'My Dear Nephew': letters to a student priest

The following compilation of letters date from between 1845 and 1854; they form part of a larger collection of papers relating to Christina Gordon and her descendants, which are currently in the author's possession.¹ The bulk of the letters included in this article were written by a Scottish priest, Donald Carmichael, to his great-nephew and namesake whilst the latter was a seminarian in Europe and are full of kindly advice and news from home for the young student.² They also offer a fascinating snapshot of Scottish religious and social history in the 1840s and 1850s. The correspondence is fundamentally a personal and family based one, reflecting as it does the mentoring relationship of great-uncle to his protégé. However, there is also much to interest historians in the post-emancipation but pre-reestablishment of the Scottish Catholic hierarchy era.

The elder Donald Carmichael was born in Perthshire, May 1772, to a Protestant family.³ The story of his family's conversion, at the instigation of his elder brother Duncan, is recounted by Archibald Carmichael, another of Carmichael's great-nephews:

My Grand uncle Duncan (the saddler) was a clever man, a great reader and a controversialist. At one time he worked where he became acquainted with a Catholic family from Braemar, named Macintosh. He [Duncan] lodged with one Jim, a protestant, who was ready to enter upon an argument with the Macintoshes on their religion. My Grand uncle perceived the advantage the Macintoshes had over Jim, and concluded that the Catholic religion was more misrepresented than known. He asked the Macintoshes to bring him to their chapel at Stobhall, which they did – Abbé Macpherson⁴ was priest there at the time – and usually lectured upon Catholic dogma. My Grand uncle attended him zealously, corresponded with God's grace, and embraced the faith. He next got my grandfather⁵ to attend the lectures, to be instructed and received – Then my Great-Grandmother⁶ . . . My Grand uncle Donald the priest was only a child at his mother's conversion, so was Finlay⁷ – All were received.⁸

Carmichael entered Scalan in April 1795, and was later a student of Bishop George Hay (1729–81) at the college of Aquhorties.⁹ After ordination in 1808, he was the priest at Tomintoul for thirty years, where he also spent his time farming. Whilst at Tomintoul, he contributed a short piece for the Scottish Catholic Directory of 1831 about the Roman Catholic chapel there, relating how a gallery had been added in 1820 to accommodate the steady increase in numbers attending the small church and that this addition, together with redecoration, had seen the building become 'one of the neatest Chapels in the north of Scotland'.¹⁰ In time, this chapel needed replacing entirely and it was largely down to the considerable efforts at fund-raising on the part of Carmichael that this was achieved. A wry anecdote relating to this can be found in Odo Blundell's first volume of The Catholic Highlands of Scotland:

How great this labour was may be judged by the tradition, still existing in Strathavon,¹¹ that it was sad to see the poor priest's hands, so worn and marked were they with carrying the bags of copper and silver which he had gathered during the fifteen months he was absent collecting for the building.¹²

During these years when the new chapel was under construction, Mass was said in a room in the region of Cults, near Tomintoul which was still being referred to in Blundell's time as the 'priest's room'.¹³ The new chapel, called St Michael's, was completed in 1839,¹⁴ although this was too late for Carmichael to celebrate Mass there since he had already been sent to Blairs College in Aberdeenshire.¹⁵ Of this he is said to have expressed the regret that 'Indeed I had a great work in building yon chapel, yet I never had the pleasure of saying Mass in it.'¹⁶

After his removal to Blairs, Carmichael...