Farming, science and the pre-parliamentary life of Peter McLagan (1823-1900)

In the fourth article in his series on Peter McLagan, MP for Linlithgowshire, 1865-93, Dr Martin Spychal explores McLagan’s early life and pre-parliamentary career. Born in Demerara, McLagan was raised and educated in Scotland, where he established himself as one of the country’s ‘leading agriculturists’ by the 1860s…

Peter McLagan was born in Georgetown, Demerara (now Guyana) in 1823. According to his gravestone he was born on 1 January 1823, but no birth certificate or other contemporary reference specifying his birthdate is known to exist. As discussed in earlier articles in this series, McLagan was the son of a Scottish enslaver and plantation owner in Guyana, who amassed considerable wealth through the exploitation of slavery in the British Caribbean.

The identity of McLagan’s mother is unknown, but she is thought to have been of African and Caribbean heritage. Historians (myself included) have speculated about the identity of McLagan’s mother. I have discussed the possibility that she might have been a woman named ‘Philly’, who was enslaved at McLagan’s household at the time of his birth. Dr Alison Clark has identified two free women, who were enslavers in Georgetown and might have been his mother, Eliza Game and Elizabeth Goodwin.

McLagan was raised in Demerara until June 1825, when he emigrated to Scotland with his father and elder brother, John (c.1815-1850). His father married Elizabeth Hagart Stewart in 1827, following which the family were based in Edinburgh. By the early 1830s, McLagan’s father had purchased an Edinburgh residence at 77 Great King Street. His stepmother died there in November 1833.

Although his family home was in Edinburgh, McLagan received his pre-university education at schools in Peebles and Tillicoultry. In doing so, he became one of hundreds of children of African and Caribbean heritage educated in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a subject explored by historians such as Daniel Livesay, Hakim Adi and David Alston.

It is not known what schools he attended in either town. However, there is a good chance one was the well-regarded Peebles Grammar School. A contemporary reflected that under the rectorship of James Sloane (c.1711-1849) during the early nineteenth century, the school ‘received a large number of boarders from all quarters – from England, America, the West Indies, and India, as well as from various parts of Scotland’.

In November 1838, aged 15, McLagan started attending classes at Edinburgh University. At the behest of his father, McLagan’s university education prepared him for a future career in farming. Specialising in agriculture during his first year and chemistry thereafter, McLagan was a high achieving and ambitious student. Over the next seven years he combined his theoretical studies at the university with hands-on training at farms in nearby Berwickshire and Haddingtonshire (East Lothian). With the support of his father’s wealth, he also complemented his studies with (in his own words) ‘an extensive tour through … countries on the [European] continent distinguished by their superiority in agriculture’. McLagan attended classes at the university until 1845 but did not graduate, which was not uncommon for the time.

After university McLagan was entrusted with farming over 700 acres of land in Midlothian and Linlithgowshire (modern West Lothian) purchased for him by his father in 1844. These extensive, largely adjoining, farmlands were situated in Pumpherston, Mid-Calder; Limekilns and East Mill in Kirknewton; and Stankards [or Stankyards] in the parish of Uphall. In 1855 (when Scottish Valuation Rolls were published for the first time) the land had a combined annual rental value of £947, representing a total value at 30 years’ purchase of £28,410. In 2026, this equated to land with a relative value of somewhere between £3.7 and £30 million.

Over the following two decades, McLagan emerged as a leading, sometimes outspoken, agriculturist and representative of the ‘farming interest’ in Midlothian and Linlithgowshire. Increasingly known for his commitment to, and experimentation with ‘practical and scientific’ farming methods in Pumpherston, he became an adept public speaker and writer on a range of agricultural issues, which prompted him towards a number of overtly political interventions by the early 1860s.

As a farmer, scientist and landed proprietor, McLagan’s chief practical and academic focus became drainage, cultivation and the development of fertilising methods on his Pumpherston farm, which he described in 1861 as chiefly ‘turnip land’. He started sharing research from his farming experiments from the late 1840s, initially at meetings of Scottish agricultural societies, and through articles in the agricultural press. His research on turnip cultivation meant he became regarded for his expertise in ‘special manures’, and by the early 1860s he was co-ordinating county-wide research into different types of South American guano and synthetic substitutes, as President of the Western Districts of Midlothian Agricultural Association.

A proficient administrator, McLagan was also appointed to several official posts and committees in the Highland and Agricultural Society during the 1850s, which included compiling official statistics for the Board of Trade, selecting essays for its journal and acting as an examiner for its education department.

He was rewarded for his work for Scotland’s agricultural associations with a public dinner in Edinburgh in August 1862. In a striking speech to the event, he celebrated the ‘extraordinary progress’ of Scottish farming, and the expansion of the agricultural industry, during the previous two decades, which he attributed to the ‘light of science’. In his own field, he suggested that scientific experimentation in fertilising methods had led to a revolution in farm production akin to the impact of the steam-engine in manufacturing.

McLagan’s agricultural pursuits brought him gradually into the realm of local administration and national politics. He was JP for Midlothian from 1853, sat on the court that fixed county grain prices by the end of the decade and accompanied the successful Conservative candidate for Midlothian to the nomination at the 1859 election.

His first foray into politics had come unwittingly a few years earlier in 1854, when he attracted national attention for an ‘uncommonly able speech’ to the Mid Calder Agricultural Association on the reform of Scottish roads. The speech was published as a pamphlet and discussed in national newspapers, leading to McLagan giving evidence to the Royal Commission on Scottish Roads in 1859 and his continual presence at public meetings on the topic over the next decade.

The death of McLagan’s father in 1860, and his succession as sole heir to the family estates, correlated with a further increase in his political activity. From 1861 he emerged as a vocal member of the Agricultural Dwellings Association. In a series of public speeches, he struck a paternalistic conservative tone to call on proprietors and tenants to fund improvements to accommodation for their labourers. On some Scottish estates, he warned, labourers were ‘worse housed than the beasts on the farm’.

He also advocated for employment via generous piece rates (rather than day wages) as the best means of retaining agricultural workers, and increased ‘household visitations’ by local clergy to farm labourers – suggesting that ‘the prosperity of a state is promoted by an industrious, intelligent, and religious labouring class’. In 1863 he advised the Social Science Congress in Edinburgh that an adoption of farm lets based on similarly paternalistic principles would stave off demands of the tenant right movement.

At around the same time McLagan became active within a rebel faction in the Highland Society that wanted to professionalise Scottish agriculture and unite its disparate societies and associations. In doing so, he urged the creation of a Scottish agricultural university, along the lines of the English Royal Agricultural College (est. 1845), and a professorship in agricultural science at the University of Edinburgh.

Frustration with the response of the Highland Society contributed to McLagan playing a central role in founding the Scottish Chamber of Agriculture during 1864. He acted as chairman in January 1865 of the first general meeting of the Chamber , whose primary aim was ‘to watch over the interests of practical agriculture’ and ‘consider questions that may be introduced into Parliament connected with agriculture’. A few weeks later McLagan was identified as a candidate for Linlithgowshire at the 1865 election…

MS

Check back for the next article in the series next year. This article reflects ongoing research into Peter McLagan (1865-1900). The author would like to thank Stephen Willis, David Alston and the participants of a workshop on Peter McLagan held at the National Archives in October 2025. If you would like to discuss this article and the sources used, please contact Martin at mspychal@histparl.ac.uk.

To read Martin’s series on Peter McLagan:

Part 1: Peter McLagan (1823-1900): Scotland’s first Black MP

Part 2: Peter McLagan senior (1774-1860): enslaver, plantation owner and landed proprietor

Part 3: ‘Philly’ or ‘Filly’ (c.1790-unknown): mother and enslaved domestic worker of Barbados and Guyana

Part 4: Farming, science and the pre-parliamentary life of Peter McLagan (1823-1900)

Suggested Reading

S. Cavanagh, Pumpherston: the Story of a Shale Oil Village (2002), 71-74

D. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (2018)

D. Livesay, ‘Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Migration From the West Indies to Britain, 1750-1820’, PhD Thesis, Univ. Michigan, 2010

D. Livesay, ‘Extended Families: Mixed-Race Children and the Scottish Experience, 1770-1820’, International Journal of Scottish Literature, (2008), 1-17

H. Adi, African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History (2023)

D. Alston, Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (2021)

L. Williams, ‘African Caribbean Residents of Edinburgh in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Kalfou, 7 (2020), 42-49

E. A. Cameron, ‘McLagan, Peter (1822/3-1900)’, Oxford DNB (2023), www.oxforddnb.com

D. W. Main, ‘The Remarkable Career of Peter McLagan MP’, History Scotland (April 2021)

D. W. Main, ‘Peter McLagan, Scotland’s first Black MP’, Scottish Local History, 123 (2026), 51-53

Scotlands People, ‘Our records: Peter McLagan (1823–1900), British Liberal Party politician and Scotland’s first black MP’, (2022)

A. Clark, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Empire, 1790-1838: Scottish Traders in the Southeast Carribean: Slavery, Cotton and the Rise of Sandbach Tinné & Co.’, PhD Univ. Edinburgh (2024)

C. Bressey, ‘The Next Chapter: The Black Presence in the Nineteenth Century’, in G. Gerzina (ed.), Britain’s Black Past (2020), 315-30

K. N. Abraham & J. Woolf, Black Victorians (2023)

N. File & C. Power, Black Settlers in Britain 1555-1958 (1981)