Robert William Jameson

Robert William Jameson, WS (1805–1868): A Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, Town Councillor, newspaper editor, poet and playwright, Robert William Jameson was the father of Sir Leander Starr Jameson, South African statesman and prime minister, and the nephew of Professor Robert Jameson of the University of Edinburgh. Born in Edinburgh in 1805, Robert William was the son of Thomas Jameson, a wealthy shipowner, merchant and burgess of the city of Edinburgh, as recorded in Colvin, Vol. 1: 1-2 (1922). Colvin writes of Robert William's father and grandfather, both of whom were named Thomas Jameson, that:

"These Jamesons came, so the tradition goes, from the Shetland Islands; and both their origin and their crest, a ship in full sail, with Sine Metu for motto, suggest that they once followed a seafaring life. But they had been long settled in Leith and Edinburgh." (Colvin, 1922, Vol.1:1).

In 1835 Robert William Jameson married Christian Pringle, daughter of Major-General Pringle of Symington and his wife Christian Watson. The Jamesons had eleven children, of whom Leander Starr was the youngest, born on 9 February 1853.

Having first pursued a career as a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, Robert William's interest in journalism was recognised by his Whig friend and patron the Earl of Stair, who in 1854 made him Editor of the Wigtownshire Free Press, the headquarters of which was based in Stranraer, to which the family moved from Edinburgh, remaining there until 1860.

Robert William was a radical and free thinker, author of the dramatic poem Nimrod, published in 1848 and of the play Timolean, a tragedy in five acts, published and performed at the Adelphi Theatre in Edinburgh in 1852. Timolean, inspired by liberal anti-slavery views of the era, was popular with audiences and ran to a second edition within the first year of publication. In 1854 Jameson published the novel The Curse of Gold.

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