‘For him the streets of the great city of learning which we wished to build lay all clearly laid out before his mind’. These words describe the first Rathbone Professor, the imposing John Macdonald Mackay – who arrived in Liverpool, after a spell in St Andrews, at the precocious age of twenty-eight. Mackay was always portrayed in the image of the modern-day prophet. This was not only a matter of his posture, seen in a famous Liverpool picture in which he is represented pointing the so-called New Testament group of his fellow university progressives to the Promised Land (Figure 1), but also of his rambling style of speech (his lectures lasted nearly two hours) and in the characteristic pause, as the archaeologist John Garstang observed, after you addressed a question to him: ‘an interval during which his eyes roamed among things unseen’. Lytton Strachey, briefly a pupil, put it more brutally: ‘Professor Mackay is very weird and somewhat casual’. But with all this, as my opening quotation suggests, Mackay was one of the chief architects of the faculty and university; discoursing passionately, for example, on the need for Liverpool to maintain its distance from the ‘repellent American type’ (of which he evidently knew very little). By comparison with the great Mackay, and still more with my immediate predecessors, I feel I must begin by lowering expectations.
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