Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd

Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd (3 November 1825 – 1 March 1899) was a Scottish writer, who originally intended for the English Bar but entered the Church of Scotland, and was minister at St. Andrews.

Life

He was born on 3 November 1825 in the manse of Auchinleck in Ayrshire, the son of James Boyd. He was educated at Ayr Academy. The family moved to the manse at Ochiltree in 1833. His father became minister of the Tron Kirk in Glasgow after he left home.

Boyd later studied at King's College School and at the Middle Temple, London, training as an English barrister. Returning to the university of Glasgow, he qualified for the ministry of the national church. He graduated B.A. at Glasgow in April 1846, and at the end of 1850 was licensed as a preacher by the presbytery of Ayr.

For several months Boyd was assistant in St. George's parish, Edinburgh, and on 18 September 1851 he was ordained parish minister of Newton-on-Ayr, where he succeeded John Caird. In 1854, he became minister of Kirkpatrick-Irongray, near Dumfries. Here he remained five years, maturing his pulpit style, and, writing under his initials of "A. K. H. B.," steadily gaining reputation in Fraser's Magazine with his Recreations of a Country Parson.

In April 1859, Boyd was appointed to the parish of St. Bernard's, in Stockbridge, Edinburgh, and found the presbytery exercised on the question of decorous church service, raised by the practice and advocacy of Robert Lee. Boyd sympathised with the desire for a devout and graceful form of worship, and he was afterwards a member of the Church Service Society. In 1864 the university of Edinburgh conferred on him the honorary degree of D.D.