Great Scots of Note: Scotland on Britannia

Gateway to the British Isles since 1996

Scots Who Made A Difference

by Peter N. Williams, Ph.D.
© 2007 Britannia.com

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DALHOUSIE, JAMES, 1st Marquis (1812-60)
James Ramsey Dalhousie, Dalhousie Castle, Midlothian, Governor General of India 1847-56, can be accorded the honor of creating the centralized state of India. This was accomplished mainly through military conquest and annexation of various independent provinces. To Dalhousie we can also attribute the map of modern India. He laid the foundations of modern transportation and communication systems on the Indian continent as well as instituting social reforms. To his discredit, some of his policies helped spark the Indian Mutiny of 1857 that so shook up the British Empire.

DALRYMPLE, ALEXANDER (1727-1808)
Indirectly, Alexander Dalrymple from New Hailes, Midlothian, geographer and first hydrographer of the British Admiralty, was responsible for much of the successful voyagers of James Cook to the South Pacific. Dalrymple was convinced that a huge, populous continent existed in the South Pacific, which he called "the Great South Land." He hoped to find this land on an expedition of 1769, but command was given to Cook who found no evidence of its existence. Cook did find evidence of a so-called "Terra Australia," however, by his discovery of New Zealand and the southeast coast of Australia.

When Dalrymple published his Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean in 1770-71, the widespread interest aroused by his continued claim of the existence of the unknown continent led Cook, now promoted to Captain, to undertake yet another voyage into the South Pacific, adding more knowledge of that part of the world and charting many new coasts.

DAVID I (1082-1153)
King David l of Scotland had a profound influence on his country's future course of events, for it was he who introduced the Anglo-Norman feudal system into the south of Scotland. Before acceding to the Scottish throne in 1124, David had spent much of his life at the Court of Henry l of England, his brother-in-law. With the help of many Anglo-Normans, he ruled large areas of northern England, but his continual intrigues against King Stephen, who succeeded Henry in 1135, cost him dearly, for he was badly defeated at the Battle of the Standard in 1138, having to forfeit his right to Northumberland. David also recognized his niece, the Holy Roman Empress Matilda as rightful heir to the English throne and fought on her behalf with much success, enabling her son Henry Plantagenet to succeed Stephen in 1154.

David's grants of lands to many Norman families helped settle the Lowlands with a new aristocracy; their intermarriage with those Anglo-Normans who had preceded them into Scotland gave birth to the great dynasties of Comyn, Bruce, Stewart and Oliphant that were to play such prominent parts in future Scottish history. It was David who created a kind of central administration for Scotland and who issued the first Scottish royal coinage. He built the castles around which the first Scottish burghs grew, including Edinburgh and Stirling. He also reorganized the Scottish Church to conform to continental and English standards and practices in addition to founding many religious communities that laid the foundation for Scotland's later reputation for scholarship and education.

DAVID II (1324-71)
Robert Bruce's daughter had married Walter fitzAlan, the hereditary High Steward of Scotland, also known as Walter the Steward, the later form of which became Stuart. Their son David became king at the age of five, with Moray acting as regent. At first, the reign of David II as King of Scotland seems to show us little more than long periods of costly wars against England, but the consequent decline in the prestige of the monarchy and the increase in the power of the Scottish barons had important repercussions.

Especially important for Scotland's future was the strengthening, largely by royal default, of the Scottish Parliament that was to play such a huge part in the later imposition of Protestantism in their disregard of the religious policies of the Stuart monarchs of England. It was this Parliament that repudiated the arrangement made by David that a son of Edward III of England would succeed to the throne of Scotland. Thus David's irresponsible behavior sowed the seeds of a mighty revolution in Scottish political and religious history.

DAVIDSON, THOMAS (1817-85)
At the same time that Charles Darwin was publishing his monumental work on natural history and the miraculous but painstakingly slow ways that species have evolved, Scottish naturalist Thomas Davidson was hard at work at the University of Edinburgh. Davidson's specialty, involving some of the earth's oldest fossils, was Brachiopoda, a phylum of marine invertebrates that possesses a bivalve shell. Of extreme importance to this branch of science, Davidson produced his Monograph of the British Fossil Brachiopoda in 6 volumes (1851-86) for which he provided his own illustrations.

DAVIDSON OF LAMBETH (1848-1930)
As archbishop of Canterbury, another man of Edinburgh, Randall Thomas Davidson, 1st Baron Davidson of Lambeth, played an enormous role in the extension of the prestige of his See, but also of the Church of England overseas. He played a great part in the reconciliation of extremists during the religious problems of the early 1900's in England, especially over the place of religious instruction in schools. Perhaps more important for future historians was his influence in persuading other Anglican bishops to support the Prime Minister's attempts to lessen the power of the House of Lords in the 1911 legislature.

Bishop Davidson worked on behalf of the United Nations in many countries. He led public protests against religious persecution in Russia, helped draft the "Appeal to All Christian People" to promote Christian unity, encouraged closer ties with the Eastern Orthodox Church and was extremely active in promoting and advising missionary activities.

DAWSON, SIR JOHN WILLIAM (1820-99)
John William Dawson was born in the Scottish settlement at Pictou, Nova Scotia, where he later became superintendent of education. It was in extending the knowledge of Canadian geology, however, that he made his principal contribution to science. In 1855, he published his Acadian Geology, the same year that he became professor and principal of McGill University, Montreal. His many years at that institution helped transform it into one of the world's foremost centers of learning.

In 1839, Dawson announced his discovery of the then earliest known land plant, estimated as belonging to the Devonian period, 3,500,000 years old. He also published an account of the first remains of an air-breathing reptile in his Air Breathers of the Cool Period (1863). Dawson also published a vast quantity of information dealing with various aspects of the subjects he taught at McGill, including geology, paleontology, zoology, chemistry and agriculture.

DE QUINCY, THOMAS (1785-1859)
Edinburgh-born Thomas De Quincy is best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (published in London Magazine in 1821 and later in book form, which apparently has nothing to do with eating English Opium). Though he wrote copiously -- his writings run to more than 14 volumes -- De Quincy never put it all together in a coherent philosophy. It has been pointed out that his daily intake of laudenum, taken at first to relieve facial neuralgia, probably prevented him from organizing his imaginative insights and astute literary criticisms into a compact body of writing that would fulfill his early ambition of becoming "the intellectual benefactor of mankind." Instead, we have this solitary remembrance of a life in the grip of drug addiction and a warning to all whom would delude themselves as to the pleasures of opium.

DEWAR, JAMES (1842-1923)
People who live in cold climates who need to have their drinks kept hot owe an enormous debt of gratitude to James Dewar, an industrial chemist from Kincardine on Forth. Dewar lectured at Edinburgh University while he carried out his experiments on the low temperature liquification of gases, including oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. In 1872, he produced the forerunner of what was to become known world wide as the Thermos bottle, or flask in Britain. Known by his colleagues as a superb expermentalist, along with English chemist Frederick Abel, Dewar also developed cordite, a smokeless, slow-burning explosive powder that became the standard explosive of the British Armed Forces.

DOUGLAS, DAVID (1798-1834)
David Douglas was born in Scone, Perthshire, but spent most of his life as a traveller, explorer and botanical collector in North America. Those tourists who marvel at the huge, towering Douglas firs in the Northwest are gazing upwards at trees named after this Scotsman and can also gaze downwards at the primrose genius Douglasia, also named for him. Douglas left his position as lowly gardener at Glasgow's Botanical Garden to work for the Royal Horticultural Society as a botanical collector, in which capacity he discovered many new plant and animal species in the Pacific Northwest. Beginning his explorations in the Oregon Territory in 1823, he later explored British Columbia and Hudson Bay before travelling and collecting in California and the Frazer River area.

DOUGLAS, GAVIN (1475-1522)
Gavin Douglas is remembered in literary circles as one of the major Scottish Chaucerian poets. His King Hart, an allegory of the heart of a man as king of a castle surrounded by good and bad courtiers, was no doubt based on the Scottish court. Douglas abandoned his literary career for politics after the Battle of Flodden (1513) in which James IV of Scotland was killed. His political intrigues finally led to his exile, where he died of the plague.

Douglas managed to produce the first direct translation of Virgil's Aeneid in Britain, the 12 books entitled XIII Bukes of the Eneados in 10-syllabled metre (with the extra book added to Virgil by Maffeo Vegio). He added to each of Virgil's twelve books a prolog in which he presents facets of nature expressed in realistic Scottish terms. Critics consider his Eneados a literary monument; it showed that the Scottish language was perfectly capable of rendering the Classics. Douglas was the first writer to use the term "Scottish," rather than "Inglis" to describe his language.

DOUGLAS, SIR JAMES (1803-77)
Though he was born in what was then British Guiana, James Douglas is known as "the father of British Columbia." Joining the Hudson Bay Company in 1821, Douglas became responsible for its operations west of the Rockies. He moved the company's headquarters to Vancouver Island from Oregon after the northwest boundary of the US had been settled. By preventing Americans from establishing a foothold in the Canadian Pacific territories, especially after gold had been discovered in the Frazer River in 1858 which brought a flood of settlers, Douglas' actions led to the creation of British Columbia by the British Government. He became its first governor, overseeing its rapid transformation from a wilderness colony into a vital, prosperous province of Canada.

DOUGLAS, JAMES (1837-1918)
Yet another Scot born overseas, this time in Quebec, James Douglas, mining engineer, industrialist and philanthropist contributed much to the industrial development of the southwestern region of the United States. In a rapidly advancing career, Douglas became Chancellor of Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario where he had formerly studied engineering. He also studied medicine and theology in Scotland. With T. Sterry Hunt, Douglas invented the Hunt-Douglas process for treating copper, a feat that led to his becoming superintendent of the Chemical Copper Company at Phoenixville, Pennsylvania in 1875, where he installed the first commercial copper-electrolytic refining plant.

From 1899 to 1901, Douglas was President of the American Institute of Mining Engineers. He had previously examined, and then acquired copper mines in Arizona, later becoming President of the Copper Queen Mining Company. This venture, along with his building of the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, did much to promote the economic growth of the southwestern region of the United States. Douglas' donation of radium to General Memorial Hospital, New York helped put that institution in the forefront of cancer research.

DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN (1859-1930)
What a debt we all owe to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation of Sherlock Holmes, one of the most exciting figures in all of English fiction, not to mention Holmes' lovable, genial companion Dr. Watson and his archenemy, the evil Professor Moriarty. Indeed, so fixed a part of our lives have these characters become that thousands and thousands of visitors come each year from all parts of the globe to visit 221B Baker Street in London to see where they believe Holmes lived and worked. There is a tavern nearby, "The Sherlock Holmes" that has a small exhibition in the bar of the fictional detectives pipe, deerstalker hat and so on. We can dismiss the rest of Conan Doyle's writings and we can only be amused by his belief in the supernatural and para normal (he could be easily fooled by even the most amateur spiritualist and charlatan, as Houdini was to discover).

Doyle's stories about the eccentric, but brilliant detective and his unfailing powers of perception were apparently based on one of his teachers at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied medicine. They first appeared in A Study in Scarlet (1887). Evidence of his own medical training at Edinburgh surfaces from time to time in Doyle's detective stories. The instructor was greatly admired for his deductive reasoning, an attribute for which Sherlock Holmes was to become famous (Doyle then contributed additional stories in the Strand Magazine). When the writer killed off his famous detective in 1893, public demand made his restoration inevitable.

DRUMMOND, WILLIAM (1585-1649)
Drummond of Hawthornden (near Edinburgh) was the first notable Scottish poet to write deliberately in English, being heavily influenced by the Renaissance love poetry, which had become so popular in Britain during the previous century and so slavishly imitated. Drummond settled down at Hawthornden in his middle twenties, having studied at Edinburgh but having spent a number of years in France. His writings, in which he was the first to use the Italian metrical form, the conzone in English, brought him the attention of many English poets, including Michael Drayton, Ben Johnson and others. By using English, Drummond pointed the way for s school of Scottish writers of the future, though the use of natural Scotticisms and local dialect forms remained the norm in Scottish literature.

DUFF, ALEXANDER (1806-78)
It is difficult to gauge the influence of Christian missionary activities in such countries as India; overwhelmingly Moslem and Hindu at the time Alexander Duff arrived in May 1830. One thing is certain, the missions fostered the use of the English language, now used throughout the sub-continent. Duff was especially keen to promote higher education. His language school at Calcutta, open to Hindus and Moslems, combined studies of the Bible with those of western science, thus challenging local religious beliefs. In 1844, Duff co-founded the Calcutta Review and later condemned British government policies in his Indian Mutiny: Its Causes and Results (1858). Upon his return to Scotland in 1873, Duff, for the second time, was appointed moderator of the Free Church Assembly.

DUNBAR, WILLIAM (1460-1530)
During the early years of the Tudor monarchs, beginning with the accession of Henry VII in 1485, Scots wrote the most vigorous poetry in the English language. It was the golden age of Scottish poetry and William Dunbar was the dominant figure among the "Scottish Chaucerians." His poetry is outstanding for its metrical variety, freshness and versatility. His masterpiece of 1503 was The Golden Targe in which he depicts the poet asleep on a May morning experiencing a dream vision (The Golden Targe is the golden shield of reason that protects him from the arrows of love.)

The language of Dunbar is middle Scots. Attached to the court of James IV, he exercised some of the functions of poet laureate. In his Thrissill and the Rois (The Thistle and the Rose), he celebrates the marriage of Margaret, daughter of English King Henry VII to James IV of Scotland. His artistry and range, covering wondrous poems of love and bitter satire, if lacking the sheer humanity of the later Robert Burns, gives Dunbar a most honored place among the literary greats of Scotland.

DUNCAN I (d. 1040)
Of Duncan's influence upon Scottish history and subsequent world developments, not much can be said. He was created king by his father Malcolm in defiance of the tradition that should have given the kingdom to another, perhaps to MacBeth, sub-king of Moray. Shakespeare, of course, fashioned his great tragedy MacBeth out of some of these elements of Scottish history, and it is there in the hallowed halls of literature that we have been most affected by Duncan' s murder.

DUNCAN, ANDREW, THE ELDER (1744-1828)
Adding to Edinburgh's fast-growing reputation as one of the world's leading medical centers in the early 18th century, Andrew Duncan, physician and professor, founded what became the Royal Public Dispensary chartered in 1818. President of the Edinburgh College of Physicians, he proposed the erection of the first public lunatic house of Edinburgh (completed 1807) and also founded the Caledonian Horticultural Society (1799).

DUNCAN, ANDREW, THE YOUNGER (1773-1832)
Son of a famous father, Andrew the Younger was the first professor of medical jurisprudence in Britain at the University of Edinburgh in 1807. He later joined the elder Duncan as joint professor of the Institute of Medicine and did much to break down the ancient theories of healing and introduce more modern, life-saving methods. The rebuilding of the university owes much to Duncan's tenure as commissioner from 1816 until his death in 2832. Among his publications were the Edinburgh New Dispensatory (1803) published in ten editions and in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal.

DUNDEE, JOHN GRAHAM OF CLAVERHOUSE, 1st Viscount (1649-89)
When John Graham died in 1689, any real hope of Jacobite success against the Protestant King of England, William III and his Queen Mary II were sadly put to rest. John Graham was a fierce and courageous fighter known to his followers as "Bonnie Dundee." He trained as a soldier in France and the Netherlands and fought in Scotland for the Anglican cause of King Charles II, helping defeat the rebel Presbyterian army at Bothwell Bridge in 1679.

When William of Orange invaded England to claim the throne from James II in 1688, Graham took up arms again on behalf of James who created him Viscount Dundee. At the Pass of Killiecrankie, in July 1689, Graham's Highlanders annihilated the soldiers of General Hugh MacKay. Falling from his horse, after being shot and mortally wounded, Graham was unable to share in the rejoicing. His disheartened troops were later utterly defeated at the Battle of Dunkeld. Had he lived, Graham may have certainly prevented the transfer of allegiance of the Highland Chiefs to the English throne by 1691. But we cannot speculate on yet another of Scotland's many "What if's?"

DUNLOP, JOHN, BOYD (1840-1921)
In 1887, John Boyd Dunlop, who had moved from his native Ayrshire to Belfast, Northern Ireland as a veterinary surgeon, invented one of the world's greatest and most blessed innovations -- the pneumatic tire. Constructed for the wheels of his son's tricycle, the tire was patented one year later, going into commercial production in 1890. It was a fortuitous time, for the advent of the automobile demanded a smooth, comfortable ride that could only be obtained through use of the pneumatic tire. The Dunlop Company was soon to become world famous and established its pre-eminent position despite the fact that a patent had been taken out on a pneumatic tire as early as 1846. The commercial success of the Dunlop tire has surely made its Scottish inventor one of the great benefactors of mankind.

DUNS, SCOTUS, JOHN (1265-1308)
We may not hear too much today about Duns Scotus, Franciscan scholastic philosopher and theologian, but his teachings had an enormous influence on Catholic theology right up until the end of the 18th century. It was John Scotus, from Duns in Berwickshire, who pioneered the classical defense of the doctrine that the mother of Jesus was conceived without original sin, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception that is still important in the Roman Catholic Church. Scots also defended the papacy against the French king's wish to tax the church to pay for his wars. His great work of theology, showing his speculative mind, is his Ordinatio.

DYCE, ALEXANDER (1798-1869)
Edinburgh-born Alexander Dyce is to be remembered as one of the 19th century's outstanding literary editors. He was especially influential in the growing interest in the works of William Shakespeare, then in danger of being relegated to the back shelves of libraries because of centuries of poor editing and misconceptions (not to mention the infamous Bowdlerizing of the previous decade). In addition to his work on Shakespeare, Dyce also edited such dramatists as George Peele, John Webster, Robert Greene, Thomas Middleton, Beaumant and Fletcher and Christopher Marlowe bringing these hitherto mainly forgotten masters to the attention of a new better-educated reading public in Britain.

DYCE, WILLIAMS (1806-64)
William Dyce, one of the most important painters in Scottish history, was born in Aberdeen. His influence may be seen in much of the work of the later English so-called pre-Raphaelites, but perhaps was more felt in his support of state art education, for which his enthusiasm, stemming from his concept of the basic relationships between painting, architecture and design, remained undimmed. In 1840, Dyce was appointed Secretary and Director of the Government School of Design at Somerset House, London, where his training of teachers of design has had a lasting influence.

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