His death last year went unnoticed but Hamish Swanston was one of the most colourful figures in Anglophone Catholicism. Church historian Eamon Duffy recalls a truly original thinker Hamish Swanston, who died in Melrose in the Scottish Borders on 8 September 2013 at the age of 80, was a gifted and flamboyant teacher with a remarkable range of interests and learning. He was also the first Roman Catholic priest since the Reformation to hold a chair of theology in a British university.Descended from a line of Oban fishermen, Swanston was born and raised in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. In 1954, after completing a degree in English at Durham, he entered Oscott College as an ordinand for the Northampton Diocese. His bishop, Leo Parker, a lordly prelate of the old school, once dined with the Swansto