James Drever Secundus 1910 - 1991

James Drever grew up in East Lothian, attending the village school in Gullane and the Royal High School on Carlton Hill. He had intended to read medicine at university and join the Royal Navy, but his father persuaded him to follow the traditional Scottish practice and take an ordinary MA first. In his second year at Edinburgh he was strongly influenced by Professor Kemp Smith in the Logic class and decided philosophy was his subject. While preparing for the prestigious Shaw fellowship competition (which he won) he simultaneously took a degree in psychology at Cambridge. He returned to Edinburgh as an assistant lecturer in philosophy for four years - Kemp Smith advising him “not to waste time on a PhD”.

James Drever
Professor of Psychology
1945 - 1966

At the outbreak of the war he volunteered for the Royal Navy and saw active service in the North Sea off the coast of Norway. He was later attached to HMS Excellent, the naval gunnery school, working on problems of selection and training. He ended the war as an acting Lieutenant-Commander. The photograph, right, shows James Drever surrounded by Wrens in 1945. Joyce Cookson, later appointed a lecturer, is in the first row third from the left.

He writes on leaving Edinburgh “my best work was theoretical or historical rather than experimental, but I had studied under Adrian and Wittgenstein at Cambridge, and this gave me the background to some interesting studies on the occipital alpha rhythm and its relation to visual function. Bartlett’s influence of course was basic, but more in producing a frame of mind than in particular projects. Looking back I feel that I justified my existence chiefly as a teacher, and some twenty professors of psychology can be pointed to as evidence”.

He was Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 1955 - 1958, active on many international psychology committees, an honorary member of the French and Polish psychological associations, and President of the British Psychological Society in 1960/61. From 1950 he served on numerous government advisory committees and councils including the Social Science Research Council. He chaired the Advisory Council on Social Work in Scotland and was a member of the influential Robbins Committee on the Future of Higher Education. This last committee led to the major expansion of higher education in the UK and the foundation of the ‘new’ universities in the 1960s. In 1966 he was appointed Master of Queen’s College in the University of St Andrews and in 1967 became the first Principal of the University of Dundee. Professor Drever was the first psychologist to be appointed as a University Vice Chancellor in the UK. The photograph shows him with the Queen Mother on his installation as Principal of Dundee.