Keeping the Memory Alive: Building the Scott Club Website
Tuesday 3rd November 2026
Summary of the Talk:
Lee Simpson’s talk traced the development of the Scott Club website from its modest beginnings in 2005 into a substantial digital archive documenting the Club’s history, its activities and its contribution to Scottish literary culture.
The talk was both a history of the website and a personal account of how one member’s enthusiasm, technical skills and many years of voluntary work have helped preserve material that might otherwise have remained inaccessible, been forgotten or even been lost.
1. From discovering Scott to joining the Club
Simpson began with his own introduction to Sir Walter Scott in 1995, when he struggled to read Peveril of the Peak but persevered. After moving to Edinburgh, he sought out the Scott Club and met its Treasurer, Fraser Elgin, in 2001.
Elgin encouraged him to take on the Treasurer’s role, and Simpson gradually became involved in the Club’s administration, its Annual Bulletin and the development of its events programme. Having built a website for his own work, he proposed creating one for the Club.
The first website appeared in 2005, initially providing basic information about the Club, its events and its Presidents.
2. Recovering the Club’s forgotten recordings
One of the most significant early developments came when Fraser Elgin discovered a box of reel-to-reel tapes dating from the 1960s. These contained recordings of speeches delivered at the Club’s Annual Dinners, including addresses by prominent figures such as Harold Macmillan.
Simpson arranged for the recordings to be digitised and began making them available online. He subsequently transcribed the speeches from old printed Bulletins, a painstaking process involving scanning, optical character recognition and extensive manual correction.
The resulting archive brought together recordings, transcripts and photographs, preserving speeches by figures including John Buchan, Lady Antonia Fraser, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Dorothy Dunnett and others.
In one particularly striking example, a photograph reproduced on the website attracted the attention of a biographer of C. S. Lewis, who had never seen it before. Simpson was also able to alert the C. S. Lewis Society to the existence of a speech Lewis had delivered to the Club.
3. Bringing Scott’s novels to life
Following the completion of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels in 2009, Simpson launched a project to record people reading their favourite passages from Scott’s works.
Contributors included academics and writers such as James Robertson, Ian Campbell, Claire Lamont and Murray Pittock. The recordings were accompanied by extracts from the published novels, reproduced under licence, allowing visitors to read along while listening.
The project has since been relaunched, and members are invited to contribute their own recordings.
4. Preserving the Club’s activities online
The Club discontinued its printed Bulletin in 2013 because it was expensive and labour-intensive to produce, and the events it reported were often already almost a year old when published.
The website became the principal means of communicating news and documenting activities. From 2014, Simpson began recording the Club’s lectures on video and creating individual pages for them.
Although most recordings have attracted between 200 and 500 views, some have reached much larger audiences. More importantly, the archive enables former members who can no longer attend meetings to continue hearing and watching lectures and to feel connected to the Club.
The website has therefore become not merely a publicity tool, but a means of maintaining the Club’s community beyond the meeting room.
5. Turning the historical records into a research resource
In 2019, Simpson undertook the enormous task of photographing approximately 5,000 pages of the Club’s Annual Bulletins and minute books, dating back to 1894. He had spent years tracking down missing editions of the Bulletins and had reduced the gaps in his collection to just two.
This work opened up a wealth of historical information. By examining the records, he was able to reconstruct the membership of the Council over many decades, identify the length of service of individual members, and document the history of the Club’s office-holders.
The research revealed that more than 300 people had served on the Council over the period examined. It also highlighted the extraordinary longevity of some office-holders: Kenneth Sanderson, for example, had served for 38 years, or 45 if the war years were included.
The records also provided material for new sections of the website covering the Club’s achievements, awards, essay competitions and historical activities.
6. Rediscovering the Club’s educational legacy
One of the most remarkable discoveries concerned the Club’s Annual Essay Competition, established in 1895 to encourage schoolchildren to study Scott’s works.
Within 15 years, more than 7,000 schoolchildren were reading the prescribed book, with nearly 5,000 submitting essays in some years. Most of these entrants were primary-school pupils.
The scheme was so successful that the costs of administering the competition and providing prizes, particularly bronze medals, pushed the Club into debt. In 1908, an anonymous member donated £1,000, a sum Simpson estimated at almost £150,000 in today's money, helping to save the scheme.
Simpson has transcribed the historical essay questions and documented the competition’s development, including its eventual connection with the Scottish Literary Studies Medal.
The Bulletins also revealed other achievements, from memorial tablets and plaques to fundraising for an indicator on Eildon Mid Hill. These discoveries have been turned into individual pages, making the Club’s wider contribution much easier to explore.
7. Rebuilding the website — twice
The project faced two major setbacks.
In 2014, the original hosting company disappeared, taking the website and its content with it. Fortunately, Simpson had backed up the pages through the Internet Archive, allowing him to reconstruct much of the site manually. The replacement was also compatible with smartphones.
In October 2023, a second hosting provider announced that the website’s underlying technology would be discontinued. Simpson had six months to rebuild it on an unfamiliar platform.
He managed to preserve the Club’s online presence, although he had to reduce the number of historical pages and simplify some sections.
Rather than abandon the work, he then embarked on another major project: converting the photographed historical records into searchable text, producing summaries and rebuilding the pages dedicated to past Presidents.
8. The archive today and plans for the future
The work has produced an archive of almost 500 webpages, with a substantial collection of historical speeches and events available in different formats.
At the time of the talk, the website included:
- 108 Presidential Addresses with downloadable transcripts, 13 with video and 18 with audio.
- 132 past events with transcripts, 80 with videos and five with audio recordings.
- Historical information about the Club’s office-holders, awards, achievements and activities.
- A growing walking tour of more than 40 Edinburgh locations associated with Scott.
Simpson also described plans to extend the walking tour to cover further locations associated with Scott and to develop a gazetteer covering public houses associated with the author, locations connected with the Waverley novels throughout the United Kingdom, and drinks associated with Scott.
He concluded by returning to Fraser Elgin and the circumstances that had brought him into the Club. He explained that his motivation was gratitude: Scott had enriched his life, and the Club had welcomed him despite his not being an academic or a Scott scholar. The website was his way of giving something back and repaying the trust placed in him.
Interesting points worth highlighting
1. The accidental rescue of the reel-to-reel recordings
A box of old tapes, discovered during a house move, preserved the voices of distinguished speakers from the 1960s. Without Simpson's intervention, these recordings might never have been digitised or made accessible. This is a compelling example of how easily an important historical resource can be overlooked.
2. Discoveries that surprised specialists
The photograph of C. S. Lewis and his previously overlooked address to the Club demonstrate that the archive is not simply preserving known information. It is revealing material that even biographers and specialist societies had not encountered.
3. The extraordinary reach of the essay competition
Thousands of schoolchildren were engaging with Scott's novels at the turn of the twentieth century. The scale of participation challenges any assumption that Scott was once studied only by a relatively small, educated elite. The competition deserves recognition as a significant educational initiative in the Club's history.
4. The Conan Doyle discovery of 1901
While digitising the records, Simpson discovered that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had replied to the toast to Literature at the Club's Annual Dinner on 6 December 1901. The Conan Doyle Estate, the Friends and the Conan Doyle Society were unaware of the speech's existence. This is perhaps the clearest illustration of the archive's potential to generate new historical discoveries.
5. The website is becoming a research archive, not merely a club website
The digitised records make it possible to investigate membership, Council service, historical events, educational work and the Club's public achievements across more than a century. The value lies not only in preserving individual documents, but also in connecting them and making their contents discoverable.
6. The importance of independent backups
When the hosting company vanished in 2014, the Internet Archive provided a means of reconstructing the website. The later forced rebuild in 2023 demonstrated how vulnerable a large digital project can be when its underlying platform becomes obsolete. The experience makes a strong case for preserving independent copies of both the website and its source material.
7. The personal value of a living archive
The email from former Council member Ronnie Renton is especially revealing. He explained that being able to see, hear and read lectures he could no longer attend helped him continue to feel part of the Club. The archive therefore preserves not just institutional history, but also a sense of belonging.
The talk has three important dimensions.
First, it demonstrates the historical value of the Club's records. The discovery of Conan Doyle's 1901 speech and the previously unseen C. S. Lewis material show that systematic digitisation can produce genuine new knowledge, rather than simply making existing information easier to access.
Second, it tells the story of an extraordinary long-term voluntary undertaking. The website has developed through nearly two decades of work, including repeated reconstruction, painstaking transcription and the creation of hundreds of interconnected pages. Much of this labour is invisible to someone simply visiting the finished website.
Third, it makes a case for the Club's continued relevance. By preserving lectures, documents, photographs and historical research online, the Club can reach people beyond its regular meetings and give future researchers access to its work.
The strongest point is that the website has become part of the Club's historical legacy in its own right. It does not merely tell the story of the Scott Club; it safeguards the evidence from which that story can be understood, tested and expanded by future generations.
And the closing reference to Fraser Elgin gives the whole talk its human significance: an invitation to lunch in 2001 ultimately led to a project that has preserved a remarkable amount of the Club's history.
Download the [transcript]
Introduction by Madeleine Mackenzie:
Lee A. Simpson has served as Treasurer of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club since 2002, having joined its Council at the invitation of the late Fraser Elgin. Over more than two decades, he has combined his responsibilities to the Club with an extensive voluntary project to preserve and document its history. What began as a modest website in 2005 has developed into a substantial digital archive of historical records, lectures, speeches, recordings and photographs, bringing previously inaccessible material to a wider audience and uncovering discoveries of interest to literary historians and researchers.
His professional career has taken him from information technology into entertainment and photography. Performing under the name Lee Live, he has worked as a wedding DJ since 2005, providing music and entertainment at more than 1,200 events. He also runs a wedding and business photography business.
Lee is also the founder and administrator of the Glencorse Reservoir Swimmers, a community established in September 2021 to bring together people who enjoy outdoor swimming at Glencorse Reservoir in the Pentland Hills. Built around the principles of inclusion, respect for privacy and consideration for the natural environment. Through regular swims, photography and the sharing of practical information, Lee has helped develop the group into a large and active community, encouraging people to enjoy the outdoors together in a welcoming and non-judgemental setting. He is aiming to swim a mile in water less than 5c without a wetsuit. So far he has managed 1km.
He lives in Midlothian with his wife Shirley, a senior surgical nurse, and their two teeange children.
Selected images from the talk
Vote of Thanks by Dr Iain G. Brown
Ladies and gentlemen, when you Google the Edinburgh Walter Scott Club, the first line you read on the screen, as the sort of trailer you typically encounter in such searches, states concisely that the Club is one of the world's most prestigious literary societies.
I'd like to suggest that the man who maintains our online presence goes straight home tonight and, at our behest and with our endorsement, adds a supplementary line to read: "The Scott Club has in Lee Simpson one of the world's finest, most enterprising, most devoted and hardworking servants that any literary society has ever had."
Will you please do that, Lee?
Seriously, it's been a real pleasure to hear Lee speak to us tonight on a topic that's not just one he knows intimately, but, remarkably and perhaps uniquely among the great cavalcade of Scott Club lectures delivered over the years, one that he has himself created almost single-handedly, but certainly single-mindedly.
I wondered how the mechanics of tonight would be handled. We're so used to Lee busying himself with sound and video, recording the words of others, leaping into action, rushing around the room, swivelling his camera, angling his microphone. Tonight, Lee, who has set the stage, metaphorically and physically, for so many previous speakers, has taken the stage himself.
I just hope that this hasn't led to a case of shoemaker's burnout syndrome. Someone who's attended to the needs of so many others, and ensured that their talks and images are recorded for the immortality that the Club's website ensures, would be doing himself a grave disservice if he were not also able to record himself and thus preserve the chronicle of what's been an excellent talk about a subject of great consequence.
J. G. Lockhart famously said of his Life of Scott that his father-in-law should be his own biographer. Tonight, in a way, Lee has been his own biographer, as he's traced the building of the Club website and taken us through many of the trials and tribulations of its construction which he's personally encountered.
In doing all this, I wonder whether he's not recalled the words of Scott in his journal for Monday, the 27th of December 1830.
Scott was writing of the competing claims on his time of different literary projects. But one task above all held him enthralled: the "notifying", as he put it, that's adding more annotation to the old texts of his existing novels for the Magnum edition.
"Well, can I work at something? So at the Magnum work I."
I myself used that line on the epigraph page of my book on the Magnum Opus in 1987. I believe I may have read it wrongly. I now think that Scott may actually have written: "Well, can I work at something? So at the website work I."
Perhaps it was through email exchanges with Lee not so very long ago that I owe my initial encounter with the possibilities of AI. I'd supplied him, at his request, with the text of some lecture I'd given to the Club, or notes for some speech or other.
I was so amazed by the apparent speed with which he'd digested the material, and with the remarkable summary he'd seemingly been able to produce, that I blurted out my admiration of his great skills in the difficult art of précis writing.
Had we been face to face, I'm sure he'd just winked. But as we were communicating through the ether, he probably just sighed inwardly at my innocence and ignorance.
This familiarity with technology and his early appreciation of the potential benefits that AI might offer in the construction of such a comprehensive website as ours is a major reason why we are all in his debt.
I thought I'd done quite well in planning and coordinating a tour of Scott's Edinburgh for the bicentenary of the publication of Waverley in 2014. But what I put together pales into utter insignificance in comparison with the riches Lee offers us in his multi-layered series of really cleverly and thoroughly constructed Tours of Sir Walter's world as he lived it in the Old and New Towns.
Those Tours alone make Lee's website a treasure house of knowledge, interest and inspiration.
Look at them yourselves. Tell your friends, wherever they may be on the planet. Rejoice that we have Lee Simpson to direct and maintain his great creation: the Scott Club website.
Lee, from us all, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Long may Lee Live be Lee Live!
