As a boy, Iain Murray would only pick up a book on tennis. The rest didn’t bother him. The school noticed he was “far behind” with reading.  Now, Iain H. Murray has become a world trademark with his stack of books and biographies from the English-speaking church history. And even at 93, he still has some works in preparation.

For the first time in nearly 70 years, he lives alone. Last year, his wife Jean died. In the previous 69 years, they always did everything together.

She read what he wrote before it went to print. After his retirement in the late 1990s, they were often away from home, preaching and lecturing in Australia and the United States. Together, they were happy when they returned home to their bungalow with that beautiful large garden in Colinton, a village on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

Enthusiastically, he opens the front door to me with the words. “If we were Americans, we would hug.” Neither of us is an American, but hugging we do. His hearing aid squeaks from it.

We have known each other for some time. When I lived in the Scottish capital for six months at the end of the 1990s, I met Mr Iain and Mrs Jean Murray in church on Sundays and in the prayer meeting on Wednesday evenings. And on Sunday afternoons, they regularly invited people for tea.

He had then just retired as editorial director of The Banner of Truth Trust, the publisher of Reformed and Evangelical reading material. And ministers from several countries know him from the Leicester Conferences. Along with Jean (pronounced as in “jeans”), Iain also served as host for the Banner of Truth Youth Conferences.

The garden and the house still look the same. The sloping lawn is still beautiful. The small bust of Spurgeon still stands on the windowsill.

However, enough has passed in his study. Few have written as much after retirement as he has. Partly because of Murray’s work, the history of Protestantism in English-speaking countries—and especially the revivals—is very accessible. Such a culture of biographies and chronicles hardly exists in church life elsewhere in the world.

We are here in the house you lived in with Jean for over thirty years. How is it to be on your own again?

“That’s a whole new experience. It brings you back to the foundations; we are all to leave this world alone. As long as we live, we have new things to learn. And less activity contributes to that end. There is more time to stop and pray.”

I can still see you walking hand-in-hand through Edinburgh on your way to the Wednesday night prayer meeting. As if you were friends.

“We were, for sure. As long as you’re together, you don’t realise how married life shapes you. It really is the best half that you lose when parted.

In 2015, we noticed that her health was deteriorating. Heart failure began to trouble her hindering from ascending slopes no steeper than this lawn,” says Murray, pointing outside. “In a measure, it also affected her memory. With the exception of one occasion, she always recognised me.

She died in this house on 27 March last year, on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday. She was lying on a hospital bed for the first time. On Sunday, she had last spoken. During that week, I had prayed: Lord, take her home. She was ready to go, and this last prayer was answered. Our daughter was there too.

We had already lost three of our children. Baby Andrew only lived to be four days old. Jonathan was living in Australia and complaining of headaches for some time before he died in his sleep in 2015. I clearly remember him looking well when we said goodbye after a visit that summer.

Stephen worked as a lawyer here in Edinburgh. He died of cancer in 2019. He was always a churchgoer, but little more than a year before his illness, he was transformed into a resolute Christian. They were all much loved.”

The three other children are still alive: two sons in Australia and our daughter in London. They and their partners and grandchildren are in his prayers.

He further asks in his prayers if he may finish some books. “From Jean’s hand, I have some addresses on Susannah Spurgeon, Charles’s wife. I think it is worth publishing.

Furthermore, I have Jean’s handwritten memoirs, which she has completed. I encouraged her to put her life on paper, in part because, when loved ones die, too often, hardly any witness is left for children and grandchildren.

By the way, most of the surprises after her death were not in her memoirs, but in notes, she made in her Bible and other books. I found things there about spiritual deliverances and such that I did not know before.

Jean was an active reader to the last. She had been stimulated to read from a young age and always saw that as a great blessing.”

And yourself, were you a reader from a young age?

“Very little. When I opened a book at all as a teenager, it was usually about tennis or other sports. Besides, the Second World War disrupted my school days. I went to seven different primary schools in that period, being moved about because of bombing or something. I was falling tremendously behind in both language and maths.

When I was 14, my mother said: If he doesn’t start reading now, it will be hopeless. The school they sent me to said, I was “far behind” in reading. I found that humiliating. In retrospect, it was God’s trigger.

This last school, which I went to in 1945, was for boarding pupils on the Isle of Man. My shortcomings in mathematics remained, and the only university that I could enter was Durham, provided I had passed the preliminary exams in Latin beforehand. It became a language I enjoyed.”

Conference

He had met Jean at a conference at Hildenborough Hall in Kent. “Groups of young people came there to spend a week with the Bible. It was there that I first heard that the gospel is personal and that Jesus came to suffer for individual people. I was unaware of hearing that before, although I grew up in England in a Presbyterian church. As a 17-year-old there, I came to know the Lord Jesus. And so did Jean.”

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