Edinburgh's bequests Graduate riches tied university to slavery

Robert Halliday Gunning was a Victorian success story – an Edinburgh-trained doctor who amassed a fortune in Brazil's goldmines before lavishing his wealth on philanthropic gifts.

- Severin Carrell

Robert Halliday Gunning was a Victorian success story – an Edinburgh-trained doctor who amassed a fortune in Brazil's goldmines before lavishing his wealth on philanthropic gifts. It also appears he was eaten by guilt. In later life, he ensured his legacy would be linked to acts of benevolence: from the 1880s onwards he paid for endowments, prizes, medals, lectures and academic posts at Edinburgh University, several of which still bear his name. Today they are worth £5.3m.

Gunning, a former Edinburgh medical student and anatomist, had been enmeshed in Brazil's enslavement-based goldmining industry. Decades after slavery was criminalised in Britain, he was widely believed to own up to 40 enslaved people – a charge he denied.

A recently discovered letter suggests his gifts were a calculated act of reputation washing.

He told the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, another institution that enjoyed his largesse, that he had "come forward without being asked, to relieve my conscience, and leave behind what I cannot take away when life ends, and I feel it no sacrifice but an honour to do so".

Gunning was one of hundreds of Edinburgh graduates who made their fortunes from the transatlantic slave trade, on plantations in the Americas or profiting from the empire.

They served as doctors on slave ships, administrators, lawyers to enslavers, merchants or plantation owners, or were slavers themselves.