Scottish Authors > John MacDougall Hay Novelist & Journalist 1880-1919

John MacDougall Hay was born on 23rd October, 1880, in Tarbert, Loch Fyne, the son of Mary MacDougall and George Hay. He was educated at Tarbert High School and the University of Glasgow where he studied Natural and Moral Philosophy and English Literature. He graduated in 1900 becoming the headmaster of the Lionel Public School, Ness, Lewis. Later he moved to teach in Ullapool. There during a bout of rheumatic fever he decided to enter the ministry, returning to Glasgow to study divinity in 1905. He excelled in Church History and Biblical Criticism, winning class prizes. From his undergraduate days, he helped support himself by writing for newspapers and journals such as MacMillan's magazine, Chamber's journal, the Spectator and the Glasgow herald. He was a student missionary at Morvern and then the Assistant Minister at Govan Old Parish Church. In 1909 he was ordained and moved to a charge at Elderslie. On 28th October 1909 he married Catherine Campbell with whom he had two children: Sheena (b.1911) and George (b.1915); George Campbell Hay later became a distinguished Gaelic poet. After the publication of his first novel Gillespie in 1914 Hay considered leaving the ministry to take up a career in writing. He published another novel Barnacles (1916) and a poem Their dead sons (1918). a victim of poor health, he remained a parish minister until his death on 10th December 1919, aged 39. His funeral took place in Paisley Abbey.

Though its impact was blunted by the onset of the First World War, Gillespie has never entirely disappeared from view. It is loosely structured, includes some melodramatic lapses, but is punctuated with passages of astonishing descriptive power. It clearly echoes George Douglas Brown's The House with the Green Shutters (1901) in its structure and setting. Hay sets his action in a small, narrow minded community called Brieston, which is based on Tarbert. In his central character, Gillespie Strang, Hay unites Brown's John Gourlay and James Wilson, to produce someone who is financially astute but morally bankrupt and brutally materialistic. However, Gillespie differs from Brown's novel in many ways; particularly, it grapples with problems of acute religious doubt. Most of these are expressed in the terrifying nightmares of Gillespie's imaginative and spiritually sensitive son, Eoghan who desperately seeks some creed through which to critique his father. The Christ of the Gospels seems to offer him this, but Christ's ethic, though deeply attractive, seems powerless against the suffering which Brieston endures in the tragedy of the plague and at the hands of Gillespie. In Gillespie a weak Christ cannot modify the overwhelming presence of fate which is the strongest spiritual reality in the novel, deriving its potency from the superstitious folk background of Eoghan's Highland grandmother. Fate cleanses but only at the terrible cost of the lives of all the main characters. It is the doctor who cares for the poor and the plague victims rather than the ministers whom the novel vindicates and in this is indicative of the move from a religious to a secular outlook which was to characterise the Scottish novel of the twentieth century.

Beth Dickson

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