James Irvine Orme Masson, 1887-1962

Abstract

Sir Irvine Masson, formerly Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield, was born at Toorak, a suburb of Melbourne, on 3 September 1887, and died at Edinburgh on 22 October 1962. He came of a family which was half Scottish in origin and almost wholly professional in occupation. His Masson ancestors may be traced, in the eighteenth century, to the district round Forres in Moray, but his grandfather David (1822-1907) was an Aberdonian by birth and education. David Masson, after some years as a journalist, was appointed Professor of English Literature at University College London, in 1853, and moved, in 1865, to the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh, an appointment which he held with distinction for 30 years; in particular, most of his great Life of Milton (six volumes, 1859-1880) was published during the Edinburgh period. Sir Irvine’s grandmother Emily Masson ( née Orme) was one of a large family of Londoners, with artistic and professional interests; a brother (Temple Orme) taught chemistry at University College School, whilst a sister (Eliza) made feminine history by becoming the first woman LL.B. of London University; another sister (Julia) married H. Charlton Bastian, F.R.S., Professor of Clinical Medicine at University College Medical School, and an upholder of the doctrine of heterogenesis in opposition to Pasteur. On the maternal side Masson’s grandparents were Sir John Struthers (1823-1898), Professor of Anatomy at Aberdeen, and Christine ( née Alexander) of Wooler in Northumberland. The Struthers family had been in the Fife linen trade and, before that, were farmers, lairds, and clergymen in Strath Avon, some 20 miles south of Glasgow, a district in which the name is still common. A Struthers ancestor of note was the Rev. William (M.A. Glasgow 1598) who rose in the church and died in 1633 as the first dean of St Giles, Edinburgh ‘just in time’ (as Masson records in his biographical notes) ‘to escape his successor’s fate of having Jenny Geddes’s stool flung at his head’.