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David Sturrock Reid (1906-1998)

Adult educationalist

David Reid was born on 27 December 1906. He was the only son of parents who farmed at Blairgowrie in Perthshire where the family was long settled. He attended Harris Academy in Dundee and then went to the University of St. Andrews where he graduated with fírst class honours in Modern and Mediaeval History. He was moreover distinguished in his year at St Andrews as Medallist in Modern History. He won a Carnegie Scholarship and did research at the Institute of Historical Research in London for his doctorate. This he obtained in 1934 at St Andrews for his thesis, 'British Public Opinion on Anglo-American Relations, 1783-1794'. He was clearly well qualifíed by student achievement as well as by temperament and preference to take up an academic career. For the next twelve years, this was not to be.

His father had died before the First World War and it appears that inheritance of the family farm made it necessary for him to take up farming, immediately upon completing his doctorate. This he did for the next six years, 1934-40, although he made time to obtain the post-graduate diploma in Business Administration at the Dundee School of Economics in 1939. When the war intervened, he fírst assisted the principal of the Dundee School who had become the city's food executive officer and then had a fíve month stint in 1940 as an official censor in Liverpool, where he learnt to fathom the pious code of Irish exiles writing home, - G.W.: God Willing, - etc.. Then he volunteered for the RAF where he obtained a commission and became an intelligence offícer. War service took him to North Africa, to Italy, and France. He took part in all the landings in the Mediterranean theatre of war. Some of these were very violently contested but he would only speak of that in southern France which, according to his report, was an unchallenged tour of liberated wine cellars. He would tell too of having to refuse the gift of a small girl from a North African Arab he had unwisely complimented as her father; or of being given a jeep by an American serviceman in Naples when he was stranded after a night out.

In 1946 David was appointed WEA tutor-organiser for Dundee, Angus and East Perth. Then in 1948, he was appointed staff tutor in History and International Relations in the department of Extra-Mural Studies at Durham University. He came to play an influential and responsible part in the Durham department’s administration, as senior tutor from 1961. H. J. Boyden, Tom Daveney and John Dixon, directors throughout David's period in the department, valued his opinions and advice. Tom Daveney has said he could not have moved without him and all knew they could rely absolutely on his confidence. In 1956, the Foreign Offíce invited him to lecture to Volkshochschulen in West Berlin as part of a programme to rehabilitate the study of History in West Germany.

As a tutor in Durham, he soon came to play a part in the development Of the study of Local History which fírst developed as an academic subject in the post-war period. It was struggling for acceptance rather as was the history of his own country, Scotland. Both Local and Scottish History really only began to flourish from the 1960s. David was in the first generation of those who not only taught but promoted Local History as a subject. He also built up the departmental library, and until he went in 1972, it was a fírst class history library. He bought widely and discriminatingly.

He played a principal part in founding the Durham County Local History Society in 1964 and became its first chairman. He thought Durham history was then too much that of the archaeological and ecclesiastical periods and that there was the need to correct an imbalance with the new history of social and economic perspectives from the 16th century - and to the 19th. He was always very sure that was the chief aim of the society and maintained that view with fírmness. He made a very material contribution to the history of the county in the book he wrote and published as recently as 1990, on the Durham Crown Lordships, showing how commercialisation of rents was at least as important as enclosure in the transformation of the agricultural economy and the role of what might be termed the public sector of the Durham Crown lands, in that process. It is a very good book which deserves to be known widely as an exemplary study. It was well reviewed.

He was a most companionable man but lived alone. He was a bachelor but very defínitely heterosexual in his preferences, - elegance was a quality which attracted him in women. He was very appreciative of the company of friends and was an excellent host. He enjoyed going to "raise food" as he put it, for an occasion, and "hooch" as well. He had a small collection of pictures which included an original etching by J. M. W. Turner and another by Raoul Dufy; lithographs by Juan Gris and Georges Braque, Marc Chagall and Fernand Leger; and original paintings and watercolours by Paul Marnv, John Varley, Sir David Wilkie, Tom McGuiness and Norman Comish He played the piano with brio. His repertoire was exclusively classical He particularly enjoyed listening to opera. He was a very expert and diligent gardener, making imaginative and knowledgeable use of the small areas to the front and back of his house. Until his sixties, when he turned to somewhat more conservative marques, he drove Rileys and Jaguars.

He was pre-eminently a reasonable man, a man of liberal opinions. There was in his liberalism not a little anti-clericalism, not obsessional but there all the same. He was very conscious of the religious and regional tensions of his Scottish homeland but regarded them with something approaching amusement. He would often speak of a Highland and Island tour he made in his university days, with a friend, a fellow-student at St. Andrews, the American writer, James A. Michener, who had the habit of Americans of those days, of putting his glass quickly under a chair when a door opened. They passed from one valley of stern weefrees into the next of libertine papists, people mutually suspicious and never meeting. David was fortifíed in his opinion that enthusiasms were dangerous. On admission to hospital in his final illness, he was asked his religion and promptly gave the old soldier’s answer, "C of E", confíding later that it was the answer which saved most trouble.

In his will he was extremely generous to friends and to the institutions which nourished him and which he served. He made very generous bequests to the two universities, St Andrews and Durham. He was most generous, too, to the Durham County Local History Society. He was always particularly anxious that the Society should produce a biographical series and it is now gratifying that we may dedicate this series to him in grateful and affectionate memory.

It is our intention to make available representative pages of some of our publications on this web-site. This is the third, selected to preview our Annual General Meeting and Lecture in May, taken from Durham Biographies Volume 1. A full contents list is available here.