ROSS, SIR JOHN (1834-1927) was born at Halkirk, Caithness, of an old Sutherland family. Educated at Rangag and Calder, and finally in the parish school at Halkirk, he left school at the age of 13 and walked 40 miles to Lybster, where he apprenticed himself to a merchant named Wallace, serving three years without pay. He then spent a few years as assistant to a merchant in Thurso, and was eventually offered a partnership in a newly established business in Dunedin. He sailed in the Velore in 1861 with merchandise to the value of £3,000. The partnership did not materialise, but he became a member of the firm of Begg and Christie, drapers. At the end of a year he bought out the other partners and took in Robert Glendining. In 1866 they sold their retail business to Brown Ewing and Co. and established themselves in the wholesale trade in Stafford street. In 1870 Ross returned to England to manage that end of the business, and he married in that year Margaret W. Cassels, who was born in Fife. In 1879 the firm commenced manufacturing hosiery, and soon afterwards they erected a mill at Roslyn, in the Kaikorai valley, for the manufacture of woollens and worsteds. In 1900 the capital of the company was £600,000, and in 1927 it was increased to £1,250,000 (another factory being operated in Auckland). Ross returned in 1905 to live in New Zealand. He interested himself in the welfare of his workers, for whom he established a restaurant and a profit-sharing scheme. He made many benefactions to his Church, including £20,000 to Knox residential college, £5,000 for the Presbyterian home for the aged and destitute, and smaller sums to the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A. He built the Ross institute on the spot in Halkirk where his little school stood.

Ross was for some years on the councils of Otago University and Knox College and the High Schools board. (K.B. 1922.) He died on 5 Jan 1927, and his widow on 29 Nov 1934.

Otago Daily Times, 3 Jan 1922, 6 Jan 1927.

Reference: Volume 2, page 132

🌳 Further sources