John Davidson, pastor, Chalmers Presbyterian church, one of the first professors in 1874 at University of Adelaide
John Davidson (at left), the Presbyterian minister at Chalmers (later Scots) church in Adelaide city, became first professor of English language and literature and mental and moral philosophy at the new Adelaide University in 1874. This was a condition of a £20,000 endowment by Walter Watson Hughes, honoured with a statue outside the university's Mitchell Building.
John Davidson image courtesy State Library of South Australia
John Davidson, the Presbyterian minister at Chalmers (later Scots) church on North Terrace, Adelaide city, filled the first chair of English language and literature and mental and moral philosophy when the new University of Adelaide opened in 1874.
Davidson was appointed to the university role as a condition of the £20,000 endowment for two professorships by Walter Watson Hughes. Hughes had made his fortune mainly as the largest shareholder in South Australia’s Moonta copper mine.
Adelaide University had its origins in the Union College, formed in 1872 for non-sectarian higher education and theological training. Educationist and minister James Jefferis inspired his fellow Congregationalists to join with Presbyterians and Baptists to set up the Union College to educate their churches’ ministers. Classes began with Jefferis as tutor in mathematics and natural science.
In 1872, the Union College council, including Hughes's friend James Lyall of the Flinders Street Presbyterian Church, approached him for a donation. His gift of £20,000 was so beyond the council's expectations that it decided to use the money for a university. Jefferies helped persuade the college council that the money should go to this cause. Hughes agreed and the University Act was passed by the South Australian parliament in 1874.
Hughes wanted two professorships to be endowed and reserved the right to nominate those lecturers, who were already teaching at Union College. The university association council wanted these wishes modified, nearly causing Hughes to withdraw his gift. John Davidson, Presbyterian minister at Chalmers Presbyterian church in Adelaide, was one of Hughes’ nominees; the other was Henry Read, to be university’s professor of classics and philology, who had been rector at St Michael’s Anglican church in Adelaide’s Mitcham.
John Davidson, born in 1834, in Kinghorn, Fife, Scotland, the son of John Davidson, dominie of Burntisland, attended the universities of St Andrews )1851-55) and Edinburgh (1855-56) universities but didn’t take degrees. He studied divinity in 1856-58 and 1860-61, became a licentiate of the Free Church presbytery of Kinross and in 1864 was ordained minister of Langholm, Dumfriesshire.
In 1869, he was called to Adelaide and arrived with his wife and children on the Carnaquheen in June 1870. At Chalmers Church, North Terrace, as a popular preacher, Davidson was soon “instrumental in raising his congregation to a high state of prosperity”.
Davidson was among many supporters of William Robertson Smith (1846-1894), whose entries on biblical subjects in the ninth Encyclopaedia Britannica (1877) alarmed Presbyterian leaders and cost him his chair at the Free Church College, Aberdeen. Davidson's theological views were also too advanced for some of his congregation but his expositions were always sincere and scrupulously fair. His purity of style and close reasoning were attractive even to students who had little taste for the subtleties of metaphysics and his manliness won him widespread respect and friendship.
Despite criticism in parliament on his university appointment that he was not a graduate or “of any great culture”, Davidson was in constant demand outside the university as a popular lecturer. Although he resigned from Chalmers church in 1877, he continued to preach on most Sundays at various churches. He held his university chair until he died aged 47 from a liver complaint at Glenelg in 1881.