A Free-Minded ScotrnDouglas Young Rememberedrnby E. Christian KopffrnDouglas Young was a tall man, six feet six inclies; with hisrnl:)earcl he looked like a Calvinist Jehovah. At St. Andrews,rnhe acquired the nickname “God” by eavesdropping on a politicalrndiscussion about the Balkans. (In the 1930’s, the Balkansrnwere full of angry ethnic factions, fighting and killing one another.)rnThe group was stumped over the identity of a politicalrnleader. “God alone knows his name,” one of them muttered.rn”Well, I know his name,” said Douglas, “and I shall tell it tornvou.” For a game of charades at Oxford, he was carried in upsiderndown as a clue for the word “dog.” (The editors of hisrnmemorial volume, A Clear Voice, call this a legend, but NigelrnNicolson in My Oxford, My Cambridge says he helped carryrnDouglas in.)rnHis father, an officer in the Bengal Artillery, was a Tory andrnan hnperialist, but, apart from polities, a loyal Scot. (Douglasrnremembered, “He was always annoyed to hear of any of hisrnfemale relatives marrying a Sassanaeh, almost as if they hadrnespoused a coloured person.”) Douglas was a Unionist untilrn1929, when he was at Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh.rnThe poet Lewis Spence’s campaign for Parliament as a ScotsrnNationalist appealed to Douglas’s natural conservatism andrnmade him “an asscrtor of my own country’s right to selfgovernment.”rnHe went to St. Andrews, despite passing thernE. Christian Kopff is a professor of Greek and Latin at thernUniversity of Colorado in Boulder.rnentrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge, and read the greatrnGaelic poet Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain) andrnthe Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid (ne C.M. Grieve). Althoughrnpresident of the Conservative Club, he worked for EricrnLinklatcr’s candidacy for Parliament as a Scots Nationalist inrn1933.rnHe loved ancient Greek and was very good at it. For a careerrnin classics, however, he had to study at Cambridge or Oxford.rnHe chose the latter and spent four years at New College. (“Wernwere New College because slightly later in the fourteenthrncentury than William of Wykcham’s other establishment,rnWinchester School.”) I le was president of the Scottish Societyrnand advocated giving social democracy a fair trial. (Unlike hisrnfriends MacLean and MacDiarmid, he was never a Communist.rnIn his 1943 speech on “William Wallace and This War,”rnhe referred contemptuously to “the now popular Mr. Djugashvili,rnalias Stalin.”) I le earned the friendship of older, morerntraditional scholars, like W.M. Lindsay of St. Andrews andrnT.W. Allen at Oxford, but not the leaders of the next generation.rnOn C.M. Bowra, the “Great Teacher” of his time, hernwrote the best limerick ever composed in ancient Greek. EduardrnFraenkel, the Corpus Professor of Latin and a refugee fromrnHitler’s Germany, conceived a profound dislike for him. In hisrnfinal translation examinations from English into Greek andrnLatin, Douglas wrote, not two, but all four compositions inrnGreek and Latin poetry and prose. Fraenkel accused him ofrnNOVEMBER 1995/27rnrnrn