# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Stephen, George

​STEPHEN, GEORGE, first Baron Mount Stephen (1829–1921), financier and philanthropist, was born at Dufftown, Banffshire, 5 June 1829. He was the eldest son of William Stephen, a carpenter, of Dufftown, by his wife, Elspet, daughter of John Smith, of Knockando. After a few years at the parish school of Mortlach, and summer work as a herd boy, Stephen at fourteen was apprenticed to an Aberdeen draper, and four years later (1847) moved first to Glasgow and then to London. A chance meeting at his employer's with a cousin, William Stephen, a Montreal draper, led him to Canada in 1850. There he became buyer to his cousin's firm, partner, and, on his cousin's death in 1860, sole proprietor. He prospered, embarked on cloth manufacture, and in 1873 became a director of the Bank of Montreal, in 1876 its president. As retail trade had led to wholesale, and that to manufacture and finance, so finance led to railway building. Business took Stephen and the bank's manager, Richard Bladworth Angus, to Chicago; thence they visited St. Paul, the head-quarters of a potentially valuable but bankrupt railway, the St. Paul and Pacific. It held wide concessions conditional on speedy completion. In 1878 it was taken up by a group of six, with Stephen as president and James J. Hill as general manager; the others being Stephen's cousin, Donald Alexander ​Smith, afterwards Baron Strathcona [q.v.], Norman W. Kittson, John Kennedy, and R. B. Angus. Stephen visited Holland and bought out the owners, Dutch bondholders, for a low price; the group finished the line and made their fortunes; the railway later grew, under Hill's management, into the Great Northern.
It was this same group, with a few changes, that built the Canadian Pacific Railway. Some 700 miles of the transcontinental line had been constructed by the Canadian government, but work was languishing and British Columbia dissatisfied. The ministry of Sir John Alexander Macdonald [q.v.] resolved to transfer the railway to private enterprise. Stephen was reluctant to undertake the task, but he and his group finally consented, and formed a company of which he was president from 1880 to 1888. There were enormous difficulties, natural, financial, and political; for surmounting the last two Stephen, more than any man, was responsible; (Sir) William Van Horne [q.v.] saw to construction. Stephen showed great courage and determination; with his associates he pledged all his resources; he wrung financial aid from a reluctant Cabinet. From January 1884 to April 1885 he nearly despaired, but at the last minute, bankruptcy being a matter of hours, the railway was saved by the intervention of the acting minister of railways, (Sir) Joseph H. Pope, with the government. In November 1885 D. A. Smith drove the last spike at Craigellachie. Stephen was not satisfied even with a coast to coast railway; from the first it was his aim that the company should run its own ships to England and China, and his views have proved justified by the Company's later expansion.
In 1888 Stephen retired from the railway presidency, and in 1893 made his home in England. He was created a baronet in 1886, and a peer in 1891, taking his title from a peak in the Rockies named after him by railway surveyors. He showed no political ambitions, and in England lived chiefly at Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire. He had no passion for continuing in harness, his tastes were simple, his ambition satisfied, and he cared little for publicity. He lived for nearly thirty years after his retirement, giving generously to hospitals in London, Montreal, and Aberdeen, distributing over £1,000,000 in his lifetime and leaving the residue of his estate to King Edward's hospital fund. He died at Brocket Hall 29 November 1921. He married, first, in 1853 Charlotte Annie (died 1896), daugter of Benjamin Kane; secondly, in 1897 Gian, daughter of Captain George Robert Tufnell, R.N. He had no children, but left an adopted daughter, who married Henry Stafford Northcote, Baron Northcote [q.v.].
There is a portrait of Stephen, painted by Sir George Reid in 1894, in the Canadian Pacific Company's offices, Toronto.
[The Times, 1 December 1921; Keith Morris,Story of Lord Mount Stephen, 1922; Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles Tupper, 2 vols., 1916; Correspondence of Sir John Macdonald, 1921; O. D. Skelton, The Railway Builders, 1916.]
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