J. Derrick McClure: An Appreciation

John M. Kirk and Iseabail Macleod

John Derrick Ralston McClure, or J. Derrick McClure as he is widely known, was born in Ayr on 20 July 1944. His mother (née Reid) was a primary-school teacher, his father a teacher of physical education; he was the eldest of three children. After secondary education at Ayr Academy, where he was joint dux, Derrick attended the University of Glasgow from 1962 to 1966 when he graduated in English Language and Literature. Among his teachers were the Shakespeareanist Peter Alexander, the literary scholar Peter Butter, the poet and critic Edwin Morgan, and the philologists John Farrish and Michael Samuels. Subsequently he graduated (1970) with a MLitt in Linguistics (Phonetics) from the University of Edinburgh; his thesis, on the Scottish Vowel Length Rule and the vowel in never, was supervised by David Abercrombie and A.J. Aitken. During this time, Derrick spent two years as a part-time assistant lecturer on the Linguistic Survey of Scotland, doing fieldwork in various parts of Scotland and also a year as a Lektor at the University of Tübingen. For two years from 1970 he taught at the University of Ottawa, and since 1972, almost his entire career, he has taught and researched at the , becoming Senior Lecturer in 1990, and retiring in 2009. While based in Aberdeen, Derrick has indefatigably travelled the world giving papers on Scots; his dynamic performances, often conducted inimitably with his hands in tune and in strict rhythm, and often in his kilt on social occasions, have endeared him to so many and earned universal respect. A favourite and recurrent destination was Japan, where Derrick regularly and vigorously promoted the Scots language and its literature and made many friends. At Aberdeen, he has supervised numerous research theses including one, in 1998, written entirely in Scots, by Alasdair Allan, now MSP for the Western Isles and Minister for Gaelic and Scots in the current . Derrick has also been in demand internationally as an external examiner for theses dealing with Scots or literature in Scots. His interests in Scots cover every conceivable aspect of the language and its study. He was educated at a time when the certainties of philology, spanning literature as well as language, the past as well as 10 John M. Kirk and Iseabail Macleod the present, were becoming challenged by the more theoretical questions of linguistics. In his studies of Scots as a literary vehicle, Derrick continued a traditional text-based, empirical approach into the twenty-first century. It is very difficult to think of an author of any period, medieval, revivalist, or present-day, who uses Scots about whom Derrick has not written. He reads and writes from the heart as well as the head, with engagement and commitment, with knowledge, sensitivity and insight, all unrivalled. His oeuvre has been produced at a steady rate over forty years and is still continuing. As Derrick has made literary Scots a field of his own, it seems entirely fitting that most works in this volume reflect that field and acknowledge Derrick’s leadership and example. We commend his collection of articles Scots and its Literature (a selection of fourteen previously- published articles, revised and updated) and especially his monograph Language, Poetry and Nationhood: Scots as a Poetic Language from 1878 to the Present, the title of which so succinctly encapsulates Derrick’s principal interests. In well over 100 articles, Derrick has written about the use of Scots in texts throughout the entire gamut of Scotland’s national literature. He has written about the stanzaic and metrical style of every main medieval and Renaissance author from Barbour to King James VI. He has also written about Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, the prose of Thomas Urquhart and George Dalgarno, and Allan Ramsay’s 1721 Poems. Derrick has written about the Scots language in many of the classical novels – by Scott, Hogg, Galt, Stevenson, Douglas Brown, and William Alexander. And his mono- graph, Language, Poetry and Nationhood, deals with the whole sweep of poetic development in Scots in the twentieth century, from R.L. Stevenson to W.N. Herbert. He has also written about the Scots- English-Gaelic trilingualism of George Campbell Hay and the multilingualism of Douglas Young. If Derrick has made any topic his own speciality in more recent years, it must surely be translation of literary texts into Scots. Besides numerous scholarly articles on translations past and present and translators, as well as general discussions of the art and craft of literary translation, he has turned his own hand to the skill, with considerable virtuosity. As his bibliography records, he has translated from English, German, Italian, Provençal, Sicilian and especially