(died 6 Jan. 1977, aged 79), clergyman, Gaelic scholar. Born on the island of Jura, Scotland. In 1918, his father, Donald Mackechnie, was working at the Royal Navy torpedo factory, Greenock, Scotland. John Mackechnie had the degrees of M. A. (1921) and B. D. (1927) from the University of Glasgow, and an M. A. (1936) from University College, Galway, and to these, at some stage, he added the degrees of B. L. (Glasgow) and LL. B. (London). He is reported, also, as having studied at Utrecht and Heidelberg. According to the application which he made in 1935, at the age of 38, for the position of lecturer in Celtic languages at the University of Glasgow, he was “a native Gaelic speaker,” and had “a full knowledge of all the Celtic languages–Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Breton, and their literature.” In the same application, he states that he had “a knowledge of French, German, Norwegian, and Swedish,” so that he was enabled to keep up with the work of Continental scholars on the Celtic languages. And again from the application, it appears that he had won university prizes as a student of Arabic and Hebrew, and that he was skilled in Greek and Latin, and that he had studied Sanskrit. In other, later sources, we hear of his knowledge of Persian. However isolated John Mackechnie may have seemed in the later stages of his life, it appears from the aforementioned 1935 application that at this stage of his life (relatively early, as one counts early in the career of a scholar) he had important contacts, for the document Includes letters of reference from Douglas Hyde, who was later the first president of Ireland, and was one of the great figures of 20th century Irish nationalism, and from the distinguished Robin Flower of the British Museum. A gifted English-language author in his own right, Flower was, like Mackechnie, a notable cataloguer of Gaelic manuscripts, in his case those of Irish Gaelic.

     During periods in the 1920s and 1930s, Mackechnie taught Celtic languages at the University of Glasgow, though up to 1935 at least, it would appear, on a temporary or part-time basis. In 1964 he was described as having been for 10 years an assistant in the Dept. of Celtic at the University of Glasgow, and for one year an interim professor of Celtic Languages at the University of Edinburgh, also as having been at the same time, or about this time, the minister of a Glasgow church the present author has been unable to identify. He held the position of reader in Celtic at the University of Aberdeen, 1964-1967. As a Presbyterian clergyman, ordained in 1928, he preached regularly in Gaelic. He also studied law, and at one period of his life acted as a lawyer in the morning, a university teacher in the afternoon, and did pastoral visits in the evening.

     He was married to Allie Lucas. (three children) He and his wife emigrated to Canada in 1967, perhaps to join a member of their family there. Before leaving Scotland, he headed a School of Scottish Studies (Sgoil Eolas Na h-Alba) which he had founded and which the University of Edinburgh, in some sense, took over.

     In Canada, he was the clergyman of a three-point charge at Colborne, Ont., before being inducted on 18 Nov. 1971 as minister of Kenyon Presbyterian Church, at Dunvegan, GC, in succession to the popular Russell Ferguson who had died the year before. (Russell Ferguson was also a native of Scotland, and John Mackechnie had been his teacher in Hebrew.) When he settled in at Dunvegan, John Mackechnie had reached the later stages of the great scholarly project on which had been working for some 40 years, namely an annotated catalogue of Gaelic manuscripts. The first two volumes of the catalogue were published, while he was at Dunvegan, as John Mackechnie, Catalogue of Gaelic Manuscripts in Selected Libraries in Great Britain and Ireland, 2 vols. (Boston, Mass., G. K. Hall & Co., 1973 (pp. xi, 757; 700). The preface of the first volume was dated at “Dunvegan, Ontario, Canada.” He did not live to publish a planned third volume. By the time John Mackechnie came to Dunvegan, few people in the community knew more than a few words of Gaelic, but the reverence for the old language remained strong, and all who valued the traditions of the area were glad to find a fluent Gaelic speaker among them. Now and then, he preached in Gaelic–people delighted in the sounds of the old language, even though the significance of the words had been lost.

     Soon, however, the relations between John Mackechnie and his congregation soured. He proved an ineffective clergyman, with his voice weak and his relations with various individuals strained; now in his mid-70s, he was probably too old for parish work, and he was absorbed, besides, in his great scholarly task. Also, and disastrously for his relations with his congregation, he became a friend of a group of youngsters in the neighbourhood, who were commonly labelled as “hippies.” Presumably, he valued their intellectual companionship, and they seem, indeed, to have liked and admired him. The outcome, however, of the various causes of discontent which had developed was that he was forced to surrender his Dunvegan pastorate, effective 30 June 1974, less than three years after he arrived. He lived in retirement at Chatham, Ont., and died in a hospital at Chatham. His successor as minister at Dunvegan, the Rev. Delbert Chatreau, well liked and valued by the congregation, died at the manse in Dunvegan just four days after John Mackechnie died at Chatham.

     Besides the Catalogue of Gaelic Manuscripts John Mackechnie was the editor or author of books which include the following: (1) a scholarly edition of Latin and Early Modern Irish texts, Instructio Pie Vivendi, 2 vols. (The Irish Texts Society, Vol. 29, 1933-), (2) a collection of Gaelic poems, The Owl Remembers: Gaelic Poems (1933) of which he was co-editor, (3) Gaelic without Groans, a textbook for beginners in Gaelic, first published in 1934, and much reprinted, and (4) The Dewar Manuscripts (1964). In response to his dismissal from his Dunvegan pastorate, the CBC did a television documentary on Dunvegan, which was broadcast soon after the events. The photography of Dunvegan was excellent, but the film, with too much tact and restraint, remained bafflingly obscure with regard to what had actually happened. Most of the local people, it is said, refused to talk to the film crew. In the course of a lively discussion which followed in the Alexandria and (especially) the Vankleek Hill press, on the subject of the dismissal and the film, there were printed many interesting comments, some of them of continuing historical value, on small town isolation, the generation gap, and the clash of small-town Glengarry with the 1960s counter-culture.

     After the death of John Mackechnie, a fascinating legendary history grew up about his perplexing relationship to rare manuscripts. The most extreme–and most interesting–form of the story relates that he had without permission taken manuscripts from libraries and archives to work on them in private, with the intention of eventually returning them to their owners, and that he had sold some of these to American universities after he had forgotten where he had originally obtained them. Other versions speak of manuscripts borrowed with permission, and variously soften–and spoil–the story. There is no established story about what happened, no principal narrative to be refuted or confirmed. Posterity will have a feast in sorting it all out. We may suppose him to be one of the GC residents of his time most likely to be remembered a hundred years from now. But strangely, he will be best remembered if he really did behave very badly about the manuscripts. The well-known Glengarrian expert on archival work, Hugh P. MacMillan, was commissioned to settle the problem of the ownership of the manuscripts as it affected the various institutions involved.

     A Glengarrian vividly remembers Mackechnie, who had just conducted a funeral service, sitting with the other guests at the post-funeral reception in a tiny GC farmhouse kitchen near Dunvegan (one of the few miniscule farm kitchens in a county where farm kitchens were vast, cavernous, and in a house which a few decades later was a shell with trees growing through it). A small trim man, made smaller by his years, he wore an old-fashioned tight-fitting suit, and seemed as remote mentally from whatever nonsense was going on about him as if he was encased in a glass cocoon. How the old scholar must have longed to get back to his desk and make the most of what remained of a wasted afternoon!

Obituary, The Presbyterian Record, March 1977 * Application by the Rev. John Mackechnie for the Position of Lecturer in Celtic Languages and Relative Testimonals [Sept. 1935], 17 pp. (printed copy; photocopy in present author’s files) * information kindly supplied by: University of Glasgow; University of Aberdeen; National University of Ireland, Galway (formerly University College, Galway); National Library of Scotland; G. K. Hall & Co.; and (though by mischance the question answered was not, unhappily, the question asked) the University of Heidelberg * his publications: British Library catalogues (printed and on-line) * enquiry has failed to discover any reviews of his Catalogue of Gaelic Manuscripts * Robin Flower: for his status, see his biog., DNB Supplement 1941-1950, & ODict * MacMillan, Kirk, 235 * MacMillan, Kenyon Presbyterian Church 36-37: judicious, with some firmness (has portrait from Mullin illustr.: see next item) * Alex Mullin, “Dunvegan Minister Is Gaelic Expert” (undated clipping, but from Standard Freeholder, with remarkable portrait of Mackechnie at his desk) * Velma Franklin, “Area Minister Catalogues Gaelic Manuscripts,” SFH 17 March 1973 * “John Mackechnie, Minister, Lawyer, and Author,” VKHR 28 Nov. 1973 (full page: text, pictures) * letter, John Mackechnie, at Chatham, Ont., to Ewan Ross, 8 Dec. 1975 (photocopy in present author’s files) * Delbert Chatreau: inducted, Glengarry News 13 Nov. 1975, obituary GN 13 Jan. 1977 and in same issue of Presbyterian Record as John Mackechnie’s * VKHR & GN 30 Oct. to mid-Dec. 1974 (controversy, film) * personal knowledge * speaks at Clan MacMillan meeting, GC, GN 1 Nov. 1973 * now of Chatham, is working on Vol. 3 of his Catalogue, SFH 31 Dec. 1975 * It is unlikely now, after so many of the informed observers have died, that anyone will ever write the distinguished book that could have been based on the story of John Mackechnie at Dunvegan. However, for relevant works of literature on driven scholars and their long-term projects, see George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and A. N. Wilson’s Wise Virgin.