“Donald Ross held a succession of the highest offices in the Scottish legal system of which he was a proud and doughty champion. He was the youngest of three children of John Ross, a solicitor in Dundee. His elder brother John was in the Parachute Regiment, took part in the first raid on the French coast at Bruneval in 1942, was awarded the DSO for bravery in North Africa, and was captured in Sicily, spending the rest of the war as a POW.

“Donald was educated at the High School of Dundee, of which he was Dux, and later became president of the Old Boys Club as well as the Edinburgh Angus Club.

“Encouraged by his father and brother, he aimed for the Bar rather than join the family practice in Dundee. He first graduated M.A. at the University of Edinburgh, then did two years’ National Service with a commission in the Black Watch and returned to Edinburgh for the LL.B, winning the Class Prizes in Scots Law, Conveyancing and Forensic Medicine and the Vans Dunlop scholarship. One of his contemporaries said Donald absorbed in one hour what it took them five hours to learn. He and others lived in a small flat in the New Town that was known as the Snake Pit in spite of (or perhaps because of) the respectability of its inhabitants.”

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