John Burns, 1st Baron Inverclyde

Who was John Burns, 1st Baron Inverclyde?

John Burns, 1st Baron Inverclyde, FRGS was a ship owner. Born in Glasgow he was the son of Sir George Burns, 1st Baronet, a founder of the shipping company G & J Burns and a partner in the Cunard Steamship Co. and his wife, Jane Cleland. After school, he attended Glasgow University and took the general arts degree before joining the family firm about 1850. He married Emily, daughter of George Clerk Arbuthnot, with whom he had two sons and three daughters.

As a young man he had been in the Crimea at the fall of Sevastopol in 1855, and had subsequently been an advocate of good coastal defences and was the first to suggest to the government the use of merchant vessels for war purposes.

His father handed over control of the family businesses to him in 1860, the year he married, and he became a key figure, first as a partner, then as chairman, in the reconstruction and subsequent flotation of Cunard in 1878. Cunard began to replace its fleet of wooden paddle steamers with iron ships, first paddle driven, but increasingly employing the screw propeller. The first iron screw steamer was the China in 1862.