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

F
FAIRBAIRN, SIR WILLIAM (1789-1874)
Kelso born engineer and inventor whose pioneering work in bridge design and in finding new applications for iron was of enourmous help to Robert Stephenson in designing the Britannia Bridge in Wales. The worldwide use of box girders in bridge building was made possible by Fairbairn's hydraulic machines.

FERGUSON, ADAM (1723-1816)
From Perthshire, Ferguson was a philosopher of the Scottish "Common Sense" school. By emphasizing individual and social interactions, he is remembered as a pioneer in modern sociology. His many writings include a work on Welsh author Richard Price's Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty in which Ferguson proposed peace teams to end the American Revolution. In 1788 he traveled to Philadelphia to take part in negotiations.

FERGUSON, PATRICK (1744-80)
Had the ultra-conservative British government listened to Patrick Ferguson, it is highly possible that the American colonies may not have been able to win their independence (at least not at the time they did). Ferguson, born at Pitfours, Aberdeen, was a career soldier from the age of 14. Wounded at the Battle of Brandywine in 1777, he had earlier invented a flintlock rifle that could outperform any other of its kind. The Ferguson rifle, a practical breechloader, was considered the finest military firearm used in the war. It could be fired six times a minute and possessed a grooved breechlock to prevent powder jam. The usual bull-necked, short-sighted officialdom so prevalent at Westminster prevented its large scale manufacture and use by the British Army who, issued with slow-firing cumbersome weapons, went down to an astonishing defeat at the hands of the upstart colonists.

FERGUSON, ROBERT (1750-74)
Though he died of an injury suffered in a fall before he reached his mid-twenties, Edinburgh native Robert Ferguson was one of the leading figures of the revival of Scots vernacular writing and a major forerunner of Robert Burns. He had contributed poems to Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine. Their popularity, in a racy, realistic and witty Scots dialect led to a collected volume in 1773. Burns based much of his own poetry on those of Ferguson, whose own work is represented by such humorous poems as "Auld Reekie."

FERRIER, SUSAN EDMONSTONE (1782-1854)
Long before the works of the female author known as George Eliot or the Bronte sisters had appeared on the literary scene, an Edinburgh woman had been writing popular novels in which she exposed the pretensions of Scottish society in the early part of the 19th century. In the fashion of the time, Susan Ferrier's works were published anonymously; they included Marriage (1818) Inheritance (1824) and Destiny; or, The Chief's Daughter (1831). So memorable were some of the characters portrayed in these novels that none other than the illustrious Sir Walter Scott himself called Ferrier his "sister shadow."

FISHER, ANDREW (1862-1928)
Three-time Labour prime minister of Australia (during the period 1908-15), Fisher began life in Crosshouse, Ayrshire, emigrating to Queensland in 1885 where he worked as a coal miner and union leader before being elected to the legislature in 1893. He became party leader in 1907 and Prime Minister one year later. During his second term, legislation was passed creating a commonwealth bank and a land tax to break up some of the country's large estates. The Navigation Act also helped protect his country's fledgling shipping industry and an Australian national navy was begun. In addition, as prime minister, Fisher also helped bring about the provision of maternity allowances, the extension of judicial arbitration for labor disputes and the start of a railroad to cross the continent of Australia and thereby link the various provinces.

Fisher showed his loyalty to the land of his birth when he led Australia into World War l, pledging to support Britain to "the last man and the last shilling." The fighting qualities of the forces from Down Under were admirable demonstrated time and time again in that bloody and senseless conflict.

FLEMING, SIR ALEXANDER (1881-1955)
It is so difficult to imagine a world without penicillin, the wonder drug that saves so many thousands of lives each year in every country of the world and that helps cure so many different diseases. Alexander Fleming, from Lockfield, Ayr was the man responsible for its discovery in 1928; thus he led the way for the widespread, universally accepted practice of antibiotic therapy for infectious diseases.

Fleming graduated from London University Medical School in 1906. He continuing to research antibacterial substances that would prove non-toxic to human tissues while he was serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War I. He later joined the staff of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1928. While working with staphylococcus bacteria, he happened to notice that a bacteria-free circle had grown around a growth of mold that had been contaminating a staph culture. He called the substance penicillin that had prevented the growth of the bacteria. His startling discovery was published in British Journal of Experimental Pathology.

In addition to penicillin (which he did very little to promote), Fleming also discovered lysozyme, an anti-bacterial agent that is found in human tears and saliva. He received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1945 (along with Ernst Chain and Howard Florey, both of whose continued work had helped in the purification, testing and quantity production of penicillin, all of which was necessary for the drug to be accepted, and thus making Fleming famous.)

FLETCHER, ANDREW (1655-1716)
It is difficult in the aftermath to judge the influence of Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, on the future affairs of his beloved nation. One thing is certain, by his sponsorship of a clause in the Scottish Act of Security in 1703 that might have caused civil war, the English Parliament went ahead with its plans to pass the Act of Union with Scotland four years later. The decision was probable inevitable, but in hindsight, we can never be sure how the speedy decision was helped along by Fletcher's anti-government stance.

Perhaps Fletcher's influence is being felt in the 1990's as Scotland gears itself for the new Assembly, its own Parliament since the Act of Union, for the Scot vigorously supported Scottish nationhood and spoke vehemently against union. Above all, he championed the rights of Scotland's own parliament.

FORBES, DUNCAN (1685-1747)
Duncan Forbes of Culloden, died less than two years after that battle, so disastrous for the Stuart hopes, to say nothing of the decimation of the Highland way of life that followed the Duke of Cumberland's easy victory. It was Forbes' staunch support of the Hanoverian monarch George II that had contributed greatly to the defeat of the Jacobites.

First elected to the British parliament in 1722, by 1737 Forbes had become the influential Lord President of the Court of Sessions. When the invasion of Charles Edward, the Bonnie Prince, finally came, Forbes kept the strategic town of Inverness loyal to the English king. During an eight-month period prior to the battle, Forbes had been the main representative of the government in northern Scotland. He was instrumental in persuading the chiefs of the powerful MacDonald and MacLeod clans not to bring their highlanders to aid the Jacobite cause with what results we can only sadly contemplate. To his credit, Forbes tried to mitigate the punishment of the defeated rebels and thus fell out of favor in jingoistic, victory-flushed (but also greatly relieved) London.

FORBES, JAMES DAVID (1809-68)
Another illustrious name from the city of Edinburgh is that of James David Forbes, whose research on heat conduction and glaciers brought him the coveted Gold Medal from the Royal Society in 1843. At the University of Edinburgh, where he taught, he published four series of "Researches on Heat" (1836-44) in which he described the polarization of radiant infrared heat. He also conducted experiments on the temperature of the Earth at different depths, adding much to our knowledge on a hitherto relatively unknown subject. He then looked at the way heat is conducted in bars, showing that iron conducts heat less efficiently as it is heated. Much of Forbes' later work, conducted in Norway and Switzerland, dealt with the internal structure of glaciers and their movement.

FORSYTH, PETER TAYLOR (1848-1921)
In the lives of many Christians, the work of Congregational minister Peter Taylor Forsyth of Aberdeen has had a profound influence. Though not made popular until expressed by philosopher Karl Barth, many of Taylor's ideas have helped remind Protestants throughout the world of their own teachings about the church, not an easy task when so many forces, including both evangelicalism and liberalism were relentlessly obscuring many basic tenets.

Much of Forsyth's writings came during his term as Principal of Hackney Theological College, London; they include Positive Preaching and the Modern Minds (1907), Lectures on the Church and the Sacraments (1917) and his most well known work, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909). In this work he brilliantly attempts to use modern personal experience to express the doctrine of Christ's divinity. Forsyth's other works, also having a great influence on the later thinking of Barth by his examination of the relevance of Christian faith to today's world, are The Justification of God (1916) and Christ on Parnassus (1911) in which he deals with theology and the arts.

FRASER, JAMES BAILLIE (1783-1856)
From the little town of Reelick in Inverness, James Fraser eventually travelled into Persia (now named Iran) and the Himalayas, providing many exciting and valuable accounts of his journeys, undertaken between 1815 and 1834. On one diplomatic mission to Persia, Fraser journeyed some 2,600 miles on horseback from Constantinople (Istanbul) to Isfahan. Fraser's name can thus be added to the roll of those intrepid Scots "who came back alive" to make known the hitherto unknown.

FRASER, PETER (1884-1950)
Peter Fraser came from Fearn, Ross and Cromarty. He joined the Independent Labour Party while working in London in 1908, but his meteoric rise in politics did not begin until after his emigration (during a period of unemployment) to New Zealand in 1910. Starting as a union organizer at several ports, he also helped found the Social Democratic Party (1913) in his adopted country and its successor the Labour Party (1916). After World War I had ended (during which he was imprisoned for opposing conscription), Fraser was elected to Parliament, becoming leader of his party only one year later.

When his party came into power in 1935, Fraser served as minister of education, health, marine and police, and was also responsible for legislation to revise the educational system and to improve pensions. One of his great achievements was the Social Security Act of 1938 that created a national health service (which many modern industrial nations still lack). In 1940, he became prime minister, helping win a voice for New Zealand in Allied military strategy in the Pacific. An eloquent spokesman for the rights of small nations, Fraser was one of the architects of the post-war United Nations.

FRAZER, SIR JAMES GEORGE (1854-1941)
For scholars and students of ancient myths, The Golden Bough is indeed a golden book, a treasure trove to be dipped into time and time again. Its author was James Frazer, anthropologist, folklorist and classicist, born in Glasgow, educated at that proud city's university and at Trinity College, Cambridge.

In 1890, Frazer, relying on his close contact with missionaries and colonial administrators, published his outstanding, The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion and his reputation was firmly and permanently established. It was a book that pioneered the anthropological distinction between magic and religion, seeing one as an attempt to control events by "technical acts based on faulty reasoning" and the other as "an appeal for help to spiritual beings."

The book is especially strong in its discussion of "Divine Kingship" as was practiced by tribes in Africa and elsewhere. It was also the first book to make intelligible to European readers a vast range or primitive custom. All modern anthropologists and folklorists (as well as those, brave enough to try to understand the beginnings of many contemporary religious practices) owe an immense debt to Frazer's pioneering work.

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