Sue Young Homeopathy

Alexander Archibald Hagart Speirs 1869 – 1958 MD 1888, MB CM Glasgow (Hons) 1885, was an orthodox physician who converted to homeopathy, to become President of the British Homeopathic Society.

In 1893, Spiers was a surgeon at the Homeopathic Dispensary & Cottage Hospital, Union Street, Plymouth. He also practiced at 6 Sussex Terrace, Plymouth.

Speirs was a contributer to The Anglo French American Hospital during WWI, and he was a Captain in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

Speirs was a colleague of John Galley Blackley, David Dyce Brown, George Henry Burford, Alfred Midgley Cash, John Henry Clarke, Arthur Crowden Clifton, Robert Thomas Cooper, Spencer Cox, Edward Cronin, Croucher, John Roberson Day, Deck, Ethelbert Petrie Hoyle, James John Garth Wilkinson, and many others.

Speirs practiced at 6 Sussex Terrace, Plymouth, and he later lived at 4 Hill Street, Berkley Square and in Renfrewshire.

Speirs was also Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Scotland 1929 – 1931.

Speirs was also Lord Lieutenant of Renfrewshire, 1943 – 1950.

Alexander Spiers’s second son, Archibald Speirs 1758 – 1832, was one of the nine original partners in the Renfrewshire Bank.

He was also chairman of the Board of Management of the Forth and Clyde Canal and presided over the opening ceremony in 1790. He had five sons and nine daughters and died in 1832.

He was succeeded by his son, Alexander Speirs who became Lord Lieutenant for Renfrewshire and was MP for Richmond in Surrey. He died in 1844 and was succeeded by his son, Captain Archibald Alexander Speirs.

He served in the Scots Fusilir Guards and was MP for Renfrew from 1865-8. He married Anne, daughter of the 4th Earl of Radnor, and died of typhoid contracted from the Clyde in December 1868 leaving a posthumous son, Alexander Archibald Speirs…

Following the death of her husband, Lady Anne moved with the infant Archie to Houston, close to the Barony of Fulwood. They settled in the remains of one of the wings of the old castle at Houston that had been converted into a hunting lodge. Lady Anne gradually enlarged the house in the Scottish baronial style. Traces of the corbelling of the old castle battlements can still be seen today.

Archie died without issue in about 1959 and the estates passed to David Crichton Maitland…. (…by a deed of 29 May 1916 Alexander Archibald Speirs adopted the Hagart name, as notified in the Edinburgh Gazette of 19 May 1911. By the Settled Land Act, 1925, the trustees declared the estate vested in Hagart Speirs on 31 May 1926…) (The Speirs family had a long history in India) (The Speirs family had a long history in America) (The family money came from tobacco during the lifetime of Alexander Speirs who died in 1782).

Colonel Alexander of Ballochmyle, M.P. for Ayrshire, and one son, the late Archibald Alexander Speirs, fourth of Elderslie, who was suddenly cut off in 1868, soon after his election as member for the county.

A few months before he had married Lady Anne Bouverie, a daughter of Lord Radnor, and a few months after his young widow gave birth to a son: this little boy, who is called after his father, is the present proprietor of Elderslie, which, by a second long minority and by the great rise in land near Glasgow, bids fair to be one of the most considerable fortunes in the country.