FROM BRICKWORKS TO BARONETCY.

Waikato Independent, Volume III, Issue 183, 25 January 1906, Page 8

FROM BRICKWORKS TO BARONETCY.

CLAIMANT TO SCOTTISH DUKEDOM. After spending 30 years of his life in Australia as a private citizen, Mr James Mailer, elder brother of Captain William Mailer, staff officer of the Victorian Field Artillery, is at present in Glasgow prosecuting inquiries into his right by descent to the Scottish titles of Duke of Gordon, Lord Lochinvar, Lord Lorn, Earl of Athol, Lord Gordon of Strathbogie, Earl of Norwich, Baron Gordon of Hvmfcly and Earl of Huntly. The titles and estates attached thereto, Mailer claims, were wrongfully conveyed to the house of Richmond, and were confined bj a private bill dated January, 1876, based, he contends, upon misrepresentations. His researches, first in Australia, and then in London, Oxford, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, satisfied him that he possessed a lawful claim to the extinct dukedom of Gordon, and the accompanying dignities of the Stuarts of Lorn and Athol. He traces his connection with the great Gordon family from 1050 down to 1904, beginning with Adam de Gordon, who was killed at the seige of Alnwick, and claims that by legitimate descent he is the lawful heir to the dukedom. The claimant for ducal honours was born in Alford, Aberdeenshire, in 1858, and is therefore now in his 48th year. He came to Australia in 1877, and spent some years in Queensland. By profession ho is a clever mechanical and constructive engineer, and in that capacity he supervised the erection of many large sugar works machinery in the northern State. Eventually he left Queensland for New South Wales, and was for a considerable period a clerk of works in the Government Works Department, Sydney. Then, when the gold fever was, on in the West, he went to that State, and, being unsuccessful as a gold-miner, established a brickworks. This latter industry proved so profitable that after some years he was able to leave it and go back to his native land to carry out the idea he had with typical Scotch pertinacity clung to through the whole of his adventurous life. He had been told when a boy of 12 by his grandmother that his uncle was the true heir to the title, and that her husband was going to put forward his son to claim his right.