David Cameron’s Scottish connection

PART ONE: Cameron’s great-great-grandfather Alexander Geddes left Huntly a penniless crofter’s son and returned from Chicago as one of Scotland’s richest men

Just over one hundred and fifty years ago, a penniless young crofter’s son from the banks of the River Deveron in Aberdeenshire boarded a ship at Broomielaw in Glasgow and headed west to a new life. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that. In 1860, Scotland’s greatest export was its people: the middle-classes left for well-paid jobs staffing the Empire, and expected that they would one day return; the poor emigrants from the Highlands left an economically depressed land blighted by the 1851 potato famine in search of a better life, and knew the chances of ever setting foot in Scotland again were slim to vanishing.

But if Alexander Geddes’ departure for the New World was unremarkable, the man himself was anything but run-of-the-mill. For a start, the sparky 17-year-old who headed to the Canadian city of Montreal was marked out by the fact that he had family waiting for him at the other end in the form of his mother’s cousin Alex Mitchell, of the Dufftown Mitchells of Parkmore, who was a successful grain merchant and, more importantly, willing to employ the young Geddes.

If that marked out Geddes, so did his character. Even as a boy he exuded bonhomie and mixed an extrovert, overtly honest manner with a selfreliance and shrewdness which endeared him to his new employer. Despite coming from humble stock – his father yearned for a tenancy as he struggled manfully to farm at Eastern Bodylair, a windswept farm near Huntly boasting a solitary, gnarled ash tree – like many Highland families his parents placed a remarkable premium on education.

These days we harbour stereotypes about the degree of social mobility in Victorian Scotland, yet this was a dynamic society in which talent and hard work were likely to be rewarded. The Geddes of Bodylair croft exemplified this: Alexander’s eldest brother William was a classics scholar who became the principal of Aberdeen University; another brother, James, was a high court judge in Bengal; and his younger sister Right: Alexander Geddes around 1880, in his days as a hugely successful grain dealer in Chicago.