Talk:Samuel Congalton

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I have added Poems and Sketches by Rev Alexander Wallace to the list of references. Its final pages (165-213), entitled One from the Ranks, constitute a brief biography of Samuel Congalton. Unfortunately it's not very searchable. The Internet Archive version of the same work at One from the Ranks is much better in this respect but has missing pages. Nevertheless it's to that version that the pages numbers I cite here refer.

A number of sources (including the article Piracy by Dr. Gilbert E. Brooke in 'One hundred years of Singapore' assert that Samuel Congalton was born at Leith – but he wasn't. In One from the Ranks Alexander Wallace Wallace says that Sam was born in Dirleton near North Berwick, East Lothian 40 km east of Leith. Although (on p17 and others) Wallace alludes to the village as D———, it is clear from his mention of Craigleith (p7) and North Berwick (p 17) that he is referring to Dirleton. Furthermore, the "very tasteful marine house of A———" (p 7) is actually Archerfield, just west of Dirleton. It is now a golf club-house. And the "neat country village of A———" where is brother lived (p96) is Aberlady. This brother, incidentally, is almost certainly not the one that did live in Leith and sent Sam home to Dirleton. There is confirmation of Sam's birthplace in ScotlandsPeople. ScotlandsPeople gives his date of birth as 04/04/1797 but I believe this is actually the date he was baptised and that the date of birth given by Brooke (23/03/1796)is correct. The brother of Sam who lived in Aberlady was John, a master shoemaker. A year or two before John died, Alexander Wallace paid him a visit and that's how he obtained most of the material he used in writing 'One from the Ranks'.

There was an oil painting of Sam in the National Museum of Singapore in 1919 (when it was Raffles Library and Museum). If it survived the Japanese occupation, and is still there, it would be very good to have an image of it on his Wiki page. Had I known about Sam when I visited the place in 2008, I would have photographed it and obtained permission to use it. Sam had a nephew, William Congalton, who he may have seen as a babe in arms when he made his one return visit to Aberlady in the late 1820s. William became a lieutenant in the RNR and had at least one merchant command – the clipper Robert Lowe from 1855 to c1865. During that time he notched up two or three notable achievements. I will probably do a Wiki page on him.

Robert Cutts Bristol filer (talk) 13:52, 24 September 2011 (UTC)