David McLaren, pious evangelical but tough canny dealer as South Australian Company manager 1837-1841
David McLaren's biggest contribution through the South Australian Company activity in the late 1830s was in banking. As a devout evangelical, he conducted baptisms in Adelaide's River Torrens.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
David McLaren, colonial manager of the South Australian Company from 1837-41, was an even stronger Protestant capitalist than his predecessor Samuel Stephens who was regarded by McLaren as too convivial and lacking in piety.
Born at Perth, Scotland, the eldest son of a Glasgow manufacturer, David McLaren went to Glasgow College, where his parents wanted him to study for the Church of Scotland ministry but he became an ardent evangelical Congregationalist under Ralph Wardlaw. He married Mary Wingate, daughter of one of Wardlaw's deacons. In 1823, with his wife and other members, he broke away over infant baptism and formed a congregation of Scottish Baptists. As an elder, he was a powerful preacher.
After apprenticeship with a Glasgow engineer, McLaren had become an accountant looking after many bankrupt estates. He also acted as an insurance and shipping agent for imported indigo and copperas.
A client was George Fife Angas who suffered big losses in shipping, with McLaren blaming himself. In 1832, Mclaren sought Angas's support in applying to be treasurer of Glasgow Water Works. He wasn’t successful and in 1835 became the South Australian colonisation commission’s emigration agent at Glasgow and Greenock. Later that year, he was promised the Scottish agency for shares in the South Australian Company.
In 1836, Angas's offer for him to be the company's colonial manager conflicted McLaren whose sense of debt to Angas was “consistent with Duty” but he complained the salary was inadequate since his family had to stay in Scotland. With a salary of £600 and a seven-year contract, McLaren sailed in the company's barque, the South Australian, and arrived at Kingscote, Kangaroo Island, in April 1837.
McLaren continued to use previous manager Stephens’ skill as a judge of land and livestock after he resigned. By 1841, in spite of bad luck in the ballot for country sections, McLaren secured the company more than 36,000 acres that produced dividends for nearly a century. McLaren gradually withdrew the company from whaling and shipping, regulated farm tenancies and, by hard dealing with overlanders, stocked the company's land with cattle and sheep.
By 1839, the company’s Kingscote headquarters had been moved to Adelaide, where McLaren began a road to the port and a wharf that bore his name for 100 years. McLaren's major contribution to the colony and the company was in banking. By cautious but well-placed loans he gained a commanding hold over many leading settlers and merchants and indirectly controlled much of second governor George Gawler’s heavy public spending.
In the boom that followed, McLaren carefully kept the company's land and trading accounts apart from its banking business. This saved the company and its bank in the depression that hit in 1840. Through his canny deals, McLaren became intensely unpopular but he found solace in religious activity.
He acted as lay pastor to a group of Baptists and often preached to other congregations. He made big loans to Dissenting chapels and schools and was the first to publicly oppose moves to establish the Church of England by law in the colony and he discouraged attempts to found a Roman Catholic church. By his unrelenting opposition to sins of the flesh, he drove many men to excesses of frivolity and intemperance. Despite his Calvinism, McLaren bitterly opposed capital punishment and believed in redeeming Aboriginal people. By business and belief, he did his best to make Adelaide a strictly Protestant evangelical preserve.
McLaren was offered the London management of the company when it was separated from its bank. Farewelled by more than 100 leading colonists at a lavish luncheon, he left Adelaide in 1841 in the John Pirie. In London, where his family joined him, he continued to run its business profitably. Evidence he gave to the select committee on Australian shipping led to the repeal of the Navigation Acts in 1849
Of his six children, the youngest, Alexander became an outstanding Baptist minister at Manchester.
