Alexander McKenzie was born at Dundee on 6 December 1869. He was the eldest of nine children, three of whom died in infancy. His father, Peter Mitchell McKenzie, was a Scottish ‘dominie’ of the old type, who taught first at Lochgoilhead, then in Dundee, and finally at Tealing, a little village some six miles north of Dundee. His mother, Isobel Buchanan, was the daughter of a farmer at Lochgoil. For several generations the McKenzies lived in the Glenshee and Blairgowrie district of Perthshire. Peter Mitchell McKenzie’s father and grandfather were weavers. One generation farther back, Kenneth McKenzie was ‘out in the ’45’, fought at Culloden Moor, and thereafter took to the hills for six months before venturing to return home. These earlier McKenzies were skilled craftsmen who had no opportunity of showing any particular intellectual or scientific ability, although Alexander McKenzie used to hint, with a twinkle in his eye, that some of them had a practical knowledge of the distillation of crude alcohol in the field! Alexander’s brother, Dr A. J. McKenzie, served through the war of 1914-1918 and gained the M.C. Before going to the High School of Dundee1 in 1882, the young McKenzie had already begun the study of Latin, Greek, French and mathematics in his father’s schools in Dundee and at Tealing. Although he entered the High School on the classical side he was able to attend some voluntary classes in practical chemistry ‘as a recreation, free from the examination bogey’, under the direction of Frank W. Young, whom he found to be a most inspiring teacher. In 1885 McKenzie was awarded the Edinburgh Angus Club Medal for Latin, and in the same year, at the age of fifteen, he left the High School and entered, as fifth Bursar, upon a four-year course of study for the M.A. degree at St Andrews.
A study of one high school teacher’s practical knowledge of book discussion lessons
