DUNCAN M‘CULLOCH.
Mr Duncan M‘Culloch was born in the little village of Carfin in Lanarkshire. After serving his apprenticeship as a joiner in Wishaw, he came to Glasgow, and on marrying became connected with Kinning Park Society. In 1887 he was made president of the society, and afterwards a member of the then newly formed educational committee. He took a prominent part in the formation of the first branch of the Scottish Co-operative Women’s Guild—Kinning Park Central branch—and came to be known amongst the ladies of the guild as “The Father of the Guild,” a title of which he was justly proud. After having been for a short time a member of the committee of the Baking Society, he was elected chairman in 1889, and continued to occupy that honourable position for the long period of fifteen years. During these years the Baking Society entered on a period of expansion which raised it from the position of a moderately sized bakery, doing a trade of 700 sacks a week, to that of the largest institution of its kind, with a trade of almost 4,000 sacks weekly. He saw the biscuit factory started, and during his term of office the Clydebank branch was opened and the Belfast branch was commenced. Mr M‘Culloch also took a warm interest in the affairs of the Convalescent Homes Association, and he served for many years, until his death in the summer of 1915, as a director of this, “the brightest jewel in the Co-operative crown,” as the chairman of the Homes Association sometimes describes it. Mr M‘Culloch became again a president of Kinning Park Society, and there, as in the work of the Baking Society, he displayed enterprise, acumen, and firmness. He was a man of strong will and dominant personality, and his work on the various boards of the Co-operative movement with which he was associated was always marked by strong common sense. On the Co-operative Defence Committee and on the Scottish Sectional Board he was also a tower of strength; never favouring schemes or policies which were far in advance of the times, but never holding back when he thought action was for the benefit of the movement to which he had devoted the leisure moments of his life. For some time in 1915 he had been laid aside with illness, and as the Congress of that year met for its first session the news of his death arrived and cast a gloom over the minds of the Scotsmen present, who felt that one who had been all a man had gone from them.