Sir George Burns 1795 - 1891
Sir George Burns , erected the English Episcopal Church of Wemyss Bay (since demolished and where Dunara now stands) as a memorial to his beloved wife. ] He was an evangelical Christian on the make at a time of post-war economic expansion and wide-reaching technological innovations. He and his brother James set up as G & J Burns & Co. general merchants in the 1820s and were soon running the mails between Greenock, Liverpool, Belfast and Londonderry. It was a licence to print money and soon they were gobbling up competitors. In the 1830s, Samuel Cunard a Boston merchant seeking funding for a mail shipping line between Liverpool and the U.S., visited George Burns having been rejected by both Wall St and the City of London. Within weeks, Burns founded a consortium investing £270,000 injecting just £10,500 of his own and by 1839 was installed as the first Chairman of the Cunard Steam Packet Company. With its fully guaranteed Government contracts, the Cunard Line expanded rapidly, Burns dedicating profits from his own Irish mail ships to buying out the consortium and also acquiring the luxurious Castle Wemyss estate on the Firth of Clyde a few miles outside Largs. Ten years later in order to demolish competition, George Burns offered to transport the British Irish mails for nothing, which an astonished Colonel Maberly, Trollope's boss, accepted. Few Scots realise that America's Cunard Line was launched on such Glaswegian chutzpah. He was a good friend of Anthony Trollope (writer). JP Retired shipowner (1881).
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Born: Glasgow, Scotland 1795 | Baptised: Barony, Lanark., , Scotland 20th Dec 1795
| Died: 1891 | Buried:
| Family: Burns |
Sources
- Family Archivists: see
Burns
Census
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Timeline
1795 | Born (birth) Glasgow, Scotland | 20th Dec 1795 | Baptised (baptism) Barony, Lanark., Scotland | 10th Jun 1822 | Married Jean/Jane Cleland
(Burns ) 1794 - 1877 (marriage) Glasgow, Scotland | 3rd Apr 1881 | Head of household in 1881 census (census) Barony, Lanark., Scotland | 1891 | Died (death) |
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