John GM Watt
Minister and social justice campaigner who led the Scottish Marriage Guidance Council
n John GM Watt, minister and social activist. Born: 13 november, 1920, Buchlyvie, Stirlingshire. died: 28 May, 2013, in Liberton, edinburgh, aged 92.
JOHN GM Watt was a humane and energetic Church of Scotland minister, and then secretary of the Scottish Marriage Guidance Council from 1964 until his retirement in 1985.
Born in 1920 in his father’s parish of Buchlyvie, Stirlingshire, he was brought up with the strong values of Presbyterianism and a keen sense of selfreliance. A happy childhood continued in Holywood, near Dumfries, where John’s abiding memory was of his father (in his sixties) grappling with modern technology. As evidenced in the damage to the trees in his glebe, his father never did learn that four wheels and a combustion engine rarely respond to cries of “Whoa!”
But at just 13, John lost his father, and he returned with his mother to her home town of Aberdeen, where he worked hard to support her and gain scholarships for his education.
As war broke out in 1939, he took the difficult path of pacifism and followed in his father’s footsteps by studying Divinity at Aberdeen University, where he tested both his intellectual limits and his physical strength in the mountaineering club and by cycling.
Perhaps formatively, he was always grateful for the Carnegie scholarship that allowed him to study, and the Classics were forever central to his interests.
Shortly after the war, he became an assistant minister in Edinburgh, where he met and married the love of his life, Isobel Monteath Thomson. Though his ideas and beliefs on many things evolved and changed over his long and fruitful life, his love for Isobel was abiding.
His first charge was at Bonnygate Church, in Cupar, Fife, then from 1954, Pollokshields East, in Glasgow.
What could have been a comfortable middle-class charge became, however, formative in his life. His own frugal, even poor background had nonetheless afforded him every opportunity to gain an excellent education. Now he found he could not ignore the inequalities he found in this great industrial city and he volunteered with the newlyfounded Samaritans, in part inspired by the very active ministry of Richard Holloway in Glasgow’s Gorbals.
The slum cases he was called to were often tragic and sometimes violent and he was active in his attempts to help mend relationships or help people in sometimes appalling circumstances. Even in the 1960s, barefoot children were commonplace.
He once described one family he visited, living in “a single end” (a one-room flat, with an outside toilet), the children sleeping double-decker style on and below the kitchen table, wrapped in old coats.
He wept one late evening, having visited a family with no food in the house, whose regular rations were bread and margarine with chips on Fridays. He raged furiously but fruitlessly on behalf of elderly parishioners who, after 60 years of marriage, were placed in separate care homes, miles apart.
He left the Church in 1964 in what he saw as a natural step into a closely related field, the Scottish Marriage Guidance Council. At a time when relationship counselling was a very new concept, John was instrumental in setting up the whole system in which many couples could find help. He led the Council successfully for 21 years, considerably expanding and extending its services.
Paradoxically, though all his working life was devoted to helping others, he was an intensely private man, happiest when alone with Isobel or walking the hills around Edinburgh or reading.
His easy sociability did not contradict his sense of autonomy and self-discipline. This was tested when, at the age of 48, he suffered a heart attack. In the years that followed, he walked himself back to astonishing good health and let fall by the wayside what he came to see as superficial and neurotic concerns.
Over the years, his views on religion changed quite dramatically: he came to see that this world is enough, that physics and Darwin were better explanations than any notion of a God. He had always been sceptical of the power structures of any church, and yet he remained a man of faith: a faith in Man that made him march with many thousands in February 2003 against the impending war in Iraq. And an abiding faith in the goodness of people, despite some evidence that he saw clearly over the years.
Isobel’s death in 1998, on the cusp of their Golden Wedding, was a devastating blow: it was typical of the man that the help they had received from Marie Curie Cancer Care inspired him to offer the organisation his counselling skills.
A natural leader who always sought to unite people, even in old age he was asked to lead the Residents’ Association in his retirement home, where he spent many happy years.
He remained active to the end, enjoying visits to family in Switzerland and to opera in Italy.
He leaves a daughter, two sons and seven grandchildren.
Superlative care in his last days at Liberton Hospital elicited his thanks to the staff, until his last breath. CONTRIBUTED 1679: Battle of Drumclog fought between Covenanters attending a conventicle and Royalist troops under Bloody Graham of Claverhouse. 1831: Sir James Clark Ross located the magnetic North Pole. 1841: Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain was founded. 1857: Royal Navy destroyed Chinese fleet in China Sea. 1911: Britain’s first electric trolley buses began operating in Bradford and Leeds. 1921: Derby Day was broadcast on radio for first time. 1935: Driving tests in Britain were introduced by Leslie HoreBelisha, and L-plates were made compulsory. 1939: The British submarine Thetis sank while on trials in Liverpool Bay, with the loss of 99 lives. It was later raised and put back into service as HMS Thunderbolt. 1946: The first television licences were issued in Britain, at a fee of £2. 1953: Gordon Richards became the first jockey to be knighted. 1958: Charles de Gaulle became prime minister of France. 1966: Bob Dylan was booed by British folk fans for performing on stage with an electric guitar. 1973: Greece’s premier, George Papadopoulos, abolished the monarchy. 1976: Syrian force, estimated at 4,000 troops and 200 tanks, invaded Lebanon and captured Christian and Muslim positions as it advanced on Beirut in attempt to halt 14-month civil war. 1979: Rhodesia became Zimbabwe Rhodesia. 1990: Two British soldiers were killed in IRA gun attacks in West Germany and Lichfield, Staffordshire. 1990: Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev and United States president George H Bush signed agreement on the reduction of conventional and nuclear forces. 1994: Willie Carson, 51, won his
Scotsman archive
ATHLETICS: FLOCKHART WINS THREE MILES; FINE EFFORT BY HEWITT 1 June, 1933 SHETTLESTON Harriers were the only Western club represented in the open sports meeting promoted by the Edinburgh Northern Harriers and the Canon A.S.C. at Hawkhill last night, and with the absence of the backmarkers there was never any possibility of records, though there was some sound running, particularly in distance events.
In the mile, J.P. Laidlaw, off fourth Derby at Epsom, on 7-2 favourite Erhaab. 2003: The People’s Republic of China began filling the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam. 2009: An Air France plane carrying 228 people – including five Britons – from Brazil to France vanished over the Atlantic after flying into a storm. 2009: General Motors filed for bankruptcy – the fourth largest US bankruptcy in history. 2011: Fifa president Sepp Blatter won a fourth term in charge after attempts by the English and Scottish Football Associations to delay the election failed. Pat Boone, pop singer, 79; Jason Donovan, singer and actor, 45; Lord Foster of Thames Bank, architect, 78; Morgan Freeman, actor and director, 76; Justine Henin, tennis champion, 31; Robert Powell, actor, 69; Jonathan Pryce CBE, actor, 66; Tom Robinson, rock singer, songwriter and guitarist, 63; Gerald Scarfe CBE, cartoonist, 77; Nigel Short MBE, chess grandmaster, 48; Ronnie Wood, rock guitarist (Rolling Stones), 66. Births: 1793 Henry Francis Lyte, clergyman (author of Abide With Me) ; 1801 Brigham Young, Mormon leader and founder of Salt Lake City; 1878 John Masefield, poet laureate, playwright and novelist; 1907 Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of jet engine; 1926 Marilyn Monroe, actress; 1935 John McGrath, playwright, producer, director. Deaths: 1943 Leslie Howard, actor and director (passenger in aircraft shot down by Germans); 1968 Helen Keller, blind and deaf author; 1999 Sir Christopher Cockerell, inventor of the hovercraft. 10 yards, was never distressed in taking first place; but in the three miles, J.C. Flockhart had to beat J.K. Hewitt, whose game finish kept the Shettleston man at full stretch in the final circuit.
Results: 100 Yards Handicap Final: 1, G. Gaffney; 2, R.A. Howieson; 3, R. Epton. Won by a yard. Time 10 2-5 secs. HalfMile – 1, C.L. M’Bain, Edinburgh Northern Harriers (54); 2 A.L. Cram, Edinburgh University; 3 A. M’Donald, Edinburgh Northern Harriers (48). Won by a dozen yards. Time, I min. 59 2-5 secs. l archive.scotsman.com