George Kinloch, and his Dundee statue

Here in Dundee we have a problem. It relates to George Kinloch of Kinloch, known as ‘the Radical Laird’, reformer and briefly the first MP for Dundee. 

He was first politically involved with issues of the Dundee harbour, around 1814, though he may have expressed reformer sentiments from at least 1808. From there, he seems to have become increasingly political, with particular attention always to Dundee and to the developments of the mill-workers there, until his death in 1833.

He’s known for getting himself arraigned on a ‘sedition’ case - because he spoke at demonstrations, particularly one after the Peterloo debacle, and supported universal (i.e. at that time meaning male) suffrage. He escaped the so-called ‘justice’ which would have sent him to Botany Bay, taking refuge in France before he was enabled to return to Britain (only to hear of the death of one of his daughters). 

But eventually, after campaigns started to change the ways in which, well, some people thought about other people, he became elected in 1833, after the first Reform Act, as MP for the newly-formed constituency of Dundee, defeating his (also Whig) rival. His speech for his Dundee electors specified his opposition and hatred of slavery.  In 1872, long after his death and after long years of debate and opposition, a statue was erected to him in Albert Square, beside the Public Library, aka Albert Institute.

So, what’s the problem?  It lies in the family’s history: his father’s brother, John Kinloch, had become an owner of a plantation in Jamaica. Then John died, without a ‘legitimate’ heir of his body, though with several (four, I think) children of ‘mixed race’. So John’s heir was his brother, George Oliphant Kinloch, who arranged (remotely, from Scotland) for schooling for the children, and would be receiving reports from Jamaica about the plantation and its earnings. He signed at least one manumission document, but I don’t have any evidence for the context of this.  And then George Oliphant Kinloch also died. So what happened to the estate?

Well, it would be ‘in trust’ for the heir of George Oliphant Kinloch, whose first son was named John - and that son died in 1789: so George, the aforesaid reformer, second son and still a minor, became the ‘owner’ in name of the estate (and of course also of the Scottish estate of Kinloch, bought by his father from a cousin earlier, his father having sold another small Scottish estate in order to buy it… this is complicated…). Young George spent some time in France, in the early 1790s, and so learnt about the early, and idealistic, years of the French Revolution and the reasons for this. When he came of age (1796) and started to deal with the accounts for that Jamaican plantation, what did he think? We don’t know. He didn’t leave a memoir, and while there are some letters from him and to him, these date from a later time.

What we do know is that by 1804 the Jamaican estate, ‘Grange’,  had been sold, apparently to the person who had been in correspondence with George Oliphant Kinloch earlier.

So. Yes, George Kinloch of Kinloch, Scottish reformer, was for a few years in his 20s an owner of a Jamaican plantation worked by slaves. He may have ‘profited’ by the sale of the plantation. What he thought of it, we don’t know. What we do know is that at the time of his election as the first MP for Dundee, he professed a hatred of all slavery, and in particular of ‘negro slavery’; his phrasing of that time, not mine!

Please do not deface his statue!