JOHNSTON McKAYBill Cant was an ideal choice to be minister of St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall in 1968. His combination of evangelical fervour and social concern had already led to successful ministries in a Stirlingshire mining community and in Leith.

JOHNSTON McKAY
Bill Cant was an ideal choice to be minister of St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall in 1968. His combination of evangelical fervour and social concern had already led to successful ministries in a Stirlingshire mining community and in Leith.

But the legend of St Magnus appealed to Cant's natural romanticism. The small, red Orkney cathedral captured his imagination. And his fierce determination ensured that by the time he retired in 1990, people knew where St Magnus Cathedral was on the map.

Bill Cant was a powerful, energetic preacher and a natural radio and television broadcaster. In acts of worship transmitted from the cathedral, he never missed an opportunity to describe the story of the martyr St Magnus, or to draw on the writing of George Mackay Brown, Edwin Muir or Eric Linklater for an apt illustration.

In the 1970s, Bill led a world-wide appeal to restore the cathedral, and he gave every encouragement to the young cathedral organist, Norman Mitchell, and composer Peter Maxwell Davies to start what has grown into the very successful annual Orkney Festival.

Bill was made a chaplain to the Queen in Scotland in 1975, and when St Magnus Cathedral celebrated its 850th anniversary in 1987, he made good use of his royal connections. The Queen unveiled the cathedral's new west window, and, two weeks later, the Queen Mother received a tapestry from King Olav V in a service which marked the strong connections Orkney has with Norway.

Bill Cant was born in the capital and went to Edinburgh Academy. In 1939, he went to Edinburgh University, joined the Officers' Training Corps and, after taking a two-year wartime arts degree, saw active service, first with the King's Own Scottish Borderers and then with the King's African Rifles in the Middle East, east Africa and Mauritius.

When the war was over, he returned to Edinburgh University to study divinity at New College, and then spent a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Cant's ministry spanned the second half of the twentieth century, which not only saw the Church of Scotland's membership decline dramatically from its high point in the mid-1950s, but also witnessed growing scepticism about the effectiveness and importance of the church as an institution.

In a phrase often used by some recent Kirk Moderators, Bill Cant always "talked up the church", not in a superficial way but as a result of the impression made on him at Union Theological Seminary by the New Testament scholar John Knox, who provided Cant with the title of his autobiography, the Mystery and Miracle of the Church.

After an assistantship in the then 3000-strong congregation of West St Nicholas in Aberdeen, Cant became minister in the Stirlingshire mining village of Fallin. In 1956, he took time out from the parish ministry to become one of the secretaries of the Student Christian Movement in Scotland and to organise a large conference held in Edinburgh two years later. That completed, he returned to parish ministry in St Thomas's, Leith, where he stayed until called in 1968 to Orkney, despite the islands being described to him at the time by a fellow minister as having "a primitive lifestyle where they regularly lit their oil lamps".

Bill Cant kept the name of St Magnus Cathedral to the fore by involvement with the central committees of the church and in the General Assembly. When he retired in 1990, he continued to live near Kirkwall and to be a member of the congregation of St Magnus under the man he wanted to succeed him there, Ron Ferguson. He is survived by his wife, Margot, two sons and a daughter.