Part 3

Early Castlemains Hallidays particularly John Halliday of Antigua

1. John the first Owner of Castlemains/Castledykes (1650-1716)

All we really know about the antecedents and life of the first Halliday owner of Castlemains/Castledykes (died 1716) is recounted in Chapter 3 (i) of Hallidays.

A sasine of 1703 records the transfer of lands of “Castell-mayns, alias Castle-dykes” to John Halliday and Margaret Gibson his spouse. Earlier Sasines record other land transfers to this pair. Evidently the first John of Castlemains was a substantial farmer. “Castledykes” is a considerable acreage at the south side of the town running along the banks of the Dee. There is still a street called “Castledykes” that connects the property to the town centre. Today the property is held by the Burgh for recreation use and grazing. The “Castle” is a c. 12th Century Danish fort of which only the foundations survive.

Sasines do not record the dates of birth or marriages and there appears to be no extant public documents confirming that this John was born in 1650 or was married in 1681. However, we do know his eldest son and heir to Castlemains was born in 1682. Moreover both Stratford Charles and C.A.T.H. probably had access to private papers supporting the dates of births and marriages.

2. John the Second Owner of Castlemains/Castledykes (1682-1756)

We learn from his table-top gravestone in the Churchyard of Old St. Cuthbert’s Church Kirkudbright (shown below in a photograph taken by Mrs. P. D. Halliday in October 2009) that this John was born in 1682 (aged 74 at the time of his death in 1756) and that his wife Margaret McKie was born in 1683 (aged 88 at the time of her death in 1771).

The Pedigree in Hallidays tells us that John and Margaret were married in 1710 and that their eldest son, who for convenience is normally referred to as “of Antigua” or “the Antiguan”, was not born until 1715.

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A.L.H. has not been able to discover any documentary evidence establishing the date of the marriage or the birth. However a Sasine dated 1723 refers to a “John Younger” the son of John Halliday and Margaret McKie being “but a young boy” at the time.

In addition to the Antiguan, John and Margaret had other children. Buried with their parents are James, Jane, Marg’ (Margaret) and David; a sad reminder of the high levels of infant mortality before the nineteenth century END-NOTE *1. Otherwise A.L.H. has uncovered no material to supplement the biography in Chapter 3 (i) of Hallidays.

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3.1 John the Antiguan, Third Owner of Castlemains/Castledykes, (1715-1779)

A narrative of the life of John Halliday of Antigua appears in Hallidays: Chapter 3 (iii-v). In researching his claim to be considered Representer of the Castlemains Hallidays, A.L.H. encountered documents and other material touching on the life of his ancestor. It is probable that many of the relevant records used here: the early Wills of John END-NOTE * 2; Elizabeth Schaw’s entertaining “Journal of a Lady of Quality”; and the West Indian studies of Vere Langford Oliver (VLO) would not have been available to Stratford Charles Halliday (S.C.H.) when in the early 1900s he was collecting the material used by CATH in the 1970s as the basis for Hallidays.

In preparing this expanded and somewhat revised perspective on the life of John Halliday, A.L.H. has benefitted from the work and suggestions of others. Gerald Halliday, A.L.H.’s first cousin once removed, living in Australia, has kindly suggested historical sources that touch on John’s life in Antigua. Mike Ball has researched the life of Samuel Martin who was John’s protégé and successor as Collector of Customs. The material provided in his unpublished monograph has proved invaluable in illuminating aspects of John Halliday’s life, notably his role in the slave trade.

The life of John Halliday (1715-1793) is the story of the son of a substantial Kirkudbright farmer who goes to the West Indies in 1738 aged 23 as a merchant; marries an heiress in 1741; raises a family; and assumes public office as an elected member of the Legislative Council. In 1759 he is appointed Collector of Customs and, in 1763, a member of the Governor’s Council. Either through inheritance from his father-in-law or by his own purchase, he acquires eight sugar plantations. In 1779 he dies in England a man with property in Richmond and of course the family’s acreage in Kirkudbright. The Antiguan plays a pivotal role in the fortunes of the Hallidays of Castlemains/Castledykes. The wealth John acquired by dint of energy, enterprise and perhaps charm propelled the family from the misty banks of the Cree to the sunnier leas of the Thames. He was able to purchase Army Commissions for his sons and introduce them to the upper echelons of English society.

Like most emigrants, John’s move from Galloway to the Caribbean was most probably motivated by economics. Kirkudbright in the early

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eighteenth century was far from flourishing. Daniel Defoe, wrote of a visit to Kirkudbright in 1724:

“Here is a pleasant situation yet nothing pleasant to be seen. Here is a harbour without ships, a port without trade, a fishery without nets, a people without business; and that, which is worse than all, they do not seem to desire business, much less do they understand it.” (Defoe, 1748) END-NOTE *3

If prospects were unpromising in Kirkudbright, they would have appeared brighter across the Atlantic. Scots, and their Ulster kin, already in the West Indies would have reported on, and doubtless exaggerated, the bounteous opportunities available to energetic young men.

Arriving in Antigua in 1738, John would have encountered a small community of Scots from Galloway. Among them members of the extended Halliday family as well as the Martins who were related by marriage (John of Antigua’s Aunt Joan or Jean had married yet another Samuel Martin). It is quite likely too that John the father (1682-1756) would have had trading contacts in Ireland with the Delap family who had originated (as Dunlops) in Ayr. Francis Delap was a plantation owner in Antigua who became John’s business partner. John was to marry Francis’s daughter Elizabeth in 1741. Scottish relations would have eased young John’s transition to the business culture and social mores of the Islands.

That John prospered in his new home and probably wrote glowingly of his experience, is supported by the fact that he was soon joined in the West Indies by his younger brother William who settled in nearby St. Kitts. It seems likely too that there was a third brother, Alexander, who also settled in St. Kitts where he died, aged 23 year and 11 months, in October 1754. (See 3.2 and 3.3 below).

The Antigua on which John Halliday disembarked in 1738 had been an English possession since 1632. The Island’s early years of settlement were troubled. The settlers were subject to raids from Carib Indians located on the island of Dominica (not colonized until 1765). No sooner had the Carib threat disappeared than Antigua and St. Kitts (originally a an Anglo/French “condominium”) became theatres for the frequent hostilities between England and, in turn, Holland and France that spilled from Europe to the Caribbean. By 1700 the French had settled Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Grenada and St. Lucia. Sea

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engagements involving both regular navies and privateers were common in wartime and islands were invaded. During John Halliday’s time in Antigua (1738-1776) the Island was subject to French naval and privateering raids on shipping in 1739-49 and 1756-63. But there was no French landing. END-NOTE*4.

The development of the Antigua settlement also faced natural challenges. As today’s tourists can attest, the Island is arid with very little surface water; just ponds that evaporate in the dry season. The dearth of water was only alleviated by the discovery of some underground springs and the building of costly cisterns to capture rain for irrigation. The Island was subject to hurricanes, a major one struck in 1772, and earthquakes. Yet the settlement not only survived, but, with the introduction of sugar, it flourished and by the time of John Halliday’s arrival in 1738, whites in Antigua would have enjoyed living standards far above those prevailing in Scotland or even England.

In Antigua, as elsewhere in the English Caribbean, sugar, first introduced into Barbados in around 1650, had, by the late seventeenth century, replaced tobacco as the staple cash crop (on mainland North America tobacco and later cotton were more important). Increasingly the plantations of the New World turned to black slavery to satisfy their demand for cheap and compliant labour. Africans proved much more capable than the local Indians and Europeans of sustaining heavy manual labour in tropical heat and more resistant to the endemic diseases of the region, notably malaria and dengue fever.

In Antigua the rise of sugar can be tracked in the growth of the slave population. From small beginnings around 1670, slaves had, by the turn of the century, come to far outnumber whites. At the time of John Halliday’s arrival blacks constituted some 85% of Antigua’s population. Indeed the risk of a slave revolt became the principal security threat to the settlers END-NOTE *5. It is hardly surprisingly, and indeed would have been a legal requirement, that John joined the local militia (Carbineers) soon after arriving on the Island

The inevitable concomitant of a slave based plantation economy on Antigua and elsewhere in the Caribbean was the development of the slave trade. Despite their toughness, slave populations in the Caribbean were not expected to be self-generating. Mortality rates were high among the overworked and under-nourished slaves and low cost replacements were readily available for purchase from Africa. Until the eighteenth century, the carriage of slaves from Africa to the New World was dominated by the Portuguese and Dutch. But the English government legislated via the Navigation Acts (1650-1651) to

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ensure a national monopoly in slave trading between Africa and England’s transatlantic possessions. (France enacted similar measures)

Slave shipping ventures became important in the commercial life of the English ports of Bristol and London but by the eighteenth century vessels registered in Liverpool came to dominate England’s slave trade. Crew wages in Liverpool were lower than in the older ports and Liverpool -based ships could sail around the North or Ireland into the Atlantic with much less risk from French privateers that harassed English shipping in the Channel during the frequent Anglo-French hostilities of the eighteenth century.

It is safe to assume that, after sugar itself, slaves constituted the most profitable cargoes for English ships plying the Atlantic. Typically a Liverpool based ship would carry trade goods: iron, cloth, rum and those vital tools for slave collection by the Africans, muskets, powder and shot. These manufactures would be used to pay coastal chiefs for the slaves, ivory and indigo, collected from the interior. The ships would then proceed to the Caribbean and North America to disgorge their slaves before returning to their home ports to unload sugar, rum and tobacco picked up in the colonies, as well as African products notably ivory. John of Antigua describes himself in his 1757 Will as “merchant”. CATH (p. 13) confirms that John was ‘sent out as a merchant’ but leaves unanswered the nature of his business. Unfortunately perhaps for the sensitivities of his descendants, there is evidence that John, together with his father-in-law and his own brother William, played a role in the importation and distribution of slaves probably as local agents for a Liverpool merchant venturer END-NOTE *6. As local agents, Francis Delap and the Halliday brothers would have taken delivery of slaves; paid off the ship’s captain; and perhaps after holding them for rehabilitation, taken the slaves to public auction. They would have profited from their involvement to the extent that the price received at auction exceeded the price they paid to the captain plus their local expenses.

In 1741, John Halliday married in St. Pauls’ Parish Church Elizabeth Delap, the elder daughter and heiress of his business partner Francis Delap. The marriage of John and Elizabeth was to prove fecund but, typically of the time, in Scotland as much as in the tropics, disease carried off a number of their children before they reached adulthood:

1. Their first born, a daughter, Margaret, was, according Hallidays and VLO baptized in 1742. VLO provides no parish record for her burial, presumably in St. Kitts, some time after 1776. In 1771,

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aged 29, Margaret married Richard Wilson on the Island of St. Kitts. She features as a substantial beneficiary in all four of John Halliday’s Wills (1757 – 1776).

2. Margaret was quickly followed by a son, Francis, baptized in St. John’s Antigua in 1743 and buried in the same church in 1746.

3. A second daughter Elizabeth was baptized in St. John’s in 1747. She died in 1763 in Richmond1 but unlike her sister Margaret, she does not feature in John Halliday’s first Will of 1756.

4. John of Antigua’s eldest surviving son and heir, John Delap, was baptized in St. John’s Antigua on Nov 23 1749; he died in 1794 and is buried in Leasownes Worcestershire.

5. VLO cites a St. John’s baptismal record for a further son, William, dated Dec 19 1751. The Hallidays Pedigree shows William born in 1752 (END-NOTE * 7) and dyng in 1760. VLO records no burial document in any Antiguan Parish or Richmond.

6. The last child of John and Elizabeth, another Francis. (END-NOTE * 8) was baptized in Richmond Surrey on October 30 1758 and died in England in 1794, the same year, as his elder brother, John Delap. Francis Delap features as a beneficiary in his father’s last three Wills

As recounted in Hallidays, after his father’s death in 1756, John accompanied by his family returned to Britain in 1757. It is documented that John formally resigned from the Antigua Legislature in 1757 on the ground that he was leaving the Island for England “by the first convoy” and that the time of return was “uncertain”. Now head of the family, John needed to arrange for the management of “Castledykes”. The fact that he settled in Richmond suggests that he did not propose to expose his family, brought up the tropics, to the rigors of Scotland. Why Richmond? CATH suggests that there were already Hallidays of Scottish stock and West Indian fortune in Richmond but perhaps the most likely explanation is the fact that Elizabeth Delap who was born there in 1721. (END-NOTE * 9). Later, ties to Richmond would have been cemented by its proximity to Ham House, the home of the Tollemaches.

One has the impression from reading Hallidays that, after 1757, John adopted Richmond as his base while travelling to Antigua periodically to supervise his affairs there. But the evidence available, not all of 1

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which may have been accessible to CATH and his grandfather SCH, suggests that John in fact returned to Antigua in 1758 or 1759 and remained there more or less continuously until his retirement from the Collectorship in c.1776. This does not preclude short visits to Britain to see his family and perhaps also to fetch his “apprentice” young Samuel Martin (see below). The most likely dates for such a visit would be 1765 and/or 1767. John draw up Wills on these dates and it was a common practice at that time to prepare Wills before undertaking the North Atlantic crossing, perilous even in peace time. John was certainly in England in 1770 to attend John Delap’s planned but abruptly cancelled wedding to Miss Byron.

What is the evidence that leads this author at least to the conclusion that John was a more or less permanent resident in Antigua from 1759 and 1776? First, there are the various iterations John’s Will. In the initial, 1756, version, he describes himself as “of Castlemains” in “North Britain (END-NOTE * 10). In his three subsequent Wills (1765, 1767, and 1776) John styles himself “of Antigua” without any reference to Richmond, England, or indeed Scotland. It would certainly be bizarre for anyone permanently residing in England to describe himself as “of Antigua”.

A further reason to question CATH’s version of John’s residence relates to income. John did not acquire his first plantation, “Delaps” until the death of his father-in-law Francis Delap, in 1763. He subsequently purchased seven or eight more plantations. (END-NOTE *11). Absentee owners were certainly a feature of Caribbean sugar plantations and indeed John himself was an absentee owner from 1776 until his death in 1779. John Delap, his heir seemingly never set foot on the Island after 1757. However, one would have expected that if John were an absentee owner he would have wanted to control his acquisitions centrally and preferably through a kinsman. Samuel Martin probably assumed this role in 1776.

In 1757 John was still relatively young (42) and although he stood to inherit from his father- in-law he was not yet assured of the plantation and “collector” income that he was later to enjoy. How could John support himself and his family in Richmond in comfort without access to income from Antigua? Apart from the relatively modest rent from Castledykes (shared with his mother and William Lidderdale) John’s only income in 1757 would have been derived from the Antigua trading partnership with Francis Delap and John’s brother William Halliday. John could not have expected his partners to allow him access to the profits of the partnership without contributing to their accumulation END-NOTE *12. There is no evidence that John attempted to become

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gainfully employed in England. Instead he returned to Antigua without his family to acquire a fortune first as “Collector” and later from the rents of his sugar plantations.

John became Collector of Customs in Antigua in 1759. The Collector’s position dates from 1663 when the English Crown decreed that a levy of 4.5% should be imposed on exports by Colonial Governments. The proceeds of the levy were intended primarily to defray the cost of colonial government. However, from all the evidence, the holder of the office was free to divert some portion of the export tax collected to his own use and Collectors were expected to profit from the post.

We know that when about to leave Antigua for good in 1775, John transferred the Collectorship to his protégé Samuel Martin (END-NOTE *13). How John acquired so profitable an office in the first place is unclear but from available evidence it seems that the post was, at that time, in the gift of Colonel Samuel Martin then the Speaker of the Antigua Assembly and thus, after the Governor, the most important man in the Colony’s political institutions. We don’t know whether the Colonel exacted any financial quid pro quo from John Halliday in return for the position – perhaps just his agreement to transfer the post eventually the younger Samuel Martin. But when in 1775/6 John transferred the Collectorship to young Samuel Martin (a fairly distant kinsman of the Colonel) the latter bound himself to the Colonel to pay annuities to certain members of the Martin family END-NOTE *14. To the modern observer these arrangements will appear grossly patrimonial; they imply that individuals, even families, had a heritable right to dispose of public offices and even a portion of their proceeds. Obviously, in the absence of a fixed salary, the holder of the position himself was entitled to a share of the proceeds and so of course was the Crown; customs duties were probably its only regular source of revenue from which to meet the ongoing expenses of government. The division of the revenue between Collector and Crown remains unclear and was possibly negotiated and variable.

John’s fortunes began their rapid ascent from the time of accession to the Collectorship. Indeed it is quite possible that with the death of brother William Halliday in 1759 and father-in-law, Francis Delap in 1763, the slave trading partnership was dissolved and John devoted his growing fortune to the acquisition of plantations. In addition to the Collectorship, we know that John held other, non-remunerative, public positions that would have necessitated his presence on the Island. In 1761 John was re-elected to the Island legislature to represent Willoughby Bay. There is no evidence that he subsequently resigned this seat as he had in 1757. His electorate would have expected their representative to be locally based. Moreover, John was, in 1763,

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appointed a member of the Governor’s Executive Council a post that was perhaps ex officio, but one that would have required an ongoing involvement in the affairs of the Island.

The Documentary evidence that John was a more or less permanent resident of Antigua between 1759 and 1776 is strongly reinforced by an outside source of which CATH was probably unaware. In December 1774 a middle aged Scots spinster, Janet Schaw visited Antigua with her brother and was immediately taken up by the Scots plantocracy including John Halliday END-NOTE *15. In her Journal Miss Schaw describes John as from Galloway END-NOTE *16, is above fifty but extremely genteel in his person and most agreeable in his manners; he has a very great fortune and lives with elegance and taste. His family resides in England and he lives the life of a Bachelor. The Journal records John’s lavish hospitality:

We found Mr. Martin END-NOTE 17 at the church door with our carriages into which we mounted and were soon at Mr. Halliday’s plantation where he this day dined for he had no less than five, all of which have houses on them. This house is extremely pleasant and so cool that one might forget they were under the Tropick. We had a family dinner, which in England might figure away in a newspaper, had it been given by a Lord Mayor, or the first Duke in the kingdoms. Why should we blame these people for their luxury? Since nature holds out her lap filled with every thing that is in her power to bestow, it were sinful in them not to be luxurious ….After a description of typical Antiguan meals that include turtle, fish, and mutton Miss Schaw END-NOTEs at Mr. Halliday’s we had thirty two different fruits and were served burgundy, a rare treat.

For all that she is evidently impressed by his table, Janet Schaw , as a careful Scot, does not spare John Halliday some criticism for his ostentation: we learn that his coach was drawn by English horses “a very needless piece of expense” given the availability of cheaper alternatives from New England or the Spanish colonies.

Miss Schaw’s impressions of Antigua, its cuisine, scenery, climate and society are generally very positive. While her brother Alexander, with whom she had travelled from Edinburgh, visited St. Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat, Janet was happy to remain on Antigua. On his retune, Alexander tries to persuade her of the superior merits of neighbouring islands she writes:

It will not be easy to make me believe it possible to excel Antigua. I will not deny I am partial to this delightful spot and go

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where I will my heart will retain a grateful sense of the hospitable reception we have met with and the numberless civilities we have received from every Individual. I think the men the most agreeable creatures I ever met with, frank, open, generous, and I dare say brave; even in advanced life they retain the Vivacity and Spirit of Youth; they are generally handsome and all of them have a sort of air that will ever attend a man of fashion. Their address is at once soft and manly; they have a kind of gallantry in their manner, which exceeds mere politeness, and in some countries we know, would be easily mistaken more interesting than civility, yet you must not suppose this the politeness of French manners, merely words of course. No, what they say, they really mean; their whole intention it to make you happy, and this they endeavor to do without any other view or motive than what they are prompted to by the natural goodness of their own natures. In short, …. the woman that brings her heart here will have little sensibility if she carry it away.

This paean to the Island’s plantocracy can almost certainly be taken to embrace John Halliday who is frequently mentioned in the Journal. Equally, however, she probably includes him in the rebuke that immediately follows:

I hear you ask me, if there is no alloy to this fine character, no reverse to this beautiful picture. Alas! my friend, tho’ children of the Sun they are mortals , and as such must have their share of failings, the most conspicuous of which is, the indulgence they give themselves in their licentious and even unnatural amours, which appears too plainly, from the crowds of Mulattoes, which you meet in the streets, houses and indeed everywhere; a crime that seems to have gained sanction from custom, tho’ attended with the greatest inconvenience not only to Individuals, but to the publick in general. The young black wenches lay themselves out for white lovers in which they are but too successful. This prevents their marrying with their natural mates, and hence a spurious and degenerate breed, neither so fit for the field nor indeed any work, as the true bred Negro. …. I would have gladly drawn a veil over this part of the character, which in everything else is most estimable.

Miss Schaw’s term “living the life of a Bachelor” in describing John Halliday in 1775 is of course open to varying interpretations in the twenty-first century. At its most innocent, it may simply mean that John had no lady in his life. But a more plausible explanation is that like many of his fellow planters and other whites in the West Indies, often with wives residing in Britain, John was more or less openly enjoying

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the favours of black or mulatto women living in his home as house slaves. Corroboration for this inference can be found in John’s Wills. In the 1767 version we find a very generous bequest to a Rebecca, daughter of Eleanor Ganthanize (sp.?) END-NOTE *18. Then as END-NOTEd in Hallidays, John, in his 1776 Will included as beneficiaries a “mulatto’’ Louisa, her daughter Elizabeth Poiry, and Elizabeth’s son Thomas Halliday. The Will freed Louisa, her children, grandchildren and their issue. There were small bequests to mother and daughter and a very generous benefit for Thomas: £500 (local currency) at 21 with a lifetime annuity of £50. The generosity of the bequest to Thomas coupled with his surname can presumably be taken as an acknowledgement of paternity and, admirably, acceptance of financial responsibility.

Janet Schaw’s observations of John Halliday in Antigua were made only a few months before he was to leave the Island for England to spend his few remaining years with his family in Richmond. Whether he ever returned to Kirkudbright is unrecorded but is perhaps unlikely. His mother Margaret McKie had died in 1771 and Castledykes was managed by William Lidderdale. However, John the Antiguan maintained some links with his Scottish origins. A map of Kirkudbright date 1776 shows “Castledykes” as belonging to John Halliday and in that year he donated to the Burgh, then constructing new port facilities, a portion of the Castledykes property that became the “Pest Yard” where cattle and perhaps humans were held in quarantine on landing END-NOTE*19.

John’s last years coincided with the American Revolution. American privateers were active in the Caribbean as well as the North Atlantic. In 1778 France entered the war and there was a spate of naval engagements between the British and French. English Harbor on Antigua became a busy place providing shelter and re-victualing for English fleets. Trade was disturbed and with it the profitability of West Indian plantations. As a historical footEND-NOTE it may be END-NOTEd that even Kirkudbright was not spared the effects of the American war. In 1778 the Burgh was attacked, without any lasting consequences, by its most famous native son, John Paul Jones (1747-1792). Jones after working on slave ships was commissioned in 1776 as a lieutenant in the newly formed Continental navy and in 1778, from the French port of Brest, conducted daring raids on British shipping in the Irish sea.

Antigua itself had not changed much between John’s arrival in 1738 and his departure in 1776. The slave population had risen in parallel with the acreage under sugar. Exports of Antigua sugar nearly doubled. The “plantocracy” still ran the Island for its own benefit. But if

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Antigua remained much the same as John found it, the world outside was undergoing a transformation. Until interrupted by the rude shock of Yorktown, the century witnessed the emergence of Britain as the unrivalled global oceanic power with a vast accretion of territory and economic weight. It was a time of intellectual ferment led by the French philosophes and luminaries of the Scottish enlightenment notably David Hume and Adam Smith. The slave trade and slavery itself, the foundation of John Halliday’s fortune came under attack from churchmen and even economists like Smith. Retired planters were viewed by the envious stay-at-homes as a new class of ostentatiously wealthy parvenus and accused of undermining Britain’s traditional social order based on dominance by the landed aristocracy and gentry.

John Halliday, his blood acclimated to the sun and heat of the Caribbean would have found Richmond’s winters cold and damp. But he would have died knowing that his energy and enterprise had transformed the fortunes of his family. His descendants, no longer constrained by the hazards of agriculture on the Solway, could now venture into the wider Imperial world with its expanding range of employment opportunities. As we see in Hallidays and Part 4 of this Blog, they embarked on careers in the military, the police, public administration, the professions, and even managed large corporately owned plantations. But so far none have displayed anything resembling John’s entrepreneurial flair.

3.2 William Halliday (c 1720-1759)

William is mentioned in CATH’s pedigree as “believed to be of St. Kitts” but there is no date of birth or record of marriage. But 1720 for a date of birth would seem about right. Vere Langford Oliver in his Halliday pedigree reproduced in his 1894 “History of Antigua” shows William marrying in 1758, a few months before his untimely death, a Jane Wilson whose father Richard was Judge on St. Kitts. Jane was born in in 1737 and thus, at 21, about half her husband’s age at the time of their marriage. There was no issue and Jane died in 1810 at St. George’s Square Marylebone END-NOTE *20. The links between Hallidays and Wilson were reinforced by the marriage of William’s niece Margaret to another Richard Wilson – probably William’s brother-in-law - in 1771. As END-NOTEd above, William features in the narrative as business partner of his elder brother John. and the latter’s father-in-law Francis

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Delap. He also appears in John’s Will of 1756 which appoints him guardian for John Delap.

3.3 Alexander Halliday (1730-1754)Although neither the text nor pedigree of Hallidays records that Margaret McKie and John Halliday (d.1756) had another son surviving childhood, there is strong evidence that in 1730 they produced a third surviving son who joined his brother William in St. Kitts where he died in October 1754. VLO reproduces in his Monumental Inscriptions of St. Kitts the following poignant inscription and testimony to the health hazards of the Caribbean tropics for recent arrivals:

Here lies Interred the Remains ofMr. ALEXANDER HALLIDAY late ofthis Island Merchant who Exchangedhis life for A better on t1st day ofOctober 1754 Aged 23 Years & 11 MonthsTo whose Honour’d MemoryHis brothers JOHN and WILLIAM paidThis Tribute of their unfeigned Love

END-NOTEs (Number refers to text entry) .

1. This list of children differs slightly from that reproduced in Hallidays: CATH’s “Janet” is a mis-transcription of the Jane of the actual gravestone. CATH’s list excludes the David appearing on the actual gravestone. The pedigree attached to Hallidays shows a David as “Treasurer of Kirkudbright” as a second son. But there is no further record of this David. It is in most unlikely that such a David would, as an adult, have been buried with his parents and perhaps this is another example of a son being named after a predeceased sibling. The Hallidays pedigree does mention the William Halliday whose life is covered here in 3.2. However, there is no mention in Hallidays of the Alexander featured in 3.3.

2. John prepared Wills in 1756, 1765, 1767 and 1776. The last, probated in 1779, is quoted in Hallidays p.15. All are archived in the Helmingham Papers that can be viewed on request to Lord Tollemache’s archivist at the Suffolk County Records Office, Ipswich.

3. ALH is indebted to Mike Ball for this quote.

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4. The French had invaded the Island in 1666. The historian and genealogist, Vere Langford Oliver (VLO) records in his History of Antigua that a James Halliday signed Antigua’s capitulation to the French (and for his pains had his acreage reduced from 1400 to 800 when the Island was restored to England in 1668).

5. The father of John’s near contemporary Samuel (c. 1690-1776), another Samuel, was murdered by his own slaves at Christmas 1701. (Christmas, when slave enjoyed a few days holiday and much rum was consumed, was always a stressful time for the proprietors on isolated plantations.) In 1736, two years before John Halliday’s arrival on the Island, 88 slaves were executed for planning to kill whites at a ball.

6. The evidence is incomplete and merits further research. What has come to light is correspondence dated 24 February 1757 between William Davenport the prominent Liverpool slave ship owner, to Francis Delap, and John and William Halliday explaining his plans to seek slaves near the mouth of the Congo (‘where they may be obtained more cheaply than in the traditional collection points further North’). Source?. In addition, there is a letter from William Davenport to one of his captains instructing him to disembark sick slaves to John and William Halliday who will pay him a reduced price and to deliver still healthy slaves for a higher price in the Carolinas. Source: Davidson’s papers (ODAV 1747-1761) held in the John Rylands Library Manchester University. Cited in N.J. Radburn “William Davenport the Slave Trade and Merchant Enterprise in Eighteenth Century Liverpool.” 2009 research thesis - <researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz>

7. Interestingly CATH in the Hallidays pedigree has him born in 1752. Can this be explained by the fact that in the same year Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar which added 12 days to dates in the Julian calendar?

8. It may puzzle moderns that the first and last sons were both named Francis after their maternal grandfather. But it was a common practice at the time to name a new-born after a predeceased sibling.

9. A.L.H . is grateful to Mike Ball for the association of Elizabeth Delap with Richmond.

10. “North Britain” was the legal term used for Scotland for some years after the Union of 1707 which resulted in the formation of “Great Britain”.

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11. According to the inventory of John Delap’s plantation properties in 1788, his father, after inheriting Delaps acquired: Blizzards, Boons, Gambles, Glanvilles, Lavincourts, Rock Hill, St. Mary’s, and Weatherills. It appears uncertain whether Glanvilles and Lavincourts should be treated as separate plantations. A typical sugar plantation had 300 acres, the area needed to produce enough cane to supply a central processing facility where the cane was crushed and the resulting juice reduced by boiling, crystalized and packed in barrels for shipment to Britain. From the inventory (reproduced in Oliver) most of John’s plantations were approximately 300 acres in extent.

12. Although it can be no more than speculation, John and his partners may originally have intended to expand their Antiguan trading business by entering the slave trade as shippers on their own account. Richmond would have been a good base to tap the capital of London’s financiers and purchase/lease the abundant shipping available at its docks. His father-in-law Francis and brother William would continue to look after the business in West Indies. It may have been John’s original intention to place a young relative in his stead in Antigua.. We are told in Hallidays that William Lidderdale, aged 29 in 1757 was selected for this role. But if it was indeed the plan of John’s and his business partners “to move up the supply chain” events were to frustrate it. First William Lidderdale, we are told, preferred to remain with Margaret McKie to run the family farm in Kirkudbright. Second, William Halliday died on St. Kitts in 1759

13. John in his 1776 Will provides: I give to my kinsman Samuel Martin esq. the sum of 100 pounds to be paid him immediately after my decease as a further token of my affection for him having resigned my office as collector of Customs for the Port of St. John in his favour on reasonable terms.

14. And this benefit was inherited by the Colonel’s own son (yet another Samuel). In this regard ALH is grateful to Mike Ball for drawing to his attention a Codicil in the Colonel’s son’s Will reproduced in Oliver’s History of Antigua (Vol.II p.245) which reads in part: 1st. Codicil dated 24 May 1787. No. 84 Pall Mall (Letter to Sam. Martin, Esq., Collector of the Port of St. John’s) By agreement between you and my late father you were to pay annuities of £ 100 to Dr. Malcolm, etc. Dr. Malcolm is dead. My father’s Codicil was dated. 5 March 1775. I desire you to pay £ 110 a year to my nephew Tho. Fitzgerald & to each of his sisters £ 150.

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15. In 1774/5, Janet Schaw from Edinburgh, met John Halliday, Colonel Samuel Martin and young Samuel Martin, John’s protégé. These encounters are described in her “Journal of a Lady of Quality” originally published in 1934 with a 2005 edition published by Bison Books and edited by Stephen Carl Arch. She repeats the common epithet for the Colonel as the “father of Antigua”.

16. Galloway (literally the land of the Irish Gaels) is the region of South Western Scotland that contains the modern County of Kirkudbrightshire.

17. Miss Schaw writes kin late 1774: young Martin, our hostess (a Mrs. Baird) who is very frank, tells us is a favourite of the Collector’s stays always with him and that it is supposed he intends to resign in his favour. (Samuel was indeed to succeed John as Collector in 1775).

18. “£500 pounds sterling currency of Great Britain to be paid her at her age of 21 years or day of marriage which shall first happen with 25 pound to be paid her said annuity being intended as a maintenance to the said Rebecca”. Neither Eleanor nor Rebecca feature in the probated 1776 Will.

19. The sale is mentioned in Kirkudbright: An Alphabetical Guide to its History by David Cullen.

20. Information provided by Mike Ball.

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