By Robert Watt
IN JANUARY Canadians and many elsewhere will mark the bicentennial of the birth, in Glasgow, of Sir John A. Macdonald, a leading architect of Confederation. Parliament has designated January 11th as the national day to commemorate Sir John's birthday. Yet the registration of his birth in the Old Parish Registers for Glasgow reads beneath the heading "Glasgow, January 1815.-" "McDonald Hugh McDonald Agent & Helen Shaw: a Son John Alexander born 10th, Witn [Witnesses] Donald & James McDonald."
The original parish record proving Jan. 10 is the correct date. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Registrar General for Scotland.
It is perhaps not the end of the world to be one day out on the actual date, but the historian in me, and the patriot, would prefer that we were using the date most clearly established in the oldest extant official record. Of more significance however, is that the disputed location of his birth, some historians favouring a site on the south of the Clyde River, some on the north side of the river, in an area around Trongate, which was the commercial heart of Glasgow in the early 19th century.
A recent discovery, made by a journalist for PostMedia, Randy Boswell, published on September 12, describes an important new piece of evidence. It is a photo printed in a memorial album issued in Toronto in 1891 by the Empire newspaper about three months after Macdonald's death. The photo shows a Glasgow street scene, presumably taken near to the time of publication , which identifies Brunswick Place in Glasgow, as the birthplace of Canada's first Prime Minister.
Brunswick Place is in the heart of the old Glasgow parish, and therefore logical in terms of the Old Parish Record registration. Boswell emphasizes the importance of this find because of the well known effort by Sir John and some Conservative colleagues to create the Empire in 1887 as a counterweight to what they saw as the Liberal bias of the other two Main Toronto papers. If this new clue points to Brunswick Place, north of the Clyde, as Sir John's birthplace, then the drama for approaching celebrations is heightened because one building still stands in Brunswick Place, a late 18th or early 19th century stone building that may have housed Hugh Macdonald's business and provided a dwelling space for his young family.
The building is slated for demolition, possibly quite soon, to make way for a massive redevelopment of the area. Before this potentially priceless structure is lost forever, I think historians, supported by our national government, need to redouble their efforts to confirm once and for all, based on the best and earliest evidence, when and where Sir John was born.
Sir John’s parish birth registration, mentioned above, comes from births recorded in the area called 644/01 in the Old parish Registers, which are from the central city old parish of High Kirk, north of the Clyde River. This provides more evidence of a birthplace north of the Clyde. If the weight of archival research establishes that it was 10 January 1815, and in this building north of the Clyde River, in the heart of old Glasgow, then a national effort needs to be swiftly set up to save this structure as a vital part of our national patrimony.
Robert Watt is the former Chief Herald of Canada and a retired Citizenship Judge in Vancouver.