(1 Jan. 1879-4 Oct. 1969 ), missionary. (Duncan McRae) Born in the Finch area of Stormont County. Parents: William McRae and his wife whose Christian name was Mary. He attended high school at Morrisburg, the University of Manitoba (B. A.), theological college in Manitoba (1908-1910, B. D.), and the University of Glasgow (1910-1911). From the 1940s, he had the degree D. D. In early life he was a teacher. He was ordained in Manitoba in 1910, and after a period of serving as a minister in Winnipeg, he was a missionary in South China from 1914, first for the Presbyterian Church and, after Church Union, for the United Church. Duncan and Mrs McRae were missionaries in the area of Kongmoon in South China when the Japanese invaders occupied their mission territory in Oct. 1938. Duncan McRae returned to Canada in 1941 just before Pearl Harbour. His wife had returned to Canada a little earlier. In 1946, he and his wife were planning to return to China to do missionary work. (Standard Freeholder 26 March 1946) At that time, he was a minister at White Lake, near Arnprior, Ont. The mission was re-established at Kongmoon that year, and Mr and Mrs McRae were a part of it. They remained at Kongmoon till 1949.

     His missionary years over, Duncan McRae was the minister of the United Church, Alexandria, from 1950 to 1953. Immediately before this time, he and his wife appear to have lived in Ottawa. After leaving Alexandria, he served as a United Church minister in Ottawa. Aged 90, he died in an Ottawa hospital. (four children) He was married in 1913 to Susan Helena Rodgers of Manitoba. (four children) She contributed information, by way of interview, to Peter Stursberg’s history, The Golden Hope: Christians in China, of 1987. Peter Stursberg wrote, “Although the Reverend and Mrs. Duncan McRae of the United Church South China Mission were sympathetically disposed toward the Communists, they left Kongmoon in 1949 at the request of the Chinese Church.” (p. 213) This statement, somewhat surprising, seems to be based, at least in part, on information from Mrs McRae. She survived her husband to die 26 Sept. 1986, aged 97.

     As Alexandria’s Protestant minister, one of his duties was to teach the Protestant students in the religious education class at Alexandria High School. One of his students in that class remembers him as a broken, deeply reflective, shabbily dressed old man, who showed (as the student interpreted the remarks) marked sympathies for the Chinese Communists. The same student remembers Leonard Lauzon reporting that this clergyman’s attitude to Communism had been arousing remark in the town; and if so, not surprisingly, for Canada was already deep in the Cold War. Like Oscar Detrait, Duncan McRae represented political dissent in Alexandria. However, it may be noted, his atttitude to the Communists was also found in other Canadian returned missionaries of the period. The same student also remembers that McRae spoke often and gloomily about the failure of the victors of World War I (older men, locked as they were in the ideas and attitudes of their generation) to make a lasting peace, and cited T. E. Lawrence’s statement that what the young men had won by their sacrifices, the old men had thrown away. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom was one of the books about which he talked to his students.

     His sister Isabel, Mrs William B. Chisholm, was one of the pioneers of the Carberry Plains in Manitoba. (her obituary, Glengarry News 28 July 1939) Another sister, Elizabeth, was married to James R. Simpson of Finch and Cornwall, who was clerk-treasurer of SDG and a grandson of Dr James Simpson. (her obituary, Standard Freeholder 12 Oct. 1948; Harkness, 450)

     The Rev. Duncan McRae’s son, Dr Robert Forbes McRae, was born in Winnipeg in 1914 and grew up in China (B. A. and M. A., University of Toronto, Ph. D. 1946 from Johns Hopkins University). Aged 28, he was a naval lieutenant in the Dieppe Raid of Aug. 1942. He was reported missing after the raid (Standard Freeholder 9 Sept. 1942), but survived as a prisoner of the Germans. He was later a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. For McRaes of GC association who were at Dieppe, see the entry for Col. Donald F. MacRae.

Glengarry News 16 Oct. 1969 * United Church Archives: Biog. Files Collection * MacMillan, Kirk, 263, 343 * personal knowledge, private information * Peter Stursberg, The Golden Hope: Christians in China (Toronto, The United Church Publishing House, 1987) 182, 195, 213, 262 & end notes * is on furlough, speaks in Cornwall, Cornwall Standard 16 June 1921, Cornwall Freeholder 4 Aug. 1921 * is on furlough, Standard Freeholder 19 Sept. 1934 * speaks in Cornwall, SFH 22 Oct. 1941 * Robert Forbes McRae: entry Canadian Who’s Who 1990; John Mellor, Forgotten Heroes: the Canadians at Dieppe (1975) 75-76 (biographical), 163 (listed among the people who have given Mellor “advice and assistance”)