Charles Cowan

Charles Cowan FRSE (7 June 1801 – 1889) was a Scottish politician and paper-maker.

For the Welsh-born English cricketer, see Charles Cowan (cricketer).

Charles Cowan
Born(1801-06-07)June 7, 1801
Crail, Fife
Died1889 (aged 87-88)
Scotland
NationalityScottish
OccupationPaper-maker (1819-1847)
Edinburgh MP (1847-1859)

Life

He was born in Charlotte Street in Edinburgh on 7 June 1801, the son of Alexander Cowan, papermaker and philanthropist, and Elizabeth Hall, daughter of George Hall a merchant in Crail in Fife. He was the eldest of eleven children, eight of whom survived until adulthood.[1] He was educated at Penicuik Parish School 1806-11 and then the High School in Edinburgh. He then attended university both in Edinburgh (1814–17) and Geneva (1817-18).[2]

He then followed his father into the paper-making industry.

He wrote the article on papermaking for the Encyclopædia Britannica.[3] In May 1819, he was sent to learn the papermaking trade at St Mary Cray, Kent, where he worked at either Lay's or Hall's mill on the River Cray.[4]

In the general election of June 1847, he ran as a Radical free-trade candidate in Edinburgh, defeating the incumbent Whig Thomas Babington Macaulay. His initial election was declared null and void due to his being a party to a government contract, but he was re-elected in a second election that December.[5] He was re-elected in the 1852 election in second place on the ballot, and returned unopposed in the 1857 election. He did not stand in 1859, and retired from politics.

In 1863 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Scotland.[2] He then lived at Mount Grange a large house in the Grange on the south side of Edinburgh.[6]

He died at Wester Lea, a villa in Murrayfield, Edinburgh on 29 March 1889.[2]

Family

He married Catharine Menzies (d.1871) in 1824.

Other accomplishments
gollark: I do. It just freezes horribly.
gollark: I've never actually seen the in-kernel OOM killer do anything.
gollark: You said something about not considering malicious programs doing evilness to memory management.
gollark: I mean that it has isolation mechanisms, so other stuff like memory management should not allow stuff to access other things in violation of those.
gollark: Can most programs do that, however?

References
Notes
  1. Machin, Ian. "Cowan, Charles". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/47109. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. Waterston, C D; Macmillan Shearer, A (July 2006), Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783 – 2002 (pdf), Edinburgh: The Royal Society of EdinburghCS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  3. Six generations of Cowans at the Valleyfield Mills, Penicuik Community Arts Association Archived 1 January 2006 at the Wayback Machine
  4. Rootsweb
  5. New Edinburgh Almanac and National Repository. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. 1850.
  6. "List of the Ordinary Fellows of the Society". Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 26 (01): xi–xiii. 2013. doi:10.1017/S008045680002648X. ISSN 0080-4568.
Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by
William Gibson-Craig
Thomas Babington Macaulay		 Member of Parliament for Edinburgh
1847–1859
With: William Gibson-Craig to 1852
Thomas Babington Macaulay 1852–56
Adam Black from 1856		 Succeeded by
Adam Black
James Moncreiff


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