James Blair

Slave-owner in British Guiana and MP for a series of boroughs 1818-1830 and 1837-1841. Son of John Blair of Co. Down, and heir of his uncle Lambert Blair (d. 1815).

1. James Blair married Elizabeth Catherine Stopford 27/12/1815 at St Marylebone. Will of James Blair of Portman Square Middlesex proved 29/11/1841. Bequeathed £300,000 in personalty, inherited by his wife's family, the Stopfords (the Earls of Courtown).

2. Blair's Penningham[e] estate in Wigtownshire went to his wife's brother, Col. William Henry Stopford, who changed his name to Stopford-Blair. When William Henry Stopford-Blair died in 1868 he left effects under £140,000. His son Edward James Stopford-Blair left £59,441 2s 5d in 1885, while his daughter Elizabeth Ellen Stopford-Blair married Edward Heron-Maxwell, who in turn added Blair to his name.

3. Blair born and raised in Ulster, but family ties and interests in Wigtownshire, Scotland and estates in Berbice, Demerara and Surinam which he inherited in 1815 as coheir of his paternal uncle Lambert Blair, whose sister-in-law he subsequently married. At death left in estates in Scotland, England and Ireland and plantations in Berbice, India and South America.

4. Member of the West India Committee and the 'Committee of April 25, 1823' formed to press the government for ameliorationist measures for the Crown colonies and to resist moves towards emancipation.

T71/885 British Guiana claim no. 15 (Blairmont); http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/blair-james-1788-1841 and http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820-1832/member/blair-james-1788-1841 [both accessed 09/07/2016].

1. Ancestry.com, London, England, Marriages and Burials, 1754-1921 [database online]; PROB 11/1953; William D. Rubinstein, Who were the rich? A biographical dictionary of British wealth-holders Volume Two 1840-1859 (MS) 1841/28.

2. Sir Bernard Burke, The General Armory [1878] p . 977, Stopford-Blair; Burke's Peerage (2003) through www.peerage.com [accessed 15/05/2011]. National Probate Calendar 1869 and 1886 [both under 'Blair'].

3. D. R. Fisher (ed.), The House of Commons 1820-1832 (7 vols., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press for the History of Parliament Trust, 2009), vol. 4.

4. Alexandra Franklin, Enterprise and advantage: The West India interest in Britain, 1774-1840 (University of Pennsylvania, Unpub. PhD, 1992), p. 214 citing West India Committee Minute Books, 25 April 1823.