Douglas Young (classicist)

Scottish classical scholar and politician (1913–1973)

Douglas Cuthbert Colquhoun Young (5 June 1913 – 23 October 1973) was a Scottish poet, scholar, translator and politician. He was the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) from 1942 to 1945, and was a classics professor at McMaster University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Young was born in Tayport, Fife, the son of Stephen Young; a mercantile clerk employed in India by a Dundee jute firm. Young senior had insisted that his pregnant wife return home to give birth to their son in Scotland. However, shortly after his birth in Fife, Douglas was taken to India with his mother, where he spent the early part of his childhood in Bengal, speaking Urdu as a second language there. From the age of eight, Young attended Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh, where he developed a deep interest in History and the Classics. He studied at the University of St Andrews, graduating with a first class MA in Classics in 1934, and then at New College, Oxford, 1935 1938.

Young began his professional academic career at the University of Aberdeen, where he served as assistant lecturer in Greek from 1938 to 1941. Following the war, Young was lecturer in Latin at University College, Dundee (which was then a part of the University of St Andrews), from 1947 to 1953, then lecturer in Greek at the University of St Andrews from 1953 to 1968. In 1952, Young travelled with Naomi Mitchison as part of an Authors' World Peace Appeal delegation to the Soviet Union. Here Young met several Russian authors, including Mikhail Zoshchenko and Samuil Marshak. During the visit, the Soviet authorities "refused to transmit a radio script" where Young stated the Western European view of the Korean War.

Young resigned from the SNP in 1948, in protest against the party's new constitution, which prohibited being a member of the SNP while also being a member of another political party. He had been a member of both the Labour Party and the SNP until he was elected leader in 1942, and had argued against efforts to ban dual party membership when this was proposed over the next few years leading up to the passing of the new constitution. The event which brought the situation to a head was the party's expulsion of Robert Wilkie, who had run as an "Independent Nationalist" under the SNP ticket at the 1948 Glasgow Camlachie by election. Young rejoined the Labour Party in June 1951, partly because of the perilous situation the party found itself in with its small parliamentary majority following the 1950 general election. He also felt that the response to the Scottish Covenant was certain to bring about the establishment of a Scottish Parliament, which he had supported as a Labour Party member. In 1967, he was a founder member of the 1320 Club, which sought to provide a nationalist alternative to the SNP. In 2003, a plaque to commemorate him was unveiled at the Writers' Museum in Edinburgh.