JAMES
GEORGE MONROWHEN he retired from the office of Town Clerk of Glasgow in 1905, Mr. Monro was the senior member of his department. A native of Stonehaven, where his father was a solicitor, he was educated at the Academy of that town and at the Grammar School and King's College, Aberdeen. After serving an apprenticeship to the legal profession in his father's office, he migrated in 1865 to Edinburgh, and while engaged in the office of Messrs. Melville & Lindsay, W.S., attended the law classes at Edinburgh University. In these classes he distinguished himself, and in 1868, two years before his admission as a law agent, he received a position in the office of his uncle, Alexander Monro, S.S.C., who in 1858 had been appointed joint Town Clerk of Glasgow. In 1871 that uncle died, and a year later Mr. Turner, his colleague in the Town-Clerkship, resigned. From that date for fifteen months Mr. Andrew Cunninghame acted as Interim Town-Clerk, till the appointment of Sir James Marwick in March, 1873. In 1885 Mr. Monro was appointed a Deputy Town Clerk, and he performed the duties of that post for eighteen years. On the retirement of Sir James Marwick in November, 1903, Mr. Monro was appointed Town Clerk, but, as already said, he himself retired fifteen months later. On this occasion he was entertained at dinner by the members of his own staff, and at another dinner by the chief officials of the Corporation. By both he was presented with handsome testimonials.
Mr. Monro is a bachelor, an angler, and an enthusiastic pedestrian, and he is hardly more intimate with the scenery and places of interest in Scotland itself than with those of the Austrian Tyrol, the Engadine, the Rhone Valley in Switzerland, and the region of the Italian lakes, Como, Lugano, and Maggiore.