Editor's Preface

Professor Watt wrote a more lengthy text, ‘The Testament of a Search’. It was never published and it remains in typewritten form only. It is a second autobiographical study. Composed later than his handwritten diary, this later account contains valuable extra information and its tone is more formal and more reflective than its predecessor.

The Text

I was born in 1909 in the Manse of Ceres in the ‘Kingdom of Fife’. My father, Andrew Watt, who came of Lanarkshire farming stock, was parish minister there. My mother, Mary, was the elder surviving daughter of John Campbell Burns, a building contractor, who liked to describe himself as a ‘self-made man’ and was proud to be a Justice of the Peace and county councillor. His father was a ship's captain based in Glasgow, but the unsettled circumstances of such a life made it desirable that young John should be sent to live with his grandfather, the ‘dominie’ or schoolteacher of the mining village of Larkhall. After his schooling he learnt the trade of a joiner, and by his intelligence and hard work and upright character became one of the leading men of the community. The family was not directly related to Robert Burns, the poet, but the anecdote was handed down in the family of how my grandfather was once told by his great-grandmother (whose husband had been a burgess of Kilmarnock) that she has once entertained the poet to tea in Kilmarnock.

When I was about six months old my father moved to Glasgow to be the minister of a new parish there. I sometimes wonder if this early change of abode is the source of my tendency, once I have found a billet, to remain in it as long as possible. This change, however, was soon to be followed by other cataclysmic ones. When I was fourteen months old my father died after an illness of only a month or two, leaving my mother a widow of thirty-nine, and myself an only child. This experience, traumatic for both my mother and myself, has undoubtedly been a major determinant of many aspects of my later life, though it is only within the last ten years that I have appreciated its importance.