John Wilson

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John Wilson [1772-1856], born in Kirkoswald (Cumberland), was a nephew of Kenneth Francis Mackenzie (of the Redcastle Mackenzies), the son of his sister Rose, and managed Mackenzie's plantation Lusignan in Demerara [PROB 11/1789/215 Will of Kenneth Francis Mackenzie; NAS GD46/17/36 James Baillie Fraser to Lord Seaforth 14 Feb 1814].

He was for many years a resident of Nickerie in Surinam before moving to Demerara [Scottish will: SC70/1/92], where he was attorney and manager of a number of plantation for a variety of other owners: Eendraght, Mon Repos and Good Hope, as an executor of the will of Joseph Hamer's (1800); and New Orange Nassau from 1807 [Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery, Martin v Martin].

Wilson did business with John Gladstone of Liverpool from about 1807, or earlier, and in 1819 returned to England to become a partner with him in John Gladstone, Grant & Wilson. He left the partnership in 1829. [The Gladstones: a family biography, 1764-1851, S. G. Checkland (CUP, 1971)].

John Wilson married Charlotte Cort in Guyana, sometime before 1803, and had two children, Eliza [1803-45] and Mackenzie [1806-91] [The will of Frederick Cort, 1835, identifies his sister Charlotte as Mrs Wilson: PROB 11/1855/4]. Obituaries of Mackenzie Wilson, who died in Auckland in 1891, say that Wilson visited Liverpool in 1809 and that Mackenzie and Gladstone's son (the future prime minister William Ewart Gladstone) attended the same school from 1821. [Observer, Volume XI, Issue 641, 11 April 1891, Page 7; Auckland Star, 1891]

Wilson's daughter Elizabeth (Eliza) married Gladstone's nephew, Thomas Ogilvie. Ogilvie bought the Corrimony estate in Inverness-shire in 1835 and build a new mansion house with extensive landscaped gounds. The house was modified and extended c.1880. Eliza died in 1845 in St Helier, Jersey.

Corrimony House (destroyed in a fire in 1951)

Elizabeth Wilson