Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland who facilitated Margaret Thatcher's Sermon on the Mound

Born: January 27, 1925;

Died: February 20, 2018

THE Very Reverend Dr Duncan Shaw, who has died aged 93, was an academic and minister who as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland played a key role in organising Margaret Thatcher's famous speech to the General Assembly in 1988 that came to be known as the Sermon on the Mound.

Dr Shaw, who was Moderator in 1987, had been invited to lunch at 10 Downing Street to discuss the possibility of the Prime Minister attending the General Assembly and the result was her address the following year. In the speech, Mrs Thatcher famously offered a philosophical explanation for her policies and praised the concept of self-reliance."It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong," she said, "but love of money for its own sake."

A senior figure in the church who served in several senior roles, Dr Shaw had been a law apprentice who enlisted into the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers during the Second World War, serving at home and in India from February, 1943 until October 1947, holding every rank from lance corporal to warrant officer, Class I.

After studying at the University of Edinburgh, from 1947 until 1951, he became minister of St Margaret’s, Edinburgh, in 1951. Four years later, he married Ilse Peiter, the daughter of a former German Confessing Church family, in Dusseldorf.

Shortly after his induction to St Christopher’s Craigentinny Church in 1959, he graduated PhD in Scottish history in 1962 at the University of Edinburgh, and five years later was awarded the Senior Hume Brown prize in Scottish History for The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland: their Origins and Development 1560-1600.

He was chosen as the British Council of Churches preacher in the United States from July to September 1967 and was offered both academic and pastoral positions. He remained at Craigentinny, becoming more aware of the problems facing the Church, and proposed reforms beginning in 1977. A number of his papers were gathered together and published in A Voice in the Wilderness in 1995.

During his moderatorial year in 1987 he was invested with the Order of St Sergius by Alexii, Metropolitan of Leningrad, who, at his invitation was the first representative of the Russian Orthodox Church ever to attend a General Assembly. Later, on the day of his retirement he received the Order of St Vladimir by the Russian Consul General in Edinburgh. For his service to the Romanian Orthodox Church he was awarded the Patriarchal Cross in 1978, followed, ten years later by the Patriarchal Cross for Hierarchs

For 16 years, he was a member of the advisory and finance committees of the Conference of European Churches. His final responsibility was the organising of the 1986 Conference of the European Churches at the University of Stirling.

In 1975, he played a role in securing a positive response to the European referendum chairing the public meeting addressed by Edward Heath in the Old Royal High School building, and later spoke as one of the platform party in the Usher Hall with Lord Carrington, Roy Jenkins and others.

Four years later, at the invitation of Professor John P. Macintosh, he became committed to seeking a yes vote in the referendum to have a Scottish Parliament established. He served as the Edinburgh chairman and a national executive committee member of the campaign.

As secretary of the General Council of the University of Edinburgh from 1965 to1993, and General Council Trust from 1982-2000, he was faced with a changing academic world. He drafted papers relating to parliamentary discussions on the Universities of Scotland Bill, sought understanding for the students, among whom was Gordon Brown as student rector, and chaired meetings of the council.

A Justice of the Peace he was chairman of the Edinburgh Justices Committee for a time, until becoming moderator of the General Assembly. It was then that he was invited to No 10 by Margaret Thatcher, subsequent to the traditional moderatorial morning visit earlier in the year.

In 1991, two years after his wife’s death, Dr Shaw married Anna Libera Dallapiccola, professor of Indian Art at the University of Heidelberg.

He retired in 1997 and resigned his seat in the presbytery of Edinburgh and thus future general assemblies, to concentrate on academic study.

There followed The Acts and Proceedings of the General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland, 1560-1618, Renaissance and Zwinglian Influences in Sixteenth Century Scotland, and finally The Clan Shaw of Argyll and the Isles: MacGilleChainich of Dalriada, completed on his ninetieth birthday. The clan had been annihilated in 1614, by Ronald Campbell of Barrichbeyan, bailie of Jura, and other Campbells and the clan and its name were forgotten. On his identifying the name MacGilleChainnich, the clan was re-established in 2005.

Dr Shaw is survived by his wife, Anna Libera Dallapiccola, and his daughter Erika; his elder daughter, Hedda and his only son Neil, having predeceased him.