Author: Menzies, George
Biography:
MENZIES, George (1796/97-1847: DCB)
Poet, gardener, teacher, newspaper editor. He was born at Townhead of Arburthnott, Kincardine, but his family moved to Redmyre when he was just a few years old. He attended the parish school at Fordoun before being apprenticed to a gardener. From about 1816 he became a teacher at various small schools, supplementing his income by weaving. Seeing little future in his makeshift existence, he decided to emigrate to Upper Canada in 1833, and, on arrival in Niagara, worked first as a teacher and then—very successfully—as an editor with a succession of newspapers, culminating in his establishment, with Alexander Hay, of the Woodstock Herald in 1840. He was politically moderate but from time to time he would replace the political leader in the Herald with satiric pieces called “Extracts from an unpublished dictionary.” He married Harriet Burton in 1841. He died suddenly at Woodstock, Ontario; in 1850 his widow published a collection of his poems (The Posthumous Works of the Late George Menzies) (DCB; William Ruxton Fraser, History of the Parish of Laurencekirk [1880])