XI 



* SIR GEORGE KING, 1840—1909. 



George King, the only son of Eobert King and Cecilia Anderson, was born 

 at Peterhead, where his father was a bookseller and his maternal grandfather 

 was Collector of Inland Revenue, on April 12, 1840. While King was still 

 a child his father moved to Aberdeen, and joined in partnership his elder 

 brother George, a bookseller in that city, where another brother, Arthur, 

 founder of the Aberdeen University Press, was a printer. Partly in con- 

 junction with this press, the firm of G. and R. King developed a publishing 

 business which rendered good service to the north-east of Scotland at a time 

 when difficulties of communication delayed supplies of literature from 

 London, or even from Edinburgh. The partners were members of a family of 

 Independents, a denomination never numerous in Scotland. Both were men 

 of strong character and much ability, and took an active part in promoting 

 the interests of the Congregational community. The senior partner, George, 

 belonged to the Scottish Society of Antiquaries, and was one of the three 

 founders of a still flourishing local Liberal newspaper.* He was for forty 

 years closely connected with the administration in Aberdeen of the Scottish 

 poor-law, and published an essay on "Modern Pauperism" which attracted 

 the attention of social statesmen fifty years ago. He also wrote an historical 

 review of the origin and condition of the Congregational churches in 

 Aberdeenshire and Banffshire, in which, while holding the views of an Inde- 

 pendent as regards the organisation of the Anglican Church, he found the 

 Presbyterian form of church government equally unjustifiable on historical 

 grounds. The junior partner, father of the subject of this notice, was the 

 author of a meritorious historical work, 'The Covenanters in the North,' 

 published in 1846, shortly after his death from phthisis, at the early age of 

 thirty-six, in November, 1845. As an Independent, the author was able to 

 handle his subject with sympathy, and at the same time without the bias so 

 often apparent in Presbyterian writings. King's mother died, also of phthisis, 

 at the age of forty, in June, 1850. 



Left an orphan at ten, King became the ward of his uncle George, who in 

 the autumn of 1850 transferred him from the preparatory academy he had 

 hitherto attended, to the Aberdeen Grammar School, then under the rectorship 

 of Dr. Melvin, one of the foremost classical schools in Scotland. Two pupils 

 named King, were already there, one in the fifth, another in the second class ; 

 the subject of this notice on entering the first class, taught by Mr. (after- 

 wards Sir William) Geddes, was therefore, to the masters, King " tertius," to 

 his schoolmates " Tertius " for short ; this agnomen stuck to him till his 



* Arthur King, of the University Press, also engaged in newspaper enterprise, and 

 became proprietor of the first penny paper published in the north of Scotland. 



