Alexander Russel

Russel was born on 10 December 1814 in Edinburgh; his father, a solicitor and a liberal in politics, died when he was still very young, whilst his mother, a daughter of John Somerville, clerk in the jury court, survived until Alexander was 50.

The Scotsman's support contributed to Thomas Babington Macaulay's re-election for Edinburgh in 1852; but in the same year Duncan McLaren successfully sued the paper for libel.

[1] In 1860 he oversaw the relocation of the Scotsman offices from the Royal Mile to Cockbirn Street in a building designed by Peddie & Kinnear.

Russel was noted as a conversationalist as well as a writer, but not as a public speaker, and he declined in 1872 an invitation to become a candidate for the lord-rectorship of Aberdeen.

[1] His monument (a huge red granite obelisk by Stewart McGlashan) forms the centrepiece of the north section of Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh.

His wife, Jessie MacWilliam (1821-1870) lies with him, as does his son, Charles MacLaren Russel, who was drowned in the Ettrick Water on 23 September 1869, aged only nine.

Angling was Russel's favourite recreation, and his articles on it in The Scotsman, the Quarterly Review, and Blackwood's Magazine were collected in The Salmon (1864).

Another daughter married Francis Dalzell Finlay the younger, proprietor of the Belfast newspaper the Northern Whig.