1 - Biography

Summary

❧ Birth, Early Years

Details of John Gunn's date and place of birth have been subject to some variation in different sources. John Gunn said that he had been born in the Highlands. The Gunn surname is particularly strongly associated with the counties of Caithness and Sutherland in north-east Scotland, where the Gunn clan, a ‘fierce and turbulent tribe’ tracing its origins to the late twelfth century, predominated. However, later writers mostly suggested Edinburgh as his birthplace, following Fétis (‘né, je crois, en Edimbourg’), presumably because of his later residence there, and perhaps on the assumption that such a wellread individual was more likely to have come from a sophisticated metropolis than from a remote part of the north of Scotland over two hundred miles from the capital. Stratton's British Musical Biography (1897) gave the Highlands but, confusingly, with Edinburgh as a possibility: ‘Gunn, John, writer and violoncello player, was born in the Highlands of Scotland [Edinburgh, 1765?].’ Gunn's date of birth is commonly given as 1765, sometimes with some qualification, again following Fétis. But no Scottish record of birth or baptism for a John Gunn has been found for 1765. However, his burial record in Camberwell, Surrey, on 4 March 1824 (Figure 1), gives his age as fifty-seven. That excludes 1765 and means that he could have been born in the latter part of 1766 or early 1767. Only one baptism of a John Gunn corresponds to his being fifty-seven in early 1824. This was registered on 4 November 1766 in the parish of Golspie, Sutherland (Figure 2). The baptismal entry reads: ‘Donald Gunn Farmer [?] in Craigton Ch[ild]. Named John.’ This is the Craigtown estate (the writer of the baptismal register abbreviated the name for reasons of space), whose acreage on John Hume's map (Figure 3) shows that it was the largest farm in the area; it was later listed as the second-largest farm in the Golspie parish in 1793. There are too many married Donald Gunns in the region to identify his father more precisely. Hume's map also shows Craigtown's Old Kirk where Gunn was baptised.