George MacLeod(1895–1991)

George Fielden MacLeod was born at 6 Park Circus in Glasgow on 17 June 1895, the third son of Sir John MacLeod, 1st Baronet, a wealthy Glasgow industrialist and Conservative MP, and Edith Fielden, daughter of a Lancashire mill-owning family. The MacLeods of his father's line came from Fuinary in Morvern, where his great-grandfather Norman MacLeod had been the minister and a major figure of the nineteenth-century Highland church. He was schooled at Winchester College and Oriel College, Oxford, where he was reading Greats when the First World War began.

He took a commission in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in 1914, fought through the Somme in 1916, was awarded the Military Cross at Passchendaele in 1917 and the Croix de Guerre later that year, and ended the war a captain with three years of trench knowledge that would shape the rest of his life. He went up to read theology at Edinburgh University in 1919 and at Union Seminary in New York, was ordained in the Church of Scotland in 1921, and after curacies in Edinburgh was called as the minister of Govan Old Parish Church in the heart of the Clyde shipyard parish in 1930. Govan in the slump that followed 1929 was a parish of unemployment that ran beyond fifty per cent and overcrowding that no other British city tolerated. MacLeod ministered to it for eight years.

In the summer of 1938, with a small group of trainee ministers and unemployed shipyard craftsmen from Govan, he went to the island of Iona, where Columba had landed in 563 and where the medieval Benedictine abbey had stood in ruins since the Reformation. He proposed that the trainee ministers and the unemployed craftsmen should rebuild the abbey buildings as one project: the ministers learning manual work, the craftsmen learning theology, both groups working alongside each other and praying together at the end of each day. The work began that July. It was a single act of practical theology in the depression decade, and it founded the Iona Community as a permanent dispersed community of Church of Scotland ministers, lay members and ecumenical partners that has continued unbroken since.

He served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1957, the year he led the Assembly's first resolution against the British nuclear weapons programme. His pacifism, formed in the trenches of 1917, ran against the grain of Cold War Scotland and gave him a reputation as a churchman who could not be relied on to back the British state on questions of war; the Assembly resolution he carried in 1957 against the H-bomb was one of the first by any mainstream British church. The Iona Abbey rebuilding was completed in 1965, twenty-seven years after the first stone was placed. He preached at the rededication that Pentecost from the high altar he had rebuilt with his own hands.

He was raised to the peerage as Baron MacLeod of Fuinary in 1967, taking his title from the village in Morvern from which his family had come, and sat as a crossbencher in the Lords for the next twenty-four years. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1988. He died on 27 June 1991 at his daughter's home in Edinburgh, ten days after his ninety-sixth birthday. He is buried at Iona, beside the abbey he rebuilt. The MacLeod name today carries his memory as the minister who rebuilt the spiritual centre of Gaelic Scotland with the hands of unemployed Govan shipwrights, and whose Iona Community has been since 1938 the most influential Scottish religious foundation of the twentieth century.