Reverend Thomas Burns

Thomas Burns was born at Mauchline in Ayrshire in 1796. He was the nephew of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns. His early years’ farming in Ayrshire gave him a lifelong love for the land and a very practical orientation. He always maintained that becoming a Presbyterian minister was not his preferred career; he would rather have pursued farming. Nonetheless he accepted his father’s will and went to the University of Edinburgh as a 16-year-old to begin his theological training. He was ordained in 1822 and by 1826 he was the minister of Ballantrae in Ayrshire. Four years later he married Clementina Grant and took over from her uncle as the minister of nearby Monkton.

Thomas Burns was one of the signatories of the Deed of Demission that established the Free Church as a breakaway from the Presbyterian Church in Scotland in 1843. This involved considerable loss for him and for his family and meant giving up a prosperous position with no great certainty about the future. It wasn’t long, however, before Burns was offered the post of minister in the planned Free Church settlement in New Zealand. From 1843 he became one of the key players in the movement to establish a Scottish Presbyterian colony at Otago. In 1847 Burns sailed from Greenock with the first party of Scottish settlers on the Philip Laing.

As the spiritual leader of the pioneer Scots Burns was the most important religious leader in early Otago. He laid the foundations of Presbyterianism in the new colony. As one of the few ‘old men’ in early Dunedin he was like an Old Testament patriarch among the first settlers. He was energetic in his pastoral care, visiting every home in his far-flung parish (originally the whole of the Otago Block) on a regular basis over the first years of settlement. He kept careful records of these visitations, noting the composition of each household, and the relationships, ages and religious affiliations of all present. This record is the Domesday Book of early Otago, a census substitute that is unique in the annals of colonial New Zealand.

Burns comes across from many sources as a rather dour character, but his daughter’s reminiscences paint a different picture of a loving husband and father with a good sense of humour. His preaching was described as like ‘a professional lecture to students in divinity’. In Otago he was often consulted for his advice on farming matters as well as spiritual ones. Yet as a religious leader Burns established the Church on firm foundations and placed equal weight on the development of education. He was the inaugural chancellor of the first university in New Zealand. When he died in Dunedin in 1871 a magnificent new First Church was under construction at the heart of the city he had helped create.