| Administrative History | James Hay Beattie [1768-1790]. Eldest son of Beattie. Named, with permission, after Beattie's patron James Hay, Earl of Erroll. His childhood is lovingly recorded in many letters, which show that Beattie was always a deeply involved parent, and in the memoir Beattie wrote shortly after James Hay's death. His childhood and adolescence were marred by his mother's mental illness, and her total disasppearance from his life when he was aged about eleven. He attended Aberdeen Grammar School, and then Marischal College from 1781 to 1786. He considered entering the church, but Beattie secured his appointment on 28 Spetember 1787 as his own assistant and successor. James Hay sometimes taught the Arts class, but was already ill with tubercolosis, of which he died on 19 November 1790. His father assembled a substantial volume of his prose and verse, printed in an edition of 200 copies for circulation among his friends in 1794, and subsequently published with Beattie's own poems in 1799
The 'Mrs Arbuthnot' referred to in this letter is probably the wife of Robert Arbuthnot of Haddo (1728 - 1803), who was born in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, where he established himself as a merchant and agent for the British Linen Bank, of which he later became a director (1767 – 1770). Arbuthnot probably moved to Edinburgh about the time he joined the Select Society. However, like Fairholm, his business collapsed with the failure of the Ayr Bank in 1772. Through the efforts of friends he became secretary to the board of trustees for the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Fisheries, a post he held from 1779 to 1803. In addition to his participation in the Select Society, Arbuthnot was also a member of the Edinburgh Musical Society and the Highland Society of Scotland, of which he was director in 1784, and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh from the following year. A patron of the music publisher George Thomson, Arbuthnot was also a long-term correspondent of his fellow Select Society member James Beattie. He died in 1803. |