Donald Currie

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Portrait of Walter William Ouless

Donald Currie (born September 17, 1825 in Greenock , Scotland, † April 13, 1909 in Sidmouth ) was a British ship owner and politician .

Live and act

After attending the Belfast Royal Academy and Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Donald Currie was employed early in the office of a ship owner there. At the age of 18 he went to Liverpool , where a partner in the newly formed Cunard Line got him a job. He became an agent in Havre and Paris, where he brokered freight traffic to America. After his return to the main house in Liverpool in 1856, he held a high post there.

In 1862 he started his own company, Castle Shipping Line , which sailed to Calcutta . Two years later he moved to London with it.

In 1872 the development of the Cape Colony seemed to him to justify setting up a steamship line to South Africa. The Prime Minister friend John Charles Molteno denied him a monopoly, so that he had to compete with the Union Steam Ship Company in the postal service . In 1876 he founded the Castle Mail Packets Company , which merged in 1900 with the competitor to form the Union-Castle Line .

In South Africa, he was involved in litigation over the ownership of the Kimberley diamond field. In 1877/1879 he headed the Transvaal delegations that protested against the annexation. After the Battle of Isandhlwana (1879), in which the British division was wiped out, it was a ship of his Union-Castle Line that brought the information about the defeat to the Caribbean island of St. Vincent , from where a telegram was sent to London that Currie used to deliver the government information. He agreed with the Admiralty that they would use his express steamers as armed cruisers.

As a member of the Liberal Party , he moved to Parliament for Perthshire , but could not agree on the Home Rule . From 1885 to 1890 he represented West Perthshire as a Liberal Unionist .

When the British Rugby Team traveled with him on the maiden voyage of Dunottar Castle to South Africa, he donated a gold cup for the Currie Cup . In 1892, he founded the first football club, Old Castle Swifts FC , in Essex , but it disbanded when he stopped financial support in March 1895.

In the 1890s he got into the hotel business. In 1893 he opened The Grand in Cape Town's Strand Street . Emil Cathrein became its hotel manager. When he opened the Mount Nelson Hotel in Gardens in 1899 , six months later, when the war broke out, the military chose it as their headquarters. After he had acquired the Glenlyon Estate in Glen Lyon in 1885 , he had the village of Fortingall completely redesigned there in the Scottish county of Perthshire by architect James MacLaren .

Web links

  • Donald Currie at Hansard (English)
  • Sir Donald Currie - Estate worth over two Millions . In: The Advertiser . Adelaide May 26, 1909, p. 7 (English, online [accessed February 11, 2016]).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Photo of the Grand Hotel, Strand Street, Cape Town. flickr, 1910, accessed February 11, 2016 .
  2. ↑ The Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town. Cape Town Magazine, accessed February 11, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Fortingall Hotel: History , accessed July 9, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Currie, Donald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British ship owner and politician
DATE OF BIRTH September 17, 1825
PLACE OF BIRTH Greenock , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH April 13, 1909
Place of death Sidmouth