William Robertson Nicoll, 1851-1923

William Robertson Nicoll William Robertson Nicoll was born at Lumsden, Aberdeenshire, on 10 Oct 1851, the son of Rev. Harry Nicoll (1812 - 1891), Free Church minister of Auchindoir, Aberdeenshire, and his wife, Jane Robertson (1829 - 1859). He graduated from the University of Aberdeen, MA 1870, and was ordained to the Free Church of Scotland in 1874, for which he held charges in Dufftown, Banffshire, 1874 - 1877, and in Kelso, Roxburghshire, 1877 - 1885. Serious illness forced him to give up the ministry in 1885, and he moved south to Norwood, East London, where he was appointed, and remained until his death in 1923, editor of Hodder and Stoughton's monthly theological magazine, The Expository Times . In 1886 he was appointed editor of their new publication, The British Weekly: a Journal of Social and Christian Progress, and in 1891 founded his own literary periodical, The Bookman . The success of this was followed in 1893 by The Woman at Home, an illustrated magazine to which Annie S. Swan (Mrs Burnett Smith) (1859 - 1943) became one of the main contributors. In the early twentieth century he became heavily involved in politics, and, through his position as editor of The British Weekly, came to exercise considerable influence upon liberal members of the Cabinet. He was knighted for his political services in 1909 and made C.H. in 1921.

William Robertson Nicoll was married twice. By his first marriage to Isabel Dunlop (d 1878), he had two children, Isa Constance Nicoll (c 1882 - 1962), poetess and author (children's books and short stories), and Maurice Nicoll (1884 - 1953), psychiatrist, psychologist and author. By his second marriage, in 1897, to Catherine Pollard, author of Bells of Memory and Under the Bay Tree, he had one daughter, Mildred Robertson Nicoll (1898 - 1995).

Mildred Robertson Nicoll Mildred Robertson Nicoll married Grange Inglis Kirkcaldy in 1920, and had three daughters, Rosemary Melville, Prudence Elizabeth Struan, and Pamela Janet Grange. Under her maiden name she was editor, with A.C. Harwood, of Anthroposophical Quarterly, from 1956 - 1978. She also edited The Letters of Annie S. Swan (London: Hodder and Soughton, 1945); Family Post Bag (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1947); and R. Steiner, The Redemption of Thinking (London: Hodder and Soughton, 1956). She also wrote and published under her married name, Mildred Robertson Kirkcaldy.

For further details see William Robertson Nicoll's entry in Dictionary of National Biography, 1922 - 1930 and T.H. Darlow, William Robertson Nicoll: Life and Letters (1925). Brief biographies of Mildred Robertson Nicoll and other family members are deposited with the collection.

From the guide to the Papers of William Robertson Nicoll and his family, Old Manse, Lumsden, 1867 - 1971, (University of Aberdeen)