F. J. Shand
Client
Francis James Shand (1854–1929) was born at Lossiemouth, Morayshire, on 11 August 1854. 1 By the time of the 1881 census he was a commercial clerk in an india-rubber factory in Edinburgh. 2 He first appears in the Glasgow Post Office Directory in 1885–6 as assistant manager of Nobel's Explosives Co. Ltd, and in 1910–11 he is listed as the company's general manager. Nobel's Explosives Company had been established in 1871 by the Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Bernhard Nobel. Its factory was at Ardeer on the Ayrshire coast, and its head office at 195 West George Street, Glasgow. 3 Shand resigned as manager due to ill health in 1918, and retired from the board in 1922. 4 He died in the Crichton Royal Hospital, Dumfries, on 28 January 1929. 5 He is almost certainly the same F. J. Shand whose collection of Anglo–Gallic, Ancient British, English and Scottish coins was sold by Glendining & Co., London, in March 1949 (his widow, Amy Shand, having died on 8 May 1948). 6
Notes:
1: Record of birth, www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk [accessed 22 February 2013].
2: 1881 census, www.ancestry.co.uk [accessed 22 February 2013].
3: 'The Greatest Explosives Factory in the World', The Times, 25 April 1911, p. 18.
4: Scotsman, 13 June 1918, p. 3; The Times, 20 November 1922, p. 19.
5: Record of death, www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk [accessed 22 February 2013].
6: The Times, 1 March 1949, p. 8. Record of Amy Shand's death, www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk [accessed 22 February 2013].
