(25 July 1823-19 Oct. 1900), shipping magnate. Born near Williamstown, GC. Parents: Duncan Cameron and his wife Margaret McLeod. Young Roderick Cameron was educated as a student of John Rae, also at Cornwall and Kingston. Cameron began business life in Hamilton, Ont., but moved to New York, where from 1852 till his death he was a businessman involved in the shipping trade between the United States and Australia (with some trade also to other parts of the world). His shipping company was first called the Australian Pioneer Line, but after W.A. Street became his partner, it was called R.W. Cameron and Company. The company, which in its its early days used clipper ships, still operates today from its headquarters near New York City. A GC researcher who visited its then office in the 1980s was impressed to find that this company of such old GC connections was based at that time just a few minutes’ walk from New York’s Grand Central Station.

     Like his contemporary Leonard Jerome, the grandfather of Winston Churchill, the wealthy Cameron was a vigorous promoter of horse racing in New York. Cameron was interested also in yachting, and was a dedicated traveller throughout life. At home he established the fine estate of Clifton Berley on Staten Island, described in an article by H. Livingston, “A Three-Hundred-Acre-Estate in New York City,” in Country Life in America, April 1904. Cameron acted as representative of New South Wales and of Canada at international exhibitions. He was knighted in 1882 at the urging of the Canadian government. In 1884 or possibly a little earlier, in one of the hardest-to-explain episodes in his most remarkable career, Cameron loaned a large sum of money to Queen Victoria’s hemophiliac son, the Duke of Albany, who possibly needed it to pay a gambling debt. The money was returned to Cameron when Albany, aged only 30, died soon afterwards. Cameron knew Sir John A. Macdonald and the legendary American millionaire Jay Gould and many other important people. Cameron purchased the former summer home at Tadoussac, Que., of Lord Dufferin, the governor general of Canada, and he acquired large landholdings (the Cameron Ranch) near Lethbridge, in what is now Alberta. Sir Roderick Cameron died in Piccadilly, London, Eng. The burial was in the cemetery of St. Andrew’s Church, Williamstown, where afterwards several of his children were also buried. He married (1) Mary Ann Cumming (d. 1858), (2) Anne Fleming Leavenworth (d. 1879). A daughter of Cameron’s married into the family of the Admiral Perry who opened Japan to American trade.

     One of the most successful Glengarrians of his time, Cameron maintained no contact except through a few letters with Glengarry in the years of his fame and success. Cameron, no enemy to conspicuous consumption, was a dedicated, triumphantly successful player in the flamboyant and extravagant life of the wealthy American upper class of his day. He seems from such evidence as survives today to have been intelligent, masterful, courteous, polished and cosmopolitan, but also aggressive, manipulative, self-centered, and indifferent to the humble and the unfortunate. There seems to be no reliable contemporary record of how wealthy he really was. But in any case there was enough money for the family to continue his lavish lifestyle afterwards.

     See also James Craig and Dr Roderick McLeod this dictionary.

     Pat Cavendish O’Neill’s A Lion in the Bedroom (592 pp., Park Street Press, 2004, 2005) is a sensational, entertaining and historically important memoir of high society life in Australia and the United States, but mainly in Europe and Africa, with material on a branch of Sir Roderick’s descendants. The book includes in its cast the legendary financier Bernard Baruch, the author Somerset Maugham, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Prominent in the book is the author’s adored half brother, another Roderick William Cameron (1913-1985), author, aesthete, wealthy restorer of a villa on the Mediterranean, man of magnetic personality, and AIDS victim. He was the grandson of Sir Roderick Cameron and is said to have been involved in the preparation of one of the twentiethth century’s historical classics, H. R. Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler.

Life by Royce MacGillivray in Dictionary of Canadian Biography XII, and sources stated there * file of papers on Cameron compiled in preparing the DCB life and now preserved in the collections of the GHS, Williamstown * the valuable collection of Cameron’s family papers, Archives of Ontario * Fraser, Gravestones, I, 109-111 * video of the life of Sir Roderick and his family prepared by a descendant, Juan Cameron. This excellent video is reasonably well known among the followers of GC history and it was shown, for example, at the GHS meeting, Sept. 1995 * Glengarry News 26 Oct. & 8 Nov. 1900 * letter in collections of GHS, written by Cameron to Annie MacLaurin of Mayfield Farm, the Cameron home in GC, in which Cameron reminisces about his early years in GC (noted GHS Newsletter of Sept. 1995). In 1889 Cameron wrote a similar letter to John A. Macdonell (Greenfield) which, regrettably, so far as is known is now lost (Glengarrian 20 Dec. 1889) * MacGillivray & Ross 48 * Ross, Lancaster, 240 * Bibliography of Glengarry: index for Cameron and see Bibliography of Glengarry 137 for Cameron’s ranch * three articles by Royce MacGillivray, “A Cosmopolitan and his Age: Sir Roderick Cameron,” The Loyalist Gazette 24:2 Dec. 1986); “Sir Roderick Cameron and the Duke of Albany,” Glengarry Life (1988), which deals with Cameron’s strange entry into the life of Queen Victoria’s son; and “The Knighthood of Sir Roderick Cameron,” Past & Present [University of Waterloo publication] (Feb. 1988), which attempts to explain how Cameron got his knighthood * monument to him placed in St. Andrew’s cemetery, Williamstown (1906), 20 Years Ago column, Cornwall Freeholder 21 Jan. 1926 * death of Sir Roderick’s daughter Miss Isabel Cameron and her burial at Williamstown, Cornwall Standard 27 July 1906, & 20 Years Ago column, CF 22 July 1926 * Roderick William Cameron (1913-1985): obituary New York Times 26 Sept. 1985, and O’Neill as cited; obituary and death notice of his father, Roderick MacLeod Cameron, New York Times 23 & 24 Oct. 1914