Richard B. Angus - Early Life

Early Life

In 1831, Angus was born in Scotland at Bathgate, a younger son of Alexander Angus, merchant and a friend of the father of Sir James Young Simpson, by his wife Margaret Forrest. Educated at Bathgate Academy, his first employment was in Manchester as a clerk with the Manchester and Liverpool Bank. In 1857, he married his wife, Mary Anne Daniels (1833–1913), the daughter of a Montreal wine merchant, and with her he came to Montreal that year, finding employment as a book-keeper with the Bank of Montreal, from where he advanced rapidly.

By 1861, Angus was placed in charge of the bank's Chicago office, and two years later he was promoted to second agent in New York. The following year he returned to Canada as interim manager of the bank's headquarters in Montreal. By 1869, he succeeded Edwin Henry King as the Bank's General Manager with an annual salary of $8,000, a position he held for the next ten years. During this time he improved relations with the federal government (at a time when the Bank of Montreal acted as Canada's national bank) and turned over respectable profits despite the economic slump of the 1870s.

Read more about this topic:  Richard B. Angus

Famous quotes related to early life:

    Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...
    Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)