The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1838-04-10 00:00:00

OUTLINE OF KINNEAR'S CAREER.

As our readers may have some curiosity respecting the former
career of an individual who has made so much noise in the
world as John Kinnear, we will give a few of the leading par-
ticulars of his life. He is, if we mistake not, a native of Mon-
trose. Ile married a Miss Donaldson, of Perth, whose maiden
name he has recently assumed, and was at one time a partner
in the house of Robinson, Tate, Kinnear, and Co., of Glasgow ;
and, if we are not misinformed, had also some connexion in
business with a member of the Monteith family. Though we
believe be did not actually fail at Glasgow, be was not success-
ful in business ,ere, and consequently removed to Liverpool
some time prior to the year 1810. Here be very soon launched
out in an extent of speculative dealing and of accommodation
paper, which up to that time had probably never had a parallel
in this country; and he eventually involved several other very
considerable houses, and an immense number of smaller con-
cerns, in utter ruin. Amongst other exploits, he is said to have
drawn and to have succeeded in, negotiating a bill for upwards
of £BO,OOO, (we believe £85,000,) which was subsequently
generally stated to have-been framed and glazed, and kept in
the private office of a Liverpool banking-house, by whom the
bill was discounted. This bill gave occasion to the following
lines, constituting part of a poem written in the year 1810, and
entitled "Things as they are at Liverpool." It was published
in the Liverpool Mercury, and, we believe, was understood to
have been the production of a well-known Liverpool merchant.
Having previously alluded to the prevalence of accommodation
bills, known by the cant name of "kites," the writer proceeds—
" In those blest days when credit ran so high,
Kinnear could make an eighty thousand tly
But God help them—God help the silly pack,
Who placed themselves, adventurous on its back.
Their dreadful fall,—and oh ! what numbers fell,—
Let the Gazette's recording pages tell."
We believe that on Kinnear's bankruptcy, which took plas-.,e
in 1810, the amount of his debts was nearly a million sterling;
those of the other houses connected with him in bill transactions,
and involved in his fall, amounted to an enormous ruin; and
the misery and ruin inflicted, not only upon Liverpool, but on
Manchester and the manufacturing districts generally, were
frightful in the extreme.

After his failure Kinnear went to London, and was not, we
believe, much heard of until the year 1817, when certain cri-
minal proceedings against blur were commfrenced. which ter-
minated in his being tried at Guildhall before Chief Justice
Abbott, together with several other persons, on a charge of
conspiring to defraud the king's subjects, by setting up three or
four persons in business as merchants in London, giving them
an appearance of wealth, which enabled them to procure cre-
dit in various quarters, and finally defrauding a large number
of persons in Manchester and elsewhere to the extent of nearly
£100,00). Three of the defendants, namely, Kinnear, Lewis
Levy, and Mozley Woolf, were convicted on the cleatest evi-
dence, and sentenced to an imprisonment of two years each, iu
addition to a fine of £lO,OOO on Woolf,-and .-E5,000 on Levy.
Kinnear, in pursuance of his sentence, was confined in Ilchester
Gaol, and was one of the witnesses to support the charges pre-
ferred against the gaoler, William Bridie, by the well-known
Henry Hunt, who was also confined at Ilchester at the same
time.

Shortly after the termination of the imprisonment at ll-
chester, Kinnear established a bank at Brighton, under the
title, if we are not mistaken, of the Royal Bank, and a ust-
derAm
le number of his notes foun'd their way into Manchester,
Liverpool, &c. In the *Amer town an office was opened to ne-
gotiate them. This was in 1823, when local notes were begin-
ning to acquire currency in the town, and many of them were
taken by incautious persons, must of whom, of course, lost their
money. Kinnear is also known to have been connected with
the "Mersey Bank," which was established in Liverpool some-
where about the same time, hot which, we believe, was not a
very successful speculation. For some time previous to -his
committal, he lived Partly.in London and partly in France, but
was not much before the public.