Russell Leadbetter

ON Monday, the seventeenth of June, 1878, the Rev Matthew Paterson, doing his rounds of Glasgow Royal Infirmary, found himself in ward 11, talking to a man who did not have long left to live but who was nevertheless keen to see him. “He is an intelligent man,” the minister would record, “but like many more has lived only for this life. He seems however to realise his awful position and asked me if God would accept him at the eleventh hour.”

So Paterson read from the Scriptures, as he did to many patients at the Royal, and seems to have intoned the words, “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Ah, the dying man said. He felt ashamed to come at the last to God, after having lived all his life for the world; but he latched onto that one word: ’Whosoever’. “I am one of the ‘whosoever’,” he said, “and I cast anchor on that.”

The details of Paterson's humbling exchange with a man who was at Heaven’s door, which took place all of 138 years ago, have survived only because Paterson’s diary has. Now one of his successors, Healthcare Chaplain Rev Adam Plenderleith, plans to publish the diary in book form. He also hopes to discover whether Paterson has any living descendants.

“He was an English Presbyterian,” he says of Paterson, “and he spent a long time in chaplaincy at the Royal, probably starting in June 1878, when this diary starts, but he worked until 1912, I think, and he died in 1930.” According to the Post Office annual Glasgow directory for the era, Paterson lived at 222 Whitehill Street in Dennistoun. He was taken ill at some point during the period of the diary, which goes up to November 1881; his handwriting undergoes a change, and Mr Plenderleith wonders if this can be attributed to his ill-health.

“I started in chaplaincy at the Royal almost five years ago," he adds, "and there was always an awareness that this diary was there. It was kept in the safe in the chaplain’s office and I’m sure it would have been used for in-service teaching, or used by previous chaplains to illustrate what happened in the late 1800s. My interest is in the historical evidence of what was going in Chaplaincy to link it to a chaplain and, obviously, to the Royal Infirmary. Paterson logs such things as the crash of the banks in the late 1800s and the societal effect that that had.” The City of Glasgow Bank closed in October 1878, and hundreds of firms collapsed as a result. “That is fascinating. We tend to lead our lives as if we are insulated from everything that is going on, but the impact of the bank on the community around Glasgow Royal would have been horrendous - there weren’t any of the safety nets we take for granted now.”

Paterson, he says, was overtly evangelical, committed to his role, but he “worked, moved and lived at a time when you would have had the doctor, the matron, the minister, the chaplain - all significant individuals who would have had a respected position in society. One of the rules he mentions was that if the chaplain was praying in a ward, everyone had to stop what they were doing and pay attention. You were in a privileged position if you were admitted to hospital, and you had to abide by the rules.”

Indeed, on the first page of the diary, a night nurse, “a Romanist”, complained to Paterson that she could not sleep for the noise of him reading the Scriptures. “None of your controversy here,” she grumpily admonished him. The following day she apologised, and said she thought the noise had been made by the patients.

The diary is a fascinating document in all sorts of ways. Human dramas are captured frequently, such as a young man who had been involved in a road accident; he was “too far gone” to talk to the chaplain, and died shortly thereafter. Paterson was distressed by the sight of the young man’s “fearfully mangled” body.

Elsewhere, he discusses the social conditions of the time and goes into sometimes graphic detail about surgical interventions at the hospital.

Did Mr Plenderleith feel any special connection through handling a handwritten diary dating from such a long-ago era? “To start with, no,” he concedes. “It wasn’t until one of my academic supervisors said to me, ‘Adam, do you realise what you’re holding?’ It was then that you realise you are sitting beside somebody who is writing 140 years ago, in a building, parts of which haven’t changed very much. At the back of the diary there’s a postcard showing what the hospital would have looked like his day.”

Mr Plenderleith, who is now based at the Centre for Integrative Care at Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital, intends “allowing this gentleman and his era to be recognised in the history of the Royal, and the message he was sharing to be shared. It is a log, but what is interesting is that, the way he wrote it, it was as if he was intending that somebody down the road would read it. It’s almost as if he was expecting you and me to be sitting down in the 21st century, reading how it was. To honour him, it needs to be published.” After publication, the diary will find a new home at the Mitchell Library.

Back in June 1878, the dying man in ward 11 did seem to derive some comfort from Matthew Paterson at the end. But the chaplain notes in his diary: “How sad to have wasted one’s life and at the last come to God when we can do no better, although even then, God does accept the sinner.”

* Anyone with information about Matthew Paterson’s living descendants can contact Mr Plenderleith at adam.plenderleith@ggc.scot.nhs.uk