DEATH OF MR JAMES MORTON.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1738, 17 May 1888, Page 4

DEATH OF MR JAMES MORTON.

Yesterday morning, at 9 o’clock, bowed down with the weight of years and poverty, a man died in the Nurses’ Home, Renfrew street, Glasgow, who in the years not long gone past played a remarkable part in the commercial life of Glasgow. This was Mr James Morton, who, after a rather extraordinary rise from the humblest circumstances to the most prominent merchant in the commercial capital of Scotland, experienced a fall quite as unprecedented, but only after he bad succeeded in involving hundreds in the ruin he had wrought. In his earlier years the deceased laboured as a humble boy on a farm and later he sold milk from house to house in the streets of Glasgow. Growing tired of this kind of work, and being of a rather speculative turn of mind, he abandoned the milk for stationery, and in a short time ho was in a position to open a shop for the sale of note paper and similar commodities in Glassford street. From the counter his ambition led him still further on into the world of commerce, and he dipped, so far as his means would allow, into various speculations. In one of the first with which he was connected matters went so badly that a commercial crisis was brought about. This was in 1847, when, as a partner in the firm of William Laird and Co., he was sequestrated. After this be continued straight on in his course, and tried his hand at sheep farming in New Zealand, to which he exported in large numbers animals of various breeds from this country. He gradually became a man of reputed wealth, and had gained a first-class position when the crash came in 1878 with the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank. The directors of: the bank, as most people will remember, were punished in accordance with the criminal law of the country for the mismanagement which led to the disaster; but James Morton, the icity merchant, who, more perhaps than any other man was the cause of [the destruction of that bank and the {necessary terrible consequences to [hundreds of individuals, escaped scot jfree. It was discovered then that the I man who had lived as a model of beneIvolence and had drained the bank to Its last penny, was himself a bankrupt I and a pauper. On the 22nd October, after the failure of the bank, Mr James Morton, of 204 West George street Glasgow; Elderslie House, Renfrewshire; and Victoria Hotel, Euston square, London, presented a petition for liquidation to the London Bankruptcy Court on behalf of the firm trading as Messrs Morton and Taylor* and their debts were set down a* 1 62,000,000. Morton had for a length of time, it appeared, drawn on the bank, from which false balance sheets

were issued by the directors, and it was said that the week before it closed he received £60,000 in hard cash. There was now no hope for him, and he sank into obscurity. Eer a time he engaged himself at his original occupation, and again drove a milk cart through G-lasgow. Recently, however, he started what are known as the Southern Coffee Rooms in Crown street on the South side, and up to the time of his removal to the Nurses’ Home he occupied a small room off his shop as a sleeping apartment, refusing all proffered help from those closely related to him. On Thursday last, however, certain gentlemen, who hold good positions commercially and socially in the city, finding him ill, induced him to go to the home, where after lingering for a few days, his chequered career was closed in death, ;