Donald MacAlister

Sir Donald MacAlister, Bt
Chancellor of the University of Glasgow
In office 1907–1929
Personal details
Born	(1854-05-17)17 May 1854 Perth, Perthshire, Scotland
Died	15 January 1934(1934-01-15) (aged 79)
Alma mater	St John's College, Cambridge
Profession	Physician

Sir Donald MacAlister, 1st Baronet of Tarbet

Early life

Donald MacAlister was born in Perth, on 17 May 1854, the son of Daniel MacAlister (also spelt MacAllister), a publisher's agent and book-deliverer, living at 2 Earls Dykes in Perth^[2] who later went to live in Liverpool to work for Blackie and Son.^[1] His mother was Euphemia Kennedy and his younger brother, born in 1856, was Sir John MacAlister. He was cousin to Hugh Macalister.

He rose in life from humble beginnings via school at the

He was a native speaker of Gaelic.

Academic career and later life

MacAlister remained a fellow of St. John's College until the end of his life, and was senior tutor from 1900 to 1904. In 1879, he published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on "The Law of the Geometric Mean." The work was in response to a question put by Francis Galton and contains what is now called the log-normal distribution.

After a spell teaching mathematics at

In addition to his great talent in mathematics and his accomplishments in medicine, MacAlister was also an extraordinary linguist. In addition to his native Gaelic and English, he was said to have spoken well German, Norse, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Basque, Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Swedish, Russian, Serbian, Afrikaans and Romany: nineteen languages total.[5]

MacAlister was a contemporary at St. John's of the first

to allow Japanese students to obtain exemption from the study of Latin and Greek for entrance examinations.

MacAlister played a very important part in the work of the

and became its president in 1904. In 1931, after an unbroken twenty-seven years in office, he stood down on grounds of ill health.

In 1907, MacAlister was appointed

.

MacAlister took a leading part in the university business of the country. He was one of the founders of the Universities Bureau of the British Empire, and was for many years Chairman of the Standing Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the British universities.

MacAlister's work was widely recognised; he received honorary doctorates from thirteen universities and was appointed KCB in 1908 and created a baronet, of Tarbert, Cantire, in the County of Argyll, in 1924.

In 1917, he was elected a Fellow of the

He died in 1934 and is buried in the

Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground

in Cambridge, with his wife, Edith Florence Boyle (16 June 1873 – 27 November 1950). They had no children and the baronetcy became extinct upon his death.

Works

• Introductory Address on the General Medical Council (lecture, 1906)

See also

• Japanese students in Britain

References

• Edith F.B. MacAlister, Sir Donald MacAlister of Tarbert, London, 1935.
• A. J. Crilly, ‘MacAlister, Sir Donald, first baronet (1854–1934)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. [Accessed 22 Aug 2005]
• Japanese Students at Cambridge University in the Meiji Era, 1868–1912: Pioneers for the Modernisation of Japan, by Noboru Koyama, translated by Ian Ruxton, (Lulu Press, September 2004,
  ISBN 1-4116-1256-6
  )
• ‘And I knew Everything Was Going to be All Right’, A Personal Memoir by Elspeth Horne, Edited by Polly Gould, Published by Morrow & Co 2015.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Donald MacAlister.

• Donald MacAlister at Find a Grave

Academic offices
Preceded by Professor Robert Story	Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glasgow 1909 to 1929	Succeeded by Professor Sir Robert Sangster Rait
Preceded by The Earl of Rosebery	Chancellor of the University of Glasgow 1929 to 1934	Succeeded by Sir Daniel Macaulay Stevenson
Baronetage of the United Kingdom
New creation	Baronet (of Tarbert) 1924–1934	Extinct