Stewart Gray

Alexander Stewart Gray (17 May 1862 – 13 April 1937) was a Scottish advocate, artist, and campaigner against unemployment. He led a "hunger march", fasted outside Windsor Castle, and created an artist's colony near Regent's Park. Early life Alexander Stewart Gray (known as Stewart) was the fifth of eleven children of William Gray (1829–1909) and Helen Marshall Stewart (1835–1904), who were tenant farmers at Brownrigg Farm, North Berwick, East Lothian. His mother had her own income, but spent most of it on the children's education. Several of his sisters had good careers. Agnes Grainger Gray (1858-1940) became headmistress of Sandecotes School, Parkstone, Dorset; Jessy MacDonald Stewart Wallace (1867-1937) became an Inspector of Workshops in Islington; Charlotte Jane Andrews (1872-1942) became an established artist of the Scottish Colourist school, and painted alongside Samuel Peploe in France and Spain. The youngest child, Hugh Stewart Gray (1875-1955), married Hilda Orchardson in 1905 (the daughter of the artist Sir William Quiller Orchardson) and became a farmer in South Africa. Alexander Stewart Gray became a solicitor in Edinburgh where he was involved in the flotation of companies on the Stock Market, including the Provost Oats Company, a well-known company at the time. He mismanaged some family finances, and his mother lost all her personal income. He abandoned his work as a solicitor - perhaps being disbarred for embezzlement - and took to politics. Activism In the early 1900s, Gray rejected his middle class existence to campaign against unemployment and poverty. Jack Kahane, who knew him, described Gray in his Memoirs of a Booklegger (1939) as "shocked out of a comfortable life by the spectacle of starvation", a "heroic dreamer", and an eccentric who wore a sombrero and had "school-boyish and impracticable" ideas.