Ibecame interested in McVey Napier for two reasons. First of all, I was drawn by the name. McVey is uncommon enough as a surname but almost unknown as a Christian name. Secondly, not only did I share a name with him, but he was born in my home town of Kirkintilloch. These are self-indulgent reasons for investigating someone’s life, not scholarly ones, but we always need a starting point, and that was mine.
Napier is little-known today, perhaps because, despite mixing with many of the great fi gures of his day, he was a jack-of-alltrades, what I have described as a multitasker. He did many things well, but he wasn’t absolutely outstanding at anything; people with that kind of profi le are rarely remembered. Yet there is also something rather modern about him besides the multitasking. It may be today’s pop and hip-hop stars who are best known for taking liberties with the name they were born with, but McVey Napier was 200 years ahead of them.
McVey Napier’s grandfather was John Napier of Craigannet on what is now the northern shore of the Carron reservoir, deep in the Kilsyth Hills. John Napier had been a lineal descendent of John Napier of Merchiston, the 17thcentury polymath who was the inventor of logarithms. He never married but had an illegitimate daughter called Jean who married a Kirkintilloch merchant called John McVey. She gave birth to McVey Napier in Kirkintilloch on 11 April 1776. However, he was christened as the more straightforward-sounding Napier McVey. It was only later that he reversed his name, apparently his grandfather’s wish, a way of perpetuating the historic family name. John Napier died at Craigannet in 1789. Long afterwards, as we will see, McVey Napier’s adoption of his grandfather’s surname would involve him in an old-fashioned Scottish cultural flyting.