Content warning: This article contains an illustration depicting slavery and an etching depicting human remains

In a letter dated 15 June 1887, Dr Robert Halliday Gunning (1818-1900), a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, promised the Society a donation of money. Gunning’s £1,000 gift (worth approximately £649,000 in present-day money, relative to wages) was one of several that he made to prominent British institutions – including the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of London, and the University of Edinburgh’s Schools of Medicine and Divinity – in honour of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.

Gunning’s endowment at the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, known as the Gunning Victoria Jubilee Gift or Fellowship, was designed to ‘help experts to visit other museums, collections or materials of archaeological science at home or abroad, for purposes of special investigation and research’. For over a century, recipients of the award used funds derived from Gunning’s endowment to support their research and advance knowledge of Scotland’s distant and recent past.

New information has come to light on Gunning’s links to slavery in Brazil thanks to my recent study, Slavery, Colonialism and Philanthropy at the University of Edinburgh, produced as part of the University of Edinburgh’s Decolonised Transformations Project. 

Gunning, a Dumfriesshire-born graduate of the University of Edinburgh, moved to Brazil in 1849. He first provided medical services in the gold mines of the State of Minas Gerais before advancing to become Chief Commissioner for the Cocais mine of the National Brazilian Mining Association, a British-owned gold-mining firm that owned and hired hundreds of enslaved miners of African descent. As well as developing other interests in Brazilian railways and roads, and transatlantic shipping, Gunning owned between thirty and forty enslaved African-descended people on Palmeiras, a chácara (private country estate) near Rio de Janeiro.

Etching of Palmeiras, Gunning’s estate near Rio de Janeiro, including enslaved Black labourers and white overseers (Image credit: John Codman, Ten Months in Brazil (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1867) – University of California via HathiTrust)

After thirty-three years in his adoptive home, the Scottish sojourner returned to Britain a very wealthy man. He used his fortune – derived from the enslavement of people of African descent in Brazil – to patronise an array of medical, scientific, religious and educational institutions in Brazil, England and Scotland.

On 12 February 1883, a year after his return to Britain, Gunning was made a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. ‘The fluviatile and glacial markings of [Gunning’s] native district and its zoology and antiquities’, an obituary of Gunning explained, ‘occupied much of his attention in his student life. The so-called “pots and pans” proofs of fluviatile action in the Kirkbean stream’s course, or the history of the Ruthwell Stone, with its form and runes, and the value of its verses, were favourite themes’.

Besides his gift to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Gunning’s affection for Scottish heritage was further displayed by his gifts towards monuments commemorating significant events and people in Scotland’s history, including the Covenanters Memorial in Deerness, Orkney; busts of Adam Smith, Thomas Chalmers and Hugh Miller in the Wallace National Monument, Stirling; tablets to Jenny Geddes and the Marquis of Argyll in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh; and a bust of Thomas Carlyle in his childhood home in Ecclefechan.

Gunning also donated objects and human remains of ethnographic ‘interest’ from South America to the Society’s Museum, including Indigenous weapons, pottery, dress and a tsantsa (a shrunken human head) from Pastaza, Ecuador.

Illustration of a tsantsa (shrunken head) from Ecuador, presented to the Society’s Museum by Dr Robert Halliday Gunning (Image credit: Duns, P. (1886). Notice of an Idol Human Head from Ecuador, now presented to the Museum by Dr R H Gunning. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 20, 159–165. https://doi.org/10.9750/PSAS.020.159.16)

Earlier this year, I was awarded the final 1887 Jubilee Gift (formerly the Gunning Victoria Jubilee Gift) to support additional research on Gunning’s links to the Society and an article for the Society’s journal, the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, before the gift was removed from the Society’s list of grants and awards. The Society will use my research and input from Fellows to inform future actions with regards to reparations.

I will also give an online lecture for Fellows of the Society on Thursday 25 September 2025, 5pm–6pm (BST), where I will discuss my research on Gunning. Event information will be made available in a forthcoming Fellows e-newsletter and on the Society’s events webpage. Fellows are encouraged to share their questions and feedback at the event or by contacting the Director of the Society, Dr Simon Gilmour, at director@socantscot.org.

I am currently working with Dr Joseph Mulhern (a specialist in British entanglements with Brazilian slavery) on a more in-depth study of Gunning’s life and legacy.

Dr Simon Buck is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities