Margaret Macpherson Grant (27 April 183414 April 1877) was a Scottish heiress and philanthropist. Born in Aberlour parish to a local surgeon, she was educated in Hampshire, and was left an only child when her elder brother died in India in 1852. Two years later, she inherited a large fortune from her uncle, Alexander Grant, an Aberlour-born planter and merchant who had become rich in Jamaica.
Macpherson Grant took up residence in Aberlour House, which had been built for her uncle by William Robertson. She lived unconventionally for a woman of her time, dressing in a manner one newspaper called "manly", and entering into what was described as a form of marriage with a female companion, Charlotte Temple, whom she had met in London in 1864. Macpherson Grant donated generously to charitable enterprises, especially those associated with the Scottish Episcopal Church, establishing an orphanage (now the Aberlour Child Care Trust) and founding St Margaret's Episcopal Church in Aberlour. She drank heavily, and despite attempts by friends and family members to persuade her to stop, she always relapsed into alcoholism.
She made several wills over the course of her life that would have left her estate to Temple but, shortly after Temple left her to marry a man, Macpherson Grant revoked her will; she died intestate five months later aged forty-two. Her disinherited former companion sued, and the court determined that the bulk of her fortune should go to cousins, who were most likely unknown to her.
Early life and family
Margaret Macpherson Grant's parents, Annie (née Grant) and Alexander Macpherson, lived in Garbity, Aberlour parish, Banffshire. Her father was a local surgeon in Aberlour, Moray, and her mother, who was from the influential Grant family, was thought to have married beneath her station. The Macphersons married on 30 April 1825, and had their first child, Alexander Grant Macpherson, in 1828; Margaret Macpherson Grant (originally called Margaret Gordon Macpherson) was born on 27 April 1834. While she was in her teens, Macpherson Grant attended school in Hampstead, in north London, studying with Mary Ann Stodart, a writer and activist for women's education. Her brother travelled to India, where he died in 1852, leaving Macpherson Grant as her parents' only surviving child.
Macpherson Grant's uncle on her mother's side was Alexander Grant. Originally from Drumfurrich Farm in Aberlour parish, he had travelled to Jamaica, where he amassed a considerable fortune as a planter and merchant. He was a slave owner, and a member of the Jamaican legislature. It is not certain when he returned to Britain, but it is thought that he was in London by the 1820s, and he visited Aberlour in 1829 to attend to the burial of his father, the farmer George Grant. When slavery was abolished in 1833, Grant benefitted from a government scheme to compensate slave owners, claiming over £24,000 for the loss of his slaves and other business assets. He commissioned the architect William Robertson to build Aberlour House for him, which was completed in 1838. He also had plans to buy the farm on which he was born. Aberlour House became his official residence, although it is doubtful that he ever actually lived there, and he was still engaged in business in London as a West Indies merchant.
Alexander Grant had been involved in business in Jamaica with Alexander Donaldson and Alexander Thomson. As the three men were absentee landlords, affairs on their estates were managed by a team of local attorneys in Kingston, with help from the bookkeepers and overseers who lived on the plantations. This arrangement created issues in settling the debts of their estates after Donaldson's death in 1807, and Thomson's in 1818, resulting in years of litigation among the heirs. Because the ongoing revenues from the estates were inadequate to satisfy the debts and accruing interest, Grant pressed for the plantations to be sold. The trustees in Jamaica, John Meek and Joseph Green, resisted these efforts and ignored orders to sell issued by the High Court of Chancery. The lawsuits would not be fully resolved until 1861, by which time Alexander Grant had died, and his estates had come into the possession of Macpherson Grant.