It must have been a poignant day for Alexander Hetherwick when he received a letter from Africa Committee Convener Archibald Scott to tell him that ‘Dr [Clement] Scott will not return to Africa, save for emergency service, and that, if at all, only temporarily. So I hope you will be enabled to continue after you get a rest.’ This did not come as a complete surprise. Like many brilliant people, Clement Scott had a certain fragility. His health had always been vulnerable. The sudden loss of both his wife and brother in 1895 had been a shattering blow. Though he remarried while on leave in Scotland, it was noticeable on his return to Blantyre in 1896 that he was not quite the force that he had been in earlier years. Matters only got worse with the ordeal of the Commission of Inquiry the following year. It was demoralising for Scott that his own church seemed to have so little understanding of what he had been trying to do at Blantyre. The tight control from Edinburgh that came into force after the Commission was so uncongenial to Scott that before long his health was breaking down and it became clear that his position in Blantyre was unsustainable.

Hetherwick witnessed what his friend, leader and confidante was passing through. He too had come through some bleak moments during the Commission of Inquiry. In character and constitution, however, he was a very different proposition. He was fortunate to enjoy robust health and very rarely fell sick. When he had a heavy cold in 1925 and had to be off work for two days, he noted that it was the first time for twenty-eight years that he had been off duty on health grounds. While he lacked the extraordinary imagination and sensitivity that marked Scott's leadership, he had qualities of stamina and resilience that would stand him in good stead in the thirty years of leading the Mission that now lay in front of him.

Hetherwick's place among the staff of the Mission was very different in the years after 1898 to what it had been before, not only in the formal sense that he was the sole leader from then until his retirement in 1928. In the earlier days the leader, whether Scott when he was present or Hetherwick when Scott was absent, was a ‘first among equals’.