MAKGILL, Sir George
George Makgill was born at Stirling, Scotland on 24 December 1868, son of Captain John Makgill (8 February 1836-14 November 1906) of the Royal Madras Engineers, and his wife Margaret Isabella née Haldane (5 January 1847-18 March 1920), sister of Lord Haldane, who married on 18 April 1866. George was educated privately, and for several years lived in New Zealand where his father had a station at Waiuku. He married in New Zealand on 1 December 1891, Frances Elizabeth Grant (1870-16 December 1947) of Merchiston, Otago, N.Z. and on the death of his father at Waiuku, Auckland, New Zealand in 1906, George Makgill established his claim to the Baronetcy of Makgill, and continued to petition for the revival of the Lordship and the Scottish Viscountcy of Oxfuird. As Sir George Makgill, 11th Bart, he leased from Lord Henniker, Yaxley Hall, an Elizabethan mansion, near Eye, Suffolk. During the First World War, Makgill was Secretary to the Anti-German Union, later renamed the British Empire Union which in 1915 and 1916 brought a lawsuit to strip German-born banker Ernest Cassel and the American-born, of German parents, railway financier Edgar Speyer, of their Privy Council membership and although the case was dismissed, Edgar Speyer's English citizenship was stripped after the war. After the war, business interests invited Makgill to set up a secretive intelligence network, the Industrial Intelligence Board, to monitor communists, trade unionists and industrial unrest and in 1926 managed the day-to-day operations of the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, set up to supply and maintain blackleg workers during the General Strike. A member of the Ipswich Art Club 1911-1915 and exhibited from The Gazebo, Walberswick, Southwold, Suffolk in 1911, twelve pictures four oils 'Fishermen', 'On the River Blyth', 'The Harbour' and 'Southwold Quay' and seven watercolours 'The Village', 'Fishing Boats Stranded', 'The Old Bridge', 'Autumn Sunset', 'Fishermen, River Blyth', 'Fishing Boats', 'Dunwich Church' and 'Snow and Sunshine'. He also exhibited an oil landscape at the Suffolk Art and Aid Association held at Eye Town Hall in 1913. By 1914 he was living at Aldbury, Tring, Hertfordshire but did not exhibit again. The author of colonial adventure stories under pseudonyms 'Victor Waite' and 'Mungo Ballas'. George Makgil was living at Kembach, Fifeshire when he died at 25 Tedworth Square, London on 17 October 1926. He had two daughters and two sons with eldest son, John Donald Makgill (1899-1986) inheriting the baronetcy.