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Ian Alister Macgregor

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Ian Alister Macgregor, M.A.

Ian Alistair Macgregor, a former Vice-President of this Society, died suddenly in West Africa in June, 1956. He was born in England in 1927, and was educated at Cranbrook College, Ilford, and Jesus College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1947, and thereafter served for two years in the Army Education Corps Ian Alistair Macgregor in the Canal Zone. At the end of this time he returned to Jesus College; but he was forced to leave for family reasons and in 1950 he joined the staff of the University of Malaya. Here he made his mark immediately as a teacher, a scholar and as a friend to those Malayan students who welcomed the vigour and precision of his work. He is so commemorated by a plaque at the entrance to the University; but it is through his unique researches into Portuguese history in South East-Asia that he is known to readers of this Journal, and for which the Branch honoured him.

He began his Portuguese enquiries at the beginning, by learning Portuguese, sixteenth century Portuguese, and then Portuguese palaeography. Subsequently he learned Dutch as well. Assisted by grants from the University, he began searching for the relevant material, which he found scarce, scattered, uncatalogued and badly cared for, untouched for centuries, in Goa and in Lisbon, Madrid and other archives in the Iberian Peninsula. Microfilm copies were brought back to Singapore, and by 1955 Macgregor had finished his translations and exhausted his immediate material. With his notes assembled, and a major historical task of great complexity completed, he left Singapore early in 1956, to continue his researches into Portuguese activities in Africa, while working as senior lecturer at the University College of the Gold Coast. In June, shortly after his assumption of duty there, he was stricken by a sudden fatal illness, and died, aged twenty-nine.

Macgregor published four papers on the Portuguese in South-East Asia in the JMBRAS.(1) and had completed a section on ‘Europe Overseas; (II) The East’ for the revised edition of the Cambridge Modern History.(2) He had acquired a world reputation among the discerning for his unique knowledge of the early history of the Portuguese in the East, and we now search unavailingly for a scholar to co-ordinate the material which he left and produce the book that he would have written.

K. G. TREGONNING.

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