This talk follows Dow from his birth in rural Perthshire, near Comrie, to Eyemouth in Berwickshire, where he worked for a leading local smuggler, then to India rising to become a Colonel in the East India Company. He wrote a pioneering history of India, had two plays produced by David Garrick and his portrait was painted by Joshua Reynolds. He died in 1779, aged just 43. Derek Janes worked for the City of Edinburgh Museums from 1985 to 2008, when he retired and took up the job of Manager at Gunsgreen House in Eyemouth, where Dow lived and worked in the early 1750s. Derek’s work on the history of the house and its builder, the smuggler John Nisbet, led to his working towards a PhD on smuggling in SE Scotland at the University of Exeter, due to be finished this year.
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The Unlikely Story of Alexander Dow