Soldier, preacher, psychoanalyst, SNP candidate, businessman; Born July 27, 1927; Died September 12, 2007.

Bill Patterson, who has died on the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu aged 80, was a schoolboy international football player, a teenage captain in the Army, a lay preacher, psychoanalyst, SNP candidate and businessman.

Born in Lauriston, near Falkirk, Patterson lived a long, fulfilling and varied life. Brought up strictly as a coal miner's son in a Plymouth Brethren home, he was the younger brother of the author and journalist George "Patterson of Tibet" Patterson and his sister, Margaret Lightbody.

He was a Scottish schoolboy international football player while attending Falkirk High School and was scouted for professional clubs.

However, he was called up into the army at the age of 18, and served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in peace-keeping duties in Palestine at the end of the Second World War, being promoted to captain at the age of 19.

Upon leaving the Army, Patterson returned to Scotland and entered Edinburgh University to study politics, philosophy and economics before a serious illness required him to leave the academic world for an extended recuperation in the countryside.

This eventually led to him becoming a farmer, raising cattle and sheep on farms, first near Lochgilphead in Argyll and then near Scourie in Sutherland.

In 1954, he married Julia Elizabeth Douglas-Reid, the daughter of Glasgow shipowners, whose family had established plantations in Jamaica in the 1800s, and whose uncles were two of the founding directors of BHP (Broken Hill Properties) which went on to become one of Australia's largest companies.

In the mid 1960s, Patterson moved his growing family south to Slamannan in Stirlingshire and diversified into other businesses including dust extraction and low-cost housing projects for the Philippines and Indonesia, which eventually required him to move his family to the US.

But Patterson returned to Scotland in 1974, and joined the Scottish National Party. In the late 1970s, against the wishes of the East Lothian & Berwickshire constituency members, the SNP central office replaced Patterson as the candidate for the by-election called following the sudden death of long time Labour MP John MacIntosh. This resulted in a defeat for Lindsay and the SNP, and Patterson's expulsion from the party, as he had opposed both the fact and the method of his heavy-handed replacement by party HQ as being totally against the core values the SNP had been set up to promote.

Patterson was a life-long horseman and beekeeper, a lay preacher and psychoanalyst both in the US and in Edinburgh, where he often worked with the late Winifred Rushforth. Patterson lived most of his life in Scotland but also spent several years in the United States, and had been a Vanuatu resident for the past 15 years, where he was chairman of the family's property investment and development company, Island Property. He was the father of seven sons and had 11 grandchildren.

He died peacefully in his sleep at home, with his wife of 53 years, Julia, and family members with him.