A memorial album published about Sir John A. Macdonald in 1891 included this photo, identifying Brunswick Place in Glasgow as the birthplace of Canada's first prime minister. (Courtesy Archives of Ontario) Photo: (Courtesy Archives of Ontario) Barely 100 days before planned celebrations to mark the bicentennial of Sir John A. Macdonald’s birth in Glasgow, Scotland, the Canadian government has joined in an 11th-hour search for the precise birthplace of the country’s founding prime minister.
After a Postmedia News archival discovery earlier this month bolstered the possibility Macdonald was born in what is now a derelict, downtown Glasgow commercial building — a former pub and massage parlour that’s still standing but slated for demolition — Foreign Affairs spokesman John Babcock has disclosed that “in search of further clarity,” officials with the Canadian High Commission in London are working “to verify the conflicting reports and evidence, and we look forward to a conclusive finding of where Sir John A.’s exact birthplace is.”
The vacant Glasgow building has been described for some time as Macdonald’s birthplace, Babcock added. “The most we can say with confidence is that somebody with a name very similar to Sir John A.’s father may have worked there around the time he was born.”
The issue is now on the radar of Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, who shares Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s well-known penchant for Canadian history and who, as the minister responsible for Parks Canada in 2008, launched the government’s search for a sunken ship from the lost Franklin expedition. That long-shot mission was accomplished earlier this month with the historic discovery of one of the fabled vessels in Arctic waters off Nunavut’s King William Island.
Until this week, the Foreign Affairs department had dismissed as “folklore” the view held by some historians that Macdonald was born in the building on Brunswick Place, a narrowing of Brunswick Street in central Glasgow, where archived city records suggest that his father, Hugh Macdonald, was running a textile business in January 1815.
Sir John A. Macdonald.
British historian Ged Martin, author of a 2013 biography of Macdonald and the leading expert on the birthplace question, has argued that more persuasive evidence comes from the 1891 recollections of Macdonald’s cousin, Maria Macpherson, who told an early Macdonald biographer that the future founder of Canada had been born in a building south of the river Clyde — on the opposite shore from downtown Glasgow, in a neighbourhood razed long ago — before his family emigrated to Upper Canada in 1820.
Martin’s writings on the matter have been guiding the Canadian government’s planning around the upcoming bicentennial and possible commemoration activities in Scotland.
But earlier this month, the discovery of a souvenir memorial supplement published by a Toronto newspaper in 1891 — just weeks after Macdonald’s death in office that June — shed fresh light on the birthplace mystery. Printed by The Empire, a Conservative party organ founded by Macdonald himself in 1887 and published by David Creighton, a close associate and regular correspondent of Macdonald’s in the final years of his life, the supplement unambiguously identified the national patriarch’s birthplace as “Brunwick Place, Glasgow.”
The supplement even included a photograph of the narrow street showing the same late-18th-century building that, until the early 21st century, was occupied by the Fox and Hound pub and an upstairs massage business, and which remains today — though vacant and dilapidated — in the Scottish city’s downtown core.
The unearthing of the long-overlooked 1891 document, Martin has acknowledged, left him “poleaxed.” While the British historian said he still believes Macdonald was likely born on the south side of the Clyde, he characterized The Empire find as a potential “game-changer” in the quest to identify Macdonald’s exact birthplace.
Earnscliffe, the stately Ottawa manor where Macdonald lived during his time as prime minister and died on June 6, 1891, is a National Historic Site that today also serves as the official residence of Britain’s high commissioner to Canada. Macdonald’s former home in Kingston, Ont., Bellevue House, is also a National Historic Site managed by Parks Canada.
Pedestrians in Charlottetown, PEI, pass a bronze sculpture of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, by artist Nichael Halterman. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan
In 2005, Postmedia News first revealed that the building at Brunswick Place had been purchased by Selfridges, the British retail giant owned by Canadian businessman Galen Weston, and was slated for demolition as part of a broader commercial redevelopment.
Selfridges’ plans never proceeded, however, and the shuttered Fox and Hound remains intact, a City of Glasgow official confirmed this week, though it remains on the books to be torn down. Selfridges sold its “Merchant City” holdings in June, but with the stipulation that the property not be demolished before April 2015.
“In terms of a physical tribute to Sir John,” Glasgow City Council spokesman Paul Kane told Postmedia News this week, “we have been assured by the new owners of the site immediately beside Brunswick Lane … that there will be an appropriate tribute — whether a plaque or piece of public art or something else is still to be considered — that will be incorporated into the planning application for the site.”
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