Clan Baird

Baird is a name whose meaning was never settled. One reading takes it from the Gaelic bard, a poet; the other from the Old French barde, armoured. Gaelic surnames in the Highlands and the west are overwhelmingly patronymic, built from the name of a remembered ancestor, but epithets and occupations do appear among them too, so a poet's byname hardening into a family name is not far-fetched. Neither derivation can be proved, and the two are still argued over.

The date, at least, is firm. Most families in Lowland Scotland had adopted hereditary surnames by 1400, and Baird is on record in Lanarkshire from the 13th century, well before the practice became general. Whatever the word had once described, by then it described nobody: it was simply what one family was called, and what their children would be called after them.

The surname's first ground is Lanarkshire, the upper Clyde country, from the 13th century. By the 14th it is also being written down far to the north-east, in Aberdeen and Banff, and from that period onward the record shows Baird families of consequence in both places rather than one. Two footholds at opposite ends of the country, and the name held firmly in both.

Nothing in the family's motto suggests modesty about the fact. Dominus fecit, God made, is the line the Bairds took for themselves, a flat statement of provenance rather than a boast of arms or conquest. It suited a family that would make its name less by the sword than by office: by the bench, the regiment and, in the end, the laboratory bench of a Helensburgh minister's son.

The idea that Highland groups are clans and Lowland groups merely families is a 19th-century convention, not a legal or historical one. An Act of the Scottish Parliament of 1587 spoke of the chiefs and chieftains of all clans, as well on the highlands as on the borders, and Sir Crispin Agnew of Lochnaw, Albany Herald Extraordinary at the Court of the Lord Lyon, has pointed out that chief and head, clan and family, have been interchangeable words all along. What actually confers standing under Scots law is a chief recognised by the Lord Lyon; a name group without one has no equivalent position, whichever word is used of it.

By the 17th century the chiefs and leading gentry of Scotland were increasingly settling their disputes by recourse to the law rather than by feud. The Bairds' particular distinction was in the legal profession.

John Baird was raised to the bench in the 17th century with the judicial title Lord Newbyth. It is a small thing to state and a large thing to have achieved: a Lanarkshire surname of debated meaning seated among the men who decided what the law of Scotland was.

David Baird (1737-1829) joined the army in 1772 and went out to India in 1780. His war began badly: he was severely wounded and held captive by Hyder Ali.

He came back to it with interest. Baird took Pondicherry in 1793 and captured Seringapatam in 1799, the action his name has been attached to ever since.

In 1801 Baird led a march overland from the Red Sea to the Nile, a feat of movement rather than of battle and famous on that account. In 1805 he commanded the expedition to the Cape of Good Hope. General Sir David Baird died in 1829, having given the surname a second register alongside the courts: the Bairds were soldiers of the first rank as well as lawyers.

Newark Castle stands on a rocky promontory just west of St Monans on the Fife coast, looking out at the North Sea. The Kinloch family began the present building in the 15th century and it passed by marriage to the Sandilands of Cruivie, who sold it in 1649 to David Leslie, a prominent commander in the English and Scottish Civil Wars who was made Lord Newark after them. On Leslie's death in 1682 it went to the Anstruthers, and last of all to the Bairds of Elie.

The upper storeys are ruinous now, though the vaulted cellars survive beneath, hidden from view, and a separate round dovecote still stands beside them. The site is a scheduled monument. It is the one building the family can be pointed at on the Fife coast, and it came to them at the end of a chain of four other names.

John Logie Baird was born at 121 West Argyle Street in Helensburgh on the Firth of Clyde on 13 August 1888, the youngest of four children of the minister of the West Parish Church. He was an inveterate boy inventor: he wired the family house for electric light at thirteen, ran a private telephone exchange to his friends' houses across the street, and at fourteen took a press photograph that ran on the front page of the local paper. He studied at the Royal Technical College and the University of Glasgow, then spent his twenties as a power-station engineer, increasingly preoccupied with the idea of sending pictures by wireless.

In 1922 he moved to Hastings and built a television apparatus out of whatever he could afford: a wooden tea-chest, a biscuit tin for the lamphousing, darning needles, sealing wax, a hatbox, and a scanning disk cut from cardboard. From that workshop, moved to 22 Frith Street in Soho, came the first recognisable transmitted human image in October 1925, a ventriloquist's dummy he called Stooky Bill, and then an office boy, William Taynton, the first human face ever televised. On the afternoon of 26 January 1926, in two attic rooms at Frith Street, he showed the system working to forty members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times. He was thirty-seven.

The firsts came fast after that: moving pictures across the Atlantic to a receiver in New York on 9 February 1928, colour television on 3 July 1928, stereoscopic television, and from 30 September 1929 experimental BBC broadcasts on his system from a transmitter at Brookmans Park, the first television service of its kind anywhere. He kept going: large-screen television by 1938, a colour receiver by 1944, fully electronic colour by 1945. He died at Bexhill-on-Sea on 14 June 1946 and lies with his parents at Helensburgh. The Royal Television Society's highest honour is the John Logie Baird Award.

The surname carried well beyond Lanarkshire and Buchan. Spencer Fullerton Baird (1823-1887) was an American ornithologist and ichthyologist; Matthew Baird (1817-1877) a railroad and locomotive businessman; Francis Baird (1802-1864) an engineer and the owner of Baird Works. Tadeusz Baird (1928-1981) was a Polish composer, the same surname on a concert programme in another language altogether.

At home it kept the same habit of quiet professional weight. Sir Dugald Baird (1899-1986) was a British doctor specialising in obstetrics and fertility; Patrick Douglas Baird (1912-1984) a Scottish glaciologist; Edith Baird (1859-1924) a British chess composer; Jane Baird (1875-1960) a Scottish educator and Esperantist; Mamie Baird (1925-2012) a Scottish journalist and author. Poets or armoured men at the root, the Bairds have spent their recorded history, from 13th-century Lanarkshire onward, being useful.