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Welcome to the website of GKB Enterprises
GKB Enterprises originated in 1996 with the aim of promoting important but little-known aspects of Scottish life and culture, past and present. It was, and remains, self-funded and non profit-making. On a very small scale we continue to carry out publication of Scottish poetry, fiction and historical memoirs under the imprints of GKB Books and the Bellfield Press but the primary focus of our 
research remains the life and work of William Robertson Smith (1846-1894).
Our most recent project has been the joint editing of Robertson Smith’s correspondence and the first section of this, covering his student days at Aberdeen University and New College, Edinburgh, is now made freely available on this website, thanks to the gracious consent of the libraries holding the original manuscripts. These early letters, fully annotated by Astrid Hess and Gordon Booth, shed interesting new light on Robertson Smith’s upbringing and intellectual development and terminate with his youthful election to the chair of Hebrew and Old Testament exegesis at Aberdeen Free Church College in May, 1870.
The publication, in 2004, of Children of the Manse (Bellfield Press, ISBN 0 9526554 7 0) attracted widespread interest. Now in its third reprint, the book contains the authentic memoirs of a sister of William Robertson Smith, Alice, who late in life wrote down her childhood reminiscences for her grandchildren. How these documents were discovered and then translated from the original German by her granddaughter, Astrid Hess, in collaboration with Gordon Booth, is in itself a fascinating tale, outlined in the book’s Introduction.
The web site also contains the full text of Gordon Booth’s PhD thesis (2000) entitled William Robertson Smith: the Scientific, Literary and Cultural Context from 1866 to 1881, which, inter alia, examines Smith’s fascinating relationship with such eminent nineteenth century figures as Peter Guthrie Tait, James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Alexander Bain.
Our web site also contains a detailed investigation into the scientific, literary and cultural context within which William Robertson Smith lived and worked. It examines his relationships with Peter Guthrie Tait, James Clerk Maxwell and Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and evaluates his impact on contemporary anthropology and theology in the late Victorian era.
Subsequent papers include The fruits of sacrifice: Sigmund Freud and William Robertson Smith [Expository Times, vol. 111 (8) 2002] and The strange case of Mr Stevenson and Professor William Robertson Smith [Aberdeen University Review, vol. LVIV, no.205, spring 2001], which explores the amusing personality clash between R. L. Stevenson and WRS when the latter attempted to initiate a recalcitrant young Stevenson into the mysteries of physics at Edinburgh University.