Slavery

Introduction

How is Strathblane linked to Black slavery? More than we might think.

First some context. Two key dates: 1807, the abolition of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people and 1833, the abolition of slavery itself throughout the British Empire.

In the past 25 years or so, academics such as Dr Stephen Mullen of Glasgow University and Professor Tom Devine of Edinburgh University have suggested that, when it comes to Black slavery, Scotland suffers from a convenient collective amnesia. This forgetfulness takes the form of stressing the limitations of Scottish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and homing in on the prominent role of Scots in the emancipation movement: “It Wisnae Us!”

What the work of these historians has shown is that Scots, especially Scots from Glasgow and the Glasgow hinterland, were front and centre in the ownership of slaves and the management and financing of many New World slave-based economies. They were also at the forefront of the ANTI-abolitionist campaign. Several of them came from our parish.

In the last few years, the Black Lives Matter movement has meant that it is no longer simply academics who are invested in uncovering the truth about these matters. There is a moral obligation on us all to do this.

The 1707 Act of Union opened up established trade routes to Scottish merchants and adventurers. The English Empire was now the British Empire. Scottish merchant ships now came under the protection of the Royal Navy. This offered increasing opportunities for Scots to work in the American colonies and the Caribbean. Who were they? They seem to have been drawn largely from minor landowners, tenant farmers, middling ranks (such as merchants and shopkeepers) and artisans. Often they were younger sons who, without any prospect of inheriting, went (or were sent) abroad by their families in the hope of making a quick fortune. It was a risky business. Some died relatively young of disease or by drowning but others made huge fortunes that became the basis for landed estates, grand houses and social advancement.

Some of the money also went into industrial investment – railways for example – and financial vehicles such as insurance and banking. The arts and emerging sporting activities such as yachting also benefited.

Following the American Revolution, Scottish activity became focused on the Caribbean. It is estimated that between 12,000 and 20,000 Scots emigrated to the Caribbean between 1750 and 1800. By 1774 a third of the white population of Jamaica were Scots or of Scots descent.

Around 1800 a lot of Scottish interest shifted to the former Dutch colonies that make up modern-day Guyana. (Britain acquired these territories – Essequebo, Demerara and Berbice, below on the map – from the Dutch in 1812)

The Local Angle

In preparing material for the Strathblane Heritage website about the landed estates that made up the parish, we came across discreet references to several families with members who had made their money in the West Indies and Guyana. All these families began as minor landowners or tenant farmers. Let’s look at five of them:

*Milliken Craig of Ballewan

*Walter Robison of Leddriegreen

*The Smiths of Craigend (who also owned Dumbrock)

*John Guthrie of Carbeth Guthrie

*The Edmonstones of Spittal

Milliken Craig of Ballewan

The Craigs began as tenant farmers at Ballewan but then bought part of the estate in 1628 and more as the century went on. The core of what we now know as Ballewan House (or The Ha’) was probably built by the Craigs. There is a carved stone above a lintel with the date 1684. Around 1789 John Craig died and Ballewan passed to his cousin, Milliken Craig, who was then in his mid-20s.

We know a lot about Milliken Craig, largely thanks to his Gt Gt Granddaughter Susan Miller who has done much research on him. We even have a miniature of him, passed down through the family in a gold locket. He is unlikely to have visited the estate very often. Instead, he installed a farm manager and initially his sisters Lillias and Marion lived at Ballewan.

Craig had joined the East India Company (EIC) at the age of 16 and rose from the rank of Junior Seaman to Captain in 12 years. He did well out of the Napoleonic Wars because by then he had his own ship, licensed by the EIC. These ships were able to smuggle opium into China and return with cargoes of tea, a very profitable operation. As we will see, he was also a big spender.

With the British acquisition of those former Dutch Colonies in what became Guyana, Milliken Craig started buying up plantations there.

Let’s look at just one of a number of plantations he bought. This one he called Balcraig in what had been Berbice. Here is an extract, dated 1819, from a Former British Colonial Dependencies Slave Register. It records the personal details of 117 enslaved people.

*All the adults except one had been victims of the transatlantic slave trade.

*Each person is recorded along with their employment, distinguishing marks and height that could identify them, should they attempt to escape.

* The eldest on Balcraig was 61-year-old Dublin, employed as a carpenter, described as “pockmarked” and 5-feet one inch tall.

* Several had significant disabilities: a 38-year-old field hand called Prince had “lost his nose” and was less than 5ft tall.

*Many were very short: Rosamund, aged 37, was “tatoed on forehead & breast” and was just 4ft 3 ½ !

There were also 46 children, all born in Berbice. (Of course, after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, planters had to rely largely on “homegrown” slaves.)

*James, aged 6 ½, was already working in the fields.

*An 18-month-old is called Luck, ironically perhaps.

*The youngest, named Wellington (a popular British name after Waterloo), was just one month old.

* 12 of the children are described as “yellow” or “yellowish”,  suggesting they were of mixed race. It’s reckoned that by 1819 about 2% of the enslaved population of Berbice was either the child or grandchild of a white European, indicating widespread sexual exploitation of enslaved women.

In the same year Milliken Craig made an extraordinary will. In it he describes himself as “Milliken Craig of Ballewin (sic) in Stirlingshire Parish of Strathblane, North Britain, Gloster (sic) Place, New Road, London” and of TEN other plantations in Demerara and Essequebo. They included a plantation called Nismes in Demerara and Vrouw Anna on an island at the mouth of the Essequebo River. (We can’t be sure he owned all these outright. However, totting up the number of enslaved men, women and children on these estates around that time, the total comes to well over 2,000.)

A lot of this information comes from the Centre for the Study of Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. For example, we know that there were 285 enslaved people on Vrouw Anna and 162 on Nismes for whom £23,652 19s 8d compensation would be paid following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. (At least £4m in today’s money, depending on which model of inflation is used.) Of course, the slaves themselves received nothing.

Milliken Craig’s will anticipates that he will have a huge fortune to distribute to his heirs, including his brother John and sisters Lillias and Marion in Blanefield, as well as his mistress and their unborn child in London. Amongst other things, it provides for the “neat proceeds” to be divided into thirds.

* The first third to go to his heirs

*The second third to be invested for his heirs until the value reaches £50,000 and then spent on an estate in Britain, “but always preferring that part of it called Scotland”.

*The third, a similar arrangement but with the trigger of £200,000.

These figures reflect assumptions about the profitability of slave estates in these colonies at that time. No wonder people used to refer to the mega-rich as being “as rich as a Demerary man”!

In fact, the will turned out to be pure fantasy. In 1820 Milliken Craig died suddenly at the age of 54 in Demerara, probably as a result of a yellow fever outbreak. Craig had mortgaged himself heavily to buy these estates but died before he could profit from his investment. As Craig’s heirs soon discovered, he owed rather than owned a vast fortune.

In 1821 advertisements appeared in the London press for the sale of his huge library of books and wine cellar. The latter included 1100 bottles of port and 3660 of Madeira. (A mere 800 bottles of claret!)

Two years later Vrouw Anna was put up for sale. The Star newspaper announced the auction by the “Colony of Demerary and Essequebo” of the “Insolvent Estate and Effects of MILLIKEN CRAIG, late of this colony”. It goes on to say: “The Sugar Works and Steam Engine are on a large scale, and equal to take off 1,000 hogsheads within the year with facility”, adding “the buildings [are] in the most complete order and the Negroes healthy”.

If there was an expectation that these sales would pay his debts and leave money for his heirs, it was a mistaken one. Ballewan passed to Milliken’s brother John, whose name appears on the 1831 Valuation Roll for Strathblane.  He died in 1832 and Ballewan was then intended to pass to his sister Lillias. But the Craigs were bankrupt and in 1835 the estate was made the subject of a judicial sale by virtue of a Court of Session warrant.

The estate was bought by the Graham family, who still own it. So Milliken Craig of Ballewan took a gamble on making a quick fortune using slave labour and lost both his fortune and his life. Other local landowners had more luck.

Walter Robison of Leddriegreen

The Robison family’s story looks like a carbon copy of that of the Craigs of Ballewan but the outcome was rather different. Like the Craigs, the Robisons were originally tenant farmers on the Ballewan estate. Walter Robison was born in the adjoining parish of Baldernock in 1726 and married Agnes Lyle there in 1756.

It is a measure of how attitudes have changed (and of his own family’s enrichment from the slave economy!) that John Guthrie Smith (above) in his weighty history of the parish of Strathblane wrote in 1886: “Like many others of the small lairds and farmers in the parish, and unlike the indolent and spiritless Highland crofters, whose miserable condition would have been theirs had they preferred to remain at home and divide and subdivide their small holdings, the Robisons left Strathblane and pushed their fortunes abroad, and by 1776 Walter Robison, who had made money in Jamaica, was enabled to return to the old parish and buy Leddriegreen.”

Leddriegreen is a fine 18thC laird’s house, though a stone in the stable wall with the date 1672 suggests part of it may be even older. The estate included the farm of Wester Leddriegreen (known locally as Puddock Hole) and in 1787 Walter Robison was able to buy part of Edenkiln as well as a section of the old Kirklands of Strathblane.

The house in Dumbrock Road, known as Old Edenkiln, was probably built as the factor’s house for the estate.

How Walter Robison made his money in Jamaica requires further research but he appears to have bought into an estate there in the Clarendon area, a broad plain on the south of the island named after Charles II’s chancellor, the first Earl of Clarendon.

By Robison’s time the area was being covered in sugar plantations, worked by enslaved Africans. Jamaican court records show Walter Robison was involved in a court case in Clarendon in 1773 against a man called John Oliphant.

Robison died in 1793, still 14 years before the end of the slave trade and more than 40 years before the abolition of slavery itself throughout the British Empire. His elder son Robert succeeded to Leddriegreen, followed by grandson James, a literary man and a sheriff in Ayrshire.

One of the few genuinely amusing anecdotes in John Guthrie Smith’s history of Strathblane is his account of the first appearance in the parish of an umbrella. Its “fortunate possessor” was Miss Robison of Leddriegreen: “All the youngsters turned out to view the phenomenon and as the old lady advanced through the descending flood under cover of her moving tent, they eyed her with such admiration…” Clearly, the Robisons had “made it”.

Leddriegreen was still in the family in John Guthrie Smith’s time and had been recently enlarged to include Broadgate Farm.

When Lord Ardwell, the well-known judge and advocate, married Walter Robison’s great granddaughter and inherited Leddriegreen, he became a noted local benefactor. He helped finance the rebuilding of the Free Church in Blanefield when it burned down in 1905 and feued on favourable terms the land on which Strathblane’s bowling green was constructed in 1907. The same applied to the Village Club, built in 1911, and the tennis courts, which date from 1913.

The Robisons of Leddriegreen are a typical example of a family able to make quick and easy money in the slave economy of the West Indies, then invest their wealth in property and social advancement. In four generations, they went from poor farmers to social elites, the source of their wealth conveniently forgotten.

The Smiths of Craigend

Today Craigend Castle is a problematic ruin in Mugdock Park. Having failed to attract any investor prepared to restore it, the park authorities have surrounded it with a high link fence to deter intruders and left it to moulder away. In front of it is an information board that makes a coy reference to a previous owner who was a “West Indies merchant”.

Happily, we know a lot about Craigend, thanks to the huge amount of research devoted to the Glasgow merchant family who built it. This was undertaken by Dr Stephen Mullen of Glasgow University. (see Chapter 3 A Glasgow-West India House in The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy, Scotland and Caribbean Slavery, 1775-1838, University of London Press.)

In the history of the landed estates that made up the parish of Strathblane, there seems to be a pattern when it comes to links to enrichment from enslaved people. Like the Craigs of Ballewan and the Robisons of Leddriegreen, the Smiths of Craigend began as tenant farmers. The Smiths were tenants of the Graham family. In 1660 Robert Smith acquired Craigend and about ten acres of land. At that time it was known as Gallowhill, as it contained the hill that had been used for local hangings and the “drowning pond” beside it.

In his privately published family history, David Burrard Smith writes: “The early lairds of Craigend had just enough land to grow oats, pasture for a cow and some sheep. The house may have had a dirt floor and was probably small and dark.”

But in 1816 Robert Smith’s descendant, James Smith, 1790-1836, pulled down a slightly enlarged version of this farmhouse to make way for a spectacular Regency Gothic mansion in which no expense was spared.

A family descendant called Lorna Blacklock, who visited Craigend many years later left this description: “It is Gothic in style and rather ecclesiastical-looking. The hall is panelled in oak and has an interlaced ceiling of stone and the coats of arms on the stained glass windows. The original tapestries hang on the walls. The drawing rooms (of which there are two, one opening out of the other) have carved Gothic doors and the original blue and silver paper – it’s really silk paper I think, or feels just like it….The dining room is on the other side of the hall and is immense and beautifully proportioned. Between the ground and first floors is a low-ceilinged suite of two or three bedrooms and upstairs there are numerous bedrooms, all very nice and so tastefully furnished. On the floor above that are servants’ quarters and above that again, but up a different staircase, is a billiard-room from which a staircase branches to one side up to the tower.”

The tower was known locally as “Smith’s Folly”. The property was surrounded by magnificently landscaped gardens. The ornate stables (now Mugdock Park visitor centre) would have left the first time visitor in no doubt that they were entering a property out of the very top drawer. (At this time both Mugdock and Duntreath castles were ruins.)

Not long before, James Smith’s father John (1739-1816) had added the Westerton area of Mugdock, the Dumbrock area of Strathblane and Milndavie Mill to his estate. Where did all the money come from?

It turns out that this showy opulence was built on the back of a vast fortune the Smith family made out of slavery, mainly from the West Indian sugar trade.

As Stephen Mullen has demonstrated, the story begins with the 4th laird’s younger brother Archibald Smith (1749-1821). Archibald had been born at Craigend but would ultimately be known as Archibald Smith of Jordanhill.

It was quite common in the 18th century for younger sons, without any prospect of landed inheritance, to be sent abroad in the hope of making their fortunes. Some joined the East India Company but many others, including Archibald, headed for Virginia, to work in the tobacco business. Loyal to the British crown, he was sent packing at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775 and returned to Glasgow, where he went into business with John Leitch, forming the famous firm of Leitch & Smith.

Later Archibald’s older brothers John (4th laird of Craigend) and James became partners. Archibald’s young sons, James, William and Archibald, also received shares, as did his nephew, John Guthrie (of whom more anon). After the death of Leitch, the firm became J & A Smith and continued trading until 1867. It was the classic family business, trading with Jamaica, the British Empire’s largest exporter of sugar, and also Grenada. Archibald would pass on both capital and entrepreneurial flair to his sons.

As Stephen Mullen writes: “Whilst there is no evidence the firm were involved in the African trafficking in a major way (historically known as the ‘slave trade’), the firm purchased enslaved people and also extended credit to planters on the island, taking enslaved people, including children, as collateral prior to the abolition of plantation slavery in 1834.”

A deed in the Grenada Supreme Court Registry records a number of people, including Archibald Smith and his brothers, buying three slaves called Louis, Alexis Brutus and Sampiere in 1812 from a planter on Martinique. Considerably more significant was the way the Smiths essentially became bankers to the large numbers of mainly British planters in Jamaica and Grenada, without which chattel slavery would have been inoperable. Of course, Leitch & Smith were also traders, providing supplies on credit, which tied planters to long-term consignment plans under the commission system. In other words, the firm took a percentage (typically 2.5%) on sales of sugar from the client’s estate. In addition, they offered short-term credit in the form of bonds and bills of exchange.

Leitch & Smith had access to a fleet of ships travelling between the Clyde ports of Greenock and Port Glasgow and the West Indies, supplying planters with goods and returning with sugar and cotton.

As John Guthrie Smith (Archibald Smith’s grandson) puts it in his history of Strathblane: “When the great West India sugar trade gained a footing in Scotland, the family of Craigend, principally through the energy of a younger son, Archibald…took an early part in it and prospered exceedingly.”

Archibald Smith was a founder member of the Glasgow West India Association, set up in 1807 to resist the abolition of plantation slavery in the British Empire, following the act that banned the transatlantic slave trade. It met in the Tontine Tavern in Glasgow’s Trongate and became the most powerful pro-slavery lobby group outside London. As abolition became increasingly inevitable and the popular mood turned against the idea of treating human beings as chattels, the association’s emphasis shifted to lobbying for compensation for plantation owners.

All three brothers (John, James and Archibald), all senior partners in Leitch & Smith, either inherited or purchased Scottish landed estates. James Smith, who had represented Craig & Smith in Demerara and the West Indies, died without issue in 1815. He left £71,000 and a mansion at Craighead near Blantyre that passed to his nephew James of Craigend. And when James’s own father, John, died the very next year, his inventory listed movable property of more than £46,000 with £37,000 in stock and profits in Leitch & Smith. (Many millions in today’s money, however one makes the calculation. At this time an agricultural worker in Strathblane could expect to earn about £28 a year.)

Having inherited from both his uncle and his father, James Smith (1790-1836) immediately sold his uncle’s mansion at Craighead and set about turning Craigend into a Gothic extravaganza that would advertise his wealth to the world.

Though much of the Smith family’s wealth had been invested in Scotland by the time plantation slavery was abolished in the British West Indies in 1834, Stephen Mullen found that the Smiths were involved in at least nine claims for compensation, arising from outstanding debts in Jamaica and Grenada. In fact they were among the biggest beneficiaries of the compensation scheme among the Sugar Aristocracy.

The Smiths’ great wealth did not long survive the Abolition Act. As John Guthrie Smith later admitted: “The fortune, and for those times it was a very large one, gradually melted away until it finally disappeared”. Another view would be that the Smiths successfully “whitewashed” the money made from Black slavery by buying property, investing in Scotland’s rapidly developing economy and becoming patrons of the sports and the arts. One of Archibald Smith’s sons (James) was known as “the father of Clyde yachting”. Craigend passed to John Smith, 6th laird, in 1836. When he died in 1851, his brother James sold Craigend to Sir Andrew Buchanan, a diplomat. In the late 1940s Craigend became a short-lived zoo.

 In 2023, one of the Smith family’s descendants, Derwyn Crozier-Smith, visited Strathblane from his home in Canada and was shown the area by members of Strathblane Heritage. How did he view his family’s involvement in supporting and profiting from enslaved people? He said: “I acknowledge this truth about our family and since it has become a sensitive topic, I should like to know more. Clearly, no one today would be proud of this legacy. For there to be reconciliation, there first must be truth and so researching and writing about this past to expose it would be a fruitful endeavour to the benefit of future generations.”

John Guthrie of Carbeth Guthrie

The story of John Guthrie of Carbeth Guthrie (1768-1834) is closely linked to that of the Smiths of Craigend. In fact, his mother, Elizabeth Smith (1737-1800), was the elder sister of John, James and Archibald Smith, senior partners in Leitch & Smith. She had been born at Craigend in 1737 and married Robert Guthrie of Baldernock in 1759.

John Guthrie joined Leitch & Smith and was sent to Grenada in the West Indies. The island had been ceded to Britain as part of the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

In the 1790s Guthrie went into business with John Ryburn, who owned land around the harbour in St George’s and had shares in trading ships that were based on the Clyde. By the end of the century Guthrie & Ryburn were the largest firm on the island, exporting sugar and extending credit to slave owners, like their sister company Leitch & Smith. As a free port, St George’s was able to trade manufactured goods with French and Spanish merchants, who paid in bullion or plantation produce produced by African-born enslaved people. This trade was hugely profitable. John Guthrie is once said to have boasted that a single cargo from Scotland was worth £5,000, the equivalent of millions today.

By 1799 John Guthrie was a prominent member of the plantation elite in Grenada and held the title “Guardian of Slaves”. This was part of a supposed amelioration programme, devised by slave owners to tackle the worst abuses of slavery, with two objectives. The first was to forestall the rise of abolitionism; the second was to promote a natural increase in the existing slave population in anticipation of the ending of the transatlantic slave trade. Later reports suggest the initiative soon became a dead letter.

Around 1800 John Guthrie returned from Grenada, joined Leitch & Smith in Glasgow and purchased what Guthrie Smith describes as a “compact little estate”. (It was 286 acres.) As well as the original Carbeth, which was part of the old Barony of Mugdock, Guthrie soon afterwards added the lands of Arlehaven, which included the supposed site of the Battle of Mugdock in which a Pictish king was killed in 750AD.

In 1810 Guthrie built a large part of the house now known as Carbeth Guthrie, surrounded by a grand ornamental garden. He also improved the road link between the Drymen Road and Strathblane, which was then a winding drove track.

His grand mansion improved his social standing. In 1810 he was appointed a Glasgow city magistrate and was Dean of Guild of the Merchants House in 1814, which was then a position of considerable influence. He was also a founder member of the Glasgow West India Association, founded in 1807 to oppose the abolition of slavery in the British colonies and represent planter interests. In 1830, he and others partners in Leitch & Smith sold their premises at the Carenage in St George’s (now Georgetown).

On his death in 1834 he left around £9,000, which was comparatively modest by the standards of the Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy. However, as with other families in this study, he had succeeded in converting capital derived from enslaved Africans into land and property in the west of Scotland. He never married.

Carbeth Guthrie was inherited by John Guthrie’s cousin, William Smith (1787-1871), the second son of Archibald Smith of Jordanhill. He styled himself William Guthrie Smith, to distinguish himself from other William Smiths in the family. He was also a West Indies merchant and was Provost of Glasgow in 1822.

According to the database of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, William Smith was awarded two-thirds of the compensation for the enslaved people on Jordanhill Estate in Trinidad (£7,649 8s). It appears that William Smith and his business partner Robert Brown had purchased 156 slaves from the Wotton Waven estate in Dominica in 1819 and imported them to the Jordanhill Estate in Trinidad. Smith was also awarded £3,697 10s 11d for 136 slaves on the Bellaire Estate on the island of St Vincent.

On his death in 1871 his family dedicated a stained glass window in Strathblane Church to his memory. Strathblane antiquarian, John Guthrie Smith, was William Guthrie Smith’s son. In his book The Old Country Houses of the Old Glasgow Gentry in 1878, he claims “[The sugar trade] probably was never entitled to the consideration it got. Being in few hands, it yielded fortunes that bulked in the public eye and less showy trades may have been of more real importance…It left behind it no single fortune equal to the largest fortunes left by the tobacco trade.” Really?! The fact that his father made considerably less out of slavery than the rest of the Smith family may have coloured his view.

The Edmonstones of Spittal

By the mid-18th century, Duntreath Castle, which had been the seat of the Edmonstone family since 1434, was a roofless ruin and the family lived elsewhere. They would not return until the 13th laird restored Duntreath in the mid-19th century.

However, the Edmonstone name survived in the Blane Valley in the meantime, due to the presence of their distant relations, the Edmonstones of Spittal. (This family appears to be descended from a man called James Edmonstone of Broich, an illegitimate half-brother of the 4th laird, who was killed at the Battle of Flodden in 1513.) For those who walk the Water Track between Blanefield and Killearn, the Spittal was the land that flanks the track between the crowstepped cottage at Cantywheerie and the property known as The Haggles. It was wedged between the Duntreath and Ballewan estates. Local historian John Guthrie Smith identifies Spittal on his map on his “Map of Old Strathblane”. Though published in 1886, it is an attempt to imagine what the distribution of land ownership was locally around 1680. Spittal is the crosshatched area on the map.

In the 17th century Spittal came into the ownership of an Archibald Edmonstone, probably a descendant of James Edmonstone of Broich. His family also rented land from the Edmonstones of Duntreath. Three more generations of Archibald Edmonstones followed. The last of these Archibald Edmonstones of Spittal (1754-1821) has something of a starring role in the First Statistical Account of Strathblane because he was a friend of its author, local minister the Reverend Gavin Gibb, and was an innovative breeder of cattle and sheep. Nowhere in the Strathblane minister’s account is there a word about the family’s wider commercial interests.

Charles Edmonstone, born in Strathblane in 1757, and younger brother of stock breeder Archibald Edmonstone of Spittal, decided to try his luck in Demerara. David Alston, an independent researcher based in Cromarty, has made a special study of the activities of Scots in Demerara and the other Dutch Guyanan colonies of Berbice and Essequebo. He depicts the area at that time as being a wild frontier where the institution of slavery was pushed to breaking point in pursuit of profit. That is why adventurers hoping to make a quick buck spoke of becoming “as rich as a Demerary man”.

Charles Edmonstone arrived in Demerara around 1780 and set up a timber-cutting estate on Mibiri Creek on the west side of the Demerara River. He married Helen Reid who was the daughter of a Scot and a high-status Amerindian lady. In Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) David Alston describes how Edmonstone used this connection:

“Edmonstone engaged Arawak men whose knowledge of the forest and tracking skills led to the capture or killing of many fugitive Africans, with a bounty paid for those captured alive or for the severed right hand of those killed.”

In 1810, 76 Africans were captured and 26 killed. The colonial government rewarded these raids with exemptions from taxes and the presentation of two ceremonial swords. When he returned to Scotland in 1817, he was presented with a silver plate with an inscription which read:

“A token of gratitude from the inhabitants of Demerary to Charles Edmonstone Esqr whose integrity and many excellent qualities during a residence of 37 years in the colony gained their sincere esteem: his prudence and humanity entitled him to the command of repeated expeditions against the revolted negroes of Guiana and his courage always ensured success.”

By 1817 Charles Edmonstone and his business partner John Jones were among the richest and most successful plantation owners in Demerara, with 643 slaves.  The estates, known latterly as Wales and Success, were sold to Liverpool merchant John Gladstone, father of four times British prime minister William Gladstone, after Jones drowned in 1821.

Charles Edmonstone returned to Scotland and invested his wealth in Cardross Park (a mansion and estate overlooking the Clyde). His will of 1827 provided generous settlements for the five children he had with Helen Reid but there was also £1000 to go to a “mulatto child Jeanie residing with me”. Was he perhaps her father? He also provided for the manumission of Catharine, Betty and Cecillia, three enslaved women in Demerara. (He later revoked Cecillia’s emancipation after Helen Reid claimed the woman belonged to her rather than her husband.) When Edmonstone died later the same year, more than £8,000 of his estate was owed him from the sale of woodland and slaves in Demerara to other family members. A further £21,200 was from money still owed by John Gladstone, Grant & Wilsons for the plantations he sold to them in Demerara.

Charles Edmonstone’s sister Jean, born in Strathblane in 1759, married Archibald Lapslie, owner of Hobbabba Creek, another timber business worked by enslaved Africans on the Demerara River. After Lapslie’s death the estate was taken over by his nephew, Archibald Edmonstone (1786-1856). This was the eldest son of Archibald Edmonstone, the stock breeder of Spittal. Presumably the family’s farming interests in the Blane Valley were insufficiently profitable to sustain the next generation. In fact, no fewer than four of his other sons (Robert, Charles, William and George) also went to Demerara. George and Charles both died there, in 1818 and 1822 respectively. Both were under 30. William later emigrated to Canada. More of Robert anon.

Archibald thrived, at least at first. In 1832 he registered 122 enslaved people in his own name. However, the anticipated slavery abolition act meant the value of his estate was much depreciated. In fact, having inherited Spittal after his father’s death, he was then obliged to sell it in 1833 to his distant cousins, the Edmonstones of Duntreath. Spittal remains part of the Duntreath estate today.

The last Archibald Edmonstone of Spittal ended up living with his wife and two unmarried sisters in Melville Place in Stirling. In the 1851 Census he is described simply as “retired wood merchant”. He died in Glasgow in 1856.

The remaining Edmonstone brother, Robert, had been born in Strathblane in 1791. He became a merchant in Georgetown, Guyana in partnership with a Mr Macdonald. One visitor, bearing a letter of introduction from John Gladstone, described Robert Edmonstone as a “gentlemanly Scotchman”. One of his slaves did well for himself.

A man born into slavery on Charles Edmonstone’s plantation in Demerara was given his owner’s surname, as was customary. John Edmonstone was taught the art of taxidermy and returned to Scotland with Charles in 1817. He was freed and in 1823 set up shop as a “bird stuffer” in Edinburgh, where his students included Charles Darwin. But John Edmonstone was an exception.

Robert Edmonstone played a key role in the response to the 1823 Demerara Rebellion. In August 1823 more than 11,000 slaves on 60 plantations on the east side of the Demerara River began a rebellion. It was led by an enslaved cooper called Jack Gladstone and other enslaved people from one of the plantations that had been owned by the Edmonstones until it was sold to Sir John Gladstone, who changed its name to Success (sic).

Their goal was to secure better working conditions. One grievance was that they were not allowed to attend church or hold religious meetings on their plantations at night.

Despite ample opportunity in the first two days to kill proprietors, managers and other white staff, there were only two recorded deaths and four injuries among personnel defending their plantations. By contrast, the response of the colonial authorities was brutal in the extreme. On 20 August 200 of the rebels were killed by British soldiers under Lt Col John Leahy, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars.

Robert Edmonstone acted as Aide-de-Camp to Lt-Col Goodman, commander of the Georgetown Brigade of the Demerara Militia. A contemporary account of the insurrection recorded that: “The greater part of the insurgents along the coast have laid down their arms and tendered their submission to Robert Edmonstone.” On 25 August he was employed as interpreter at the trials of the rebels and given the job of explaining the charges to the accused in their own dialect as well as interpreting their responses. Of the 45 prisoners who received a death sentence, 27 were executed. Crosses on this map of east Demerara (highlighted in red) show where the heads and bodies of executed prisoners were displayed.

Jack Gladstone’s father, Quamina escaped but was recaptured, shot and hung in chains outside plantation “Success”, formerly owned by the Edmonstones. Others were decapitated and their heads stuck on poles as a warning to others.

Robert Edmonstone also performed another service for the authorities. An English missionary called John Smith was implicated in the insurgency, after claims that his preaching amounted to an incitement to rebel. He had also refused to serve in the militia. Edmonstone persuaded Jack Gladstone to embroider his testimony in such a way as to suggest that Smith was the main instigator. John Smith was arrested, tried and sentenced to hang. He died in prison shortly afterwards probably on account of the terrible conditions, though this was denied by the authorities. (His main offence appears to have been to suggest that God made all men from the same flesh and blood!)

Indirectly, the 1823 Rebellion helped bring about the end of slavery. Accounts of the savagery with which the insurgency was put down (and the role of John Smith) produced a wave of revulsion against slavery and helped persuade the British government that it was no longer practicable. An appeal to support Smith’s widow, Jane (nee Goddon) was well-subscribed.

Robert Edmonstone returned to Scotland and died in Edinburgh in 1834, five months before the Abolition Act came into force. Before his death, as a partner in Archibald Edmonstone & Co, he claimed compensation of £6734 5s 7d for the 127 slaves on an estate on Waratilla Creek, Essequebo.

Archibald Edmonstone of Spittal (1754-1821), his wife Elizabeth (nee Aitken) and their ten children are commemorated in a memorial in Holy Rude Church, Stirling. Guyana remains one of the poorest countries in Latin America.

• A research project on Strathblane’s links to the abolition of slavery and the suppression of the illegal transatlantic trade is currently underway. It will include (above, from left): William Hamilton, Strathblane Minister, Charles Fleming, Stirling MP and Admiral Sir William Edmonstone, Laird of Duntreath.