The Very Rev Andrew Herron

Crusading Moderator of the Church of Scotland

Andrew Herron, minister of the church: born Glasgow 29 September 1909; ordained a minister of the Church of Scotland 1936; Minister at Linwood 1936-40, at Houston and Killellan 1940-59; Clerk to the Presbytery of Paisley 1953-59, of Glasgow 1959-81; Editor, Church of Scotland Year Book 1961-92; Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland 1971-72; married 1935 Joanna Fraser Neill (four daughters, and one son deceased); died Glasgow 27 February 2003.

In the mid-1960s, a minister's son had a brilliant mathematical career suspended because of an alleged misdemeanour against a member of staff in the students' union in Glasgow. The Reverend Andrew Herron, then Clerk to the Glasgow Presbytery, believed passionately in the boy's innocence, and approached me as the Member of Parliament for the area from which he came.

I recognised at once, as did everyone who came in contact with Herron, that he was a doughty fighter and a relentless crusader in any cause that he thought to be just. He was no respecter of persons, not even of Sir Charles Wilson, then Principal of Glasgow University and Chairman of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors for the whole of Great Britain. After many reverses Herron and his supporters, of whom I became one of the increasingly more ardent (he could inspire loyalty in friends), eventually triumphed.

It was a matter of little consequence to him that he was the only graduate member of Glasgow University to become Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland who was not given an honorary degree during his time of leadership of the church. He had to wait 18 years until his own university relented and came to terms with his passion for justice.

Andrew Herron was born into a working-class family and was the traditional Scot "lad o' pairts" who worked at night as a proofreader on the then Glasgow Herald to help pay for his university education.

His first ministry, for four years, was in Linwood, just outside Paisley, his second, from 1940 for 19 years, a few miles west at Houston and Killellan, where there was rapid housing development under the Wheatley Act. Herron realised that in order to help disadvantaged parishioners he should add a law degree to his studies in divinity.

He became involved in the wider affairs of the church and from 1953 to 1959 he was Clerk to the Presbytery of Paisley, where he showed great determination in helping to restore the wonderful abbey, one of the few ecclesiastical jewels in Scotland.

For the next two decades, 1959-81, he was Clerk of the Presbytery of Glasgow and exercised considerable influence in restraining the Church of Scotland from going overboard in the ecumenical cause. His friend Professor Tom Carbery recalls Herron as saying, "You can be as ecumenical as you like, so long as we all stay in our own churches." His view was that, after the next Vatican Council, the priests' wives would be there; at the Vatican Council after that the bishops' wives would be there; and at the Vatican Council after that, it would be the Pope's wife.

Unlikely as such a scenario might be, Carbery's recollection encapsulates Herron's attitude to ecumenism. In 1972, however, he was one of the first Moderators of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to be asked to go and see the Pope. He made it clear to all and sundry that he was only going because the Pope, Paul VI, invited him.

Some of Herron's most valuable contributions were in his lectures, such as the Baird Lectures Kirk by Divine Right (1985). But many members of the Church of Scotland will be particularly grateful for his A Guide to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (1976).

In his foreword Brigadier Bernard Fergusson, who as Lord Ballantrae, was Lord High Commissioner in 1973 and 1974, wrote:

The procedures and machinery of the Church of Scotland are far from daft if one masters them . . . The difficulty is that there has hitherto been no simple guide to them, so they remain undeniably bewildering to people encountering them for the first time. The first time that I attended the Assembly as a Commissioner, in 1956 or thereabouts, I didn't (so to speak) know my Glengarry from my spats. This short book by Dr Herron is therefore long overdue, and nobody has better qualifications than he to be its author.

He has already demonstrated the power and pith of his pen in other writings; he has been Parish Minister, Clerk to the Presbytery of Glasgow, Leader of the House and Moderator, and is a qualified lawyer forbye. His book is all sinew, with no superfluous flesh, easy to read, and interesting in its own right. Having once read it, nobody need ever feel bewilderment again.

Tam Dalyell