At the age of 17 he wrote a play The Compleat Cynic: a piece of persiflage in one act which was produced

At the age of 17 he wrote a play, The Compleat Cynic: a piece of persiflage in one act, which was produced at the Plymouth Rep; and it was in this city that he began his career as a journalist, on the Western Morning News. Instead he went to King’s School, Canterbury, where he decided he had no wish “to rule subject peoples” and resolved to “make a thin living in the arts at home”.As soon as he could he left school and went to Paris to study. “Mean living,” he wrote, “is not conducive to the propagation of greatness. Caged lions degenerate.” And, “The history of socialism in England is a history of betrayal.”
Jacob’s father was in the Indian Civil Service and at one time Political Agent in Aden; his mother was the daughter of a Danish missionary.

Alaric spent time in India and Arabia as a child and might have been expected to enter the imperial service as a soldier or a functionary since his family, landowners in Kent, had produced a Commander-in-Chief in India (cousin Claud) and a general (cousin Arthur). But there was also a creative, scholarly tradition to live up to, in Gordon, the composer, and Ernest, a Fellow of All Souls.The boy Alaric was sent to St Cyprian’s School in Eastbourne, where George Orwell had been a pupil (an “absurd little school”, Jacob later called it, contributing to a collection of essays on Orwell), and it was hoped that, like Orwell, he would go on toEton. Alaric Jacob, the writer and one-time foreign correspondent, was a man who turned against his own class: a patrician who believed in the rule of the ordinary people; a patriot made desolate by the decline of his own country. It is accepted as a possible Christian witness in the world today.”Tam Dalyell. Harold Alaric Jacob, writer and journalist: born Edinburgh 8 June 1909; married 1933 Iris Morley (died 1953; one daughter), 1953 Kathleen Byron (one son, one daughter); died London 26 January 1995.

But Christian pacifism is accepted as a possible interpretation of Christian teaching in the modern situation. Whether you agree with these people or not in their principles or action, that is another matter. He made his own position clear: “There is a place for Christian pacifist witness It is not a witness which I personally could subscribe to. As criticism persisted, it was pointed out that Craig, with experience of Normandy to the Rhine crossing, was not one to be lectured on pacifism. Controversy attended him, not least when he took the opportunity afforded by an official tour of the Dumbarton Presbytery to make a spontaneous visit to the Faslane peace camp, the home of protesters against the Clyde submarine base on the Gareloch.Criticism was strident to the effect that the Moderator had failed to visit any of the military establishments around Dumbartonshire. Dignified as usual, Craig replied that he had in fact met the wives and families of men working at the base, and had indeed been greeted by the senior naval officer in charge. Unstintingly, Robert and Olga Craig toured the parishes of Scotland.

The Craigs enhanced its reputation, and won golden opinions when he was Moderator of the Presbytery of Jerusalem in the early 1980s. He struck up a lasting friendship with the long-serving Mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek, whom he invited to St Andrews on St Andrew’s Day 1986.Uniquely, since the Second World War, the Moderatorship of the General Assembly was offered to a retired minister But Craig’s activity belied any notion of retirement. Along with many Scots, I have received hospitality from this valued outpost of Scotland. But the call of Africa was paramount, and Craig forsook the attractions of the United States to return, becoming Professor of Theology at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, of which he became Vice-Principal in 1966, and Principal in 1969.Ian Smith declared UDI in 1965 Rhodesia became the epicentre of British politics Harold Wilson, as Prime Minister, saw it as his Vietnam.

There was pressure from politicians and, indeed, from more than one heavyweight of the Church of Scotland for Craig to resign He refused. He said he opposed Ian Smith’s action; he believed in multi-racial education, as steadfastly as ever – but “because I, rightly or wrongly, consider that the interests of the continuation of the college, and the new Department ofTheology, take priority over my private conscience, I am not offering my resignation”.Craig was hurt when the Congress of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, meeting of all places in Edinburgh, asked the University of Rhodesia to withdraw from participation, in the face of a threatened boycott from other participating countries.Craig knew that what he regarded as posturing would resolve nothing in the real problems of southern Africa.Returning to Israel-Palestine in 1980, on his retirement from the University of Zimbabwe, Craig became Minister of St Andrew’s Church. Olga Craig, owing to the circumstances of the war years, preferred on health grounds to live in a warmer climate than Scotland; Craig himself said, “There are too many theologians after the available jobs in Britain, and I’m one for export.” He decided to accept a post in Natal, as Professor of Divinity at the university.Among Craig’s sponsors was Reinhold Niebuhr, William Bennett, Jan van Huzen, and Paul Tillich, who had taught Craig when he was Hugh Black Fellow at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, and the American Institute for Biblical Studies.It was the high regard of the American theologians which brought him to the Professorship of Divinity at Smith College, Massachusetts, in 1958-63. A better posting for a young theological scholar could hardly be imagined.Returning, as it turned out briefly, to Scotland, Craig combined finishing his PhD at St Andrews with the deputy leadership of the Iona Community, run by the redoubtable Dr George MacLeod, later Lord MacLeod of Fuinary.In 1950, he married Olga Strzelec, who from 1942 had served as a nurse with the Polish Forces in the Middle East under the command of General Andrews, and whom Craig met in Palestine. It enabled Craig to get to know the biblical places – Jerusalem, Nazareth, Capernaum, Bethlehem, the Sea of Galilee. No less than 13 chaplains to Scottish regiments had been killed in Normandy in the course of military actions. “I am just lucky to have been a survivor.”So well was Craig thought of by the Scottish Lowland Division powers-that-were that he was invited to be Chaplain of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in Palestine, from 1945 to1947 This was to be a seminal experience.