Series 3 > Letters of James the Fourth, 1505-1513

ROBERT KERR HANNAY
A Memoir
Robert Kerr Hannay was born in Glasgow, at 16 Wood-
side Terrace, on 31st December, 1867. He was the eldest
of the six children of Thomas Hannay, ironmaster, and
Elizabeth McDowall, the daughter of a minister of the
United Presbyterian Church. His mother, ‘ though a
woman of deeply pious and even puritanical and prudish
leanings,’ wrote one who knew them both, ‘ with more
than a tinge of anxious melancholy, was yet blessed with a
deeply innate sense of humour. It was from her that he
inherited that genuine “ eye ” for the incongruous and
ridiculous that was to delight so many of his friends.’
Much of his childhood and boyhood, however, was
passed, not in the family home at Bridge of Allan, but in
Glasgow, with his aunts, wealthy and pious old ladies. He
always spoke of them with affection, even when he recalled
the tract-distributing expeditions in which he was com¬
pelled to take part, but he felt that in these too quiet
years he lost something which neither they nor Albany
Academy—the private day-school which he attended—
could supply. His mother was evidently of the same
opinion : in the summer of 1883, after he had left Albany
Academy for good, she invited a member of the Glasgow
University rugby team to act as his purse-bearer and cub-
leader on a lengthy walking tour. ‘ The most characteristic
feature of the outer man then,’ wrote the cub-leader,
Mr. J. S. Hamilton, ‘ was his strikingly handsome face and
figure. Already six feet three inches—he attained six
feet five inches ere long—he was no willowy stripling, but
well-proportioned, with an athlete’s upright carriage,
facing life boldly with that humorous challenge in his fine
eyes and lofty bearing, which was more marked in the
youth than in the hard-working scholar of later years. I
was constantly amazed at the tireless outpouring of physical
energy, of which, for a rapidly growing boy, he was capable.