Robert Innes Grant 9th baronet of Dalvey

Son of Sir Alexander Grant (7th bart.) of Grants of Dalvey, awarded the compensation for the enslaved people on one estate in British Guiana and one in Jamaica.

1. Succeeded brother Sir Alexander Cray Grant (d. 29/11/1854) (q.v.) and became 9th bart. (Some sources give his father as the 5th and Robert Innes as the 7th baronet). Robert Innes Grant had lived in the West Indies and married Judith Tower (1804/5-1884), eldest daughter of Cornelius Durant Battelle of Santa Cruz or St Croix. Their son, Alexander, was born in New York 13/09/1826. '[Alexander] Grant had intended to study for the bar but instead became a private tutor at Oxford. Contemporary accounts reported a tradition that this change to a more immediately remunerative occupation was dictated by his family's reduced financial circumstances after the sudden emancipation, in 1848, of all the slaves on Santa Cruz by the Danish governor-general of the island, where the Grants had property.' Alexander Grant succeeded his father in 1856, and in 1859 took up an offer from Sir Charles Trevelyan to go out to Madras, becoming Vice Chancellor of the University of Bombay 1863, before his appointment as Principal of Edinburgh University, where he built the new Medical School and opposed the admission of women to it.

T71/886 British Guiana claim no. 1261 (Vrees en Hoop); T71/873 St James claim no. 348A & B (Mount Vernon).

1. Anderson, R. D. "Grant, Sir Alexander, tenth baronet (1826–1884), university principal." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 22 Feb. 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-11243. The original [archive] version of the entry said: 'In 1848-9, by the unexpected emancipation of all the slaves in the island of Santa Cruz, without any compensation, [Alexander] Grant's family was impoverished', "Grant, Sir Alexander (1826–1884)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 22 Feb. 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.001.0001/odnb-9780192683120-e-11243.