(3 Sept. 1846-3 March 1922), lawyer, public figure. (Mac Macmaster, Dan Macmaster) Born on Cameron’s Island (also known as Sir John’s Big Island), one of the GC islands in Lake St. Francis. Parents: Donald MacMaster (died 21 Nov. 1846, ages both 35 and 41 found) and his wife Mary Cameron (13 June 1813-12 Jan. 1891). Donald MacMaster the elder (the father of the subject of the present sketch) was born in Scotland. He died at Alexandria before his son was three months old, and is buried in St. Finnan’s cemetery there. His widow Mary Cameron, who was the sister of James Cameron the diarist of Cameron’s Island, remarried in 1849 to Angus MacDonald, who died in1879. She operated a hotel in Williamstown. The future Sir Donald, attentive to his mother throughout life, remembered his stepfather with high regard as having encouraged him in his career, but it would seem the family was not prosperous, at least if the tradition is true about young Donald having “gone to school with patched clothing.” (Wood letter) He attended primary and grammar school at Williamstown. It is said that as a young man he taught school at Ormstown, Que., and the North Branch near Martintown, and for several years in the United States at the time of the Civil War. When interest in the militia was reawakened by the Fenian threat, he was in the Williamstown militia with the rank in 1866 of lieutenant. He studied law at McGill University, graduating in law with the degree of B. C. L. in 1871. One of his law teachers was J. J. C. Abbott, later a prime minister of Canada.

     Macmaster was admitted to the Quebec bar in 1871 and the Ontario bar in 1882. Throughout his years in Canada, his law office was in Montreal, where he practised under the varying names of his firm, and with varying partners, one of them (for 18 years) being Farquhar Stuart Maclennan. One of the most successful and most widely known Canadian lawyers of his time, Macmaster was involved in many well known cases (including the Shortis murder case, where he was crown prosecutor); with the years, he moved from criminal cases to civil law cases, and then became a distinguished practioner in appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

     Macmaster was elected MLA for GC in the Ontario general election of 5 June 1879 as a Conservative, defeating James Rayside the Liberal candidate. He did not serve his full term, but resigned to run as the Conservative candidate for the GC federal seat in the general election of 20 June1882, where his Liberal opponent was the Hon. D. A. Macdonald, who was attempting a comeback in politics. Macmaster had already distinguished himself by his forceful attacks on Macdonald’s extravagance in the latter’s tour of northwestern Ontario as lieutenant-governor. Macdonald was, incidentally, the uncle of Macmaster’s first wife. Macmaster won the election, and was thereafter for nearly five years GC’s MP. However, in the notorious GC general election of 22 Feb. 1887, Macmaster was defeated by Patrick Purcell, the campaign having been marked by the extravagant use of Purcell money to influence voters. The sensational election trial which followed in Cornwall (Jan. 1888), during which Macmaster acted as his own lawyer, saw Purcell unseated and the reputation of the GC voters for integrity inflicted with no small damage; but in the event Purcell was allowed to serve out his term when the Supreme Court reversed the Cornwall verdict on technicalities and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council refused to hear the case. Macmaster never stood again for parliamentary office in Canada, concentrating instead on his law practice. As a GC political representative, he had lived in Montreal, not GC. During his involvement in GC politics, he had been very closely associated with R. R. (Big Rory) McLennan, and Macmaster features prominently in the splendid collection of McLennan’s papers in the Ontario Archives. In 1908 he was offered the Conservative candidacy for the GC federal seat, but he refused as having a constituency in view in England, and John F. McGregor became the GC candidate instead, to be defeated at the polls. (Cornwall Freeholder 28 Aug. 1908)

     Macmaster was married at Lancaster, GC, on 15 Sept. 1880 to Janet Sandfield Macdonald, born 6 Nov. 1860, who was the daughter of Ranald Sandfield Macdonald, and the niece, therefore, of John Sandfield Macdonald, the former premier of Ontario. She died in Montreal on 14 Sept. 1883. They had one son who died at the age of 13 months a little more than a year before his mother. The Cornwall Freeholder of 28 July 1882 prints verses by Rev. Fr Cavanaugh on Douglas G. MacMaster, deceased infant son of D. A. MacMaster, MP. In 1890, after being a widower for seven years, he married for a second time, to Ella Virginia Deford (3 April 1861-7 June 1923), who was born at Baltimore, Maryland. (Date of birth 1860 and spelling De Ford also found) They had two daughters, who survived him, and a son, Donald Cameron Deford Macmaster, who was killed in action on 25 Sept. 1915 in the First World War, being a lieutenant in the 6th Battalion of the Cameron Highlanders.

     When Alexander Mackenzie of the Celtic Magazine toured Canada in 1879 Macmaster was one of the Glengarrians he met, and he was pleased that Macmaster made a trip from Montreal to Lancaster expressly to hear Mackenzie’s lecture on Flora Macdonald and Prince Charles. Kenneth Macdonald, a writer for the Celtic Magazine who visited GC a few years later, stated that he read one of Macmaster’s political speeches while crossing the ocean and was appalled by the personal attacks it contained on his opponent, the Hon. D. A. Macdonald; later, Kenneth Macdonald, becoming more aware of the conventions of Canadian politics, and mollified perhaps by his meeting with Macmaster in Montreal, agreed that Macmaster did well to go along with current practice.

     In 1905, at the age of almost 60, Macmaster settled in England to specialize in appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, an area of the law in which he had already gained experience and prestige. He was admitted to the English bar the next year. In the British general election of 1906, he stood as the Unionist (i, e., Conservative) candidate for Leigh in Lancashire, and won widespread admiration for the vigour of his campaign in a constituency where the Unionists had little chance of victory, and in an election at which the Unionists nationwide suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of the Liberals. In the general election of January 1910, he was elected as Unionist MP for the Chertsey division of Surrey. He remained MP until his death, being re-elected in the general elections of Dec. 1910 (the second general election of that year) and Dec. 1918 (the first general election since 1910, the voting having been postponed because of the war). As a Unionist MP, he witnessed some of the most dramatic events in British parliamentary history. First, in the years 1910-1914, there were the struggles, which shook the British constitution to its base, over the Liberal government’s projects (which the Unionists opposed) of curtailing the powers of the House of Lords and giving limited powers of self-government to Ireland; then there followed the extraordinary strains of the First World War; and finally the unprecedented problems of the peace settlement.

     In July 1912, at his home in England, he entertained Canadian prime minister Borden, the future British prime minister Bonar Law, and the future Lord Beaverbrook. Mary Mack (of the Cornwall Mack family) preserved a tradition that the Macmasters, the Peacocks (Sir Edward Peacock), and the descendants of “Red George” Macdonell were friends in England.

     Macmaster was made a baronet in the New Year’s honours list, 1921. The baronetcy was hereditary, but Macmaster’s son having been killed in the war, the baronetcy became dormant on Sir Donald’s death. Sir Donald died at his home in London, England. Newspaper reports varied on whether the death was in London or at his house at Virginia Water, Surrey, near Windsor, but the former claim was true. His obituary (about 18 column inches) in the London Times recalled that 70 years before GC had been “more Scottish than the Highland glens from which its settlers had come.” His wife died the following year. They are buried in the cemetery of Christ Church, the parish church of Virginia Water.

     He contributed much of the material in The Coteau Bridge Controversy: Letters of Donald Macmaster… (and Others), with Opinions of the Press (36 pp., Montreal 1880), which related to the Canada Atlantic Railway. He was the author also of The Seal Arbitration (65 pp., Montreal 1894). His speech to the Constitutional Club, London, Eng., on the Canada-U.S. Reciprocity Agreement was published as a pamphlet, The Great Betrayal (24 pp., London, 1911). He was also the author of “a small pamphlet” called The Empire in Arms (mentioned Cornwall Standard 21 Jan. 1915) He was a writer of letters to the press on various subjects of the day.

     His scrapbooks, which he directed in his will were to be preserved as containing “records of many important historical events, as well as some items of personal interest to the family,” appear, unfortunately, to have been lost.

     His portrait as bâtonnier of the Montreal Bar was painted by the well-known Canadian portrait painter Robert Harris (1849-1919) and is preserved, with the portraits of the other bâtonniers, in the Palais de Justice, Montreal. It was commissioned in 1904 and was presumably painted that year.

     During his years in England, he maintained strong contacts with Canada. The Cornwall Standard, in his obituary, remembered that “Since taking up his residence in England he has paid frequent visits to Canada, and on those occasions never failed to call on the old friends in his native county, Glengarry. His last visit was in 1919.” In fact, he was in Canada as late as 1920, but perhaps he did not visit GC then; he was, however, certainly in GC as late as 1919, when he spoke in Alexandria. (S17 July 1919). He campaigned in Canada in 1911 vigorously against the Reciprocity agreement with the United States. He attended the 1912 centenary celebrations of St. Andrew’s Church, Willliamstown, and his address on that occasion was published in the centennial book which followed in 1916. On 30 Jan., 1922, when in his final illness, he sent General Sir A. C. Macdonell a cheque for $100 in support of a scheme for outfitting the GC-area regiment (now the SDG Highlanders) as a Highland (kilted) unit. He made provision in his will for the support, in Rockwood Hospital, Kingston, of his sister Ann, Mrs Duncan Murchison. In a debate in the Canadian House of Commons in 1927 on the federal government’s policy of reclaiming the St. Lawrence River islands for the St. Regis Indians, the MP for Stormont remembered that “Macmaster island [i. e., Cameron’s Island] was the summer home of the late Sir Donald Macmaster.”

     From early in World War I, his English home at Virginia Water was used as a convalescent home for Canadian soldiers and officers. Writing on 3 March 1915 to his cousin Leander Cameron, under the letterhead of “Merlewood Military Convalescent Home, Virginia Water, Surrey,” he described the cost as being “at the expense of Mrs. Macmaster and myself.”

     He was a Presbyterian.

     Macmaster was one of the people whose brilliant example emphasized the truth of the 19th-century claims to Glengarry success and strength, but he had all the same committed the serious blunder while MP of tactlessly referring in a House of Commons debate on 8 June 1885 to the Highlanders of remote generations as a barbarous people. His opponents in the Liberal press, joyously returning again and again to the unhappy incident, hereafter made the most of the alleged insult to the Highland race, arguably causing him damage at the polls. But electioneering is electioneering, and doubtless Macmaster himself would have made the most of such a remark if one of his political opponents had made it.

     His sister Helen Macmaster (7 Nov. 1844-14 Aug. 1913) was married 18 March 1863 to James A. Burton. They were Maxville residents from 1886. Burton was a drover and a reeve of Maxville, and is one of the people whose lives were included in T. W. Munro’s remarkable “I Remember” series. Mrs Burton operated a millinery shop. Burton, B. C. (known in early days as Burton City, and now a community rather than a town), was named after their sons, Reuben, Byron and Arthur, who arrived at that location about 1897 and took a leading role in founding the village. Only Arthur, however, seems to have remained there any appreciable period of time. But he too eventually moved on–apparently during the Depression–and died at Quesnel, B. C., 17 July 1943.

There are biog. sketches (each one usually offering a few details not in the others) in Rattray, III, 804-806; Rose, i, 497; Morgan (1898 & 1912); Roberts and Tunnell’s A Standard Dictionary of Canadian Biography; MDict; Who Was Who, 1916-1928; Harkness; Johnson (1968); Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament, Vol. III: 1919-1945, by M. Stenton & S. Lees (1979) 230; and by Angus H. McDonell in the Highland Games supplement to Glengarry News 24 July 1991 (with picture of the gravestone at Williamstown–not as the caption says at Virginia Water) * MacGillivray & Ross (as per index, with notes p. 689; has more on his GC political career than is possible to include in the present sketch * Fraser, Gravestones, I, 106 (the family gravestone at St. Andrew’s cemetery, Williamstown; has valuable biog. data), 124 (his sister Mrs Burton) * gravestone, Virginia Water * obituaries in London Times 4 March 1922, The Montreal Daily Star 6 March 1922, Cornwall Standard 9 March 1922 (with portrait, and material from Montreal Gazette obituary), Cornwall Freeholder 9 March 1922, GN 10 March 1922, The McGill News Vol. III No. 2 (1922) 35-36 (with portrait); and see also the same Vol. II No. 2 (1921) 27 * his will: CS 18 May 1922 & GN 19 May 1922 * Fraser, Cameron, 107 * recollections of Macmaster by Rev. Alexander MacGillivray, Macmaster’s letter to Gen. Sir A. C. Macdonell, CS 16 & 30 March 1922 * Whyte, i, 41, 297 * St. Finnan’s CRNI, III, 629 * Alexander Mackenzie and Kenneth Macdonald in The Celtic Magazine, V(1880) 154, 155, 158, VIII(1883) 110, IX(1884) 224 * “entertained”: CS 2 Aug. 1912; Sir Joseph Pope, Public Servant (1960) 241 * Boss 44-48 * Centenary 1912 48-51 * Burke’s… Peerage Baronetage and Knightage, 102nd edn. (1959) p. 2858 * Archives of Ontario, Provincial Secretary’s Dept. Correspondence, Macmaster file, RG8, I-1-A-1 Box 17 (misc. materials, but of considerable interest) * small but valuable collection of papers at Nor’Westers and Loyalist Museum, Williamstown, relating to Sir Donald Macmaster and Cameron’s Island * A. W. MCDOUGALD’s history of GC sections 8-10 (for his political career in GC) * islands: Can. House of Commons, Debates, 10 & 15 & 18 Feb.1927 * first marriage: Witness 16 Sept. 1880 (two items), also 15 Sept. (dinner for bridegroom) * birth, death, of son Douglas Gordon, Cornwall Reporter, 4 June 1881, 29 July 1882 * death of first wife: Cornwall Freeholder 21 Sept. 1883, cited in DTL Standard Freeholder 16 Sept. 1944 * commemorative tablet placed in St. Andrew’s Church, Williamstown, for first wife: Glengarrian 10 June 1887; CF 17 June 1887 cited DTL SFH 18 June 1949 * death of his son in WWI: Glengarry News 3 Oct. 1915, CS 7 & 21 Oct. 4 & 25 Nov. 1915 * death of his wife, Lady Macmaster: CS 14 June & 5 July 1923 * convalescent home: his papers in Nor’westers Museum, Williamstown; CS 17 Sept. 1914, CF 25 Feb. 1915 * summary of Williamstown area traditions about Macmaster in letter of Mrs Gertrude Wood to Ewan Ross, 29 July 1976 (copy in present author’s files) * private information * Macmaster’s life and career were followed by the newspapers over many years; the present entry draws on many such references as recorded in the present author’s files without listing them here in detail * visits Europe, India and Egypt, Glengarrian 23 May & 20 June 1890 * returns to Canada “to spend a couple of months,” speaks at Williamstown & at Canadian Club, Montreal, has summer residence at St. Andrews, N. B., CS 11, 18 & 25 Oct. 1907 * his views on Reciprocity, has come to Canada to fight against it, CS 15 Sept. 1911 (from Montreal Gazette), * admitted to study of law 50 years ago yesterday, CS 19 Sept. 1918 * is back in Canada, Montreal Gazette interview with him on questions of the day, CS 13 & 20 May 1920 * The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, ed. T. Pinney, IV (1999) 125 (mentioned) * Macmaster’s insult to Highlanders: Cornwall Freeholder 19 June 1885, 19 March 1886, 4 June 1886; Can. House of Commons Debates, 8, 15, 17 June 1885 * Burton relatives, of Maxville and B. C. : obituary of Mrs James A. Burton, Glengarry News 22 Aug. 1913; Munro GN 20 May 1938; Maxville (1991) 78, 690-691; information from Arrow Lakes Historical Society, B. C.; Whistle Stops along the Columbia River Narrows: A History of Burton and Surrounding Area (1982); James Burton, of Williamstown, to move to Maxville, CF 19 March 1886 cited DTL SFH 16 March 1957