complicated political situation in Japan which provided his first opportunities in business.
Glover was intimately involved in the rebellion of dissatisfied samurai which dominated the 1860s. This uprising brought down the bakufu, the government, nominally led by the shogun, then ruling Japan. He was involved to the extent that in an interview given shortly before his death he claimed for himself the title of the ‘greatest rebel’ in the movement which brought down the last shogun and ‘restored’ the Emperor in 1868.
This rebellion, which ended the Tokugawa family’s 200-year grip on the office of shogun, is a watershed in Japanese history. The first Tokugawa shogun had been helped into power by Will Adams, the English pilot of a shipwrecked Dutch vessel and the model for Blackthorne in James Clavell’s historical novel, Shogun. Two centuries later the last Tokugawa shogun was eased out of power by a young Scottish adventurer.
Glover helped the rebels with money, with arms, and with escape and transport to the West. Supplying arms made Glover rich but there is much more to his story than that.
He helped push Japan into the modern world. His Aberdeen-built slip-dock pioneered the Mitsubishi shipyard complex now sited in Nagasaki, one of the most advanced in the world, containing a dry-dock with a capacity of berthing ships of up to 1 million tons. The coal-mine he developed with imported British technology at Takashima, near Nagasaki, fuelled the industrialisation of Japan and its exports provided much of the crucial foreign currency necessary to pay for it. His ships formed the nucleus of the Japanese Navy and Merchant Marine.
In 1908, aged seventy, Glover was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the man he had helped to power forty years before – Emperor Meiji. The citation for his award lists his achievements for Japan and runs to twenty pages of script.
He died in 1911 at his palatial Tokyo residence. At seventy-three he was a Hero of the New Japan but even to this day he is little known in his own country.
Glover’s personal life was as complicated and dramatic as his public one. He had a string of affairs with Japanese women and there are at least four recorded instances of children he fathered to different mothers while in Japan. An affair with the completely unknown Maki Kaga early in 1870 led to the birth of a son and almost certainly some elements of the Madam Butterfly legend.
No family letters are known to have survived although Glover’s business dealings in his decade as Jardine, Matheson & Co.’s agent are well documented. Yet from all the available sources it is possible to track Glover’s life with some accuracy.
This is the story of a Scottish samurai.
FOREWORD
February 2012
I am delighted Canongate are re-issuing Scottish Samurai. There has been recent interest in Glover in the UK by, among others, the BBC and in Japan by its equivalent, NHK, and the book has been out of print for some time. It expresses much of my non-academic excitement at having discovered Thomas Glover in the early 1970s. It had come about almost by accident. While engaged in looking for oil in the Sea of Japan I lived and worked in Japan for almost a decade and married a Japanese girl in 1973. We visited Nagasaki on honeymoon. The book, which had bubbled inside me for years, was written in the years after my permanent return to the UK in the mid-1980s.
This is not a new edition. I must therefore point out that in the years since first publication, extensive scholarship, principally by my good friend Professor Brian Burke-Gaffney of Nagasaki, has shed much more light on the origins of the Glover—Madam Butterfly story and those wishing to pursue this particular aspect should access his work on the subject. More details of Glover’s son, Tomisaburo, have also emerged but the basic details and the story remain exactly as I wrote them in this book.
Alexander McKay, Edinburgh, February 2012
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For their patience, encouragement, kindness and help in the writing of this book, I would like to acknowledge the following: in Japan: Brian Burke-Gaffney, Kenji Fujita, Junichi Kusumoto, Hatsuho Naito, Yumiyo Yamamoto; in Belgium: Birgit Debeerst; in The Netherlands: Jan van Rij; in the UK: David G.O. Carmichael, Dr Hazel Carnegie, Sir Hugh Cortazzi, Robin Denniston, Dr John Edward, Dr John McMaster, Anne Malcolm, Loraine Noble, the late Dr Sandy Sharp, Commander Brian Wainwright, Billy Watson; in the USA: Mrs Mabel Bennett. I am grateful, also, to Duncan McAra, for his contribution as editorial consultant.
CHAPTER ONE
THE COASTGUARD’S FAMILY
Thomas Blake Glover’s family background was typically that of the Victorian middle class of north-east Scotland: farming and the sea.
His father, Thomas Berry Glover, who had been born in London, was a naval officer whose career with the Coastguard spanned twenty-seven years. As a newly qualified twenty-two-year-old ship’s master, he had joined the service in Vauxhall, London, in 1827. The Coastguard was then five years old – formed in 1822 from an amalgamation of the various coastal defence and anti-smuggling organisations then in existence. The officers of the new service were nominated by the Lords of the Admiralty. The Coastguard’s main functions were to prevent smuggling and to give aid to ships in distress. Later its duties were widened to include ‘searching for mines and torpedoes lost at sea, and performing sundry duties in connection with signals, telegraphs, buoys, lighthouses, wild birds and rare fish washed ashore’.
A string of Coastguard stations ringed the British coastline and Glover took up his first appointment in Aberdeenshire. His base was the station located in Sandend, a small fishing village on the north-facing coast of the Moray Firth.
Isolated as the posting was, it did not take long for the young chief officer to woo and to marry Mary Findlay, the daughter of a local landowner. Mary’s family home was in Fordyce, a small farming community a few miles inland from the Sandend station. After their marriage in Fordyce on 3 July 1829, the couple settled in Sandend and their first son, named Charles Thomas, was born in Fordyce the following year; presumably, Mary returned to her parents’ home for the birth. Their second child, another boy named William Jacob, was born two years later at the Sandend Coastguard house. Mary went back to Fordyce for the birth of their third son, James Lindley, in 1834.
In November 1835 Glover was appointed chief officer at Fraserburgh’s Coastguard station, further to the east of the Moray coastline. At the age of thirty, the posting to the bigger Fraserburgh command was a promotion for him.
The station was situated in the centre of the fishing town’s harbour area but the family resided at nearby 15 Commerce Street. This house was apparently rented privately from its wealthy owner, Alexander Malcolm, by Lieutenant Glover. Henry Martin was the next addition to the family, born in their new home in 1836, but he died before his first birthday, in March 1837, and was buried in a local graveyard. Despite this blow, by the end of 1837 Mary was pregnant again.
Their fifth successive son, named Thomas Blake, was born on 6 June 1838, most likely in the house at 15 Commerce Street. He was baptised just over a month later in the local Episcopal church at Mid Street, an easy walk from the station house. The baptismal witnesses were a Mr Fraser and a Mr Gordon, bank agents in the town. A sixth son, Alexander Johnson, was born in 1840, followed two years later by a daughter – at last – called Martha Anne.
The Glovers were sufficiently well off to send their three oldest boys as boarders to Aberdeen
