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====== Bethune, James ====== (7 July 1840-18 Dec. 1884), lawyer. Born in Charlottenburgh Township, GC. Parents: Angus Bethune and his wife Ann McKenzie. Angus Bethune (1816-1898) the father, who was also a native of Charlottenburgh, was a warden of SDG, deputy sheriff, and mayor of Cornwall, and was police magistrate at Cornwall 1880 till his death (see J. L. D. Danis). If these Bethunes were of the family of the Rev. John Bethune the connection was presumably not a close one. Young James attended Queen’s University and the University of Toronto. He studied law in the offices of J.F. Pringle, Cornwall, and Edward Blake, Toronto, and was called to the bar of Upper Canada in 1862. He was a lawyer in Cornwall, and crown attorney for SDG. He represented Stormont in the Ontario Legislature 1872 to 1879 as a Liberal (see W. Colquhoun). Bethune moved to Toronto in 1870 and practised law there with great success. He belonged to the Toronto law firm of Blake, Kerr and Bethune, and afterwards of Bethune, Osler and Moss, and later of Bethune, Moss, Falconbridge and Hoyles. He died in Toronto of typhoid fever. Presbyterian. He was married in 1860 to Elizabeth Mary Rattray (form Elizabeth Chesley Rattray also found), of Cornwall, daughter of Dr Charles Rattray, mayor of Cornwall. As a widow she remarried to Sir William Pearce Howland, who was a federal cabinet minister and lieut. governor of Ontario, and one of the fathers of Confederation.
James Bethune’s daughter, Mrs Elizabeth Bethune Campbell (23 Sept. 1880-Jan. 1956), fought a celebrated legal battle, which lasted many years, to retrieve money she believed a family connection in the Hogg family had stolen from her mother’s estate. Memorably, in 1930, though she had no formal legal training, Mrs Campbell acting as her own lawyer successfully argued her case before the Privy Council court in London, a court where her father had once been well known as a lawyer. Mrs Campbell appears to have been the first woman to argue a case before this court. A fluent writer, Mrs Campbell described her struggle, up to the Privy Council victory, in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1940), which became an underground classic in the legal profession. The book has been republished, with a full set of notes and much explanation of the legal background, in Constance and Nancy L. Backhouse, The Heiress vs the Establishment: Mrs. Campbell’s Campaign for Legal Justice (University of British Columbia Press, for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2004). Financially, the struggle proved a failure, for Mrs Campbell succeeded in obtaining little of the money she sought. There seems no record of GC interests on the part of Mrs Campbell. Her husband, Campbell, apparently not of GC connections, was an Episcopalian clergyman in Boston.
Mrs Campbell’s sister, who was married to A. W. McDougald, has her own biography in the present dictionary as Annie Bethune McDougald.
Another daughter of James Bethune, Mrs Cora Lindsey, was married to a grandson of the rebel leader William Lyon Mackenzie. Also, Mackenzie King the future prime minister was a close friend of Charles Bethune (d. 1921), James’s son, and there was a Bethune family belief that King himself had come close to marrying the future Mrs Campbell.
Mrs Campbell, during much or all of the long legal struggle, which they did not support, appears to have been estranged from her sisters Annie and Cora.
Life in Rose, i, 680-681 * J. Smyth Carter, The Story of Dundas (1905) 221-222 * Harkness: index * life of his father in Rose, i, 651-652, see also Harkness: index obituary of James Bethune, “a brilliant son” of GC, DTL Standard Freeholder 20 Dec. 1947 based on Cornwall Freeholder 19 Dec. 1884 * The Heiress vs the Establishment: family data, portraits (includes fine portrait of James) * Roderick Lewis 357 * Dr Charles Rattray: Harkness 449 and (with a useful note on Bethune) Canniff 567-568 * Howland: DNB Supplement 1901-1911 & Dictionary of Canadian Biography XIII * obituary of Mrs A. W. McDougald, SFH 30 April 1942