page_title: William Ivison Macadam
section_title: Military career
hierarchical_section_title: William Ivison Macadam / Military career
caption_attribution_description: English: Col. William Ivison Macadam, Royal Scots Forth VI regiment in uniform three quarter length photograph taken in 1896 or 1897
context_page_description: Colonel William Ivison Macadam VD FRSE FSA FIC FCS FRSSA
  Colonel Professor W. Ivison Macadam was a prominent Scottish scientist, academic author and antiquarian. He was also Colonel of the 1st Lothian Volunteer Infantry Brigade and a leading Freemason. He was generally known by his middle name Ivison.
  On 24 June 1902, aged forty-six, he was shot and killed, along with a student, by a mentally disturbed gunman in his own laboratory at Surgeons Hall, Edinburgh.
context_section_description: His career as a Volunteer army officer extended over a period of 27 years.
  In 1875, as a young man he joined the 5th (Leith) Volunteer Battalion of the Royal Scots Guards and largely on his initiative, a company of that regiment was raised in Portobello. During the twelve years he was captain it was noted for its strength and efficiency. He was in charge of testing and analysis of artillery ammunition for the army in Scotland. As a major he commanded the important tactical field days and was in charge of the defence of the Blackford Hill high point in Edinburgh during the post-Crimean War period with the resulting protracted Anglo-Russia tensions. He later became commandant of the battalion 1892–1896. (This battalion after his death was to be involved in the Quintinshill rail disaster in 1915 on the way to Gallipoli, the worst rail disaster in British history with a great part of the regiment killed. An annual remembrance is held in Edinburgh’s Rosebank Cemetery.)
  In July 1896 he succeeded Colonel Cranston as brigade-major of the Royal Scots Forth Volunteer Infantry Brigade as their colonel. As such he took the battalion to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, where he led them in the procession (they had embarked and were barracked on a ship he chartered from Leith to London, where it remained moored on the Victoria Embankment on the Thames throughout the celebrations).
  He subsequently was appointed colonel in command on the reformation of the brigade as the 1st Lothians.
  In 1902 Colonel Macadam was appointed commander of the Second Scottish Volunteer Coronation Battalion for Edward VII’s coronation. It was intended that he lead the regiment at the coronation celebrations and he had again chartered a ship to transport the battalion to the coronation in London on the day of his death. The coronation had to be postponed the day he was killed on account of the King’s appendicitis emergency.
caption: Col. William Ivison Macadam, Royal Scots Forth VI Brigade
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