Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Strachan-Davidson, James Leigh
STRACHAN - DAVIDSON, JAMES LEIGH (1843–1916), classical scholar, the eldest son of James Strachan, merchant (who took the name of Davidson in 1861), by his second wife, Mary Anne Richardson, was born at Byfleet, Surrey, 22 October 1843. His father came of a Dundee family, and was a merchant trading and residing in Madras. His mother was the daughter of a Yorkshire land-agent who lived at Kirkby Ravensworth; she died when her eldest son was only four years old. Her husband married again in 1853 and retired to Leamington, where he resided until his death (1867). James Leigh Strachan became a day-boy at Leamington College in 1854. Thence he passed to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1862 as an exhibitioner; among those who entered the college at the same time were (Sir) William Reynell Anson [q.v.]. Evelyn Abbott [q.v.], Paul Ferdinand Willert, and Francis de Paravicini, who became and remained his close friends. Strachan-Davidson (as he was now named) obtained first classes in classical moderations (1864) and literae humaniores (1866). In 1864 he was elected to the Jenkyns exhibition (the chief college prize for classical men), and in 1866 to a fellowship. As an undergraduate he read with three remarkable tutors, Edwin Palmer, Benjamin Jowett, and William Lambert Newman; by the last of these three he was inspired to make ancient history the avocation of his life. He was a frequent speaker at the Union Society, of which he was successively secretary (1863), librarian (1866–1867), and president (1867).
In his early years as a fellow Strachan-Davidson was much abroad, owing to the weakness of his health. He began to lecture regularly in 1874, but for many years wintered habitually in Egypt. In 1875 he accepted the office of senior dean, which he was to hold for thirty-two years. In this capacity he was Jowett's right-hand man. His own personality, which though elusive was singularly charming, made him the social centre of the senior common room and the idol of those undergraduates to whom he acted as a tutor or a censor morum. The subjects which he habitually taught were political economy, in which he represented orthodox individualism, and Roman history, of which he was an acknowledged master. In 1880 he contributed a study of Polybius to a volume of Hellenica, edited by Evelyn Abbott, and in 1888 he published Selections from Polybius with substantial prolegomena and appendices. In 1886 and 1890 he contributed to the English Historical Review two articles on ‘The Growth of Plebeian Privilege at Rome’ and ‘The Decrees of the Roman Plebs’. In 1890–1891 he wrote articles on Roman subjects for the third edition of William Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. His small but learned volume on Cicero and the Fall of the Roman Republic (1894) was a brilliant vindication of his favourite Roman statesman and an effective rejoinder to Mommsen's eulogy of Julius Caesar. In 1901 he criticized at some length the Römisches Strafrecht of Mommsen in the English Historical Review; and out of this article developed his own searching examination of Problems of the Roman Criminal Law (2 vols., 1912), his most elaborate and ambitious work, which Oxford recognized by the degree of D.C.L. (1916).
Learning, however, was only Strachan-Davidson's recreation. Though essentially a scholar he gave his best energies to the service of his university—whose interests in connexion with the Indian civil service he defended strenuously and successfully on more than one occasion, but especially in the years 1903–1904 and in 1913—and of his college, which he loved with a monastic patriotism most appropriate in one of the last representatives of the race of celibate life-fellows. This patriotism was humanized, but in no sense weakened, by his strong personal friendships and by his tolerance for those who could not permanently embrace his rule of life.
In 1893, on Jowett's death, there were many who expected that Strachan-Davidson would succeed him. But the electors preferred Edward Caird, a great philosophical teacher, and Strachan-Davidson loyally placed himself at the service of the new master, who was also an old friend. Their alliance was fortunate for the college, and in 1907, when Caird resigned, Strachan-Davidson was unanimously elected in his place—but at the age of sixty-three, with his naturally weak health impaired by a recent accident and operation. His tenure of office was quiet, prosperous, and uneventful until the outbreak of the European War in 1914. He faced the crisis in college affairs with a wise and cautious statesmanship. With the help of only three fellows he kept the teaching organization in being; and he did his utmost to make the college useful for the chief purpose that it then served, the training of officer-cadets. He gave his juniors a high example of courage, patience, and unobtrusive well-doing. On 28 March 1916 he died suddenly, at the Master's Lodgings, of cerebral haemorrhage. He is buried in the cemetery of Holywell church, Oxford. A speaking portrait, painted in 1909–1910 by Sir George Reid, hangs in the hall of Balliol College.
[J. W. Mackail, James Leigh Strachan-Davidson, 1925; personal knowledge.]