William Stewart Duke-Elder, 22 April 1898 - 27 March 1978

Abstract

William Stewart Duke-Elder was born in Dundee, 5 miles south of his home, the Manse at Tealing, the second of three sons of the Rev. Neil Stewart Elder, Minister of the United Free Church of Scotland, and his wife Isabella, née Duke, the daughter of the Rev. John Duke, also a Minister of the United Free Church of Scotland at Campsie, Stirlingshire. Stewart’s father—the son of John Elder, a merchant in Thurso, Caithness, and his wife, Anne Sutherland—was a scholarly man. Among the prizes he gained was a book given in the Annual Competition in the Town of Thurso, 1871, for ‘the greatest Proficiency in Highest Greek’. Perhaps with others it may have laid the foundation for Stewart’s own fluent, lucid style of writing. There were no eminent scientific or literary forebears in the family, but he relished the thought of an ancestor hanged for sheep-stealing. The Elders are a sept of the Clan Mackintosh whose Coat of Arms bears the Cat o’ Mountain (the Wild Cat of Caithness) and their motto ‘Touch not the Cat bot (without) glove’. Duke-Elder’s own Arms bear the Caithness cats as supporters, and his motto ‘Concilio et labore’.