'Moray Loon' kept us up to date from new life
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DISPATCHES to ‘The Northern Scot’ sent from Buenos Aires in the 1890s tell of growing unrest and a country on the brink of revolution – the author was the ‘Moray Loon’.
Now, 122 years later, the family of one of the ‘Scot’s’ first foreign correspondents has travelled to Argentina and nearby Uruguay to learn more about the man behind the newspaper clippings.
"It was an incredible trip," said Elgin consultant anaesthetist Iain Macdonald, who was accompanied on the journey by his son, Oscar.
"Originally, we weren’t sure if my great-grandfather James Fraser was buried in Buenos Aires or where he was. We hadn’t really gone through our family history very much until my son started looking into the life of his great-great-grandfather and it all began to piece together."
The flight from Amsterdam to Buenos Aires – a distance of about 7,000 miles – took just over 11 hours. That was in stark contrast to the voyage across the Atlantic that took the ‘Moray Loon’ and his wife, Margaret, several months.
It was 1889 and the young couple were leaving Britain aboard a steamship, with James having signed a contract to work for the English Bank of the River Plate.
A leapling, he was born into a farming family at Delfur, near Orton, in 1860; the youngest of three children. Educated in Moray, he entered banking on finishing school, and in 1888, aged 28, completed examinations at King’s College, London.
After emigrating to South America, he went on to join the Montevideo Waterworks Company in Uruguay, where he became manager. He and his wife had two girls, both born in nearby Buenos Aires.
As well as being a prominent member of the Montevideo community, James took time to write for the ‘Moray and Nairn Express’, which later became ‘The Northern Scot’.
"The Moray Loon, where is he not?" he asked, in a report sent from Buenos Aires dated August 2, 1890. "Under every clime and every flag, there he is pursuing fortune’s slippery ba’.
"There are very few, if any, great political events, that do not affect him very closely. The readers of the ‘Moray and Nairn Express’, who are to be found here and in many parts of the world, will have heard ere now by telegraph of the revolution that broke out in this city in the early morning of the 26th ult., but a few notes from one on the spot may not be uninteresting."
He was referring to the ‘Revolution of the Park’, an uprising against the Government which began in the city on July 26 that year. As a close observer, he began his correspondence back to the "old country".
The clipping was one of many contained in James Fraser’s scrapbook, which was passed down to Dr Macdonald and eventually piqued Oscar’s curiosity.
After arriving in Buenos Aires, the Elgin visitors chose to sail into Montevideo – as their forefather would have done more than a century ago.
For the rest of this story, see this week's 'Northern Scot'
