Nanton, Sir Augustus Meredith

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Peter Hanlon, “NANTON, Sir AUGUSTUS MEREDITH,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 15, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/nanton_augustus_meredith_15E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Broker, financier, capitalist, and philanthropist; b. 7 May 1860 in Toronto, son of Daniel Augustus Nanton, a barrister, and Mary Louisa Jarvis, daughter of William Botsford Jarvis; m. first 7 Dec. 1886 Georgina Hope Hespeler (d. 1887), daughter of William Hespeler, in Galt, Ont., and they had one daughter; m. secondly 17 Nov. 1894 Ethel Constance Clark in Winnipeg, and they had two sons and two daughters who survived infancy; d. 24 April 1925 in Toronto and was buried in Winnipeg.
    • The death of his alcoholic father forced 13-year-old Augustus Nanton to leave the Toronto Model School to help support his mother and younger brother and sisters. His first position was as an office boy in a real estate firm. Two years later, in 1875, through the influence of an uncle, he obtained a junior clerical position at $300 a year in Edmund Boyd Osler’s brokerage firm, Pellatt and Osler.
    • In 1882 Osler broke with his partner, Henry Pellatt, and founded, with Herbert Carlyle Hammond, secretary of the Bank of Hamilton, the firm Osler and Hammond. Osler retained the agency of the North of Scotland and kept Nanton with him as its secretary. The following year the partners sent Nanton to Winnipeg on behalf of the Aberdeen company to report on investment opportunities in farm mortgages in the northwest. Nanton’s shrewd mind intuitively grasped the opportunities offered by the region to create untold wealth and to further his own ambitions. In 1884 he returned to open a Winnipeg office as a junior partner in the Toronto firm’s western branch. Through the agency of Osler, Hammond, and Nanton, the North of Scotland was one of the first companies in the northwest to finance first mortgages, or purchase municipal and school debentures, to any significant extent. Nanton tirelessly promoted the Scottish business and by the end of the first year made £28,629 worth of loans; ten years later capital investment had risen to £315,664 under his management.
    • Through his intimate business association with Osler, who in 1901 had become president of the Dominion Bank, Nanton had been appointed one of the bank’s directors in 1907. He became a vice-president in 1919 and on Osler’s death in August 1924 he succeeded to the presidency. In 1910 Nanton had been appointed vice-president of the Great-West Life Assurance Company. It was his appointment in 1912 as secretary to the Canadian advisory committee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, however, that clinched his reputation as a dominant figure on the national financial stage.
    • Nanton was, above all, a nation builder who aimed to develop the northwest from a region dependent upon central Canada and Great Britain for immigration and development capital to one capable of generating its own wealth. The wider aspirations of his expansionist vision embraced a stable and civilized life stretching across the prairies through the development of town-sites to serve as centres of rural economic life. Winnipeg would become a manufacturing and distribution centre, as well as an important source of capital within the expanding nation. Nanton’s sudden death eight months after he assumed the presidency of the Dominion Bank saw the passing of one who had helped lay the foundation of sound financial organization for the development of western Canada.
  • Second Great Grandson of Proven Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory –https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=4201
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/143659160/augustus-meredith-nanton