Rev Dr John Watson DD (1850-1907), was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. He is remembered as an author of fiction, known by his pen name Ian Maclaren. In 1874 he was licensed by the Free Church of Scotland and became assistant minister of Edinburgh Barclay Church. In 1880 he became minister of Sefton Park Presbyterian Church, Liverpool, from which he retired in 1905. In 1896 he was Lyman Beecher lecturer at Yale University, and in 1900 he was moderator of the synod of the English Presbyterian Church. While travelling in the United States he died at Mount Pleasant, Iowa. Maclaren’s first stories of rural Scottish life, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894), achieved extraordinary popularity, and was followed by other successful books, The Days of Auld Lang Syne (1895), Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers (1896), and Afterwards and Other Stories (1898).