Busby House: the Kippen connection (2)
Of liberal newspapers, US railways, and aiding the Labour Party
In the previous article on Busby House, we saw that in the 1830s, William Kippen, successful owner of the Busby printworks, purchased the Glasgow Chronicle, the oldest Liberal newspaper in Glasgow.
The late 18th and early 19th century in Glasgow was notable both for the number of newspapers that were published and the frequency with which they died off1. However, the Glasgow Courant had first appeared as far back as 1715, published by Robert Thomson, Glasgow’s postmaster, and printed by Donald Govan, printer to Glasgow College. Another longer-lasting newspaper was the Glasgow Journal, first published in 1741. Both continued into the last quarter of the 18th century.
In 1775, the first iteration of the Glasgow Chronicle appeared; it only lasted four years, when it was bought up and absorbed into the Journal. A new paper, the Mercury, appeared in 1779, surviving until 1796, while John Mennons began the Glasgow Advertiser in 1783, which added the Herald title in 1801, becoming the Glasgow Herald in 1804.
A year before, in January 1803, Samuel Hunter, a surgeon originally from Wigtownshire now resident in Glasgow, became the Glasgow Herald and Advertiser’s editor and co-proprietor. He remained in the role for 34 years, during which time he was elected a Glasgow town councillor. He opposed political reform and was actively involved in volunteer militias, first during a French invasion scare and later as commander of the ‘Glasgow Sharpshooters’ in response to the Radical Rising of 1820.
The Glasgow Courier, launched in 1791, was another conservative voice, and between the two newspapers, the political views of the Dukes of Hamilton and the Maxwells of Pollok predominated.
At this time, the Herald and Courier tended to be published twice a week. The more liberal Glasgow Sentinel appeared in 1809, published three times a week, focusing on exposing political scandals and supportng parliamentary reform. It only survived two years, however, before being bought out by David Prentice and reappearing as a second Glasgow Chronicle in 1811 (the Sentinel name would reappear in later newspapers). Kippen took over the newspaper shortly before Prentice died in 1837.
At his death in January 1853, William Kippen left a significant fortune: some £2,000 in cash at the Royal Bank in Glasgow, £21,000 in shares in the Forth & Clyde Navigation Company and Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway Company, as well as another £6,000 in shares in the London & South Western Railway Company and the London Brighton & South Coast Railway Company. There were also rents due to his estate from seven separate properties in and around Busby. In his will, he left annuities to his sons, two three unmarried daughters and two married ones (if the former ones married, the sums provided would ‘be administered by their husband’). Two sons, George and William, both owed their father around £2,000, but George had been sequestered, and his father’s will stated initially that George would only receive the money due to him if he were discharged as a bankrupt; in a codicil, however, William changed his mind and forgave the debts owed by both sons.
The Kippen family
Between them, William and Marianne’s marriage produced 14 children, two of whom died in infancy and two others, a son and a daughter, aged 19. The son, John Kippen (1818-1837), must have travelled at a young age to Port Philip in Victoria, possibly being aided by Yuill(e) relatives of his great-grandmother who were living there. In May 1837, he signed a petition to the Governor General seeking the appointment of a police magistrate to control aborigines who were said to be stealing clothes and supplies. He died in Port Philip in December 1837.
George (1816-1895), the eldest son, emigrated to New York state in 1850, becoming a farmer and marrying another Scots immigrant there, with one daughter.
The next son, James Hill Kippen (1820-1886), gave his occupation as ‘Printer & Publisher and Cotton Spinner’ in the 1851 Census (the former occupation demonstrating his interest in the Glasgow Chronicle). Inheriting Busby and Westerton on his father’s death in 1853, he married Rachel Sword, eldest daughter of a Glasgow writer and procurator, two years later but seems to have spent most of his life living in Edinburgh at 8 Oxford Terrace since only their eldest child, a daughter, was born at Westerton, the others (two daughters and a son) being born in Edinburgh2.
The eldest daughter, Rachel Emily (1860-1914) died unmarried in Glasgow, her younger sister, Mariamne Louise (1862-1908) dying six years earlier in Constantinople, also unmarried. The youngest sister, Margaret Edith (1863-1946) married twice, but there were no known children from the marriages before her death at Westerton (the witness to her death certificate was a relation by marriage, William Strang, from Bosfield House in East Kilbride).
James Hill Kippen’s only son, William James (1866-1928), first inherited Westerton and then Busby after his younger brother, Durham Kippen, died in 1884. He became a member of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, a King’s Counsel and JP, and also never married. Four years before his death, he donated eight acres from the estate bordering the White Cart as a public park, opened as Busby Glen Park in Cartside Drive in late 1926.
William Kippen’s next son, William Kippen (1822-1882), inherited Gogar Park near Edinburgh. He married another Sword daughter, Margaret St Leger, but there were no known children from the marriage. A few years after she died in 1875, suffering from depression, he shot himself at his own front door.
As mentioned previously, Durham (1838-1884), the youngest son, began life as a tearaway and eventually became an active supporter of Conservative policies (something which did not always keep him out of trouble during elections). He died, aged 45, in Glasgow, unmarried.
Two more Kippen sisters, Jane Dennistoun (1830-1912) and Elisabeth Murdoch (1831-1911), would also remain unmarried: of these, more later.
The Fleming Edmiston family
The eldest surviving daughter from William and Mariamne’s marriage was Margaret, who in 1850 married Hugh Fleming Edmiston of Bosfield (sometimes ‘Bossfield’), East Kilbride (the family’s surnames are sometimes recorded as ‘Fleming Edmiston’, sometimes just as ‘Edmiston’). Born Hugh Fleming in Houston, Renfrewshire in 1818, the source of the additional surname ‘Edmiston’ is unknown, but may arise as a condition of a bequest (a James Edmiston owned Bosfield in the 1840s, and in 1850 Hugh was described as the ‘heir of entail’).
This marriage produced six sons and three daughters, most of whom were born at Yoker Mains Farm in Renfrewshire, of whom three - one son and a daughter - died young. Hugh may have commissioned Bosfield House in the 1870s from architect David Thomson, who built five villas in East Kilbride between 1873 and 1876 (shortly after, he partnered with Robert Turnbull following Alexander Thomson’s death in 1875).
After her husband died in 1879, Margaret left Bosfield House for Cathcart, where she stayed with her youngest son, Richard Fleming, who worked for a grain merchant, but Richard died in Colombo, Ceylon, in 1903, so she had probably returned to Bosfield before then. She died there in 1914, after which the house was occupied by William Strang, whose family came from the area, owning land at Millhouse, and which, in the 1840s had tenanted Bosfield. He was a writer and local historian recognised as one of the leading agricultural lawyers in Scotland. He appears to have adopted the middle name ‘Fleming’ after his marriage. Strang died in 1921 and his widow in 1935, after which the mansion house was rented out, eventually becoming the first offices of East Kilbride District Council and, in 1994, the East Kilbride Arts Centre, below).
The financial circumstances of William and Mariamne’s family are unclear, but from landed proprietors, their offspring largely went into trade. The eldest son travelled to New Zealand and married there. He eventually returned with his family but settled outside London. Their second son became a farmer, married in New Zealand and again in Australia. He returned at least once to England before dying in Australia in 1916.
Their fourth surviving son, George Fleming Edmiston (1863-1935), initially remained in Scotland, working as a grain merchant’s clerk, but by 1880 had moved to Geneva, New York State, probably to join George Kippen, their farmer uncle. He appears to have stayed in New York State, married and then divorced, with one daughter.
William and Mariamne’s third surviving son, James Kippen Edmiston (b 1861) had other interests, however.
Of tramcars and bank fraud
James Kippen must have moved to the USA at least in his early twenties since he became an American citizen in Walla Walla, Washington state, in June 1883. By the end of the decade, James had become president of the Walla Walla Savings Bank. In September 1890, the two Edmiston brothers, together with Samuel L. Bowman, filed articles of incorporation for the Rainier Avenue Electric Railway Company, aiming to run a street trolley from downtown Seattle to the hamlet of Columbia and eventually to Rainier Beach on Lake Washington. James invested $173,000 out of a total stock of $250,000.
By late December 1890, cars had already begun running on a completed section, and the reason for Edmiston’s sizeable investment became clear. In March 1891, with two others, the Washington Co-operative Home Company was incorporated with a capital value of $300,000 and revealed to own about 200 acres in Columbia, with plans to sell 1,500 lots, at around $300 each, all of which were claimed to be on high land, with great views, good soil, and easy transportation to downtown Seattle via the recently completed street trolley. The same year, the line reached Rainier Beach and also Taylor's Mill, one of the major sawmills on Lake Washington, and the line was renamed the Seattle and Rainier Beach Railway. The venture was successful enough that within two years, Columbia City had been incorporated as an independent town (In 1907, it was annexed into the city of Seattle). In 1896, extended to 12 miles and now renamed the Seattle, Renton & Southern Railway, it was the longest electric rail route in the state and one of the longest in the world.
Even as the railway expanded, the Walla Walla Savings Bank was closing its doors. Although the widespread ‘Panic of 1893’ was largely a response to European disinvestment as a result of lower returns from the large number of railways being constructed (not affecting Edmiston’s enterprise), the low price of wheat that year seems to have impacted the bank’s ability to stay afloat. As it transpired, James Edmiston was another cause, having helped himself to $30,000 of the bank’s deposits.
At a first trial, accused of embezzling funds, Edmiston was acquitted; a second, where he was accused of receiving deposits when he knew the bank was insolvent and using those funds for personal purposes, ended in a mistrial. At a third, on the same charges, he was found guilty and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment (in the interim, an aggrieved bank customer had attempted to shoot him but missed five times; the shooter was fined $20).
Rather than surrendering himself, however, James, disappeared. Then, during the first decade of the twentieth century, a judge in Walla Walla started to receive money from him. Over the next several years, Edmiston repaid all the investors who had lost money in the bank; in January 1911, he was pardoned by Washington’s Governor Marion E. Hay.
Throughout, James’s whereabouts remained unknown. When his uncle, the farmer George Kippen, died in Geneva, New York, in 1895, he left much of his money to his sister’s children, including James and George (at George Kippen’s death, his only daughter, Margaret, was in a mental home). When Margaret died in 1925 she left part of her estate to James. By then, he may have married and changed his name to ‘James Fleming’. Where he was living is unknown, nor is the date or location of his death3.
The Kippen bequests
In July 1892, just after James Keir Hardie had won the Parliamentary seat of West Ham South as an independent, he returned home to Lanarkshire to hear of
two quaintly dressed old ladies [who] had spent a week in the village making very exhaustive inquiries about my life and character. Later in the year we were spending a few days with my wife’s mother at Hamilton and learned that they had been there also, and had visited my wife’s mother. They told her frankly their errand. They knew that as a working-man, I would be none too flush with money, and they were anxious to help in this respect, provided they were satisfied that I was dependable. Their inquiries into my public record were assuring, but - was I a good husband? A mother-in-law was the best authority on that4.
Meeting the two sisters - Jane Dennistoun and Elisabeth Murdoch Kippen - in Edinburgh - Keir Hardie was told that they wished to help Socialism, ‘which, they believed, would one day be working with Nationalism’. They offered him £300 a year while he was in Parliament and to make provision in their wills to give more.
Keir Hardie suggested they should donate the money to the Scottish Labour Party, which he had helped to found in 1888, a proposal which ‘gave mighty offense’. After some years of silence (during which time Keir Hardie lost his seat in 1895), the sisters resumed contact, providing £100 in late 1897, then £1,000 and £2,000 to the Independent Labour Party, which he had helped to establish in 1893, and also supported the ‘Irish Party’:
The ladies were now very frail. Elizabeth died (in 1911) and Jane, very old and nearly blind, had become obsessed by a determination not to spend a farthing on lawyer’s fees in preparing a will.
The two sisters also appeared determined not to follow the family’s falling way from liberal causes that their father had supported. The determination to avoid any legal fees probably arose from Elizabeth’s dispute with her nine siblings over her father’s will, a case which reached the Court of Session in 1874, more than twenty years after her father’s death, with Elizabeth’s claim being ‘deemed barred by mora, taciturnity, and acquiescence’.
Jane, who had been living in Houstoun’s Temperance Hotel in Edinburgh, died on 13th April 1912. Her will was succinct and to the point. It appointed John Edward Redmond and his brother, William Hoey Kearney Redmond, both Irish MPs, as her executors of her £7,600 estate, together with Keir Hardie, and stated
Burnside House, Kippen, August 25, 1911: I, Jane Dennistoun Kippen, desirous to settle any disputes that my death may cause, while in mental health, do herewith intrust to the Messieurs Redmond of the Nationalist Irish Party and Mr Keir Hardie, Independent Labour Party, in equal proportions, all that justly may belong to me, undertaking to pay all debts due by me. Funeral as my late sister’s, at Kippen Cemetery, directing to be engraved on her stone
I now have come to lye with you
Whoever was to me so true.The above, willing to take the latest trust, aided with the manager of Commercial Bank, George’s Street, Edinburgh. Thus acting in accordance with my dear sister’s wishes, had she been alive, to hereby endorse my signature.
However, Jane’s document had been handed on her deathbed to a nurse at Chalmers’ Hospital and was contested by a surviving sister and the children of Jane’s deceased siblings. The will was declared at the Court of Session in 1914 to be ‘not holograph’, (that is, not written entirely in the author’s handwriting or not signed by the author). Of two further similar documents, one was not holographic, and another was, but undated. Close attention was paid to the language used: the beneficiaries were to be ‘the Messieurs Redmond of the Nationalist Irish Party and Mr Keir Hardie, Independent Labour Party, in equal proportions’, but did that mean Keir Hardie and the ILP were separate beneficiaries or the same ones? Were the funds, now totalling £10,000, to be divided by three or four? Ultimately, the Court of Session ruled in favour of four beneficiaries, with the relatives excluded5.
We don’t know the views of the Kippen sisters on women’s suffrage, but John Redmond was a definite opponent: in 1912, he informed a delegation of the Irish Women’s Franchise League that he would not support giving women the vote if home rule was granted. John died in 1918; William Redmond was among a number of Irish MPs who enlisted during the First World War, and was killed in action in June 1917.
Reflecting on the outcome, Keir Hardie noted
The Misses Kippen belonged to a generation which has passed away. Quaint in dress and full of an old-world courtesy, they must have felt strangely cut off from the modern whirlpool of life. But instinctively they loved the common people and the cause of human freedom6.
The Sword family lived at Marleybank (sometimes ‘Marley Bank’), an 1840s villa at the corner of Horslethill Road and Observatory Road in Glasgow’s West End, now used by Glasgow University for its department of General Practice and Primary Care.
For more on this story, see https://historylink.org/File/20324
Western Daily Press, 14 Feb 1914
Weekly Irish Times, 31 Jan 1914
Western Daily Press, 14 Feb 1914