#2728, James Nicol FLEMING

Keil House was built by James Nicol Fleming at a cost of £28,000 (about £2.9 million in 2020 money). He had made a fortune in the 1860s in Indian cotton when the American Civil War had cut off supplies from the southern states. By the time he built Keil in 1873 he was hiding a big secret: he was bankrupt.

His businesses were being kept afloat by an overdraft from the City of Glasgow Bank which, by the time the bank spectacularly collapsed in 1878, was nearly £1.3 million (£140 million). To make it worse, Fleming had been a director of the bank and the reason it failed was the board's reckless lending to themselves and their cronies concealing things by false accounting. What appeared to the outside world as the very model of Presbyterian Victorian rectitude was in fact the private cash cow of a corrupt clique. Most of the 1200 shareholders - a lot of them ordinary folk with a few hundred shares were ruined because the bank was not a limited liability company so they were personally liable for its loss.

The directors and the manager were promptly arrested, put on trial and convicted of false accounting but J N Fleming, who'd resigned as a director three years earlier vanished. The manner of his disappearance is shrouded in mystery but he turned up in Spain and then the USA before returning to Scotland, handing himself in and pleading guilty to false accounting. He was given 8 months, the same as the other directors.

James was the 10th child of John Fleming of Clairmont who was born on 25th August 1783 and who married on 19th January 1818 Jane Fordyce Nicol who was born 24th September 1795 and died on 2nd of September 1841.

Thanks to Neil King whose post Western Isles was dated 28th October 2016.

Our picture is believed to have been taken from Perth General Prison.