Gillray, James

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Dates c.1748-88
Location London (Chelsea)
Vocation Blacksmith
Place of Birth Culter, Lanarkshire
Marriage Jane Coleman
Issue James
Place of birth Source Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Biography found in the entry on his son, the famous satirist of the same name.

Enlisted in the cavalry and, as a trooper in the Queen's dragoons, lost an arm at the battle of Fontenoy (1745). He became in 1748 a pensioner at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea. Joined the Moravian Brethren (1749). As a strict Calvinist, James Gillray senior had much in common with the Moravians and for over forty years he acted as sexton of their burial-ground at Chelsea.