.

He is survived by his wife of 62 years, Olga, his children Donald, Kenneth, Katrina, and Olga, and four grandchildren.

ALEXANDER MURDOCH (with thanks to David J Brown and Donald Ferguson)

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