Notables of Canada

Moffat Dunlap is well known throughout the Canadian horse and farm community having been a twenty year member of the show jumping team of the Canadian Equestrian Team (a Team Bronze Medal winner at the 1967 Pan-American Games and Team Gold Medal winner at the 1970 World Championships). He has served on many boards and management committees; a former director and Jumping Team Chairman of the Canadian Equestrian team over the Los Angeles Olympic Games; a past Director of the Canadian Pony Club; the Canadian Horse Council; the Canadian Horse Shows Association; the Horseman's Benevolent and Protective Association. He is an Honourary Director of the Canadian Therapeutic Riding Association and a Director, former Horse Show Chairman and a Past President of the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. Moffat was a co-founder of an independent school in King Township, The Country Day School, with a present enrolment of 725 students. Moffat Dunlap is a graduate of Upper Canada College (Toronto) and the University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario). He is a member of the Advisory Council of the Equine Research Centre at the University of Guelph. Moffat Dunlap has also served on the Equine Advisory Board at both Humber and Seneca Colleges; is a member of the capital fund raising team at the Princess Margaret Hospital and the Southlake Regional Health Centre Foundation and co-chairman of the 1999 York Region Police Appreciation Committee.

DUNLOP, JAMES, businessman and militia officer; b. November 1757 in Glasgow, Scotland, third and youngest son of David Dunlop, merchant and textile manufacturer, and his wife, a daughter of James McGregor of Clober; d. unmarried 28 Aug. 1815 in Montreal, Lower Canada.

James Dunlop received a “sound commercial education,” which included instruction in “bookkeeping, mathematics and navigation,” probably at the High School of Glasgow. Like many other young men of the city’s mercantile class, he was sent out to Virginia, the focus of the tobacco trade and the main centre of Scottish overseas enterprise; he arrived, it seems, early in 1773 and settled on the James River opposite Jamestown as an employee of William and John Hay, correspondents of his brothers Robert and Alexander Dunlop, partners in Glasgow. At the outbreak of the American revolution, according to James’s nephew, Alexander Dunlop of Clober, he served as a loyalist in several campaigns in Virginia and the southern colonies.

Early in 1779 Dunlop came to Quebec and, in the upper part of a house on Rue Saint-Pierre, established a small store in which he sold dry goods, hardware, groceries, and “fancy goods,” imported on credit from Glasgow. 

. By 1785 Dunlop was established in a warehouse, with its own wharf, on Montreal’s main business thoroughfare, Rue Saint-Paul. It was probably from there that he sold the large assortments of dry goods, cutlery, alcoholic beverages, sugar, and other products that he continued to import. Foreseeing the possibilities in the flour and lumber trades, he began in the early 1780s to travel extensively throughout the colony, negotiating purchases of grain and timber. His activities in this business, and the wide range of contacts he established, had placed him in a strong position by 1788 when an act of the British parliament permitted vessels from Canada to carry lumber and provisions to the West Indies and to bring back, free of duty, sugars and rum to the value of the outward cargo. By 1789 he was also exporting shiploads of choice Canadian oak to Leith, Scotland.

Wines and spirits were another specialty. Dunlop imported high-grade rums and whiskies from Greenock and found a ready market among habitants and fur traders. His rum, identified by the initials J. D. and a thistle burnt into the barrel, was highly regarded. Before the war with Spain began in 1796, he imported from Cadiz shiploads of Spanish, Madeira, and Portuguese wines, supplying the domestic cellars of most of the fur-trade magnates, including Simon McTavish. Dunlop also imported from Cadiz on a large scale rum, sugar, and tobacco. He maintained a useful network of agents, mostly Scottish firms, in Tuscany (Italy) at Leghorn, in Spain at Cadiz and Barcelona, in Portugal at Lisbon, and on Madeira. Spirits also formed a large part of his trade with York (Toronto), where he supplied Alexander Wood* and William Allan* beginning in 1798. 

In Montreal Dunlop rented a house on Rue Saint-Paul until March 1788. By 1795 he was ensconced, on the outskirts of the city, in a handsome mansion that became a social centre; visitors to Montreal testified to Dunlop’s warm-hearted hospitality, which was characteristic of Montreal’s Scottish nabobs. His liveried servants were invariably brought from Scotland. 

Dunlop also participated in the public life of the city.  Dunlop became active in the British Militia of the Town and Banlieu of Montreal; he joined it as an ensign in 1790 and was promoted lieutenant in 1794.

Dunlop exploited fully the favourable economic conditions in the period of potential and open conflict with France and then the United States that lasted from 1793 to 1814. In 1797 he wrote that his business activities had become so numerous and so varied that he required additional staff from Scotland. By 1802 his headquarters on Rue Saint-Paul were among the largest mercantile premises in the colony. Dunlop’s exports for 1803 were estimated to be worth a total of £60,000, surpassed among Montreal firms only by the North West Company and Parker, Gerrard, Ogilvy and Company [see John Ogilvy]. His original import business had by then been overshadowed by new lines of activity; in 1800 he stated that his imports from Scotland made him no profit, but that he was rapidly accumulating a large fortune through bill brokering, shipowning, and the export of bulk products.

The war with France had also spurred Dunlop to move into shipbuilding. In 1793 he took a long-term lease on a lot at Pointe-à-Callière, Montreal, where he constructed a shipyard, staffing it with skilled craftsmen brought from the Clyde and New York and local men and apprentices who were acquiring shipbuilding skills. From this yard came the vessels for his trade with Europe and the West Indies, as well as for privateering. In order to augment his fleet more rapidly he bought vessels, such as the schooner Marie in 1794 from the Quebec merchant John Munro, the sloop Peggy three years later, and, in 1805, the Industrie, constructed by the Quebec shipbuilders François and Romain Robitaille. In 1806 Dunlop’s fleet numbered three large ocean-going vessels, and seven smaller craft for the river and coastal trades. By the end of 1811 he had six vessels named after members of the Dunlop family, and that May the launching of the last of these, the James Dunlop, built at a cost of £10,000, attracted a crowd of 5,000. The following year Dunlop laid the keels of three more large vessels, one of them, the George Canning, of 482 tons. In 1814 he purchased the Earl St Vincent, an East Indiaman of over 900 tons, and was planning to buy several others. Shipbuilding costs in Lower Canada were approximately 35 per cent higher than on the Clyde, but Dunlop had faith in the future of the industry in British North America if first-class materials were used by competent craftsmen.

War had sharpened demand in Britain for bulk products such as potash, lumber, grain, and flour; in the autumn of 1797 Dunlop remitted bills to Glasgow for more than £17,000, derived from grain exports in the preceding eight months. By 1800 he was considering the ambitious project of cornering Canadian flour and potash supplies, and in 1805 he nearly succeeded in monopolizing the latter, which he exported on a large scale at a handsome profit for use in the cotton, linen, and woollen mills on the Clyde. Similarly, in the years 1812 and 1813, when Scotland suffered a crisis in provisioning that led to the formation of “meal-mobs,” Dunlop dispatched several thousand tons of flour from his stocks, the most extensive in the province, and was able to secure considerable returns. With the Scottish market, supply contracts for the British army on the Iberian peninsula, and provisioning of the forces in North America during the War of 1812, he bid fair to being the key operator in the Canadian grain trade.

The interlocking of Dunlop’s shipbuilding and privateering activities with his commodity operations is shown by the special permission accorded him on 22 July 1812 by the Legislative Council of Lower Canada: he was authorized to dispatch his large and heavily armed vessel, the James Dunlop, to Lisbon with army provisions despite Napoleon’s embargo, since “her force [of armament] . . . will in all probability be equal to her protection.” He was so confident in the strength of his ships, all of which were accorded letters of marque as privateers, that he refused to insure them throughout the war, apparently considering insurance rates excessive; his risk was justified, since he lost only the James Dunlop, wrecked in 1812 during a storm off the coast of Anticosti Island but well compensated for by the capture of an enemy ship. In 1814 he boasted in a letter to his sister in Glasgow that he had done “more good business since the War began than ever I did in the same space of time” and that he was the wealthiest man in the province. Even making allowance for his natural ebullience, there seems little reason to doubt the assertion: in November 1813 one of his cargoes of imported goods was valued at £50,000 including duty; six months later he remitted what was apparently the largest bill of exchange – £32,500 – yet sent from the colony; in August 1815 he had a stock of goods in hand estimated at £100,000; and that year the Montreal Herald noted that his fortune was “supposed to be greater than ever was acquired by any individual in this country.”

Unlike the merchants of the fur trade, whose business was transacted through London, Dunlop conducted his affairs in Britain largely with Scottish correspondents. He had contacts with James Dunlop of Garnkirk, the Dunlops of Lockerbie, and his brothers Alexander, a bookseller, and Robert, a linen manufacturer, who still acted in Glasgow as purchasing agents and exporters for the wide range of dry goods and other commodities Dunlop imported. However, his most important Scottish agent was Allan, Kerr and Company of Greenock, a leading firm in the trade to the Canadas.

Throughout the early 1800s Dunlop continued to participate enthusiastically in the Montreal militia. A captain in 1803, he became a major, commanding four companies of the 1st Battalion, including the artillery. In June 1811 he and Étienne Nivard Saint-Dizier were chosen to take an address from the citizens of Montreal to Governor Craig, who was about to depart for London. In November 1812 part of the militia, including Dunlop’s artillery company, was placed on alert. The following year he expressed the hope that the American invaders would penetrate to Montreal so that “my Great-Guns will make Thousands of them Sleep with their Fathers.” 

In August 1815, perhaps as the result of an excursion late in July to the Chaudière Falls near Quebec, Dunlop developed inflammation of the bowels, for which he seems to have put off medical attention. He died on 28 August in Montreal. In a letter in 1814 to his brother-in-law he had claimed to “have been more bold in my Speculations than any other person or Company in this Province,” and the Quebec Gazette acknowledged that he had been “one of the most eminent, respectable and enterprising” merchants in Montreal.  Throughout his life, though very much a progressive businessman of the enterprising 18th-century type, he had been keenly conscious of his heritage, coming as he did from a cadet branch of the ancient Ayrshire house of Dunlop, and being linked as well to the Scottish national hero William Wallace.  To his relatives in Scotland he was extremely generous, but tended to be “steering.” They regarded him with some trepidation. During his visits home they experienced his impulsive rages, particularly over the education and upbringing of his nephews and nieces, matters that profoundly concerned him; as his nephew Alexander Dunlop of Clober recalled, “The Canadian was kind, but overbearing.” Dunlop’s characteristic sang-froid was manifested on the occasion of a fire that razed his Montreal warehouse; as he watched the blaze, seated on a sofa rescued from the building, he remarked, “Why should not a man enjoy his own fireside?” In Clober’s words, he was “a prompt, active and dashing fellow, with indomitable intrepidity, both in maintaining sword and pen. He took fortune by storm, and dared his all to secure it.”

James Dunlop was a mercantile man of outstanding talent and originality, far beyond his contemporaries, even the fur-trade magnates, in techniques and vision. He was directly responsible for opening up several important lines of Canadian commercial activity, and, certainly, he was one of the founding fathers of Canadian finance. 

Canadian Dictionary of Biography  Volume V (1801-1820)