Macdonald birthplace search intensifies
Government joins in 11th hour investigation
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.”
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.
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.
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, 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.