John Macdonald Cameron

Who was John Macdonald Cameron?

John Macdonald Cameron was a Scottish chemist and Liberal Party politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1885 to 1892.

Cameron was the only son of Lachlan Cameron of Saltburn Ross and his wife Christina Macdonald of Brackla, Nairnshire. He was educated at Sharp's Institution, Perth and entered the Inland Revenue in 1866. In 1870 he gained a Board of Inland Revenue scholarship in Science and studied at the Royal School of Mines winning 1st class prize in Organic and Inorganic Chemistry. He was a chemist in the Inland Revenue Laboratory at Somerset House from 1870 to 1874 and then became an instructor in the Chemical Research Laboratory at the Royal School of Mines. In 1879 he began in business as an assayer and mining expert.

At the 1885 general election, Cameron was elected as the Member of Parliament for Wick Burghs as an independent liberal, defeating the sitting Liberal MP John Pender. A committed land reformer, he had been nominated by the Wick Radical Workingmen's Association and supported by the Highland Law Reform Association and appears to have been sympathetic to the Crofters Party.