Dilworth, M. (2004). Graham, Henry Grey (1874-1959). In Oxford dictionary of national biography (pp. 187-188). Toronto, ON: Oxford University Press.

Graham, Henry Grey (1874-1959), Roman Catholic bishop, was born on 8 March 1874 at the manse, Maxton, Roxburghshire, the fifth son and last of the ten children of Manners Hamilton Nisbet Graham (1830-1911), minister of Maxton, and his wife, Margaret Jane Ritchie (d. 1891). He was descended from a long line of Presbyterian ministers and his father's brother, the Revd Henry Grey Graham, was a well-known historian. Having attended Kelso burgh school, Henry, aged fifteen, went to St Andrews University in 1889, graduated master of arts in 1893, and went on to study divinity. Repeatedly a prizewinner, he graduated bachelor of divinity in 1896 and for a year was assistant to the professor of Hebrew. Licensed by the presbytery of Selkirk, he became assistant minister at Dalserf, Lanarkshire, in 1897 and three years later assistant at the Park Church in Glasgow. Then in November 1901 he was ordained as assistant and successor in the parish of Avendale (Strathaven), Lanarkshire.

For some time Grey Graham (as he was usually known) had been attracted to the Roman Catholic church and its worship, an attraction strengthened by his visiting Catholic families in Dalserf and Strathaven and by visits to Ireland and Belgium. He was involved in the movement to promote 'Catholic' worship in the Church of Scotland, and the question of the church's authority likewise concerned him greatly. From 1900 Graham and another young minister, John Campbell McNaught, were much influenced by an older minister, John Charleson, who changed Graham's fascination with Catholic externals into a more reasoned understanding of Catholicism.

Late in 1901 Charleson finally became a Roman Catholic. After further agonizing Graham resigned his ministerial charge in July 1903, was received into the Roman Catholic church at Fort Augustus Abbey on 15 August, and in October joined Charleson at the Scots College at Rome. The whole episode received much publicity in the context of the Scoto-Catholic movement and the impeccable ministerial background of Graham's family.

Ordained priest at Rome for the archdiocese of Glasgow on 12 December 1906, Graham returned to Scotland the following July and was appointed assistant priest at Motherwell. Eight years later, in 1915, he became parish priest at Longriggend, Lanarkshire. At this time the Roman Catholic church in Scotland was experiencing complex problems which the bishops, all of them elderly and some infirm, could hardly solve. Accordingly Monsignor William Brown was commissioned by Rome to conduct a visitation and arrived in Scotland in June 1917. On 30 August, Graham was nominated titular bishop of Tipasa in Namibia and auxiliary to the infirm archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, and on 16 November he received episcopal ordination in Edinburgh.

Graham's appointment was unexpected and unwelcome and, though he was given full powers by Rome to administer the diocese, there were difficulties from the outset. A mensal fund and dwelling had to be found for him and much that he did was contentious, for discretion was not his strong suit and he was somewhat scrupulous, always seeking the flawless solution and arrangement. In 1918 the Scottish Education Act was being negotiated, whereby local authorities would take over responsibility for the dilapidated Catholic schools and their underpaid teachers, with the church's rights duly safeguarded. Graham opposed the act implacably until ordered by Rome to conform with the other bishops in supporting it. Later Rome instructed him to act moderately and not according to the strictest letter of the law over the sale of these schools.

In 1919 Graham was appointed administrator of Glasgow diocese but its ailing archbishop refused to accept him. In 1921, when Archbishop Mannix, in the teeth of the British government's opposition, came to Scotland to advocate Irish independence and no hall in Edinburgh could be booked for him, Graham arranged an open-air meeting in the playground of a Catholic school. When the aged archbishop in Edinburgh died in November 1928, Graham took charge of the diocese as vicar capitular (Scottish Catholic Archives, ED 19/11/8) until a new archbishop was appointed less than a year later.

Graham's episcopal appointment had terminated. Although in bishop's orders, he now became parish priest of Holy Cross parish in Glasgow, where he remained for the next thirty years and was rarely in the public eye. His tall, thin figure was a familiar sight locally as he conscientiously visited parishioners' homes. After a short illness he died on 5 December 1959 in the Bon Secours Nursing Home, Glasgow; he was buried at St Peter's cemetery, Dalbeth, Glasgow, on 10 December 1959.

In 1904 Graham had begun to write articles for the Scottish Catholic press about his impressions as a convert and as a student in Rome. From about 1911 he published religious pamphlets, mostly for the Catholic Truth societies of Scotland and London. His aim was to refute error and proclaim truth and, being a single-minded man, he tended to see things in black and white and was perhaps not always fair to the church he had left. His determination, verging on imprudence, was shown when he embarked on twelve public lectures on the truth of Catholicism at Motherwell in 1909 and, despite opposition and even street violence, delivered them all.

Graham was patently upright and sincere, endowed with a sense of humour, but his meticulousness and attention to detail led to scrupulosity. The story is told that when a young woman approached him in church with her head uncovered, he took the biretta off his own head and put it on hers. In his old age his scrupulosity increased, but when he died his parishioners felt that 'a holy pastor had gone to his reward' (McEwan, 128). MARK DILWORTH

Sources H. G. McEwan, Bishop Grey Graham, 1874-1959 (1973) • H. G. Graham, From the kirk to the Catholic church, new edn (1960) • J. Darragh, 'The apostolic visitations of Scotland, 1912 and 1917', Innes Review, 41 (1990), 7-118 • J. Darragh, The Catholic hierarchy of Scotland: a biographical list, 1653-1985 (1986) • D. M. Murray, 'Scoto-Catholicism and Roman Catholicism: John Charleson's conversion of 1901', Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 24 (1990-92), 305-19 • Catholic directory for Scotland, 1908-61 • Fasti Scot., new edn, vols. 2, 3 • Scottish Catholic Archives, Edinburgh, ED 19/11/8
Archives Scottish Catholic Archives, Edinburgh, notes
Likenesses photographs, repro. in McEwan, Bishop Grey Graham
Wealth at death £9188 0s. 1d.: confirmation, 10 Feb 1960, CCI