We started thinking about this year’s exhibition by considering who visited Innerpeffray 150 years ago, in 1874. With 181 visitors to the library that year, we could not focus on them all, and one interesting gentleman we did not manage to highlight in the main exhibition was the Reverend Hugh Aird, M.A., D.D. (1824-1895).
On Saturday 5th September 1874, ‘Hugh Aird, M.A.’ wrote his signature in the Innerpeffray visitors’ book, indicating that he had come from Brechin, Angus, perhaps accompanied by ‘William Stevenson, M.A.’, from Madras, India (what is now Chennai), who visited on the same date.[1]
Born in Glasgow in November 1824 and educated at Glasgow University, Aird was ordained by the United Presbyterian Church in Arbroath in January 1854 and received his doctorate from Glasgow in April 1889 (15 years after his visit to Innerpeffray). A much esteemed and respected member of the community, Aird preached at the City Road United Presbyterian Church in Brechin for forty years. He died after a brief illness, aged 70, in July 1895, and is buried in Brechin Cemetery.
While doing some initial research into Hugh Aird in case we decided to feature him in the 2024 exhibition, I came across some related items held by the National Library of Scotland: a photograph, printed by Glasgow company MacLure, MacDonald & Co. taken at some point between 1889 and Aird’s death in 1895; a printed obituary, featuring an excerpt from The United Presbyterian Magazine, 2nd September 1895; and a handwritten hymnal filled with around 80 tunes of the United Presbyterian Church.[2]
The obituary is finely printed and tells much about the man and his legacy, in addition to details of his funeral, which was presided over by the Reverend R. C. Cameron of Cambridge Street United Presbyterian Church, Glasgow. Aird was a member of the Mechanics’ Institution, the Parochial Board, chairman of the Brechin Savings’ Bank and Burgh School Board, and a “popular speaker at temperance meetings and at the annual gatherings of Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations.” [3] What the obituary does not include, however, is any details on Aird’s involvement with music, which leads me to perhaps the most interesting item of this manuscript collection: Aird’s personal hymnbook.
This lovely little book features Aird’s bookplate on the inside front cover and almost 100 tunes for Presbyterian hymns, handwritten on hand-drawn staves, with an alphabetical contents page. The tunes are written with four-part harmonies and mostly titled with names of locations, such as Derby, Eastgate, Glasgow, Hamilton, New Portugal, and St. Lawrence. Other titles include Comfort, Creation, Invocation, Refuge and Tranquility [sic]. Almost all the tunes are followed by the initials C.M., L.M. or S.M., indicating each tune’s metre – either Common, Long, or Short Metre. The book seems to have been a work in progress, as Aird has started copying ‘Sicilian Hymn’ into the book but it is left unfinished, and it does not appear in the contents page.
These may have been some of the most well-known or most popular tunes commonly sung in Aird’s locality, all gathered into one place as an easy reference for a choir, or, indeed, Aird himself.
In the majority of cases, we do not know how historical visitors spent their time at Innerpeffray. Did they have a guided tour, much like visitors today? Were they able to peruse the collection and sit and read or examine books? Although we do not know for sure, we can guess at some books which might have been of interest to certain visitors. One such book which may have interested Hugh Aird is a sixteenth-century collection of psalms set to metre, “with Tunes augmented to them”.[4]
Many of the tunes within are credited to Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, whose arrangements of psalms set to metre had a wide readership and were frequently bound with copies of the Bible. It would be interesting to know if any of the tunes laid out in this book from 1594 were still in use in 1874, when Hugh Aird visited Innerpeffray. Perhaps Aird even transcribed some of these old tunes into his personal hymnal.
To learn more about other historical visitors to Innerpeffray and the books that they might have read, come along to the 2024 exhibition, Travelling Tales, which will be open until the end of October. This year’s Festival of Reading, A Way with Words, will be taking place from Thursday 5th to Sunday 8th September, with a wide range of workshops, talks and performances to celebrate books and reading. And if you would like to hear even more about Innerpeffray’s visitors’ books and my PhD research, I will be giving the FOIL Ted Powell Memorial lecture this year on 23rd October.
Isla Macfarlane, PhD Candidate
Footnotes:
[1]William Stevenson may have been a student of the Madras Christian College, which was originally founded by Church of Scotland missionaries. A nineteenth-century article about the Madras Christian College, in the magazine Harvest Field, is featured in this year’s exhibition.
[2] National Library of Scotland Archives and Manuscripts Division, ‘Book of United Presbyterian Hymn Tunes of the Rev. Dr Hugh Aird, Brechin, with Associated Material.’, NLS Archives and Manuscript Catalogue <https://manuscripts.nls.uk/repositories/2/resources/19078> [accessed 9 May 2023].
[3] ‘In Memoriam. Rev. Hugh Aird, M.A., D.D., Brechin’, 1895, NLS, Acc.13951(ii).
[4] The Psalmes of David in Metre, with Divers Notes, and Tunes Augmented to Them. (Middelburgh: Richard Schilders, 1594), The Library of Innerpeffray.