Hamilton Academy - Alumni

Alumni

Alumni of the former Hamilton Academy have and still make contribution to many spheres of endeavour and public, business and cultural life in Scotland and beyond. Half of the 2010 membership of the Rotary Club of Hamilton, including past presidents, were educated at the former Hamilton Academy.

Possibly the oldest surviving former pupil of Hamilton Academy is Mrs. Elsie McBroom (née MacPhail), a graduate of Glasgow University and formerly a teacher of mathematics, Ayr, Scotland; aged 100 in 2010.

Two former pupils and near contemporaries at Hamilton Academy were to serve together on the faculty of the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand – the physicist Robert Jack and the mathematician Robert J. T. Bell. In 1914 Jack went out to take up the appointment as Professor of Physics at Otago, in 1920 being joined by Bell, appointed Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics. They were to be faculty colleagues until Robert Jack's retirement in 1947, Robert Bell retiring the following year. Both also served as Chairman of the professorial board and as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science at the university that had been built by yet another former pupil of Hamilton Academy, Robert Forrest of the firm of McGill and Forrest, contractors, Dunedin. (Refer to their entries on List of former pupils of Hamilton Academy.)

Another alumnus of the school was John Cairncross, (1913–1995), a former Dux medallist at Hamilton Academy who went on to study at the University of Glasgow; the Sorbonne and Trinity College, Cambridge. A brilliant linguist and renowned author, in 1951 John Cairncross confessed to spying for the Soviets, associated with the KGB's Cambridge Five (the "Ring of Five".) His brother was the celebrated economist Sir Alexander Cairncross, who also attended Hamilton Academy (and is listed below under Notable Alumni.)