William Garden Blaikie
British minister (1820–1899)
William Garden Blaikie FRSE (5 February 1820, in Aberdeen – 11 June 1899) was a Scottish minister, writer, biographer, and temperance reformer.
Life
His father James Ogilvie Blaikie was the first Provost of Aberdeen following its reformed corporation. After studying at Marischal College, where Alexander Bain and David Masson were among his contemporaries, he went in 1839 to Edinburgh to complete his theological studies under Thomas Chalmers. In 1842 he was presented to the parish of Drumblade as their minister by the Earl of Kintore, to whose family he was connected. The Disruption of 1843 reached its climax immediately afterwards, and Blaikie was one of the 474 ministers who signed the deed of demission and gave up their livings.
He found a brief position as Free Church minister of Turriff 1843/44 before being translated to Pilrig Free Church on the boundary between Leith and Edinburgh. This was agreed in January 1844 and his first service was on 1 March 1844. The church was the second purpose-built church for the Free Church and was designed by a congregation member, David Cousin. Elders of the church included Francis Brown Douglas.
Blaikie remained minister of Pilrig until 1868, overseeing the building of a new and more lavish Free Church on the corner opposite the original church, this being designed in 1865 by the architects Peddie & Kinnear, together with a new purpose-built manse on Pilrig Street.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8009658. VIAF identifies the subject as 32778228. The Library of Congress control number is n88603941. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1820, 1899, 1839 and 1842.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Garden Blaikie” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.