There he lavishly entertained Dutch and British inhabitants of the Cape Colony and eminent visitors of all nationalities.
It included footage of the president, deadpan as ever, deftly gathering hay with a pitchfork, and of four eminent visitors, Henry Ford, Harvey and Russell Firestone and Thomas Edison.
And for the past 10 years, he has helped to run seminars on British governance that have attracted eminent visitors to Oxford, including Blair and John Major.
Amongst the first eminent overseas visitors to Staffa were Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, a wealthy French zoologist and mineralogist and the American architect and naturalist William Thornton.
One of his most eminent admirers, Wesley C. Mitchell, called him "a visitor from another world," saying, "No other such emancipator of the mind from the subtle tyranny of circumstance has been known in social science, and no other such enlarger of the realm of inquiry".
Reporting on Calcraft's visit to Dundee to perform an execution in that city in April 1873, The Times newspaper observed that "if their visitor had been a Royal personage, or an eminent statesman he could hardly have been treated with greater consideration".
Last month, when I went back for the first time, it was clear that the gloomy room of my memory must have been the Hall of Heroes, where the visitor is presented with the marble busts of 16 eminent Scots – a number that includes William Ewart Gladstone, on account of his father being born in Leith.
This pre-eminent Polish sculptor's regiment of 95 life-size, headless shells of human figures in rough bronze confronts the visitor here, creating a theater of tragic existentialism.
