To many people, James Douglas was Jim or JDD ("Call me JD squared"). Following his death on August 13 at age 80, we celebrated a memorial service for him; celebrate is the right word, for Jim would not want us to be solemn or pompous. Thirty years ago I wrote thanking him for being so gracious (I was a late contributor to one of his dictionaries). He wrote back from St. Andrews (on a card from the Roxburghe Hotel, Edinburgh): "Please, oh please, let it not be known that I have been 'gracious.' … It would spoil my maverick reputation."
He signed himself "Anne-Marie's friend, Jim."
It was so often such little things that revealed the man. No one, for example, was ever so assiduous in writing to acknowledge services rendered as he was. His declining activity must have had something to do with the Post Office's financial woes. Jim was in some ways a back-room boy, not often in the limelight but for all that very widely known, successful and influential. He did not always get the credit when bigger names were involved.
James' first years were spent in Glasgow. His father was a shipyard laborer, and his mother died when he was 2. His only sibling, his elder brother Alex, died 18 months ago. Alex's widow Doris and two daughters, Jess and Sandra, were latterly James's closest family. His humble beginnings—he recalled moving house to Scotstoun with the family's belongings in a cart—included his first school, one for PDs: "Physically Deficients." No PC in these days!
While at Hyndland Secondary School, several of his lifelong friendships began. After a couple of years of clerical work he joined the RAF in 1941, serving in the Signals for five years in places like Malta and Gibralter. While in the Forces he took exams which got him into Glasgow University. After one year he was able to transfer to St. Andrews, where by 1953 he had completed studies.
Jim remained strikingly proud of his lowly origins. These years left him with not only an addiction to fish and chips but also an aversion to the high-falutin', to self-important conceit, and to empty show. He became a master at puncturing pretentiousness, at pricking inflated balloons, often playfully but never cruelly. It was while at Hyndland Secondary that he was taken in hand by Jim Meiklejohn, leader of Hyndland Crusader Class—"Boss" Meiklejohn, later head of the Scripture Union in Scotland, to whom above all our Jim owed those Christian and evangelical convictions which would determine the course of the rest of his life.
Jim rarely wore his evangelicalism on his sleeve (and he liked to expose evangelical foibles), but he retained a strong biblical faith to the end.
After St. Andrews, masters (STM) and doctoral study took him to Hartford Theological Seminary in Connecticut—presumably the first of numerous visits to the United States. (He won several cups for table tennis while traversing the Atlantic in the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth). He graduated Ph.D. magna cum laude in 1955 for a thesis on the Covenanters, which became his most substantial single-author book, Light in the North (1964). It is still the most accessible scholarly introduction to the Covenanters.
After his return to Scotland, a year lecturing in church history at St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, and less than that as minister of St. John's Kirk Rothesay, both proved to be cul-de-sac experiences for Jim. He moved south to become librarian of Tyndale House, Cambridge (1958-1961), where I first met him around 1960. His main occupation was planning and editing the New Bible Dictionary (1962), a landmark achievement for InterVarsity Press, for British evangelical scholarship and above all for JDD. He was thereby launched on a career that would make him one of the most highly regarded religious editors in the English-speaking world of the later 20th century.
Jim's gifts as writer and editor found an outlet in journalism also. He was recruited by Carl Henry (the beginning of a particularly close friendship with Carl and Helga) first as editorial associate and then editor-at-large of Christianity Today, 1961-1983.
These years included a spell as editor of The Christian weekly, fruitful not least in nurturing younger staff who would go on to make their mark in the media. But his editorship was brought to a painfully sharp end when the proprietor pulled the plug on the paper in what was one of the lowest points in Jim's working life. But by now he was in wide demand, writing columns or news comment for papers and journals in Scotland, England, Australia, and the USA. He regularly covered the Kirk's General Assembly, with an independent eye not always welcomed by the establishment.
Jim's connections with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which went back at least to the years with The Christian, gave him a key role at the World Congress on Evangelism at Lausanne in 1974. He edited the volume of Congress papers "Let the Earth Hear His Voice," produced the first draft of the Lausanne Covenant, and oversaw the final text of this immensely significant statement of evangelical beliefs.
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For several years Jim lived in Cheam, south of London. (He once got through passport control without his passport by replying promptly to the question who lived at 29A Railway Cutting, East Cheam: Tony Hancock). He moved to St. Andrews in 1973, where he continued to freelance his way around the world on assignments to congresses, conferences, missionary enterprises and much more besides, all the while editing a string of reference works, especially the New International Dictionary of the Christian Church (1974), which, with the New Bible Dictionary, embodied his most valuable editorial achievement.
From 1988 he paid ever-longer annual visits to Singapore to lecture on church history, ethics, journalism and (I am sure) humor in the Bible College. This missionary commitment (as he viewed it) became full-time, entirely on a voluntary basis, and lasted in all for a decade, with later return visits to share in College celebrations—showing the extraordinary affection he won among colleagues, and even more so students.
Most recently of all, Jim's editorial skills were enlisted to deal with 20th century Scottish churchmen for the forthcoming New Dictionary of National Bibliography. A brief outline can scarcely reveal how much James packed into his life or the astonishingly wide reach of his activities and his friendships.
"There can be few who have made and kept so many friends in so many continents," says Bob Davidson, a fellow student at St. Andrews. He was incredibly well-traveled, having visited every state in the USA. He knew all the state capitals and loved to expose the ignorance of the most obscure ones on the part of uppity Americans. He made it to, and reported on, Haiti under Baby Doc, Cuba under Castro and Greece under the colonels.
But Jim was no tourist. One letter-writer asked: "Who would visit Sydney and decline a ferry trip on our magnificent harbor, a visit to our unique Opera House, a walk in the beautiful Royal Botanic Gardens?"
Jim did, preferring instead the local supermarket, the Forsyte Saga on TV and planning a birthday for his hosts' pet budgie.
Jim liked to learn a phrase or two in the language of the country he was to visit. Prior to a trip to Lappland he learnt the Lappish for "A bevy of red-haired dwarfs is dancing on the roof." During the visit, the party experienced a violent thunderstorm in an isolated church with a corrugated iron roof. Jim immediately produced to general astonishment his one sentence of Lappish.
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James traveled not to see the sights but to meet people, and it will be as a man and a Christian with a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for good old-fashioned friendship that we will chiefly remember him. He was pursued of course, by the fairer sex, but as he told Violet James, a close Singapore colleague, one of the commandments he religiously adhered to was "Never compliment a woman on her hairdo" lest she think that "you have committed matrimony in your heart."
When two young American ladies came to Doocot Road for a few days he quipped "The neighbors will talk, of course, and I am glad to introduce a little color into their routine-ridden lives."
Among Jim's gifts was a heart for the underdog, the outsider, the loner, and he was unstintingly generous in friendship. Ruj, his house-companion since 1968 in Cheam, could speak at great length of Jim's sheer selfless openhandedness. And did we all not feel that his friendship enriched us, made our lips crease and our eyes sparkle?
"This veritable hobbit of kindness, fun and wit" is so right. James Packer called him "one of the joys of our life."
Each of us will have our favorite JDD story, our cherished JDD saying. He loathed Tuesdays, cultivated grievances ("I'd rather have the grievance"—than an apology), cited the line of the hymn "and some have friends who cause them pain," and had an unerring eye for the ridiculous in life, often simply relishing the absurd, but sometimes spotting a gritty pearl of wisdom, such as the Belfast wall inscribed "No Pope Here," with underneath scrawled "Lucky Old Pope!" He amused his Singapore students by telling them that the trouble with Americans was that they all looked alike!
Jim's editorial methods are a byword in many households in many lands. To winkle articles out of a dilatory contributor he would often write to his wife (he had no problems with women contributors)—and sometime even to his dog. One delinquent retorted "Who could not fail to miss a deadline just to receive one of Jim's letters!"
He displayed amazing patience with procrastinators; he must have been, said one, "a direct descendant of Job." Certainly Jim's remarkable letters are preserved by recipients worldwide.
To the end he retained what another summed up as his "unique blend of wit, wisdom, warmth and whimsy." His last months were full of rich experiences: his young Malaysian friend Stephen Poh took him on a car tour of Scotland visiting old haunts. Earlier he managed to revisit Singapore, and also several friends in several continents, especially the Henrys in the USA. He had journeyed south to a family gathering of the Gathercoles, good friends from Cambridge days, including his god-daughter Kate. He had again welcomed to St. Andrews his sister-in-law and his nieces, Jessie having come from Canada, now back again so soon for a sadder occasion. He had been pushing on with his memoirs—"The Half that Can be Told."
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James had recently expressed to one or two folk an intimation that the body was beginning to fail. He died suddenly, alone, on a bus, the neatest answer surely to the question "Will there be laughter in heaven?" And on the way too, it seems: "When you cross the river" he advised, "speak kindly of the crocodile's mother."
Jim had massive powers of recollection and frequently quoted both prose and verse, including these lines on a ship limping into harbour:
Safe home, safe home in port, Strange cordage, shattered deck, Torn sails, provision short, And only not a wreck. But oh the joy upon the shore To tell our voyage perils oe'r.
This "flavorsome character," this self-styled maverick, this generous host and prized guest, this irrepressible Christian gentleman, will surely regale the saints in Heaven as he delighted us on earth.
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