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spiritual calling from the temporal needs of their flock. Hard men, I would guess, theologically but the necessary leaders within a culture which had lost too many. If not the priests, then who? Curiously, I had known Calum since I was a child. Close to my home in Dunoon, there was a piece of waste ground where we used to put the jackets down for goalposts and play football with a tattered ball. The Catholic primary school was not far away and Calum was the young priest who would join in the kick-about with the kids. There was no reason to suppose that our paths would cross again and it is difficult to explain why I remember this so clearly, except that there was an aura of goodness and integrity about him that left a deep impression, never subsequently contradicted. It is impossible to define the DNA of influences upon ones life and outlook, but I feel sure that Calum represented a strand in mine. Many years later, he lifted scales from my eyes with stories about the prejudice he experienced in my home town. One of them featured the begowned rector of Dunoon Grammar School, a pillar of respectability, who told Calum bluntly that, as long as he held that position, no Catholic would ever be Dux of the school. The need to deal with such attitudes doubtless helped him to develop his hallmarks of dignity, acerbic humour and moral superiority. Neither was prejudice a one-way street. I recall an encounter with a Dunoon near-contemporary, Ian Gow. To cut an extraordinary story short, Ian was plucked from school at 15 to join the Navy, became interested through his travels in Japanese culture, took Highers at night-school, progressed to university and ended up as Britains leading Japanese studies academic before setting up the University of Nottingham campus in China. As the evening wore on, Ian recalled a chilling story from his childhood. He came from a Catholic family but his parents separated and his mother remarried to a Protestant. Ian was in his last year of St Muns primary school and the head teacher took her revenge on the mother by denying the child the right to go on to Dunoon Grammar School, sending him back instead to primary four. At the range of nearly 50 years, Ian recalled how the intervention of a young priest saved my life by not only reversing the action but having the woman sacked. I guessed who the priest would have been and called Calum in Eriskay there and then. He remembered the episode well. Ian later told me it was one of the most emotional moments of his life the opportunity to thank the man who had made all things possible for him. The story seemed to sum up everything I respected in Calum he was not only a good and wise man, but he also possessed an edge of steel, which made him so effective as a political operator and advocate of just causes. And of course our paths did cross again, barely a decade after his Dunoon days when I turned up on Barra as editor of the fledgling West Highland Free Press. By then Calum was a member of Inverness County Council. Previously, Barras two councillors lived on the mainland which was indicative of how little political leadership was left in these islands. John MacFadden, son of the formidable Christina who had been one of the first Labour members of Inverness County Council, was pressed into service while a student in Glasgow. When Calum was posted to Northbay, John suggested to him that it was ridiculous for Barra to be represented in this way. Thus was Calums political career born. For decades, Inverness County Council had been run by landlords and the island representatives were mostly marginalised and patronised. The big decisions were taken in the Highland Club while the peasantry were in the pub. Calum did not take long to see through this farrago. At the first meeting of the committee which dealt with island matters, Lord MacDonald of Sleat presumed his accustomed right to take the chair. Calum challenged this procedure, which was unheard of. He was off and running. If there is a Free Press front page that should be in textbooks, it is the one that accompanied the death of two children in a Vatersay house fire because there was no water supply for the firemens hoses to draw on an issue that had been raised and ignored in Inverness. I ran Calums quote as the headline: If we were to accept all the arguments about spending so much money for so few people, then we in the islands might as well pack up and go. His words are as relevant today as they were then. Everything he saw in Inverness convinced Calum that the Gaels of the west should take control of their own destiny. The creation of an islands authority became his great cause and his vision went beyond what eventually emerged. He canvassed for support in Skye and Tiree without reward. What he wanted was a little Gaelic empire but he had to settle for Comhairle nan Eilean. He found like-minded politicians, notably Sandy Matheson, in Lewis and like-minded councillorclergymen from the Church of Scotland. They formed a powerful team. Whatever role he operated in, Calum was a force for good and enlightenment. He carried the authority to persuade doubters and to influence decision-makers. When I became a Scottish Office Minister in 1997, he wrote to me with gentle reminders of what he expected. As you know Ive worn many hats in my time and knocked on many doors to advance the cause of various communities. The only hat I wear now is as parish priest of Eriskay He poignantly described the condition of Eriskay where he had grown up among a population of 500, by then reduced to 140. The need for a causeway was urgent and he was looking for a wee miracle which, happily, was delivered a few years later. But I wonder how much of the decline which has beset the Gaidhealtachd that Calum once dreamt of as a political entity could have been avoided if more of his philosophy had been embraced and then implemented from within? It is too late now. Calum served his Church, his people and his culture, all with the same degree of distinction. It was a privilege to have counted him as a friend and I extend my sympathy to the family who survive him and to the people of Eriskay on their particular loss.

BRIAN WILSON

Like many others, I shed a tear last Friday on learning of the death of Father Calum MacLellan. There was an agelessness to him that belied his 86 years and a sharpness of intellect that was still being honed by the wisdom of experience.
Calum was not only a great man but the epitome of a breed, the Hebridean priests Gaelic in every fibre of their being, who never made the mistake of separating their