Administrator, St Mary's Metropolitan Cathedral,
Edinburgh;
Born May 28, 1953;
Died March 6, 2008.

MONSIGNOR David Gemmell, who has died aged 54, was the genial vicar general of the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, administrator of St Mary's Metropolitan Cathedral in Edinburgh, a teacher, mountain climber, fisherman and a lover of people, music and sport.

Known to all as Davy, Gemmell was born in the Fife mining village of Oakley, where his father (also David) worked at the pit. His mother Josephine gave birth to eight children (four boys and four girls), and David was the third in the family, receiving his education at Holy Name Primary, Oakley (1958-65) and St Columba's High School, Cowdenbeath (1965-71) where, for a period, his maths and science teacher was the future Cardinal Keith O'Brien.

On leaving school he applied to train for the priesthood and was accepted for the diocesan seminary St Andrew's College at Drygrange (1971-78) near Melrose. In 1975 he spent the obligatory gap year working in the heat and dust of a steel mill at Corby, Northamptonshire, to help him understand the hardships of working people similar to his own father. Then he returned to Drygrange to complete his studies. At one point he felt his vocation was to help develop educational provision and combat poverty in South America, but was persuaded by Archbishop O'Brien that his skills could be put to closer and more immediate use among Catholics in Scotland. However, he still managed to travel to many developing parts of the world, including, more recently, Guatemala (2005) and China (2007).

After ordination in 1978, Gemmell's first post was as assistant priest at St Kentigern's under Father Patrick Grady, who would become his life-long friend and mentor. In 1982 he became assistant at St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh (to which Father Grady had also recently been appointed as assistant administrator). When, in 1986, Drygrange was closed and transferred to the new Gillis College in Edinburgh, Gemmell was appointed pastoral and vocations director.

When that institution closed in 1993, he was given a similar teaching responsibility as a pastoral tutor in the new national seminary, Scotus College (1993-95) at Bearsden, where he continued to recognise the complex realities of forming men for a life of celibacy in the 1990s.

During this period he also attended Edinburgh University's New College where, with Dr Jolyon Mitchell as his tutor, he was awarded the degree of Master of Theology (1994). The following year, Gemmell's father died, at a time when he was also experiencing some professional troubles. He and a number of the other staff who had transferred from Gillis to Scotus found it impossible to reconcile the two colleges' distinctly different philosophies of pastoral formation, and he therefore returned to St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh as assistant priest (1995-96) under Mgr Grady.

At the latter's retirement, Gemmell took over as administrator, facing a formidable challenge in using his post-Vatican II training and experience, coupled with enormous enthusiasm and his gift for communication, to help the cathedral parish face the decline in priestly vocations and in congregations already being experienced by all denominations in Britain.

Gemmell and several of his peers were members of a support group for middle-aged priests that met every six weeks or so for more than 12 years. On May 20, 1996, while the group was climbing in Skye, his close friend Father Norman Cooper died tragically in a fall from the Cuillin Ridge. This loss affected Gemmell profoundly, but it also gave him the determination to continue his friend's programme of community development.

Even after the accident, his love of the hills and the outdoors never left him. In 2000 he made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, later naming the cafe in the new cathedral complex the Cafe Camino. He continued to climb, in 2004 even reaching 16,000 feet on Mount Everest before the physical challenge took its toll. Not long afterwards, he underwent a knee operation from which he never completely recovered and developed arrhythmia (rapid irregular beating of the heart). As a new form of recreation he attempted, with limited success, to take up sea-kayaking with his brother Tony.

At St Mary's Cathedral, Gemmell made a point of standing in the porch before and after Mass so as to meet the people and this helped draw visitors to the cathedral from as far afield as Perth or the Borders.

After his death, Sir Tom Farmer, the Kwik-Fit tycoon, asked: "Where do we go from now? We go on, because that's what David would have wanted. He was a good man, a great man, and I am proud to have called him my friend."

Gemmell also loved children, and many loved him in return for his wit and musicality: he was known to entertain them with his guitar. After his death, a pupil in the cathedral school wrote that Father David was needed in heaven because "God wanted a funny angel".

Gemmell died peacefully in a Barcelona hotel after travelling to Spain to watch Celtic play. The club immediately posted a statement expressing sadness at his passing and their gratitude for his loyalty as a supporter. He leaves his mother, Josephine, and his brothers and sisters Margaret, Tony, Anne Marie, Josephine, Rosemary, Paula and Keith. His brother Thomas died in 1983 at the age of 27.