John Reid (British Army officer)

Reid's father, Alexander Robertson, took an active part and incurred heavy losses in resisting the Jacobite rising of 1745.

When Lord Loudoun's regiment of highlanders was raised, after the Battle of Fontenoy, he received a commission in it (8 June 1745) as lieutenant, his name being shown as John Robertson or Reid of Straloch.

[1] He served with the regiment against the Jacobite rebels of 1745, and was with that part of it which captured the troops landed in Tongue Bay from the sloop Hazard on 25 March 1746.

When peace was made in 1748 the regiment was reduced, and Reid bought a commission as captain-lieutenant in the 42nd Highlanders on 26 June 1751.

[1] In the same year he was at the siege of Havana, which lasted two months, and cost his battalion heavy losses from sickness.

When some new regiments were added to the establishment on account of French intervention in the war between Great Britain and the American colonies, he raised one, the 95th Foot of which he was colonel from 7 April 1780 till 31 May 1783, when it was disbanded.

[1] In the previous July he had written to Lord Amherst, the commander-in-chief under whom he had served in America asking for the colonelcy of a regiment not liable to be reduced after the war, and setting forth in detail, perhaps with some exaggeration, his past services and the losses he had sustained.

He had acquired, chiefly by purchase, about 35,000 acres (140 km2) of land in Vermont, and had erected mills and made other improvements.

Twelve marches by Reid were arranged for a full band of wind instruments by P. Winter in the early part of the nineteenth century.

They diverted the bulk of it from the primary object to the further uses mentioned in Reid's will, and they fixed the professor's salary at £300, the minimum which he had named.