1 January 1824: The Bicentenary
The first Macmillan joins the booktrade
On 1 January 1824, at the tender age of ten, a boy named Daniel Macmillan was apprenticed to Maxwell Dick, bookseller and bookbinder of Irvine, Ayshire for seven years – at one shilling and sixpence a week with a rise of one shilling a week for each of the remaining six years thereafter. If his widowed mother and his brothers could not afford any more schooling for him, they could at least place him somewhere he might continue to educate himself, and keep warm. This simple decision, to put young Daniel to work in a safe but stimulating environment, would lead directly to the foundation of Macmillan & Co, one of the great international publishing houses, still thriving today.
Irvine in the 1820s was a smart little market town. There is a painting of the high street in 1819, just after the Macmillans had arrived, and it shows a wide paved road with elegant two-storey buildings stretching for some distance and, in the middle of the road, a large building with a tall steeple, which was the ancient tollbooth then in use as the Council chamber and prison cells combined.
The town was an ancient royal burgh with a grammar school which dated back to the sixteenth century, undistinguished apart from the fact that Edgar Allan Poe had been a pupil there for a year in 1815 while living with his Scottish relations, the Allans. It could hardly have been more different from the site of Daniel’s birth on the Isle of Arran.
Achog, the Macmillan’s farm above the granite boulder known as the Cat Stone between Corrie and Sannox, has long disappeared. Even in the 1960s a local historian tried to photograph the ruins but had trouble making them out. He thought there had been a traditional long blackhouse with two small cottages. It had been one of the larger farms on Arran with thirty-two acres of arable land, twenty-one of pasture and access to twenty-seven acres of open moorland for grazing cattle. ‘A most humble house on the brow of a hill’, as Daniel Macmillan later described his parents’ home, overlooking the sea, and on clear days one could see the Ayrshire coast some forty miles away. Behind the house were the mountains, sometimes covered in snow. It might have looked pretty, but the land was of little value – the soil was so poor that it could barely support the grazing of cattle and sheep. The family often went hungry.
Daniel’s father Duncan preached in Gaelic and his wife Katharine clung to her Bible. But the demands of their family became overwhelming: the couple would produce twelve children in all, over twenty-four years. The little cottage must have been a noisy place until suddenly stilled in the terrible year of 1814, when the couple’s four youngest daughters, Janet, Bell, Ann and Lizzie, were carried off by some nameless epidemic within a few weeks. It is possible that the five older children only survived because they had already left to find work of some kind: certainly the two oldest boys, Malcolm and William, had settled on the mainland and were working as carpenters in Irvine. The three older daughters, Mary, Katherine and Margaret survived, as did little Daniel, born on 13 September 1813, the tenth child and the third son. This terrible loss seems if anything to have strengthened the parents’ spirituality. Duncan and Katharine would need their faith to cope with the troubles ahead.
In later life, Daniel often spoke of his childhood – his Calvinist training, the morning and evening prayers, grace before and after meals, going to the kirk, the quiet solemnity of the Sabbath. Both brothers always spoke of their mother Katharine with reverence. ‘She is gone from this world but her influence can never die’ wrote Daniel to his fiancée Fanny in the summer of 1850: ‘she helped to form my brothers and sisters: they have influenced others, and so the good works through all generations.’ Alexander wrote: ‘My mother was a woman of very devout nature and habits, whose daily life was, as I believe, lived as in the conscious presence of God.’
In 1815 the enforcement of enclosure on Arran meant that the farm could no longer support Duncan and Katharine, and in 1816 they left for Irvine. The family settled at 25 Townhead, a one-storey thatched terraced cottage close to the parish church, and this is where Alexander Macmillan was born. They continued to keep animals, a few cows on the burgh moor, and tried to grow crops – Daniel remembered as a little boy having to watch the cows to keep them from straying into the corn. Many years later, Alexander would tell his second wife Emma of the admiration and gratitude he had for his mother ‘and the brave bringing up of his cottage home in Irvine.’ He never forgot the devotion with which his mother ‘rested the little tired feet of her boys by bathing them with oatmeal at night, before putting them to bed, while she kept their minds alive with Bible stories and with what she knew of Dante and Milton.’
By 1823 Duncan Macmillan’s health had completely broken down, and he died, leaving Katharine with three children under the age of ten. Daniel remembered him as suffering from cold after cold ‘so between one thing and another his vigorous, robust, manly frame was all too soon broken up and gave way. A braver more upright man never left this world . . . he was most truly a king and priest and true “man of God”.’He is buried in the graveyard of Irvine parish church, under a gravestone carefully repaired by his grandchildren in 1902.
Daniel, just ten years old and already a voracious reader like his mother, had been attending school for several years and was being coached and encouraged in his studies by his two older brothers, but there was no money for further education. As Tom Hughes put it: ‘The marvellously few pounds which seem to be sufficient to maintain a Scotch lad at a Scotch University were not forthcoming in his case: and at the age when he should have been tramping to Glasgow to enter himself as a student, Daniel had already served his apprenticeship and was in full work in his trade.’
The full story of how Daniel and his brother Alexander founded the great publishing powerhouse that bears their name is told in Literature for the People, to be published in May this year, two hundred years after Daniel first entered the trade. And here is a reminder of how far and how fast this family would rise: This is Daniel’s grandson, escorting the Queen through Oxford in his role as Chancellor of the University.
What a story! I will get the book. Thank you for sharing
This is such a great story, expertly told as ever. Thank you for this.