2018

Our President in 2018/9 was:

Sir Maxwell MacLeod

He proposed the Toast to Sir Walter at our 110th Annual Dinner on 2nd May 2019 in the New Club, Edinburgh> [photos]

The Hon Sir Maxwell Macleod of Fuinary was educated at Cargilfield, Gordonstoun, Durham and Oxford, where he was awarded a scholarship by the Inner London Education Authority to acquire a post graduate certificate in the teaching of the hearing impaired through the revolutionary natural oralism method.

He taught in an East London Comprehensive for over six years before leaving as an educational audiologist specialising in high frequency deafness.

On giving up teaching he returned to the family home at Fuinary in Morvern before pursuing a number of jobs including writing for over ten news papers, writing a column for the Herald, and a daily cartoon strip for the Herald, Express and Week Magazine, running expeditions throughout the Hebrides, starting an energy advisory business and lecturing in Japan, Washington, New York and Mississippi where he was recently the writer in residence at Mississippi State University.

He was the senior President of the Speculative Society and is currently in line to be the President of Glasgow's Nomad Society. 

He has circled the world twice and has a particular interest in the Middle East. He is currently leading a project to bring two Palestinian nurses, one a Christian and one a Muslim out of the troubles to Scotland for the month of June.. 

Maxwell's hobby is long distance sea rowing and he rowed from Skye to Iona, reporting on the socio-economics of the different islands for a number of papers.

His interest in Sir Walter Scott is based on his interest in his assistant William Laidlaw, to whom he is related through his Mother and was sparked after being shown family heirlooms including a silver plate gifted by Sir Walter to Laidlaw in gratitude for his assistance and wooden boxes containing unpublished letters from him to Laidlaw. 

He intends explaining some of the unrevealed background to Laidlaw's work in his address.