Edward was the seventh son of William Cargill, Otago’s founding father, but already a grown man by the time his parents set forth on their great venture to New Zealand in 1847. Born in Edinburgh in 1823, Edward was educated there and at Norwich in England. He then spent six years at sea before embarking on a mercantile career. When his parents set sail for Otago, Edward was running his own business in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as a merchant and coffee exporter. He then spent a couple of years in Melbourne before joining the family in Dunedin in 1857. In partnership with his brother John, and John Jones, he established a successful general trading company that also operated Otago’s first coastal steamer Geelong.
Edward was a highly successful businessman, diversifying his interests into everything from wool to mining, banking and insurance, shipping and refrigeration. He epitomised Dunedin’s mercantile elite at a time when the city led the country as a commercial and industrial centre. He also played a leading part in politics and civic affairs, serving on the Town Board, the City Council, the Provincial Council and in the House of Representatives. In 1898 he was elected Mayor of Dunedin, a symbolically appropriate choice to lead the city in the year of Otago’s 50th anniversary, even though he was not actually on the Council from whose members the mayor was usually chosen.
Edward had married Dorothy Nesham in 1854 and the couple had five daughters. Their eldest daughter, Margaret, caused quite a stir in Presbyterian Dunedin when she fell in love with Francis Petre, a member of one of New Zealand’s leading Catholic families. Petre was a prominent architect, responsible for many fine buildings in Dunedin and elsewhere, and then working for Edward on a grand cliff-top residence above St Clair. Despite his initial disapproval, Edward was finally won over and the couple celebrated their wedding at the newly-completed house in 1881. Officially ‘The Cliffs’, the Cargill mansion was always known to Dunedin people as ‘Cargill’s Castle’. Edward died there in 1903 aged 79.
Mr & Mrs Edward Bowes Cargill