When George Hodge Ballantyne was appointed Librarian to the Society of Writers to H.M. Signet in 1968, he became the first qualified librarian to hold the post, which he did until his early retirement through ill health in 1995. Ballantyne inherited a Signet Library that was still in the throes of reorganization following the Sotheby’s Sales of the early 1960s. It fell to him to oversee the second round of sales in 1978 and 1979, but by the time of his retirement he had overseen the Library’s transformation into a modern law library of the highest class that had regained a central place in the life and culture of Ballantyne’s beloved Scotland.

He was born in 1934 in the “Lang Toun” of Kirkcaldy in Fife. It was there that he met his wife, Eileen, who he married in 1956, and in fact he would spend all of his life in Kirkcaldy with his only significant absences being his evacuation to the Borders as a child during the Second World War and his service as a tank driver in the Korean War. After his education at Kirkcaldy High School he began his career with the Fife County Library Service before coming to prominence in the role of deputy librarian to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It was from there that he received the call from the Signet Library in 1968 and joined the long and distinguished line of Librarians in the grand buildings in Parliament Square in place of the long-serving James Christie.

Ballantyne’s achievements as Signet Librarian place him among the greatest to have served in the role. His 1979 work The Signet Library and its Librarians 1722-1972 remains the authoritative account, and earned him a master’s degree from Strathclyde University. Ballantyne’s great indexes to the Session Papers of the Enlightenment advocate and biographer James Boswell, compiled between 1969 and 1980 and encompassing the papers in the collections of both the Signet Library and the Advocates Library, have recently been digitized and form part of the basis of the new Stair Society edition of Boswell’s papers currently being edited by Hugh Milne. Throughout his time at the Signet Library Ballantyne sought to encourage the scholarly use of the Library’s collections and archives, giving lectures and producing journal articles and pamphlets in addition to his major published works. To him fell the administrative labour and responsibility for liaison that enabled the Signet Library to participate in Scotland’s cultural life, hosting television, music, theatre, exhibitions and Edinburgh Festival events. Ballantyne was elected a fellow of the Library Association in 1965. He was a founder member in 1969 of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians, one of few genuinely transformational organisations in the history of post-war librarianship. In 1988, he was a founding member of the Scottish Law Librarians Group.

Yet Ballantyne’s greatest contribution to scholarship was in the field of botany. He became Vice-County Recorder for Fife in 1969 and was the sole Recorder for Fife for four decades. He played significant roles in the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, Kirkcaldy Naturalists’ Society, the Botanical Society of Scotland and the Scottish Wildlife Trust, and became a national authority on brambles, alien plant species in Fife and roses. His publications on these matters were extensive and essential: but for his health, he would surely have added a Flora of Fife as a culmination of a remarkable career.