Hunter Beattie (1876–1951): A Conscientious Objector at the Margins

Glasgow was the Scottish city in which the Open Brethren movement grew most profusely. During the First World War, significant sections of the leadership of their assemblies supported the British war effort. One individual who stood apart from this was the evangelist and homeopath, Hunter Beattie. He was the leading individual in an assembly in the east end who launched an occasional periodical in which he expounded his pacifist views. His publication was criticized in a Sunday newspaper, and his subsequent military hearing and criminal trial was covered by the newspaper. Other leading Glasgow Brethren publicly disassociated themselves from his position, which, in turn, led to criticism of them by some Brethren non-combatants. As well as giving an example of the treatment of conscientious objectors during the First World War, the paper examines the positions adopted towards war by both Beattie and his antagonists, illuminating aspects of the Brethren, their social class and relationships to society. It examines how some Brethren rejected a completely marginal status in church and society, but others saw the attraction of the margins.

Church Dedications in Badenoch and Strathspey Revisited

The article takes its start from Prof. G. Barrow's 1988–9 ‘Badenoch and Strathspey, 1130–1312. 2: The Church’, and looks again at the evidence for pre-parochial dedications to saints in the light of recent archaeology and historiography. Strong ecclesiastical affinity with an Irish or Gaelic style of Christianity can be observed. Different options for a Sitz im Leban for this Gaelic connection are discussed and the eighth century is proposed as a plausible context for when the dedications in this region developed. No account of the conversion of the region is attempted. Whatever the state of the church before the battle of Dun Nechtain in 685, thereafter the kings of Fortriu, a Pictish realm and hegemony with increasing Gaelic characteristics, relied heavily on the Gaelic churches of Argyll, Perthshire and Atholl to structure and resource Christianity in this area of their kingdom. Yet if resources came from the south, control was based to the north, where centres of power have been identified at Portmahomack, Rosemarkie, Burghead and Kinneddar.

Methodism in Victorian Shetland

Methodism arrived in Shetland in the 1820s, growing until 1866 and remaining relatively strong. It suffered from the handicaps of geography, the weather, poverty and the dictates of the fishing industry. Lay leadership was hard to find, ministers were overburdened, other denominations provided competition and emigration deprived the Methodist movement of talent. On the other hand, patronage, the work of James Loutit and the doctrines and institutions of Methodism provided advantages. Education and temperance drew in the young, the movement fitted into Shetland life and most fundamentally the Evangelical impulse and episodes of revival brought growth. Shetland Methodism became something exceptional: by far the most successful branch of the denomination in Scotland.