William Blaikie

Who was William Blaikie?

Garden Blaikie was a Scottish divine, writer, biographer, and temperance reformer.

His father, James Ogilvie Blaikie, had been the first provost in Aberdeen of the reformed corporation. After studying at the Marischal College, where Alexander Bain and David Masson were among his contemporaries, he went in 1839 to Edinburgh to complete his theological course under Thomas Chalmers. In 1842 he was presented to the living of Drumblade by Lord Kintore, with whose family he was connected. The Disruption controversy reached its climax immediately afterwards, and Blaikie, whose sympathies were entirely with Chalmers, was one of the 474 ministers who signed the deed of demission and gave up their livings. He was Free Church minister at Pilrig, between Edinburgh and Leith, from 1844 to 1868. Keenly interested in questions of social reform, his first publication was a pamphlet, which was afterwards enlarged into a book called Better Days for Working People. It received public commendation from Lord Brougham, and 60,000 copies were sold. He formed an association for providing better homes for working people, and the Pilrig Model Buildings were erected. He also undertook the editorship of the Free Church Magazine, and then that of the North British Review, which he carried on until 1863. In 1864 he was asked to undertake the Scottish editorship of the Sunday Magazine, and for this magazine much of his most characteristic literary work was done, especially in the editorial notes, then a new feature in magazine literature.