PG WALSH
PROFESSOR William Smith Watt, formerly professor of humanity and vice-principal at Aberdeen University, died on December 23, aged 89.
Born in Harthill, Lanarkshire, Watt, the son of a moorland farmer, attended Airdrie Academy, where he was dux in 1929. At the age of 16 he entered Glasgow University to read classics under such illustrious teachers as Gomme and Kirro for Greek and Austin for Latin. After winning the class prizes in both languages each year, he achieved a first and was awarded the Logan medal as the most distinguished undergraduate in arts.
In the meantime, he had been awarded the Snell exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford, which he entered in 1933. In his four years as a student there he won the Craven, Hertford, and Ireland scholarships, and emerged with a first in both Mods (1935) and Greats (1937). In consequence Balliol appointed him fellow and tutor in classics from 1938. In the intervening year he held a temporary post in Greek at Glasgow; in those days he regarded himself as more proficient in Greek than in Latin.
Watt was rejected for
national service in the Second World War because of defective eyesight, but between 1941 and 1945 he was attached to the inter-services topographical department, based at Oxford, which prepared intelligence for military operations. He edited several influential reports, including that for the Torch operation in the invasion of North Africa, which gained plaudits from Eisenhower and Alexander.
He resumed his teaching at Balliol from 1945 to 1952, assisted after 1948 by Professor (later Sir) Kenneth Dover. Many of their talented students became eminent in academic and other spheres. During those years he started his research on the text of Cicero's letters, on which he was to become the leading international authority. Though his three volumes in the Oxford Classical Texts appeared only later (in 1958, 1965, 1982), his authority was increasingly recognised, and after turning down the offer of the
humanity chair at St Andrews, he was appointed to the chair at Aberdeen in 1952.
Watt held the chair for 27 years, during which he was increasingly involved in heavy administrative duties. He was curator of the library (1954-9), dean of arts (1963-6), assessor on the court (1966-77), and vice-principal (1966-9). For long periods he served on the Scottish Council on Entrance, latterly as convener, and as a Scottish representative on UCCA. He was a governor of Aberdeen College of Education from 1959-75, serving as chairman for the final four years.
Retirement in 1979 gave him leisure to devote himself more fully to academic research. In addition to the third volume of Cicero's letters, his greatest scholarly achievement, he published in the same year (1982) an edition with translation of George Buchanan's Miscellaneorum Liber, and in 1989 an edition of Velleius Paterculus in the Teubner series. Even more strikingly, he wrote more than 120 scholarly articles, in which he offered emendations of the published editions of 50 authors, ranging from Lucretius to the Latin poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
In addition, he unselfishly cast a critical eye over the unpublished works of other scholars, eliciting respectful appreciation not unmixed with apprehension at the arrival of his forthright comments.
His eminence was recognised in 1989 when he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Other distinctions should surely have come his way, but the privacy of his life in Aberdeen, and his unfashionable type of textual scholarship militated against such wider recognition.
In 1944 he married Dorothea Codrington Smith, then a junior commander in the ATS. She survives him, together with their son, Dr Richard Watt, and his family.
Professor WS Watt; born June 20, 1913, died December 23, 2002
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