Dr David Steel
Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; born October 5, 1910, died November 11, 2002.
Father of Sir David Steel, the presiding officer of the Scottish Parliament, Dr David Steel was Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1974-75.
From 1959 to 1976 he was also minister of St Michael's Church, Linlithgow, during which time he had charge of the restoration scheme which included the controversial ''crown of thorns'' steeple now topping the medieval Linlithgow church and which has become such a landmark.
Although his roots were in Lanarkshire, David Steel grew up in Peterhead and was educated in Aberdeen before he returned to Glasgow where as a divinity graduate he worked as part of a kirk mission team in the Plantation area of the city. Some of his social and political opinions were shaped by his reaction to the poverty and squalor that he found there.
He was in Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau emergency. Steel's liberalism often displeased the government but he took pride in his brushes with authority and claimed that the executive council considered deporting him, but decided it was more trouble than it was worth
When elected moderator Dr Steel was characteristically forthright, criticising the Kirk's Westminster Confession, and insisting that it must be ''conscience-stricken about the disparities and inequalities of our economic order''.
Sir Charles Wilson,
Principal of Glasgow
University; born May 16, 1909, died November 9, 2002.
Sir Charles Wilson was principal of Glasgow University during the period of its most spectacular development and a powerful influence on British higher education during the 1960s era of university expansion. He was closely associated with the foundation of a number of new universities, including Stirling, but always opposed academic experiment for its own sake on the grounds that students were far too important to be used as guinea pigs.
Born in Govan in 1909, Charles Haynes Wilson was a pupil at Hillhead High School before going on to Glasgow University, where he gained a first class honours degree in modern languages and economics. He taught at the London School of Economics and Oxford before becoming principal of University College, Leicester, where he guided the institution through its transition to full university status.
On his return to Gilmorehill in 1961 he presided over the most remarkable expansion in the university's
history when a whole series of new buildings made their appearance on the other side of University Avenue from the original edifice. About half the university's fabric dates from that period. Meanwhile, the student population increased from about 6000 to about 10,000, the academic staff from 900 to 2000, and there was a proliferation of new chairs, degree courses, and subjects.
