A Tribute to Morton Gauld

A personal perspective by Francesca Murphy

Many people in Aberdeen and around the world will mourn the loss of Morton Gauld on Tuesday 11 April, 2006, aged 68. He was proud, shy, an aesthete and actor, and for all that a selfless friend to countless youthful students and ladies of an uncertain age. Morton studied Classics at Aberdeen in the 1950s – specializing in philologizing and spurning philosophy. He remained in Aberdeen through the 1960s and '70s, teaching Latin in the schools. When Latin died out in Aberdeen's schools (the last straw, Morton told me, was a fire in the 'cabin' in which he'd been reduced to teaching Latin for the Grammar School) he had to take early retirement. After the lamentable closure of the Aberdeen University Classics department in 1987, Divinity graduates were cast up with no means of learning the language required by nearly all serious Church Historians and not a few Biblical scholars – Latin. Morton began teaching Latin informally to our postgrads in this time. When I came to be interviewed for my post in 1995, he presented himself to me as our 'Fellow in Ecclesiastical Latin', and I knew at once that I had encountered an important figure. In those years, our photocopier was cranky and antediluvian: Morton named it 'Oscar', and he was the only person in King's College who could make it function. In short, Morton made himself unobtrusively indispensable. Between 1995 and 2000, he was constantly to be seen on the Quad, engaged in slow and earnest conversation with our most roguish postgrads. I once remarked to Dr Helen Bond that Morton provided something of non-material value to the Divinity department: she promptly corrected me, pointing out that the number of failing students saved from dropping out by Morton's avuncular attentions was very precisely quantifiable in material terms. Soon, Morton had his own Latin class, and he also taught a postgraduate class in Latin and ran a Latin reading club for us oldies. The work he did for Divinity students and others went much further than that: dozens of our students will acknowledge that they could not have achieved their PhDs without his Latin teaching, his proof-reading, and his unfailing assistance with every linguistic question. He probably attended the 12.15 mass at the Catholic chaplaincy every week day for 20 years. Morton was a Stoic: one day, at 12.10 I passed him on the Quad, and he asked me, 'Are you going to Mass?' I said, 'I don't feel like it', and he replied, 'Neither do I' – and marched on, with me marching in his rear. As Simon Gathercole remarked recently, 'Morton is a Roman'. He never much liked what he always called 'the Roman Empire ' – the Catholic Church – but stoically endured it.

In our very last conversation, lunching at my house on 30 March, Morton happened to describe a bit of his religious history. He had begun as an attender at Gilcomston South. He had been an admirer of the Reverend William Still. But by his late teens, even before he came up to the University, he had begun to receive instruction – partly from Donald McKinnon – at St. Margaret's, Gallowgate. To my surprise, I learned that he had not left the Episcopalian Church over the ordination of women – he had left long before that 'fateful' decision, but, he said, needed little instruction, since the Church of Rome was a come-down after the ritual severities of the Anglican liturgy he preferred until his death. A dedicated ritualist, Morton's bearing in Church was far from humourless. Members of the Catholic chaplaincy do not yet know how we will learn to live without his brilliant rhetorical skill in reading the lesson – 'doing the voices' of the characters in Daniel and Maccabees in a way that had us shaking with laughter. He continued to attend the Anglican services at the Gallowgate and loved his many Protestant students, but told a group of older friends over lunch in 2004 that he was stuck in 'the Roman Empire' for good now, because of the doctrinal degradations elsewhere. But he remained profoundly ecumenical: the 2006 Ash Wednesday service in King's Chapel, presided over by Catholic, Anglican and Methodist ministers was a sparkling occasion for him.

His last years were marked by sadness and joy, I think. His struggle to retain his own office was finally lost, and he was pained by having no place of his own in which to instruct his beloved ecclesiastical historians. But, especially since his heart trouble, which began in 2003, his friends amongst staff and students rallied round, and their visits to him in hospital showed him how much he was truly loved. Many current and former PhD students will not forget his birthday party, in 2004, in the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. Those heart problems gave him pain, but also the joy of deepened friendship. For the first time, perhaps, this 'Roman' Stoic learned a bit to depend on the care of others, and to receive help as well as to give it. The refectory will not be the same without the sight of Morton lunching with his favourite postgraduates, instructing them on the importance of healthy eating. He could resist everything except the temptation of Belgian chocolates and steamed puddings.

In the last fortnight of Morton's life, disaster stuck in the form of a hotel double-booking, destroying his annual ritual of spending Holy Week in Walsingham. No one could persuade him to go to Pluscarden Abbey for the Triduum ('I'm not spiritual enough', he insisted with typical gloomy realism). I left for France expecting to meet him at the Good Friday Service at Huntly Street Cathedral, and to discover the upshot of our weekly gamble on the Euromillion Lottery (he always expected to lose). If I may be excused a Romanism: Morton will not have long for purgatory.