THE BALLAD OF BIG BILL By Owen Dudley Edwards A Festschrift is one of the most delightful, and sometimes one of the most valuable, scholarly pauses at ageing signposts by whose wisdom we may examine what the worst President in US history would call our road-maps. It has no English form, though attempts are made from ‘tribute’ (rather unpleasantly reminiscent of ancient imperial blackmail) to ‘presentation’ (even more unpleasantly evocative of smarmy salesmen swindling suckers). Gaelic has the term, as Feilsgribhinn (in Munster Irish, varying somewhat in more northern climes). It implies a writing feast, plates high with the essays there piled up, but the imagery is not wholly or even primarily gastronomic apart from the implication that the recipient should eat and drink well on what is offered, since elsewhere is famine. We have to remember that feasts are for saints, and hence there is a canonisation element (no wonder Anglophones lack the term, at least since they dropped saints in favour of Tudors). We have two candidates for canonisation here, one being Dr William Ferguson, and the other being Scotland. I proceed to confuse them with one another, as is always happening (consider the cases of the saints James, John, Jude, Patrick, David (yes, the Welsh patron, and the selfcanonised Scots philosopher). But it is Scotland, not St Andrew that is to be confused with St William Ferguson. As to another St William, I have a story. When I was at Belvedere College, Dublin, under Jesuit survivors of James Joyce, the teaching staff were augmented by some very elderly priests, of whom the most conspicuous was known to the few as the Rev. John O’Connor and to the masses as ‘Bloody Bi1l’, why, nobody knew. Authority let it be known that he had served as headmaster (Prefect of Studies), at a time taken to be somewhere between Noah and the nineteenth century; public opinion explained the absence of two fingers from one of his hands as the result of a gun-battle at the Last Chance Saloon whence his adversaries (Protestants, no doubt) were carried out feet foremost. We grew older (he had aged to ultimate human possibilities, we assumed). And we left and, many years later, looking at the obituaries in the Belvederian, idly skimmed one for the Rev. John O’Connor, whose name by now Awoke no echo in memory until its douce conclusion that he about had seemed as though about to die on the feast of his patron saint, St John, but that in fact he died the following day,
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which was almost as appropriate, being the feast of St William. And, I suspect like every other exschoolboy reading it, I shouted’BLOODY BILL! (In passing, that is a quintessence of the Jesuitical. They needed to, convey the name by which we all knew him, but delicacy prevented its direct use since when we were at school ‘bloody’ was as bad a word as anyone said. And thus they told the world of his demise... and in our four corners of the world we said our prayers for Bloody Bill, and Bar Nothing Ranch or wherever he lost his fingers.) In like manner, I examine on your behalf The Scottish Nation: Identity and History Essays in Honour of William Ferguson, edited by Alexander Murdoch with the assistance of Edward J. Cowan and Richard J. Finlay, with a Foreword by Professor T. M. Devine, and an Appreciation by the late John M. Simpson (Edinburgh: John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.) but to me it will always be ‘The Book for Big Bill’. Why I thought of him as ‘Big Bill’ I cannot altogether guess. He is big, physically, but not overwhelming. He is a ferocious controversialist when occasion demands:(it demanded it most recently in the Scottish Historical Review for April 2007, where he denounced Professor Colin Kidd, of Glasgow, for gratuitous hagiographising’ a false god, the late, if not universally lamented Hugh Trevor-Roper, first Lord Dacre (the title probably chosen from the line in Scott, ‘Noble Lord Dacre, he lives on the Border’, although there are alternative hypotheses as to the border on which Trevor-Roper himself lived, not being at all geographical. Colin Kidd, (who, unlike TrevorRoper, is a sportsman to his finger-tips) promptly replied; It is an honour to have been thwacked by Dr Ferguson. For several decades Dr Ferguson has assumed the role of the dominie of Scottish historiography, and several distinguished historians, including a former Regius Professor at Oxford [Trevor-Roper] and Her Majesty’s present Historiographer in Scotland [T. C. Smout], have felt the sting of his tawse for errors large, small and non-existent. However the honour I feel also stems from another source, for Dr Ferguson - a scholar of great erudition and an indefatigable smiter