Early Years in Scotland
Born at Saltcoats, Ayrshire, he was the second son of Captain Alexander Allan and his wife Jean Crawford (1782–1856). In 1819, Alexander Allan had founded the Allan Shipping Line, which became synonymous with running goods and passengers between Scotland and Montreal. Hugh Allan received a parish education at Saltcoats before starting work in 1823 at the family's counting house of Allan, Kerr & Co., of Greenock. Three years later he was sent by his father to Montreal to work as a clerk for the grain merchant, William Kerr. In 1830, he took a year off to travel through his native Scotland (he later named his home, Ravenscrag, after his favorite childhood haunt in Ayrshire) and continued via London, New York and Upper Canada.
Read more about this topic: Hugh Allan
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early, years and/or scotland:
“Parents ... are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years.”
—Anthony Powell (b. 1905)
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and given them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The “second sight” possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don’t wear trousers.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)