THOMPSON (II), George (1804-1895), of 5 Golden Square, Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire

A self-made shipping magnate, Thompson was a Liberal free trader whose Free Churchmanship influenced his hostility to religious endowments. He was described as ‘an advanced Liberal from an early period of his life, and he consistently maintained these views to the end’.1Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 12 Apr. 1895. The main theme of his political career was his opposition to monopolies, whether protectionist trade policies or church establishments.

Born in London, Thompson’s father was employed by the East India Company as a conductor of stores in Madras. After his father’s death in 1807, the infant Thompson was raised in Aberdeenshire by his maternal grandfather.2Ibid. In Aberdeen he was generally known as George Thompson junior to distinguish him from his paternal grandfather. He was first employed in the London Shipping Company’s office, and later worked as a timber and ship insurance broker.3R. Perren, ‘The nineteenth-century economy’, in W.H. Fraser and C.H. Lee eds., Aberdeen, 1800-2000: a new history (2000), 86. He founded the ‘great shipping company of George Thompson & Company’, which opened a London branch in 1854, and conducted the celebrated Aberdeen clipper line that operated between Britain and China and Australia.4Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 12 Apr. 1895. He was the major partner in the ship-building firm Walter Hood & Company, whose famous vessels included the Aberdeen, Damascus, the Nineveh and the Thermopylae. The last was described as ‘the fastest sailing ship ever built’.5Perren, ‘The nineteenth-century economy’, 86. He was also a director of the North of Scotland Bank and the Great North of Scotland Railway.6Ibid.

When Aberdeen Liberalism divided on essentially sectarian lines in the mid-1840s, Thompson became one of the leaders of the Free Church faction that opposed the Whig Moderates who had hitherto dominated the parliamentary and municipal representation of the city. He gave a forthright summary of his views at the 1847 general election as part of the successful campaign to return the Free Churchman Alexander Dingwall Fordyce. A long-standing opponent of the corn laws, Thompson declared that the navigation laws ‘like any other monopoly’ must ‘result in the injury of the monopolists themselves’. Instead of relying on protection, Aberdeen must ‘become a great emporium of shipbuilding’. He contemptuously dismissed Lord John Russell’s plan for concurrent religious endowment as ‘a sop thrown to all denominations, for the purpose of obtaining political power’. Indeed, Thompson predicted that ‘the abolition of Church Establishments must sooner or later come’.7Aberdeen Journal, 4 Aug. 1847. In the same year Thompson’s accession to the lord provostship signalled the triumph of the Free Church party in municipal politics.

Thompson succeeded the retiring Fordyce as the Free Church candidate at the 1852 general election. During the campaign he advocated a £5 borough franchise, the secret ballot, giving parliamentary representation to Scottish universities, and a national unsectarian system of education.8Aberdeen Journal, 24 Mar. 1852, 5 May 1852. He defended the repeal of the navigation laws by arguing that:

The coasting trade, it was true, had been injured, or nearly destroyed; but this followed wherever railways were introduced. The Baltic trade, again, was never a profitable one; but looking to the India, China, and South American trade, there was no reason for despondency.9Aberdeen Journal, 5 May 1852.

Thompson voted with the free traders in all the key divisions on financial policy in the 1852-3 session, including Gladstone’s budget, 2 May 1853. An opponent of all religious endowments, he backed the ultra-Protestant Richard Spooner’s campaign against the Maynooth grant, 23 Feb. 1853, but supported Russell’s bill for Jewish relief at every stage. He divided in favour of the abolition of church rates in England and the repeal of advertisement duty and the newspaper stamp, but not paper duty, 14 Apr. 1853. Thompson welcomed the 1853 merchant shipping bill, believing that it would remove restrictions on shipping left in place by the repeal of the navigation laws. In particular he approved of clause 29 that repealed the requirement for British ships to have British captains and crew and William Hutt’s unsuccessful amendment to make it illegal for merchant seamen to desert their ships to serve in the royal navy, 15 July, 1 Aug. 1853. The following year he voiced his support for another merchant shipping bill at the second reading, 18 May 1854.

Thompson became a loyal supporter of the Aberdeen coalition after the outbreak of the Crimean war, backing the emergency financial measures to fund the conflict, 9, 15, and 22 May 1854 and opposing Roebuck’s motion for an inquiry into the state of the army before Sebastopol, 29 Jan. 1855. He opposed Disraeli and Roebuck’s censure motions on Palmerston’s handling of the war, 25 May, 20 July 1855, but did support the motions of Austen Henry Layard and Vincent Scully for administrative reform, 18 June, 10 July 1855. He objected to the 1855 education bill for Scotland, correctly noting that ‘the bill pleased nobody’, certainly none of the Presbyterian factions whose support was essential for the measure to be successful.10Hansard, 12 July 1855, vol. 139, cc. 824-5. On the issue see I.G.C. Hutchison, A political history of Scotland, 1832-1924 (1986), 71-83.

Like many Scottish MPs, Thompson had Sabbatarian sympathies, telling his constituents that ‘man had got six days to discharge the business of the world; and he thought it but right that the seventh should be devoted to other purposes’.11Aberdeen Journal, 14 July 1852. Accordingly he opposed Sir Joshua Walmsley’s motion for the Sunday opening of the British Museum and other public institutions, 21 Feb. 1856. A critic of the Bank Acts, Thompson had previously expressed in public speeches his hostility to a ‘monopoly in money, as in other commodities’, and supported George Frederick Muntz’s motion for a select committee on the monetary system, 28 Feb. 1856.12Ibid. After pressing the government to amalgamate the two Aberdeen universities, King’s and Marischal colleges, Thompson introduced his own bill in 1856.13Hansard, 16 June 1856, vol. 142, c. 1494; PP 1856 (267), i. 1-10. The measure would have formally united the two colleges, but kept them ‘separate and independent’. For example, the study of divinity was to be confined to King’s, and law and medicine to Marischal.14Ibid. The bill did not pass, but the union was achieved in 1860 as a government measure.

Thompson signalled his support for political reform by dividing in favour of Locke King’s motion to equalise the borough and county franchise, and Walmsley’s motion for an inquiry into the representative system, 19, 24 Feb. 1857. He divided in favour of Cobden’s censure motion on Canton that defeated Palmerston’s government, 3 Mar. 1857. Thompson retired at the ensuing election apparently after ‘an eminent London medical man … professed to have detected indications of incipient heart disease’.15Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 12 Apr. 1895. However, the unpopularity of his vote was another reason for his resignation, although Lord Aberdeen warmly approved of his conduct, writing: ‘Thompson has taken leave of Aberdeen in a good and stout address; but the China mania seems to be stronger in Aberdeen than in most places’.16Lord Aberdeen to Arthur Hamilton Gordon, 16 Mar. 1857, Add. 43226, f. 240.

After his retirement, Thompson continued his successful business career. In 1850 he had been joined in partnership by his sons and his son-in-law Sir William Henderson and he was later assisted by his grandsons. He purchased the Pitmedden and Rainnieshill estates in 1857 and 1864 respectively. In 1880 he finally agreed to the civic portrait he had declined after stepping down as lord provost of Aberdeen in 1851. In October 1880 the picture, by Sir George Reid, was presented and hung in the town hall.17Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 12 Apr. 1895. Thompson’s longevity meant that he was predeceased by three of his four sons and all of his four daughters. On his death in 1895 he was succeeded by his only surviving son George (1836-1904).